The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East with Sean Mathews (Hurst, 2025)

Karmic Winds: Reflections from “The Smartest Guy in Hollywood” (Rare Bird Books, 2026) is a memoir of power, collapse, and reckoning by Peter M. Hoffman, a Yale-trained lawyer and Hollywood insider who once stood at the center of the independent film boom and later found himself stripped of status, freedom, and certainty. As president of Carolco Pictures, Hoffman helped steer an era-defining slate that included Terminator 2, Basic Instinct, and Rambo, navigating a world of massive egos, creative brilliance, and financial brinkmanship. But ambition has its cost. After the industry turns, legal battles mount, and a federal conviction leads to imprisonment, Hoffman is forced into a confrontation far more exacting than any boardroom negotiation: a reckoning with his own choices, illusions, and moral blind spots. Set partly within the quiet, disorienting confines of Terminal Island federal prison, Karmic Winds traces a journey through humiliation and loss toward clarity and acceptance. Drawing on philosophy, Buddhism, and a lifelong search for meaning, Hoffman examines the nature of justice, the seductions of power, and the invisible forces—personal and systemic—that shape our lives. Neither a tell-all nor a plea for absolution, Karmic Winds is a deeply reflective account of success and failure, told with intellectual rigor and emotional restraint. It is a story of what remains when the titles disappear, the noise falls away, and one is left alone with the self...and the winds that carried them there.

The history of the environmental movement-from environmentalism of the nineteenth century to the environmental justice struggles of the late twentieth century-has often been portrayed as a series of efforts led by white environmentalists. In Stewards of the Land, Stevie Ruiz reassesses the movement and reveals that it has always been a multiracial endeavor. From Southern California berry fields to Japanese American concentration camps, from Chinese cooks in national parks to Chicano Civilian Conservation Corps workers, Ruiz traces how the racialized labor and environmental knowledge of Asian migrants and Chicana/o communities built the material foundations of modern environmentalism.

Wartime leaders should understand the link between violent means and political ends. They should also have a sense of how strategic decisions will affect the post-war peace. Yet they often fail to make these connections. Mistaking strategy for grand strategy, or misunderstanding the relationship between them, can frustrate soldiers and statesmen alike. Sometimes it can lead to national ruin. In this Adelphi book Strategy and Grand Strategy (Routledge, 2025), Joshua Rovner offers a lucid analysis of strategy (a theory of victory) and grand strategy (a theory of security). He demonstrates vividly how these concepts interact in case studies from antiquity to the present, and he describes the implications for war and peace at a time of extraordinary technological change. Rovner’s work will prove indispensable to policymakers, scholars and anyone seeking to grasp these essential but often misunderstood concepts.

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Agi Bodis speaks with Dr Carly Steele (Curtin University, Perth) about researching education with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and how to enable culturally and linguistically responsive teaching. They discuss the importance of positionality when working in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander context, and why it matters in collaborative work with communities.

Few things delight a historical novelist more than true stories of forgotten individuals remembered, if they are remembered at all, for one dramatic moment or act. Flora Cordier—a Belgian glove maker who apparently married the last effective Ottoman sultan, Abdulhamid II (1876–1909), before his accession to the throne—is just such a person. Flora left almost no impression in the historical record, not much more than a newspaper account and a few references to her outside the empire in later life, yet the question of how a European craftswoman might not only have set up shop in nineteenth-century Istanbul but have also crossed the path of a prince from the House of Osman begs to be told.