Slave
by Mende Nazer and Damien Lewis
Virago £7.99
Mende Nazar grew up among the Nuba people in southern Sudan. At the age of 12, she was abducted by Arab raiders who sold her as a slave in Khartoum. Her mistress beat her, forced her to work constantly and subjected her to gratuitous racism. At 19, she was sent to London, where a relative of her mistress, a high-ranking official at the Sudanese embassy, continued to enslave her. After managing to escape, she still had a long struggle to obtain asylum in Britain. Nazer is evidently a woman of almost unimaginable bravery, not only to endure years of abuse and exploitation but also to be willing to remember every detail and bear witness to the continuation of slavery in the year in which we celebrated the 200th anniversary of its supposed abolition.
Margaret Thatcher, Volume One: The Grocer's Daughter
by John Campbell
Vintage £11.99
This reissue of the first volume of Campbell's acclaimed three-part biography finishes with Margaret at the door of No 10 after her 1979 election victory. His analysis of the preceding years demonstrates that her ascent to the top of British politics caught her own party by surprise. At Oxford, she failed to shine with the same sparkle as some of her more luminous contemporaries, including Tony Benn and Ludovic Kennedy. Her immense capacity for hard work earned her a place in Heath's cabinet but few colleagues expected her to become party leader. Campbell's biography is stuffed with policy detail but we find little about her barren inner life. Politics took priority over her family and she had few strong friendships, even in politics, her intellectual mentor, Keith Joseph, being a striking exception.
Under Three Flags
by Benedict Anderson
Verso £9.99
Anderson asks us to consider his book as 'a black-and-white film or a novel manque'. Under such a light, this curious yet riveting history of anti-colonial resistance in the Philippines at the end of the 19th century becomes both exciting and important. Anderson pivots his story around Jose Rizal, political agitator and author of two great Filipino novels, Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. While depicting Rizal's life and intellectual development, Anderson also uses him as a springboard for demonstrating the globalisation of anti-colonial movements. Ease of transport and communication meant Filipinos drew inspiration from Cuban revolutionaries on the other side of the world. Freedom fighters conspired in Europe, enthused by anarchist thought, before returning home. Anderson recounts their squabbles, tragedies and triumphs.
City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish
by Peter Parsons
Phoenix £9.99
In 1897, Oxford classicists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt were excavating the site of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchos (meaning 'sharp-nosed') near Cairo when they found a huge cache of papyri. Excavations continued for another 10 years - and the discoveries are still being published today. Peter Parsons, a former Regius professor of Greek at Oxford University, covers a vast range of subjects from the history of scholarship to 19th-century Egyptomania to the significance of the Nile in Egyptian culture, diligently expounding on the fragments of letters, shopping lists, business documents and schoolbooks to create a fascinating picture of Greeks and Egyptians under Roman rule as Christianity began to expand into Africa.
