Charlotte Lydia Riley – författare

This riveting new history tells the story of Britain''s journey from imperial power to a nation divided.After the Second World War, Britain''s overseas empire disintegrated. But over the next seventy years, empire came to define Britain and its people as never before.From immigration and race riots to the Suez Crisis and the Falklands War, from the simplistic moral equation of Band Aid to the invasion of Iraq, the imperial mindset has dominated Britain''s relationship with itself and the world. In the tragedy of Stephen Lawrence, in Britain''s response to radical Islam, even in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, we see how this contradictory relationship has undermined its self-image as a multicultural nation, helping explain the Windrush deportations and Brexit.Drawing on a mass of new research, from personal letters to pop culture, Imperial Island tells a story of immigration and fractured identity, of social strife and communal solidarity, of people on the move and of a people wrestling with their past. It is the story that best explains Britain today.

Brought to you by Penguin.Two leading thinkers present alternative answers to one of the most difficult and divisive questions of our times: Is free speech under threat?Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, the leading free expression organisation, argues that alongside the necessary and long-overdue elevation of minority voices in recent years, there has also arisen an uncompromising intolerance – most notably on university campuses and online – that wrongly equates a wide range of offensive speech with violence and seeks to shut it down. This has led to an escalating free speech arms race, from which everyone loses.Charlotte Lydia Riley, historian of empire and editor of The Free Speech Wars, argues that accusations of cancel culture and defences of free speech are too often disingenuous attempts to fuel a culture war and so inhibit an important realignment in which hateful speech is at last being called out for what it is and the right to free expression is being extended to more people than ever before.Published in conjunction with Intelligence Squared, the world’s leading curator of debate, this book is part of the THINK AGAIN series: short books that present two expert, contrasting but equally persuasive views in a single volume that can be read from either end.© Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024