Matt Johnson

In this compelling series of conversations, Matt Johnson--songwriter and founder of legendary band THE THE--sits down with BFI Executive Director Jason Wood to reflect on over four decades of fearless artistry. From the band's post-punk origins to their critically acclaimed 2024 album 'Ensoulment', Johnson shares candid insights into his life and music. Renowned for his raw emotional depth and razor-sharp socio-political commentary, Johnson offers a revealing self-portrait as someone who has never shied away from exploring life's darkest corners. Jason Wood is Executive Director of Public Programmes and Audiences at BFI. His other books include 100 American Independent Films, Nick Broomfield: Documenting Icons, The Faber Book of Mexican Cinema, 100 Road Movies and 100 American Independent Films

Winner of the Book of the Year and Reader's Choice awards at the 2024 CrimeCon True Crime Awards. Highly commended at the same awards for Outstanding Investigative Reporting. Winner of the 2024 Capital Crime Fingerprint Award (True Crime). Shortlisted for the 2024 Crime Writers Association ALCS Gold Dagger for non-fiction. Behind one of the greatest tragedies in UK policing history lies an incredible political scandal 'An important book, especially now' Lee Child 'Espionage, betrayal, terrorism, corruption and murder. All the ingredients of a Le Carre novel, only it's real' Matthew Hall 'A powerful and timely account' John Sutherland 'Very well written and deeply researched . . . an account of a relentless search for justice. It has pride of place in my library' John Grieve CBE QPM former DAC MPS and former National Coordinator for Counter-Terrorist Investigations 'Well-written, brilliantly researched, uplifting and yet, a truly shocking read.' DCI Colin Sutton (ret'd) Senior Investigating Officer, the Millie Dowler enquiry On 17 April 1984, as demonstrators gathered outside the Libyan embassy in London, two gunmen lay in wait inside. At 10.18 a.m. automatic gunfire rained down on the protestors and WPC Yvonne Fletcher fell, mortally wounded. As his friend lay dying, PC John Murray made her a promise that he would not rest until those responsible had been brought to justice. Thirty-seven years would pass before he was able to fulfil that undertaking. While researching this moving account of one man's dogged pursuit of justice for a murdered colleague, Matt Johnson uncovered secret-service deals and government duplicity, all part of a plan to force an end to the National Union of Mineworkers' strike. He discovered the real reason Yvonne's killers were allowed to go free and how events that day led to thirty years of growing political control of policing, resulting in the disarray increasingly evident today. This compelling account pulls seemingly unconnected threads into a coherent - and shocking - whole. It provides startling insights into how decisions taken by our politicians and the actions of our intelligence agencies, supposedly in our best interests, may be anything but.

Christopher Hitchens was for many years considered one of the fiercest and most eloquent left-wing polemicists in the world. But on much of today’s left, he’s remembered as a defector, a warmonger, and a sellout—a supporter of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who traded his left-wing principles for neoconservatism after the September 11 attacks. In How Hitchens Can Save the Left, Matt Johnson argues that this easy narrative gets Hitchens exactly wrong. Hitchens was a lifelong champion of free inquiry, humanism, and universal liberal values. He was an internationalist who believed all people should have the liberty to speak and write openly, to be free of authoritarian domination, and to escape the arbitrary constraints of tribe, faith, and nation. He was a figure of the Enlightenment and a man of the left until the very end, and his example has never been more important. Over the past several years, the liberal foundations of democratic societies have been showing signs of structural decay. On the right, nationalism and authoritarianism have been revived on both sides of the Atlantic. On the left, many activists and intellectuals have become obsessed with a reductive and censorious brand of identity politics, as well as the conviction that their own liberal democratic societies are institutionally racist, exploitative, and imperialistic. Across the democratic world, free speech, individual rights, and other basic liberal values are losing their power to inspire. Hitchens’s case for universal Enlightenment principles won’t just help genuine liberals mount a resistance to the emerging illiberal orthodoxies on the left and the right. It will also remind us how to think and speak fearlessly in defense of those principles.

A revelatory guide on how to build, sustain and grow a brand. A brand is either beloved, or it's noise. We live in a fast-paced world of immediate gratification where consumers can listen to any song, watch any movie, or read any article, with the touch of a few buttons. They are peppered with hyper-personalized targeting for products that can be ordered seamlessly and arrive within hours. And if your brand isn't the first to come to mind, they'll click that button and it'll be delivered by someone else. So how do you make sure your brand connects with consumers? Branding that Means Business draws from the authors' experience and business literature as well as psychology, sociology, and even anthropology to show readers that while any brand serves the business, the mechanisms that enable it are all about connecting with people. Readers will learn how to create, maintain, and operationalize their brand, and think creatively about how to differentiate their product and most importantly, make consumers fall in love with it.

New in the Economist Edge series: how brands can create enduring bonds with customers and markets in the post-digital age of social influence.

Ever notice that all watch ads show 10:10 as the time? Or that all fast-food restaurants use red or yellow in their logos? Or that certain stores are always having a sale? You may not be aware of these details, yet they've been influencing you all along. Every time you purchase, swipe, or click, marketers are able to more accurately predict your behavior. These days, brands know more about you than you know about yourself. Blindsight is here to change that. With eye-opening science, engaging stories, and fascinating real-world examples, neuroscientist Matt Johnson and marketer Prince Ghuman dive deep into the surprising relationship between brains and brands. In Blindsight, they showcase how marketing taps every aspect of our mental lives, covering the neuroscience of pain and pleasure, emotion and logic, fear and safety, attention and addiction, and much more. We like to think of ourselves as independent actors in control of our decisions, but the truth is far more complicated. Blindsight will give you the ability to see the unseeable when it comes to marketing, so that you can consume on your own terms. On the surface, you will learn how the brain works and how brands design for it. But peel back a layer, and you'll find a sharper image of your psychology, reflected in your consumer behavior. This book will change the way you view not just branding, but yourself, too.

Right now, there is a group of people running a simple, profitable business without being glued to their phones.What's their secret? They have become famously influential to the right people. And so can you.This book gives you a new strategy to attract an audience, build influence and create ideal clients - systematically.So you can teach, train and lead people while growing a business you love.

The Green Bay Packers and San Francisco 49ers have a unique and distinct rivalry. While not division foes, the Packers and Niners used to meet on an semiannual basis. Their rivalry became boiling hot in the nineties, when both teams won a Super Bowl, and they met in the playoffs four consecutive seasons. They then met three more times in the playoffs after the turn of the century. Join Tommy (a Packers fan) and Matt (a 49ers fan) as we look back at one of the NFL's most underrated rivalries

When the author of a book about secret government operations goes missing – along with his agent, and the manuscript itself – Police Inspector Robert Finlay is thrust into a complex and terrifying investigation. The final instalment in a searingly authentic series. ‘A taut, knife-edge thriller you won’t put down till the last full stop’ M R Hall ‘Matt Johnson’s real-life experiences shine through in the vivid plotting and authentic action’ Rob Sinclair ‘Another fast-moving and beautifully detailed page-turner from a master thriller writer’ Robert Daws ____________________ Robert Finlay has finally left his SAS past behind him and is settled into his new career as a detective, but when the author of a book about secret operations goes missing, along with his agent and an explosive new manuscript, it’s clear that Finlay’s troubles are far from over. With his friend and former colleague, Kevin Jones, in trouble, and police complaints branch gunning for them both, Robert teams up with MI5 agent Toni Fellowes to find out who’s behind the growing conspiracy. Their quest soon reveals a plot that goes to the very heart of the UK’s security services. End Game, the final part in the critically acclaimed Robert Finlay trilogy, sees our hero in an intricate and terrifyingly fast-paced race to uncover the truth and escape those who’d sooner have him dead than be exposed. ____________________ ‘A compelling mix of highly credible detail, tactics, procedures, and all striated into the political games that the intelligence services play. Highly Recommended’ Shots Mag ‘Gripping stuff’ New Welsh Review ‘Matt Johnson is a brilliant new name in the world of thrillers’ Peter James ‘This tense, edge-of-the-seat writing will keep fans frantically turning the pages as they race towards the conclusion’ Amanda Jennings ‘Utterly compelling and dripping with authenticity’ J S Law ‘Five shining gold stars of brilliant’ The Quiet Knitter ‘Nothing is clear-cut in a gripping labyrinthine plot, which – despite thrills and spills aplenty – never falls short of believable’ David Young

Optimize your talent by removing the obstacles in their path Capacity is a proven system for bringing the best out of your team-and yourself. Matt and Chris Johnson set the mark on how to succeed in the future with their energizing message, humorous stories and their generational differences. As the world speeds-up faster and faster, organizations and their people try to keep up. This pressure to do more with less has reached epidemic levels of concern and organizations are panicking on how to recruit, retain and attract the best talent for the future. Burnout, low engagement, and overwhelming stress are jeopardizing organizations’ ability to scale and win. As outdated performance models of the past crumble under pressure, Matt and Chris show you how to build and protect your most valuable asset—YOUR PEOPLE. What if you could beat the clock and expand your capacity by 6 hours per week? Or 11? Think about the organizational impact if your workforce were given fresh capacity to perform, lead, and grow. This book offers a clear, workable solution for organizations functioning in the real world: by paring it down to three performance pillars they must have to succeed—focus, energy, and drive. Ever organization sets initiatives, but many remain unfinished because their capacity to do so fails before it starts. This framework is different: these changes bring the type of benefits that cause transformation. Giving your people what they need makes buy-in irrelevant, and allows them to perform at their highest potential. Not only can it work, but it is the only thing that will work over the long term. By making your organization a great place to work, you retain your best talent and attract more like it. With dedicated resources, focus, sustainable effort, and comprehensive strategy, your top performers will be equipped to drive your organization to the top. Among Capacity’s Key Points: Learn what top performers need to produce their very best workDiscover the biggest factor influencing your team’s FOCUS, ENERGY and DRIVEPrevent burnout and stimulate innovation by allowing your people to have a bigger containerAdopt a strategy of expanding capacity to exceed your high-performance goals Deeply personal, but organizational focused. Capacity is an engaging and even life changing book Capacity is the next big paradigm shift for the future of training and development—as we shift to the world of the knowledge worker, it is not information or talent that wins, it’s is whoever has the largest capacity that will win. Capacity is your secret weapon to winning the performance war.

Police Inspector Robert Finlay takes on a ruthless criminal gang, as he and his new partner Nina investigate a sex-trafficking ring … the second instalment in the addictive, searingly authentic Robert Finlay series. **NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER** ‘Nothing is clear-cut in a gripping labyrinthine plot, which – despite thrills and spills aplenty – never falls short of believable’ David Young ‘Terse, tense and vivid writing’ Peter James ‘The magic mix of jeopardy, emotion and action. I could not put it down’ Louise Voss ____________________ Reeling from the attempts on his life and that of his family, Police Inspector Robert Finlay returns to work to discover that any hope of a peaceful existence has been dashed. Assigned to investigate the Eastern European sex-slave industry just as a key witness is murdered. Finlay, along with his new partner Nina Brasov, finds himself facing a ruthless criminal gang, determined to keep control of the traffic of people into the UK. On the home front, Finlay’s efforts to protect his wife and child may have been in vain, as an MI5 protection officer uncovers a covert secret service operation that threatens them all… Aided by new allies, he must not only protect his family but save a colleague from an unseen enemy … and a shocking fate. Deadly Game is a stunning, terrifying and eye-opening thriller from one of the most exciting new names in crime fiction. ____________________ ‘Utterly compelling and dripping with authenticity. This summer’s must-read thriller’ J S Law ‘From the first page to the last, an authentic, magnetic and completely absorbing read’ Sir Ranulph Fiennes ‘A genuine page-turner, very well written, and just flows from one scenario to the next. It is clear the author lived through these times and this is evident in knowledge and description. Excellent’ Ian Patrick ‘It’s this normality about Finlay that appealed to me and kept me reading. The believability of the story. The authenticity’ Rebecca Bradley ‘Gripping stuff’ New Welsh Review 'Finlay’s first-person narrative voice is punchy and to the point, and the switching between him and the third person points of view carries the story along smoothly. Mention should be made of the interesting supporting cast that add layers of intrigue into the narrative and compels the reader to look out for these thrillers from Matt Johnson. Highly Recommended’ Shots Magazine ‘This tense, edge-of-the-seat writing will keep fans frantically turning the pages as they race towards the conclusion’ Amanda Jennings ‘A top-notch thriller with a dark heart and an emotional soul’ Liz Loves Books 'Deadly Game combines spy thriller and police procedural extremely well and should certainly be destined for the shelves of anyone into their conspiracy thrillers' Crime Fiction Lover

Royalty Protection Team officer Robert Finlay is looking forward to a quieter life, when two police officers are killed and their links to his own past becomes clear … putting everyone’s lives in danger. A startlingly authentic debut … first in a page-turning, searing new series.**NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER****Shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger****LoveReading Debut of the Month**‘Terse, tense and vivid writing. Matt Johnson is a brilliant new name in the world of thrillers. And he’s going to be a big name’ Peter James‘From the first page to the last, an authentic, magnetic and completely absorbing read’ Sir Ranulph Fiennes____________________2001. Age is catching up with Robert Finlay, a police officer on the Royalty Protection team based in London. He's looking forward to returning to uniform policing and a less stressful life with his new family. But fate has other plans. Finlay's deeply traumatic, carefully concealed past is about to return to haunt him. A policeman is killed by a bomb blast, and a second is gunned down in his own driveway. Both of the murdered men were former Army colleagues from Finlay's own SAS regiment, and in a series of explosive events, it becomes clear that he is not the ordinary man that his colleagues, friends and new family think he is. And so begins a game of cat and mouse – a wicked game, in which Finlay is the target, forced to test his long-buried skills in a fight against a determined and unidentified enemy. Wicked Game is a taut, action-packed, emotive thriller about a man who might be your neighbour, a man who is forced to confront his past in order to face a threat that may wipe out his future, a man who is willing to do anything to protect the people he loves. But is it too late?____________________‘Utterly compelling and dripping with authenticity. This summer’s must-read thriller’ J S Law‘Out of terrible personal circumstances, Matt Johnson has written a barnstormer of a thriller. Nothing is clear-cut in a gripping labyrinthine plot, which – despite thrills and spills aplenty – never falls short of believable’ David Young‘Wicked Game has the authenticity I look for in a thriller. While the plot kept me turning pages, the characters made me care. Matt writes like a man who has lived it’ Kevin Maurer‘Johnson litters his tale with the plotting equivalent of incendiaries: cops we don’t quite trust, a career that came abruptly to an end, a secret needing to be kept … Gripping stuff’ New Welsh Review

Gustav Klimt was an Austrian symbolist painter, whose primary subject was the female body. His paintings, murals, and sketches are marked by a sensual eroticism, which is especially apparent in his pencil drawings. He was Vienna's most famous advocator of Art Nouveau, or, as the style was identified in Germany, "youth style". He is remembered as one of the famous decorative artists of the 20 century, and he also created one of the century's most important examples of erotic art. Primarily flourishing as a conservative academic painter, his run into with more modern trends in European art encouraged him to build up his own free and frequently out of this world style. His place as the co-founder and first president of the Vienna Secession also ensured that this style would become broadly prominent - though Klimt's direct authority on other artists was partial.