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Nearly a century after his wrenching death, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) remains one of our most enigmatic writers. Believing he could do "more in dreams than Napoleon," yet haunted by the specter of hereditary madness, Pessoa invented dozens of alter egos, or "heteronyms," under whose names he wrote in Portuguese, English, and French. Unsurprisingly, this "most multifarious of writers" (Guardian) has long eluded a definitive biographer-but in renowned translator and Pessoa scholar Richard Zenith, he has met his match.

Relatively unknown in his lifetime, Pessoa was all but destined for literary oblivion when the arc of his afterlife bent, suddenly and improbably, toward greatness, with the discovery of some 25,000 unpublished papers left in a large, wooden trunk. Drawing on this vast archive of sources as well as on unpublished family letters, and skillfully setting the poet’s life against the nationalist currents of twentieth-century European history, Zenith at last reveals the true depths of Pessoa’s teeming imagination and literary genius.

Much as Nobel laureate José Saramago brought a single heteronym to life in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Zenith traces the backstories of virtually all of Pessoa’s imagined personalities, demonstrating how they were projections, spin-offs, or metamorphoses of Pessoa himself. A solitary man who had only one, ultimately platonic love affair, Pessoa used his and his heteronyms’ writings to explore questions of sexuality, to obsessively search after spiritual truth, and to try to chart a way forward for a benighted and politically agitated Portugal.

Although he preferred the world of his mind, Pessoa was nonetheless a man of the places he inhabited, including not only Lisbon but also turn-of-the-century Durban, South Africa, where he spent nine years as a child. Zenith re-creates the drama of Pessoa’s adolescence—when the first heteronyms emerged—and his bumbling attempts to survive as a translator and publisher. Zenith introduces us, too, to Pessoa’s bohemian circle of friends, and to Ophelia Quieroz, with whom he exchanged numerous love letters. Pessoa reveals in equal force the poet’s unwavering commitment to defending homosexual writers whose books had been banned, as well as his courageous opposition to Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, toward the end of his life. In stunning, magisterial prose, Zenith contextualizes Pessoa’s posthumous literary achievements—especially his most renowned work, The Book of Disquiet.

A modern literary masterpiece, Pessoa simultaneously immortalizes the life of a literary maestro and confirms the enduring power of Pessoa’s work to speak prophetically to the disconnectedness of our modern world.

"The language learning I want to talk about is sensory bombardment. It is a possession, a bedevilment, a physical takeover," writes Polly Barton in her eloquent treatise on this profoundly humbling and gratifying act. Shortly before graduating with a degree in philosophy from the University of Cambridge, Barton on a whim accepted an English-teaching position in Japan. With the characteristic ambivalence of a twenty-one-year-old whose summer-and life-stretched out almost infinitely before her, she moved to a remote island in the Sea of Japan, unaware that this journey would come to define not only her career but her very understanding of her own identity.

Divided into fifty onomatopoeic Japanese phrases, Fifty Sounds recounts Barton’s path to becoming a literary translator fluent in an incredibly difficult vernacular. From “min-min,” the sound of air screaming, to “jin-jin,” the sound of being touched for the first time, Barton analyzes these and countless other foreign sounds and phrases as a means of reflecting on various cultural attitudes, including the nuances of conformity and the challenges of being an outsider in what many consider a hermetically sealed society.

In a tour-de-force of lyrical, playful prose, Barton recalls the stifling humidity that first greeted her on the island along with the incessant hum of peculiar new noises. As Barton taught English to inquisitive middle school children, she studied the basics of Japanese in an inverse way, beginning with simple nouns and phrases, such as “cat,” “dog,” and “Hello, my name is.” But when it came to surrounding herself in the culture, simply mastering the basics wasn’t enough.

Japanese, Barton learned, has three scripts: the phonetic katakana and hiragana (collectively known as kana) and kanji (characters of Chinese origin). Despite her months-long immersion in the language, a word would occasionally produce a sinking feeling and send her sifting through her dictionaries to find the exact meaning. But this is precisely how Barton has come to define language learning: “It is the always-bruised but ever-renewing desire to draw close: to a person, a territory, a culture, an idea, an indefinable feeling.”

Engaging and penetrating, Fifty Sounds chronicles everything from Barton’s most hilarious misinterpretations to her new friends and lovers in Tokyo —and even the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s transformative philosophy. A classic in the making in the tradition of Anne Carson and Rachel Cusk, Fifty Sounds is a celebration of the empowering act of learning to communicate in any new language.

When the twelve-year-old daughter of a British carpenter pulled some strange-looking bones from the country's southern shoreline in 1811, few people dared to question that the Bible told the accurate history of the world. But Mary Anning had in fact discovered the "first" ichthyosaur, and over the next seventy-five years-as the science of paleontology developed, as Charles Darwin posited radical new theories of evolutionary biology, and as scholars began to identify the internal inconsistencies of the Scriptures-everything changed. Beginning with the archbishop who dated the creation of the world to 6 p.m. on October 22, 4004 BC, and told through the lives of the nineteenth-century men and women who found and argued about these seemingly impossible, history-rewriting fossils, Impossible Monsters reveals the central role of dinosaurs and their discovery in toppling traditional religious authority, and in changing perceptions about the Bible, history, and mankind's place in the world.

The racers-an Italian prince and his chauffeur, a French racing driver, a con man, and several rival journalists-battle over steep inclines, through narrow mountain passages, and across the arid Gobi Desert. Competitors endure torrential rain and choking dust. There are barely any roads, and petrol is almost impossible to find. A global audience of millions follows each twist and turn, devouring reports telegraphed from the course.

More than its many adventures, the Peking-to-Paris Motor Challenge took place on the precipice of a new world. As the twentieth century dawned, imperial regimes in China and Russia were crumbling, paving the way for the rise of communist ones. The electric telegraph was rapidly transforming modern communication, and with it, the news media, commerce, and politics. Suspended between the old and the new, the Peking-to-Paris, as best-selling historian Kassia St. Clair writes, became a critical tipping point.

A gripping, immersive narrative of the race, The Race to the Future sets the drivers’ derring-do (and occasional cheating) against the backdrop of a larger geopolitical and technological race to the future. Interweaving events from the fall of the Qing dynasty to the departure of the horse economy and the rise of gendered marketing, St. Clair shows how the Peking-to-Paris provided an impetus for profound social, cultural, and industrial change, while masterfully capturing the mounting tensions between nations and empires—all building up to the cataclysmic event that changed everything: the First World War.

“Consistently mind-boggling, often funny, and occasionally hair-raising” (Philip Ball), The Race to the Future is the incredible true story of the quest against the odds that propelled us along the road to modernity.

Hannah Lucinda Smith, a Pulitzer grantee and acclaimed foreign correspondent, has devoted well over a decade to intrepid, on-the-ground reporting where few dare travel: the small, often disputed territories at the edges of Europe and Russia. There, Smith finds, the influence of Vladimir Putin and his favored strongmen-along with Turkish president and regional lynchpin Recep Tayyip Erdogan-fan territorial disputes and destabilize already fragile democracies.Hinterlands offers a rare glimpse into the ghost towns of Syria and Nagorno-Karabakh, the cryptocurrency farms of Transnistria, the brittle border communities of Bosnia and its Republika Srpska, and the enclaves of Northern Cyprus that Russian oligarchs call home. In rarely seen places in Crimea and the Caucasus, frontiers have shifted and new countries have been made. Informed by her encounters with politicians, combatants, and the ordinary people caught in the crosshairs, Smith paints a vivid portrait of the places where geopolitical alliances are forged and broken, where the violent ambitions of dictators are most keenly felt.This indispensable account of events in the gray zones of Eurasia gives vital context to our rapidly changing world and sounds a clear-eyed, urgent warning: We ignore the hinterlands at our own peril. What happens inside them has the power to redraw the fault lines of a new Cold War and shape the future of the West.

In the novel that catapulted him to international acclaim upon its publication in 1962, J.G. Ballard's mesmerizing and ferociously prescient The Drowned World imagines a terrifying future in which solar radiation and global warming has melted the ice caps, and Triassic-era jungles have overrun a submerged and tropical London. Set during the year 2145, the novel follows biologist Dr. Robert Kerans and his team of scientists as they confront a surreal cityscape populated by giant iguanas, albino alligators, and endless swarms of malarial insects. Nature has swallowed all but a few remnants of human civilization, and slowly, Kearns and his companions are transformed-both physically and psychologically-by this prehistoric environment. The Drowned World is both a thrilling adventure and haunting examination of the effects of environmental collapse on the human mind.

Written in Cho Nam-joo's signature razor-sharp prose, Miss Kim Knows follows eight women as they confront how gender shapes and orders their lives. A woman is born. A woman is filmed in public without consent. A woman is gaslit. A woman is discriminated against at work. A woman grows old. A woman becomes famous. A woman is hated, and loved, and then hated again. As with Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, these microcosmic stories prove eerily relatable under Cho Nam-joo's precise, unveiled gaze, offering another captivating read from an essential voice in fiction.“There is mischief and glee to be found in these pages, along with the kind of laughter that sets two women over 50 rolling in snow with tears streaming down their frozen cheeks and the aurora borealis dancing above them.” —Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian

A work of extraordinary range and striking originality, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen traces the global history of written constitutions from the 1750s to the twentieth century, modifying accepted narratives and uncovering the close connections between the making of constitutions and the making of war. In the process, Linda Colley both reappraises famous constitutions and recovers those that have been marginalized but were central to the rise of a modern world.

She brings to the fore neglected sites, such as Corsica, with its pioneering constitution of 1755, and tiny Pitcairn Island in the Pacific, the first place on the globe permanently to enfranchise women. She highlights the role of unexpected players, such as Catherine the Great of Russia, who was experimenting with constitutional techniques with her enlightened Nakaz decades before the Founding Fathers framed the American constitution. Written constitutions are usually examined in relation to individual states, but Colley focuses on how they crossed boundaries, spreading into six continents by 1918 and aiding the rise of empires as well as nations. She also illumines their place not simply in law and politics but also in wider cultural histories, and their intimate connections with print, literary creativity, and the rise of the novel.

Colley shows how—while advancing epic revolutions and enfranchising white males—constitutions frequently served over the long nineteenth century to marginalize indigenous people, exclude women and people of color, and expropriate land. Simultaneously, though, she investigates how these devices were adapted by peoples and activists outside the West seeking to resist European and American power. She describes how Tunisia generated the first modern Islamic constitution in 1861, quickly suppressed, but an influence still on the Arab Spring; how Africanus Horton of Sierra Leone—inspired by the American Civil War—devised plans for self-governing nations in West Africa; and how Japan’s Meiji constitution of 1889 came to compete with Western constitutionalism as a model for Indian, Chinese, and Ottoman nationalists and reformers.

Vividly written and handsomely illustrated, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen is an absorbing work that—with its pageant of formative wars, powerful leaders, visionary lawmakers and committed rebels—retells the story of constitutional government and the evolution of ideas of what it means to be modern.

An immediate sensation when it was published in 1929, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front has sold more than twenty million copies worldwide since then, making it the best-selling German novel of all time. Its impact is indisputable: it has been adapted for film, television, and other media; has influenced all subsequent works of war literature; and has been taught in high school and college classes ever since.

Until now, one translation—published in 1929, and very much a product of its time—has introduced most readers in English to Remarque’s wrenching portrait of the horrors of trench warfare. Now, nearly a century later, renowned translator Kurt Beals recaptures the energy and descriptive force of the German original, rendering Remarque’s distinctly terse, telegraphic prose into a contemporary idiom, conveying for a new generation the immediacy and intensity of this classic novel.

The Nobel laureate Amartya Sen is one of a handful of people who may truly be called "a global intellectual" (Financial Times). A towering figure in the field of economics, Sen is perhaps best known for his work on poverty and famine, as inspired by events in his boyhood home of West Bengal, India. But Sen has, in fact, called many places "home," including Dhaka, in modern Bangladesh; Kolkata, where he first studied economics; and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he engaged with the greatest minds of his generation.

In Home in the World, these “homes” collectively form an unparalleled and profoundly truthful vision of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life. Here Sen, “one of the most distinguished minds of our time” (New York Review of Books), interweaves scenes from his remarkable life with candid philosophical reflections on economics, welfare, and social justice, demonstrating how his experiences—in Asia, Europe, and later America—vitally informed his work. In exquisite prose, Sen evokes his childhood travels on the rivers of Bengal, as well as the “quiet beauty” of Dhaka. The Mandalay of Orwell and Kipling is recast as a flourishing cultural center with pagodas, palaces, and bazaars, “always humming with intriguing activities.”

With characteristic moral clarity and compassion, Sen reflects on the cataclysmic events that soon tore his world asunder, from the Bengal famine of 1943 to the struggle for Indian independence against colonial tyranny—and the outbreak of political violence that accompanied the end of British rule. Witnessing these lacerating tragedies only amplified Sen’s sense of social purpose. He went on to study famine and inequality, wholly reconstructing theories of social choice and development. In 1998, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contributions to welfare economics, which included a fuller understanding of poverty as the deprivation of human capability. Still Sen, a tireless champion of the dispossessed, remains an activist, working now as ever to empower vulnerable minorities and break down walls among warring ethnic groups.

As much a book of penetrating ideas as of people and places, Home in the World is the ultimate “portrait of a citizen of the world” (Spectator), telling an extraordinary story of human empathy across distance and time, and above all, of being at home in the world.

The most celebrated general in history, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) has for centuries attracted eminent male writers. Since Thomas Carlyle first christened him “our last Great Man,” regiments of biographers have marched across the same territory, weighing campaigns and conflicts, military tactics and power politics. Yet in all this time, no definitive portrait of Napoleon has endured, and a mere handful of women have written his biography—a fact that surely would have pleased him.

With Napoleon, Ruth Scurr, one of our most eloquent and original historians, emphatically rejects the shibboleth of the “Great Man” theory of history, instead following the dramatic trajectory of Napoleon’s life through gardens, parks, and forests. As Scurr reveals, gardening was the first and last love of Napoleon, offering him a retreat from the manifold frustrations of war and politics. Gardens were, at the same time, a mirror image to the battlefields on which he fought, discrete settings in which terrain and weather were as important as they were in combat, but for creative rather than destructive purposes.

Drawing on a wealth of contemporary and historical scholarship, and taking us from his early days at the military school in Brienne-le-Château through his canny seizure of power and eventual exile, Napoleon frames the general’s story through the green spaces he cultivated. Amid Corsican olive groves, ornate menageries in Paris, and lone garden plots on the island of Saint Helena, Scurr introduces a diverse cast of scientists, architects, family members, and gardeners, all of whom stood in the shadows of Napoleon’s meteoric rise and fall. Building a cumulative panorama, she offers indelible portraits of Augustin Bon Joseph de Robespierre, the younger brother of Maximilien Robespierre, who used his position to advance Napoleon’s career; Marianne Peusol, the fourteen-year-old girl manipulated into a Christmas-Eve assassination attempt on Napoleon that resulted in her death; and Emmanuel, comte de Las Cases, the atlas maker to whom Napoleon dictated his memoirs. As Scurr contends, Napoleon’s dealings with these people offer unusual and unguarded opportunities to see how he grafted a new empire onto the remnants of the ancien régime and the French Revolution.

Epic in scale and novelistic in its detail, Napoleon, with stunning illustrations, is a work of revelatory range and depth, revealing the contours of the general’s personality and power as no conventional biography can.

The racers-an Italian prince and his chauffeur, a French racing driver, a con man, and several rival journalists-battle over steep inclines, through narrow mountain passages, and across the arid Gobi Desert. Competitors endure torrential rain and choking dust. There are barely any roads, and petrol is almost impossible to find. A global audience of millions follows each twist and turn, devouring reports telegraphed from the course.

More than its many adventures, the Peking-to-Paris Motor Challenge took place on the precipice of a new world. As the twentieth century dawned, imperial regimes in China and Russia were crumbling, paving the way for the rise of communist ones. The electric telegraph was rapidly transforming modern communication, and with it, the news media, commerce, and politics. Suspended between the old and the new, the Peking-to-Paris, as best-selling historian Kassia St. Clair writes, became a critical tipping point.

A gripping, immersive narrative of the race, The Race to the Future sets the drivers’ derring-do (and occasional cheating) against the backdrop of a larger geopolitical and technological race to the future. Interweaving events from the fall of the Qing dynasty to the departure of the horse economy and the rise of gendered marketing, St. Clair shows how the Peking-to-Paris provided an impetus for profound social, cultural, and industrial change, while masterfully capturing the mounting tensions between nations and empires—all building up to the cataclysmic event that changed everything: the First World War.

“Consistently mind-boggling, often funny, and occasionally hair-raising” (Philip Ball), The Race to the Future is the incredible true story of the quest against the odds that propelled us along the road to modernity.

As the only daughter of Roman Triumvir Marc Antony and Egyptian Queen Cleopatra VII, Cleopatra Selene was expected to uphold traditional feminine virtues; to marry well and bear sons; and to legitimize and strengthen her parents' rule. Yet with their parents' deaths by suicide, the princess and her brothers found themselves the inheritors of Egypt, a claim that placed them squarely in the warpath of the Roman emperor.

“Supported by a feast of visual and literary references” (Caroline Lawrence), Cleopatra’s Daughter reimagines the life of Cleopatra Selene, a woman who, although born into Egyptian royalty and raised in her mother’s court, was cruelly abandoned and held captive by Augustus Caesar. Creating a narrative from frescos and coinage, ivory dolls and bronzes, historian and archaeologist Jane Draycott shows how Cleopatra Selene navigated years of imprisonment on Palatine Hill—where Octavia, the emperor’s sister and Antony’s fourth wife, housed royal children orphaned in the wake of Roman expansion—and emerged a queen.

Despite the disrepute of her family, Cleopatra Selene in time endeared herself to her captors through her remarkable intellect and political acumen. Rather than put her to death, Augustus wed her to the Numidian prince Juba, son of the deposed regent Juba I, and installed them both as client rulers of Mauretania in Africa. There, Cleopatra Selene ruled successfully for nearly twenty years, promoting trade, fostering the arts, and reclaiming her mother’s legacy—all at a time, Draycott reminds us, when kingship was an inherently male activity.

A princess who became a prisoner and a prisoner who became a queen, Cleopatra Selene here “finally attains her rightful place in history” (Barry Strauss). A much-needed corrective, Cleopatra’s Daughter sheds new and revelatory light on Egyptian and Roman politics, society, and culture in the early days of the Roman Empire.

Don Paterson is one of our most acclaimed contemporary poets, possessed of "an infinite sensitivity to the world" (Zadie Smith). But his current standing gives few hints of his hilariously misspent youth. An indifferent student prone to obsessions (with girls at school and . . . origami), Paterson nevertheless made clear early on his immense gift for observation. In Toy Fights, he vividly re-creates the customs of the Scottish working class, from the titular childhood game ("basically twenty minutes of extreme violence without pretext") to the virtues of the sugary sweet known as tablet. When American pop culture arrived, Paterson fell hard for the so-called outlaw sound; by his teens, he was traveling with his father, a Stetson-wearing "country" musician, and becoming guitar-mad himself. A memoir of family, music, and highly inventive profanity, Toy Fights is an unforgettable account of the years we all spend in rehearsal for real life.

Nothing has brought English soccer more immediately into the American mainstream than Ted Lasso, which captivated the nation in thirty-four episodes over three seasons. But before there was Jason Sudeikis's lovable and, at first, hapless AFC Richmond, there was Watford Football Club, a team from the outskirts of London with barely enough fans to fill its stands-and which, in the mid-1970s, was languishing in 92nd place at the bottom of the last division of the English Football League. That is, until rock superstar Elton John-who, with his dad, had followed the team as a boy-bought the lowly franchise and, with legendary manager Graham Taylor, transformed the luckless football club into a top-seeded Premier League team. Inspiring, funny, and ultimately heartbreaking, Watford Forever recalls the improbably tender relationship between Elton John and Taylor, a straight-talking former fullback, who together beat the odds and their personal demons to save a club and a struggling community.

Countless books, news reports, and opinion pieces have announced the impending arrival of artificial intelligence, with most claiming that it will upend our world, revolutionizing not just work but society overall. Yet according to political philosopher and historian David Runciman, we've actually been living with a version of AI for 300 years because states and corporations are robots, too. In The Handover, Runciman explains our current situation through the history of these "artificial agents" we created to rescue us from our all-too-human limitations-and demonstrates what this radical new view of our recent past means for our collective future.

From the United States and the United Kingdom to the East India Company, Standard Oil, Facebook, and Alibaba, states and corporations have gradually, and then much more rapidly, taken over the planet. They have helped to conquer poverty and eliminate disease, but also unleashed global wars and environmental degradation. As Runciman demonstrates, states and corporations are the ultimate decision-making machines, defined by their ability to make their own choices and, crucially, to sustain the consequences of what has been chosen. And if the rapid spread of the modern state and corporation has already transformed the conditions of human existence, new AI technology promises the same.

But what happens when AI interacts with other kinds of artificial agents, the inhuman kind represented by states and corporations? Runciman argues that the twenty-first century will be defined by increasingly intense battles between state and corporate power for the fruits of the AI revolution. In the end, it is not our own, human relationship with AI that will determine our future. Rather, humanity’s fate will be shaped by the interactions among states, corporations, and thinking machines.

With clarity and verve, The Handover presents a brilliantly original history of the last three centuries and a new understanding of the immense challenges we now face.

Jon Savage, the author of the canonical England's Dreaming, explodes new ground in this electrifying history of pop music from 1955 through 1979. In demonstrating that gay and lesbian artists were responsible for many of the greatest cultural breakthroughs in the last half of the twentieth century, he shows that it was their secretly encoded music-appealing to a closeted but greatly oppressed public-which led to the historic dismantling of discriminatory gay laws and the fusion of queer and straight culture.Fittingly, Savage’s kaleidoscopic work begins with the pomp-and-pompadour appearance of Little Richard, whose relentlessly driving sound, replete with gospel shrieks and sexual contortions, enthralled a generation of 1950s stultified white teenagers. Things soon went mainstream, as Elvis enthralled a nation with his seductive low moans and bump-and-grind twists, heavily derivative of Black music, while James Dean and Rock Hudson became the face of 1950s Hollywood; yet this explosion of queer expression remained covert and could not be accepted for what it was.While music, with supporting roles from cinema and fashion, became the key medium through which homosexuality could be clandestinely enacted, overt expressions of gay behavior were met with arrests and crackdowns. While hippies reveled in 1967’s “Summer of Love,” gays remained “harassed by police, demonized by the media and politicians, imprisoned simply for being who they were.” J. Edgar Hoover, himself a closeted homosexual, continued to spy on homosexual deviants; CBS’s Mike Wallace aired an invidious show about homosexuality; and the New York police continued to raid gay bars.Yet the music itself produced a cultural eruption that simply could not be stanched. While Bette Midler sang “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boys” to a Continental Baths audience of 600 gay men, all naked except for towels, David Bowie “blew the whole topic wide open” and “became the most totemic pop star of his generation.” Even though roadblocks remained, the gear-grinding crunch of the music signaled that the gay civil rights movement could no longer be suppressed.Ending the narrative with the sudden collapse of disco, The Secret Public asserts then that the genie was out of the bottle, that queer culture had finally entered the mainstream, producing a transcendent vision of pop culture that could never be marginalized again.

When the twelve-year-old daughter of a British carpenter pulled some strange-looking bones from the country's southern shoreline in 1811, few people dared to question that the Bible told the accurate history of the world. But Mary Anning had in fact discovered the "first" ichthyosaur, and over the next seventy-five years-as the science of paleontology developed, as Charles Darwin posited radical new theories of evolutionary biology, and as scholars began to identify the internal inconsistencies of the Scriptures-everything changed. Beginning with the archbishop who dated the creation of the world to 6 p.m. on October 22, 4004 BC, and told through the lives of the nineteenth-century men and women who found and argued about these seemingly impossible, history-rewriting fossils, Impossible Monsters reveals the central role of dinosaurs and their discovery in toppling traditional religious authority, and in changing perceptions about the Bible, history, and mankind's place in the world.

Nothing has brought English soccer more immediately into the American mainstream than Ted Lasso, which captivated the nation in thirty-four episodes over three seasons. But before there was Jason Sudeikis's lovable and, at first, hapless AFC Richmond, there was Watford Football Club, a team from the outskirts of London with barely enough fans to fill its stands-and which, in the mid-1970s, was languishing in 92nd place at the bottom of the last division of the English Football League. That is, until rock superstar Elton John-who, with his dad, had followed the team as a boy-bought the lowly franchise and, with legendary manager Graham Taylor, transformed the luckless football club into a top-seeded Premier League team. Inspiring, funny, and ultimately heartbreaking, Watford Forever recalls the improbably tender relationship between Elton John and Taylor, a straight-talking former fullback, who together beat the odds and their personal demons to save a club and a struggling community.