Haus Publishing

What does it mean to lead with compassion in a world riven by fear, at a time when the responses to forced displacement hold the power to reshape communities? How can institutions and individuals sustain solidarity amid rising divisio? his moving reflection of Filippo Grandi’s ten years as UN High Commissioner for Refugees and four decades spent working in humanitarian crises across the world addresses the growing complexity of forced displacement, its repercussions for international relations, and the challenges it poses for governments. Grandi calls for greater cooperation between nations and considers measures – along displacement routes and in host countries – which would provide life-saving assistance to refugees as well as preserve international cooperation and goodwill. He suggests a universal responsibility not to exacerbate division but to work diligently on the space between pragmatism and principle. Taking up this challenge, Catherine Ashton’s response to Grandi draws on her own distinguished leadership during some of the most important moments that have shaped contemporary diplomacy, and suggests how enduring principles can be retained within the realities of public life.

Patrice Lumumba had been prime minister of the newly liberated Congo for only seven months at the time of his assassination in 1961. As news of his execution spread, his image was brandished in demonstrations around the world along with those of Che Guevara and Mao Zedong. He would go on to become an icon of anti-imperialist struggle and perhaps the most famous leader of the African independence movement. Lumumba’s life and the freedom that he sought for the Congo exposed ongoing Western colonialism and the problematic nature of the independence granted to huge swathes of the globe after 1945. Leo Zeilig’s concise, direct biography tells the story of the Congo in the dying days of colonialism; of Lumumba’s transition from nationalist, to revolutionary, to international symbol of African liberation; and of the role of Western powers in his murder.

The first complete account of Emperor Joseph II’s undercover journey through his kingdom It is the middle of the eighteenth century, and across Europe signs of crisis are everywhere. Travelling incognito, and without the customary pomp and entourage, the young emperor Joseph II journeys through the Holy Roman Empire and his Habsburg lands to see with his own eyes how his subjects live, suffer, and starve. Moving between the world of kings and queens and that of ordinary people in their hospitals and factories, he is persuaded by Enlightenment ideas of progress and liberty. Visiting his sister, Marie Antoinette in Versailles, he senses the French Revolution looming and realises that reform is imperative if he is to build a modern state. The Emperor Incognito tells the story of an extraordinary man in an age of great upheaval, who spent a quarter of his twenty-five-year reign on the road. The result of his radical ambition and titanic efforts, despite his own admission (as inscribed on his tombstone) that he ‘failed in everything he undertook’, was the foundation of a more modern Austrian monarchy, in a Europe in which progress would no longer be determined solely by its rulers.

This is a book is about walking and writing; about walkers who wrote, and writers who walk. And because it is a book about walking and writing it is also a book about thinking, the circuit that exists between mind and feet, and about moving through a landscape that can be both physically in front of you, and exist in a line of words or the flight of a line of thought. And since all this walking and writing and thinking must have somewhere to take place, it is also a book about Suffolk, where I come from as a writer. So it also has a something in it of the journal, the writer's notebook; a little of the memoir and a little of the love-letter. You might call it the literary biography of a landscape. You may follow the walks on foot, with this book in your backpack perhaps, for those moments when walking must give way to reading, or you can follow them from within the deep comfort of a favourite armchair. You will travel in it from west to east, from chalk plain to crag; from velvety farmlands muffled by leaves to deafening shingle and uncompromising sea. You will be in excellent company - the walkers who will join you along the way range from Daniel Defoe and Robert Louis Stevenson to Patricia Highsmith, Maggie Hemingway, Rebecca Solnit and Noreen Masud. They will include the poets George Crabbe, Robert Bloomfield, Algernon Swinburne, Stevie Smith and Blake Morrison; the literary greats Wilkie Collins, George Orwell and W. G. Sebald, who found a new native land here; and those born to it, such as M. R. James and Edward Fitzgerald. All have their own thoughts, their own connections and reflections to add to the conversation. Let us walk.

Fully Revised and Enlarged Edition with a new ForewordSince his execution for high treason in 1916, Roger Casement has been lauded for his humanitarian activism in Africa and the Amazon. His life, however, has remained obscured behind speculation about his sexuality and his complicated contribution to Ireland’s revolutionary generation that took up arms against the British Empire. He lives on as an enduring enigma in the history of British-Irish relations—a figure who refuses easy categorisation, and whose legacy demands radical reconsideration. Angus Mitchell traces the life of a man fatally divided between serving the empire and advancing demands for an independent Irish nation. Understanding his logical evolution from imperialist to revolutionary unmasks a coherent global dimension to the Irish struggle. The apparent contradictions of his life resolve into a singular commitment to humanity, justice, and universal principles of love and tolerance. Beyond what it tells us about Casement’s fated path to the scaffold in Pentonville Prison, this biography invites readers to question the curation of national history,  the hidden power of archives, and the lasting impact of state secrecy.

Syracuse, on the eastern coast of Sicily, was one of the great cities of the ancient Mediterranean: a place of brute power, dazzling culture, and vivid myth. Here, tyrants waged wars and built vast palaces, Aeschylus staged tragedies, Plato hoped to create his ideal ‘philosopher king’, and the nymph Arethusa, transformed into water, lived on as a spring fringed with papyrus. Moving to the city after a bereavement, the poet Joachim Sartorius discovers a place of haunting and haunted beauty, where the layers of the past are always visible. At his side we wander with demigods and generals through the old town of Ortigia and meet the people of the present-day city: its artists and police officers, café owners and barbers, barons and refugees. Unravelling the threads of Sicilian history, Sartorius explores the city’s mingling of ancient and modern, Greek and Arab, medieval and baroque, creating a portrait of a city inseparably entwined with its past.

A useful guide to thinking about the past and present condition of prophecy. Few people remember Ralph Wigram. If he is known at all, it is as the Foreign Office official who warned Winston Churchill of the Nazi threat with such persistence, conviction, and hard evidence that Churchill had the wherewithal to make his case to the British people. Prophets like Wigram are a fixture of a world without certainty. Oracles and fortune-tellers populate our myths and holy texts, and modern life is not short of forecasters, intelligence analysts, and threat-mongers. So how can we, and our leaders, know whose warnings to hee? educing the well-worn subject of predicting the future to its most essential aspects, Weisbrode revisits significant incidents of prophecy, from Stalin’s dismissal of the warnings of German invasion to those given to successive US presidents about the terrorist threat in the years preceding 9/11. This idiosyncratic guide considers the past and present condition of prophecy, uncovering patterns of fear, complacency, and neglect.

Growing up in the wake of the Spanish military’s shattering defeat at the hands of the United States in 1898 over Cuba and having survived a bullet to the stomach while serving his country in Morocco, it is perhaps no wonder that Francisco Franco’s fame and notoriety was eventually guaranteed by his ruthless pursuit of victory for the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. Franco played a major role on the world stage until his death in 1975. At once intensely sentimental and affecting cool indifference at times of bad news, he emphasised the need to obey orders, the importance of individual bravery, absolute loyalty to the Fatherland and the crucial role of the army. Variously courted by the liberal democracies of Britain and France, the Fascist alliance of Hitler and Mussolini and then by anti-communist administrations in Washington, the memory of his successful policies, leading to rapid growth during a time of economic depression, are tempered by his government’s extreme repression of political opponents and perpetration of mass violence during the White Terror. In Franco, Michael Streeter explores the Generalissimo’s legacy as the subject of a cult of personality in one of Europe’s longest-lasting modern dictatorships and considers his genesis, his successes – decades of relative stability and prosperity during a period of great European conflict – and the terrible cost at which they came.

In Human Nature, Thomas Bell embarks on four walks through the Himalaya, each in a different season, to explore the interplay between the land and the people who call it home. This evocative history entwines travelogue with folklore, literature, art and anthropology, offering a nuanced portrait of life over the centuries in one of the world’s most enigmatic regions. Bell’s decades in Nepal give him an unusual perspective that bridges the gap between insider and outsider. The stories he recounts touch on themes from religion to ecology and political economy, and span from pre-history to the present day. He also deftly examines the impact of British imperialism and the growing external pressures on the environment. Accompanied by Bell’s striking photographs and maps, Human Nature is a magnificently written account that spans big ideas and real lives. Erudite, intimate and evocative, this is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the relationship between communities and their environments.

One of Britain's foremost constitutional experts, Peter Hennessy has spent his five-decade career unpicking the arcane world of Whitehall and Westminster as a journalist, prize-winning historian, and political commentator. In doing so, he has chronicled the workings of the British state with wit, affection, and a healthy sense of absurd. In On the Back of an Envelope, he reflects in his time observing post-war Britain and its governance, considering the making and unmaking of prime ministers from Attlee to Truss, the role of the Monarchy, and the changing constitutional landscape in the wake of Brexit and in the midst of uncertainty about the Union. Interspersed with lectures, journalism, and new pieces, Hennessy looks back at a fascinating career, reflecting on his own experiences in the hard-nosed world of Fleet Street in the 1970s and bringing to life a cast of characters from a world now largely gone. He also revisits his time as a public historian, academic, and crossbench peer with a levity reflected in his belief that history is 'gossip with footnotes'.

In the Future of Yesterday offers a refreshing approach to the life and work of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, delving into his considerable contribution to world literature, rooted in the Austro-Jewish tradition. A world traveller from the outset, Zweig liked to uproot himself – but whether he stayed in London, New York, or eventually Brazil, his literary baggage continued to contain the flair of fin de sie`cle Vienna. Looking anew at Zweig’s influential time in England and offering fresh insights into his final years in the United States and Brazil, Go¨rner discusses Zweig’s prolific literary output in relation to his life and treats his political views on Europe, Zionism, and the world order with great depth and scrutiny. Most importantly, In the Future of Yesterday shows Zweig as a towering figure of a form of writing that was bursting with life and was written in the knowledge that there can only be a future if we remain conscious of the past.

During Admiral Thomas Cochrane’s demolition of imperial Spain’s naval presence in the Pacific during the revolutionary wars for Spanish South America, all the raids were carried out by his marines under a young officer called William Miller. He came from nowhere – one of three sons of a baker in a small village in Kent, with no family influence, money, or even secondary education – but, following his service as a teenaged soldier in Wellington’s Peninsular War, went on to have a meteoric rise in the armies that liberated the nations of Chile and Peru. Inspired by some South Americans’ wish to leave Spain’s colonial empire, Miller went not to join Simón Bolívar in the north (as did many demobilised European soldiers), but to the south, to José de San Martín in Argentina and Chile. By the time of Ayacucho in 1824, the large battle that ended Spanish rule in South America, there were seven generals in the royalist Spanish army and five on the patriot side. Eleven of these generals were Hispanic; Miller was the only foreigner. Miller was passionately anti-imperialist, anti-slavery, and unusually kind to ordinary people and peasant farmers due to his own humble origins. He was highly regarded by all the leaders of independence and popular with his men and fellow officers, and when he died decades after the battles in which he made his name he was buried in the Pantheon of founding fathers of Peru. William (or Guillermo, as he is known in South America) Miller is well recognised and loved particularly in modern Peru, but also across the swathe of nations liberated from Spanish rule during this period.

The history of the transatlantic partnership has become highly topical in recent years; in fact, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it has been felt as a key reassurance under threat from the United States’ increasing isolationism during Donald Trump’s second term in the White House. In her life of Eric Warburg, Jeanette Erazo Heufelder tells the story of the nephew of the art historian Aby Warburg, whose world-famous library Eric relocated to London and saved from the Nazis. Coming from a long line of German–Jewish bankers, Eric Warburg emerged from the looming shadow of preceding generations of Warburgs, and repurposed their liberal values to form the core of his own Atlantacist convictions. Warburg spent the inter-war years working closely with the American branch of his family and their connections in government to promote the cause of international peace and stability in the wake of the Great War. After Hitler’s rise to power and the period following his fall, Warburg became a helper of escapees, an intelligence officer in the US Army, a transatlantic bridge builder, and a Cold Warrior, and with the help of the cooperation channels he set up, West German and US social groups were aligned with the West amidst the turmoil of post-war Europe. His life, and that of Aby Warburg’s library, tells the story of Europe's twentieth century, the legacy of which continues to inform and inspire the transatlantic partnership today.

Who was Arminius Vambéry? A poverty-stricken, Jewish autodidact; a linguist, traveller, and writer; or a sometime Zionist, inspiration for Dracula’s nemesis, and British secret agent? Vambéry wrote his own story many times over. And it was these often highly embroidered accounts of journeys through Persia and Central Asia that saw him acclaimed in Victorian England as an intrepid explorer and daring adventurer. Against the backdrop of the ‘Great Game’, in which Russia and Britain jostled for territory, influence, and control of the borders and gateways to Central Asia and its wealth, Vambéry played the roles of hero and double-dealer, of fascinated witness and imperial charlatan. The Dervish Bowl is the story of these competing narratives, a compelling investigation of the ever-changing persona Vámbéry created for himself, and of the man who emerges from his private correspondence and the accounts of both his friends and his enemies, many of whom were themselves major players in the geopolitical adventures of the volatile nineteenth century – a time when Britain’s ambitions for her empire were at their height, yet nothing and no one was quite as they seemed.

Making the Weather is the story of six post-war politicians, all of whom exerted an outsized influence on the political life of the UK; an influence greater than that of most prime ministers. Vernon Bogdanor’s cast includes three from the political Left – Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, Roy Jenkins, and Tony Benn – and three from the political Right – Enoch Powell, Keith Joseph, and Nigel Farage. Each study is a fascinating analysis that examines how these men achieved such prominence and influence and how, though very different figures in many ways, they came to dominate the political landscape, often for a period of years. Each of the six made fundamental contributions to the debate about Britain’s future and to the vibrancy of our democracy. From immigration to Europe, from the NHS to devolution, the issues and causes that brought these men to prominence are still of considerable contemporary relevance.

A memoir that combines political and economic commentary with personal and national history. Mohammad Tarbush was born in British Mandate Palestine. As an infant, he and his family were forced to evacuate their village together with its entire population, after the Zionist victory that led to the establishment of the State of Israel. Then as landless refugees in the West Bank, the family sank into poverty. When, as a teenager, Tarbush left home one day under the pretext of visiting relatives in Jordan, he in fact set off on a year-long hitchhiking journey to Europe, where he would eventually become a highly successful international banker and a key behind-the-scenes promoter of the Palestinian cause. In My Palestine, Mohammad Tarbush combines poignant personal memoir with incisive political and economic commentary on the tumultuous events that shaped the history of Israel, Palestine, and the modern Middle East.