Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed up Big Media

An entertaining, impassioned polemic on the retreat of reason in the late 20th century. An intellectual call to arms, Francis Wheen's Sunday Times bestseller is one of 2004's most talked about books. In 1979 two events occurred that would shape the next twenty-five years. In Britain, an era of weary consensualist politics was displaced by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, whose ambition was to reassert 'Victorian values'. In Iran, the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini set out to restore a regime that had last existed almost 1,300 years ago. Between them they succeeded in bringing the twentieth century to a premature close. By 1989, Francis Fukuyama was declaring that we had now reached the End of History. What colonised the space recently vacated by notions of history, progress and reason' Cults, quackery, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo. Modernity was challenged by a gruesome alliance of pre-modernists and post-modernists, medieval theocrats and New Age mystics. It was as if the Enlightenment had never happened. Francis Wheen, winner of the George Orwell prize, evokes the key personalities of the post-political era ' including Princess Diana and Deepak Chopra, Osama Bin-Laden and Nancy Reagan's astrologer ' while charting the extraordinary rise in superstition, relativism and emotional hysteria over the past quarter of a century. From UFO scares to dotcom mania, his hilarious and gloriously impassioned polemic describes a period in the world's history when everything began to stop making sense. Naomi Klein's No Logo told us what was wrong. Now, George Monbiot shows us how to put it right. Provocative, brave and beautifully argued, The Age of Consent is nothing less than a manifesto for a new world order. Our task is not to overthrow globalisation, but to capture it, and to use it as a vehicle for humanity's first global democratic revolution. All over our planet, the rich get richer while the poor are overtaken by debt and disaster. The world is run not by its people but by a handful of unelected or underelected executives who make the decisions on which everyone else concerning war, peace, debt, development and the balance of trade. Without democracy at the global level, the rest of us are left with no means of influencing these men but to shout abuse and hurl ourselves at the lines of police defending their gatherings and decisions. Does it have to be this way? George Monbiot knows not only that things ought to change, but also that they can change. Drawing on decades of thinking about how the world is organized and administered politically, fiscally and commercially, Monbiot has developed an interlocking set of proposals all his own, which attempts nothing less than a revolution in the way the world is run. If these proposals become popular, never again will people be able to ask of the critics of the existing world order, we know what they don't want, but what do they want? Fiercely controversial and yet utterly persuasive, the ingenious solutions Monbiot suggests for some of the planet's most pressing problems mark him as perhaps the most realistic utopian of our time and a man whose passion is infectious and whose ideas, many will surely come to agree, are becoming irresistible. Violent rebellion comes to London's middle classes in the extraordinary new novel from the author of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes. When a bomb goes off at Heathrow it looks like just another random act of violence to psychologist David Markham. But then he discovers that his ex-wife Laura is among the victims. Acting on police suspicions, he starts to investigate London's fringe protest movements, falling in with a shadowy group based in the comfortable Thameside estate of Chelsea Marina. Led by a charismatic doctor, the group aims to rouse the docile middle classes to anger and violence, to free them from both the self-imposed burdens of civic responsibility and the trappings of a consumer society -- private schools, foreign nannies, health insurance and overpriced housing. Markham, seeking the truth behind Laura's death, is swept up in a campaign that spirals rapidly out of control. Every certainty in his life is questioned as the cornerstones of middle England become targets and growing panic grips the capital .. Having made a hugely significant contribution to the increasingly irrefutable, if alarming, diagnosis of the ills of early 21st century consumerist culture and its free-market myths, George Monbiot sets out now with this new book to offer something more constructive, a set of proposals – political, democratic, economic, environmental – that might effect the cultural change that many in the West (not to mention those on the outside of the West looking in) now want but scarcely know how to make happen.'The Age of Consent' is provocative, brave, even utopian. But, with most of the 20th century's Big Ideas dead in the gutter, it's time for a book that can be a touchstone for real debate about the political and economic presumptions and prejudices on which our society has rested since World War II. FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE SHOCKING NEW BOOK SHAKING US POLITICS: FIRE AND FURY, INSIDE THE TRUMP WHITEHOUSE A riveting, barnstorming, thrilling ride through the loud, lively and all-embracing world of the modern media conglomerates – its key deals, dealmakers, divas and delusions. The global media industry has never been more powerful. And there is no more astute, forthright and entertaining chronicler of this roller-coaster world than award-winning writer Michael Wolff. In 'Autumn of the Moguls', a funny, frank, and incendiary account that looks hard at the great characters of this media age – from homes and gardens empress Martha Stewart to Disney czar Michael Eisner – he has written the guide we all need to the media, a world that is often more entertaining than what it produces. In this text, George Monbiot sets out to offer a set of proposals - political, democratic, economic and environmental - that might effect the cultural change that many in the West (not to mention those on the outside of the West looking in) now want but scarcely know how to make happen In this collection of speeches and essays, Roy writes about the subjects dearest to her heart, subjects of importance to anyone interested in democracy, in global justice, and in the direction certain powerful agencies beyond our control are taking the world Led by a charismatic doctor, a group of individuals form a violent protest movement to tear down the consumer society and replace it with a more meaningful existence. As middle England comes under attack, a sense of panic grips the capital