Andro Linklater Book order

Barely two centuries ago, most of the world's productive land still belonged either communally to traditional societies or to the higher powers of monarch or church. But that pattern, and the ways of life that went with it, were consigned to history as a result of the most creative - and, at the same time, destructive - cultural force in the modern era: the idea of individual, exclusive ownership of land. This notion laid waste to traditional communal civilisations, displacing entire peoples from their homelands, and brought into being a unique concept of individual freedom and a distinct form of representative government and democratic institutions. Other great civilizations, in Russia, China, and the Islamic world, evolved very different structures of land ownership, and thus very different forms of government and social responsibility. The seventeenth-century English surveyor William Petty was the first man to recognise the connection between private property and free-market capitalism; the American radical Wolf Ladejinsky redistributed land in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea after the Second World War to make possible the emergence of Asian tiger economies. Through the eyes of these remarkable individuals and many more, including Chinese emperors and German peasants, Andro Linklater here presents the evolution of land ownership to offer a radically new view of mankind's place on the planet.

On the two hundredth anniversary of the assassination of Spencer Perceval - the only British Prime Minister ever to have suffered that fate - this is the riveting untold story of the murder, the murderer and the repercussions of his act

Set in 1790, the narrative explores America's struggle with debt post-independence and the necessity of establishing a uniform measurement system for land west of the Ohio River. The story highlights the complexities of choosing from 100,000 different units in use at the time. It focuses on the pivotal role of one man's surveying chain in shaping the American Customary System, which became the last traditional measurement system globally, leaving a lasting impact on land, cities, and American culture.

For fifty years, Pamela Kirrage longed to unlock the secrets of her husband’s encrypted war diary. She was on the verge of giving up when she at last found a mathematician who became as obsessed with learning the secrets of the diary as she was. After months of painstaking investigation, he was finally able to crack the code, and in the process uncover the ending to an extraordinary World War II romance.Pamela fell in love with RAF pilot Donald Hill in the summer of 1939, just a few months before he was sent to fight in Pacific. Although they planned to marry soon, Donald was captured after siege of Hong Kong and spent the next four years in a Japanese POW camp. Donald ultimately returned to Pamela, but he was never able to tell her about those lost years–and Pamela became convinced that the key to their happiness lay within the mysterious diary he brought back from the war. In The Code of Love Andro Linklater uses the decoded diary as well as extensive research and interviews to paint a vivid portrait of the World War II era, turning this dramatic love story into an inspiring, unconventional epic.

A funny and often poignant study of the Iban people of Sarawak. Expecting them to be noble, bare-breasted savages in dugout canoes, the author found a people who, whilst they did decorate their homes with heads not their own, also possessed outboard motors, chainsaws and I love New York T-shirts.

The life of Compton Mackenzie, author of "Sinister Street" and "Whiskey Galore". He came from an acting family, became a best-selling writer, a master-spy in Greece, a Roman Catholic convert, a buyer of islands and a Scottish Nationalist. The author's father was a close friend of Mackenzie.