Jonathan Powell Books

Exploring selected castles across Mid, South, and West Wales, this comprehensive guide delves into the rich history of the region during the castle era. It highlights Wales as a unique landscape of fortresses, boasting the highest concentration of castles in Europe. Perfect for history enthusiasts and travelers alike, it serves as both a companion and an informative resource for understanding the significance of these historical structures in Welsh culture.

Now includes a new Afterword - Talking to ISIL Across the world governments proclaim that they will never 'negotiate with evil'. And yet they always have and always will. From jungle clearings to stately homes and anonymous airport hotels, Talking to Terrorists puts us in the room with the terrorists, secret agents and go-betweens who seek to change the course of history. Jonathan Powell has spent nearly two decades mediating between governments and terrorist organisations. Drawing on conflicts from Colombia and Sri Lanka to Palestine and South Africa, this optimistic, wide-ranging, authoritative book is about how and why we should talk to terrorists.

From orbiting comets to the workings of the Asteroid Belt, and from meteor showers to our home-grown network of orbiting satellites, the full diversity of space objects and the debris they create is explored.

From phenomena as old and far-off as a supernova witnessed a thousand years ago, and as recent and nearby as Sputnik's famous beeping, this book covers everything that one must know to see, hear, and appreciate the astronomical events happening around us.

Since ancient times, humans have been engaged in a continual quest to find meaning in and make sense of sights and events in the night sky. Cultures spread around the world recorded their earliest efforts in artwork made directly on the natural landscapes around them, and from there they developed more and more sophisticated techniques for observing and documenting astronomy. This book brings readers on an astronomical journey through the ages, offering a history of how our species has recorded and interpreted the night sky over time. From cave art to parchment scribe to modern X-ray mapping of the sky, it chronicles the ever-quickening development of tools that informed and at times entirely toppled our understanding of the natural world. Our documentation and recording techniques formed the bedrock for increasingly complex forays into astronomy and celestial mechanics, which are addressed within these chapters. Additionally, the book explores how nature itself has recorded the skies in its own way, which can be unraveled through ongoing geological and archaeological studies. This tale of human discovery and ingenuity over the ages will appeal to anybody interested in the field of astronomy and its rich cultural history.

Making peace in Northern Ireland was the greatest success of the Blair government, and one of the greatest achievements in British politics since the Second World War.

Illustrating each of Machiavelli’s maxims with a description of events that occurred during Tony Blair's time as Prime Minister, Blair's former close adviser gives a devastating, frank, and insightful analysis of how power is wielded in the modern world  In a 21st-century reworking of Niccolò Machiavelli influential masterpiece, Jonathan Powell argues that the Italian philosopher is misunderstood, and explains how the lessons derived from his experience as an official in 15th-century Florence can still apply today. Drawing on his own unpublished diaries during his time as Blair's chief of staff, Powell gives a frank account of the intimate details of the internal political struggles, including the failure to join the Euro or hold a referendum on the European constitution; the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo; the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland; and the relations with Clinton, Bush, and Chirac. Short, stark, and clear—much like The Prince —this gripping account of life inside "the bunker" of Number 10 draws lessons from those experiences, not just for political leaders but for anyone who has access to the levers of power.

Cicero's The Republic is an impassioned plea for responsible government written just before the civil war that ended the Roman Republic in a dialogue following Plato. This is the first complete English translation of both works for over sixty years and features a lucid introduction, a table ofdates, notes on the Roman constitution, and an index of names.