![](https://politybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Barnier-web-qual.jpg")
My Secret Brexit Diary
A Glorious Illusion
Michel Barnier
In June 2016, the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. As the EU’s chief negotiator, for four years Michel Barnier had a seat at the table as the two sides thrashed out what ‘Brexit’ would really mean. His secret diary lifts the lid on what really happened behind the scenes of one of the most high-stakes negotiations in modern history.
October 2021
Love
A History in Five Fantasies
Barbara H. Rosenwein
We make sense of love with fantasies, stories that shape feelings that are otherwise too overwhelming, incoherent, and wayward to be tamed. Drawing on poetry, fiction, letters, memoirs and art, and with the aid of a rich array of illustrations, historian Barbara H. Rosenwein explores five of our most enduring fantasies of love: like-minded union, transcendent rapture, selfless giving, obsessive longing, and insatiable desire.
October 2021
The World According to China
Elizabeth C. Economy
“In this brilliant, urgent analysis, Elizabeth Economy proves once again why she is one of the most important scholars of China in a generation.”
Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition
“If you want to understand the most important competition of this century, read The World According to China. It illuminates the CCP’s grand ambition and forces us to confront the reality that if it succeeds, our world will be less free, less prosperous, and less safe.”
H.R. McMaster, author of Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World
November 2021
After Lockdown
A Metamorphosis
Bruno Latour
After the harrowing experience of the pandemic and the lockdowns, both states and individuals have been searching for ways to exit the crisis, hoping to return as soon as possible to ‘the world as it was before the pandemic’. But there is another way to learn the lessons of this ordeal: as inhabitants of the earth, we may not be able to exit the lockdowns so easily after all, since the global health crisis is embedded in another larger and more serious crisis – that brought about by the New Climatic Regime. Bruno Latour provides a compass for a necessary re-orientation of our lives.
September 2021
Skin
Sergio del Molino
Skin is the border of our body and, as such, it is that through which we relate to others but also what separates us from them. Through skin, we speak: when we display it, when we tan it, when we tattoo it, or when we mute it by covering it with clothes. Skin exhibits social relationships, displays power and the effects of power, explains many things about who we are, how others perceive us and how we exist in the world. And when it gets sick, it turns us into monsters.
October 2021
In AI We Trust
Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms
Helga Nowotny
One of the most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI – and, if so, what this will mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for what it means to be human. AI changes our experience of time and the future and challenges our identities, yet we are blinded by its efficiency and fail to understand how it affects us.
September 2021
The First Days of Berlin
The Sound of Change
Ulrich Gutmair
Ulrich Gutmair moved to West Berlin as a student in autumn 1989. He spent the next few years studying during the day and exploring the squats and techno clubs at night, when one regime was brought down and a new one wasn’t yet established. When utopia was actually a place to inhabit for a moment.
His book is a vivid portrait of the counterculture that flourished in Berlin after the fall of the Wall and turned the once-divided city into Europe’s capital of cool.
October 2021
![](https://politybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Felsch-hi-res-1-scaled.jpg")
The Summer of Theory
History of a Rebellion, 1960-1990
Philipp Felsch
“A vivid, wry portrait of West Germany in the 1960s and ‘70s…Philipp Felsch has an unerring eye for where the earnest meets the absurd, and his account of the strange passion for theory is unforgettable.”
Lorraine Daston, Director Emerita, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
October 2021
