Britain's best-known classicist Mary Beard, is also a committed and vocal feminist. With wry wit, she revisits the gender agenda and shows how history has treated powerful women. Her examples range from the classical world to the modern day, from Medusa and Athena to Theresa May and Elizabeth Warren. Beard explores the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, considering the public voice of women, our cultural assumptions about women's relationship with...

In the post-9/11 era, America's policy-makers have increasingly prioritised the pursuit of power, both military and economic, above all else - human rights, democracy, even security. Drawing on examples ranging from expanding drone assassination programmes to the civil war in Syria and the continued violence in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine, philosopher, political commentator and activist Noam Chomsky here offers unexpected and nuanced...

Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and...