©Antonio Olmos
Books by Philippe Sands
Philippe Sands KC is Professor of the Public Understanding of Law at University College London where he directs the Project on International Courts and Tribunals. He is also a barrister at Matrix Chambers. He is President of English PEN and won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2016 for East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity.
“There were several other things written about the ‘torture memos’ as they were called during the Bush administration. But Sands went ahead and interviewed the authors of those memos and tried to get to the bottom of their motivation…The motivations are similar to the ones that the United States has criticised in many other countries that are accused of torture. They use the idea of there being exceptions to the rule and that this was needed because the US was in a state of emergency, and maybe these arguments are a little more sophisticated than what Pinochet and his minions came up with 30 years ago, but they are not all that different…The other aspect of it is also that these proponents of torture during the Bush administration say that it works, and I think that Philippe Sands’s book demonstrates that this is by no means the case.” Read more...
Juan Mendez, Lawyer
East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity
by Philippe Sands
🏆 Winner of the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
“This is a fantastic and very impressive book. He manages to maintain lots of different storylines through quite complex material, in a way that I found completely absorbing. He’s tracing the history of the notion of war crimes and genocide, through two lawyers who were most associated with the Nuremberg trials. They were not related to each other, and didn’t even knew each other very well, but they both came from the same town in Poland that his grandfather also came from…It’s also telling a story of the Holocaust, and how his grandparents managed to escape Vienna quite late and get back to London. There are lots of unanswered questions and loose ends in the story that he gets told by his mother and his grandfather never talked about it. He follows up all of these loose ends, including trying to find the mysterious woman who saved his mother’s life by taking her, as a baby, across Europe, for what turns out to be bizarre motives.” Read more...
Stephanie Flanders, Economist
The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy
by Philippe Sands
The Last Colony by Philippe Sands is about the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean, which Britain grabbed hold of in exchange for allowing the rest of Mauritius to become independent in the 1960s. The entire population of the islands was deported to make way for a US military base at Diego Garcia. Sands is a human rights lawyer and represented Mauritius at the World Court in the Hague, in a fight to allow the people of Chagos to go home. It's a book about the importance of international law, an explanation of how it evolves and how it can be used to find justice. It's also the story of one woman, Liseby Elyse, deported from Peros Banhos in 1973. She was 20 years old and pregnant at the time, but lost the baby. She gave powerful testimony to the ICJ in 2018.
Interviews with Philippe Sands
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1
The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness
by Katie Booth -
2
Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955
by Harald Jähner & Shaun Whiteside (translator) -
3
Osebol: Voices from a Swedish Village
by Marit Kapla & Peter Graves (translator) -
4
Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science
by James Poskett -
5
When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold
by Alia Trabucco Zerán & Sophie Hughes (translator) -
6
Kingdom of Characters: A Tale of Language, Obsession, and Genius in Modern China
by Jing Tsu
The British Academy Book Prize: 2022 Shortlist, recommended by Philippe Sands
The British Academy Book Prize: 2022 Shortlist, recommended by Philippe Sands
The annual British Academy book prize rewards “works of nonfiction that have contributed to public understanding of world cultures and their interaction.” Human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, one of the prize’s judges, talks us through the books that made the 2022 shortlist and explains what makes them so compelling.
Interviews where books by Philippe Sands were recommended
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1
The Fire of the Dragon: China’s New Cold War
by Ian Williams -
2
Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival
by Luke Harding -
3
Who Cares: The Hidden Crisis of Caregiving, and How We Solve It
by Emily Kenway -
4
The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy
by Philippe Sands -
5
The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule
by Angela Saini
The 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, recommended by Martha Lane Fox
The 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, recommended by Martha Lane Fox
The Orwell Prizes are the UK’s most prestigious prizes for writing about politics, awarded annually to books and articles that best meet George Orwell’s own ambition “to make political writing into an art.” Martha Lane Fox, chair of this year’s judging panel, talks us through the shortlist of the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, awarded annually to a nonfiction book.
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1
Question 7
by Richard Flanagan -
2
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
by John Vaillant -
3
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
by Katherine Rundell -
4
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
by Patrick Radden Keefe -
5
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time
by Craig Brown -
6
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
by Hallie Rubenhold
Baillie Gifford Prize-Winning Nonfiction Books
Baillie Gifford Prize-Winning Nonfiction Books
It's a prize that has been awarded annually since 1999 to a book that speaks to an important issue but is also highly readable. Below you'll find all the winners of the Baillie Gifford Prize, the UK's most prestigious non-fiction book award—from a gripping account of a turning point in World War II to a terrifying forest fire in an oil town in Canada.
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1
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between
by Hisham Matar -
2
Negroland: A Memoir
by Margo Jefferson -
3
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
by Svetlana Alexievich -
4
East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity
by Philippe Sands -
5
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War
by Robert J. Gordon
Best Nonfiction Books of 2016, recommended by Stephanie Flanders
Best Nonfiction Books of 2016, recommended by Stephanie Flanders
Stephanie Flanders, chair of this year’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, talks us through some of the best nonfiction books of 2016.
The best books on Torture, recommended by Juan Mendez
Can torture ever be justified? No, says the UN special rapporteur, who tells us how torturers try to excuse themselves and what remedies should be available to surviving victims
The best books on Violence and Torture, recommended by Darius Rejali
The author of Torture and Democracy gives a harrowing interview on the effects of violence, torture and trauma on the human being, ‘torture has a slippery slope and once you authorise it, it rapidly runs out of control’
