'Downing Street is said to be 'furious' at this book - and it is easy to understand why. It is the first meticulous chronicle of all that has happened since that bright May Day three years ago which first brought the Blair government to office' Anthony Howard, Sunday Times

The finance sector of Western economies is too large and attracts too many of the smartest college graduates. Financialization over the past three decades has created a structure that lacks resilience and supports absurd volumes of trading. The finance sector devotes too little attention to the search for new investment opportunities and the stewardship of existing ones, and far too much to secondary-market dealing in existing assets. Regulation has contributed more to the problems than the solutions. Why? What is finance for? John Kay, with wide practical and academic experience in the world of finance, understands the operation of the financial sector better than most. He believes in good banks and effective asset managers, but good banks and effective asset managers are not what he sees. In a dazzling and revelatory tour of the financial world as it has emerged from the wreckage of the 2008 crisis, Kay does not flinch in his criticism: we do need some of the things that Citigroup and Goldman Sachs do, but we do not need Citigroup and Goldman to do them. And many of the things done by Citigroup and Goldman do not need to be done at all. The finance sector needs to be reminded of its primary purpose: to manage other people's money for the benefit of businesses and households. It is an aberration when the some of the finest mathematical and scientific minds are tasked with devising algorithms for the sole purpose of exploiting the weakness of other algorithms for computerized trading in securities. To travel further down that road leads to ruin. A Financial Times Book of the Year, 2015 An Economist Best Book of the Year, 2015 A Bloomberg Best Book of the Year, 2015

Beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case, this book traces the lives of six American civil rights leaders as they willingly risk their lives for the civil rights cause: A. Philip Randolph, Frederick D. Patterson, Thurgood Marshall, Whitney M. Young, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and Fannie Lou Hamer.

Spanning two centuries, an intricately woven collection of stories and novellas journeys across landscapes of yearning, awakening, loss, and unexpected discovery as the lives of extraordinary characters unfold in a borderland between science and passion.

Italy is a country of free political institutions, yet it has become a nation of servile courtesans, with Silvio Berlusconi as their prince. Drawing upon the republican conception of liberty, this title shows that a people can be unfree even though they are not oppressed.

Servants of the people, abbreviated to SPs, are all those who hold office in politics and government. The people grant them power under the condition that they serve with integrity. But how do you do that? This book offers the necessary concepts, insights and guidelines. Each of the 95 chapters discusses one of the many facets of integrity, with plenty of positive and negative examples involving different kinds of SPs from different countries. The central message is that integrity has great power over SPs: it can make or break their careers.Muel Kaptein is a professor of ethics and integrity and a partner at KPMG.

A history of the British Crown honours system in the 20th century, showing its evolution through a period of democratisation and decolonisation, Tobias Harper examines how governments used the honours system to shape ideologies of loyalty and service, while dissidents turned the symbolism of honours against the Crown.