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A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

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Kate Brown

In the heart of bustling European and American cities lies an overlooked yet vibrant corner of resilience, ingenuity and magic: our gardens. 
 
From pre-industrial England to modern-day Ohio, via the Paris Commune, Barackia in pre-war Berlin, Soviet allotments in Estonia, the orchards tended by Black migrants in Washington and food forests in contemporary Amsterdam, ordinary people, working with each other and with nature, cultivated life in the unlikeliest of places. Over the past three hundred years, these tiny gardens, often born from necessity and shaped by precarity, immigration and environmental crisis, have thrived by recycling nutrients, remedying contaminated soil and transforming how we think about our relationship to the earth. 
 
Tiny Gardens Everywhere is a hymn to the most fertile agriculture in recorded human history, showing that it occurred not on farms – the product of gigantic exertions of fossil fuels and technology – but with little effort in small garden beds. And the resourcefulness, intuition and inherited methods of their growers accomplished many of today’s sustainability goals by producing local, diverse and organic food. 
 
Acclaimed historian Kate Brown unearths the long and battered story of gardeners and their gardens, asking what happens when these urban Edens are not seen as retreats from the city but become part of its social fabric, alive with histories of displacement, conflict and resistance. This is a book about land, but also about community, repair and the quiet revolutions that begin when someone plants a seed in unloved ground.

Tiny Gardens Everywhere

A History of Urban Resilience

Kate Pickett

A fairer, healthier, more caring and sustainable society is entirely within our grasp. This book shows us the way. 
 
• How do we ensure that everyone has good health and receives the care they need? 
• How do we provide education that allows every child to flourish? 
• How do we ensure safety, justice and a sustainable environment for all? 
 
Kate Pickett is a world-leading social scientist whose life’s work has been to identify the underlying causes of society’s most important problems – and the long-term solutions that will actually work. 
 
In this inspiring book, she shows that to make a good society – in which everyone has what they need to be well, and everyone would be better off – we must prioritise the health, care, education and rehabilitation of those who have the least and suffer the most. This means confronting once and for all the fundamental problems of poverty and inequality that lie behind all the others. 
 
Drawing on over three decades of evidence, and an array of proven solutions and real-world success stories from across the globe, The Good Society cuts to the essence of the challenges we face and presents us with a practical, galvanising, perspective-shifting vision for how to tackle them.

The Good Society

And How We Make It

Tim Wu

Today’s tech platforms are some of history's most advanced tools for extracting as much as possible – data, attention, profit-margins – from everyone else. As they become essential, we are at risk of building an economy that is perpetually unfair for much of humanity. 
 
Places and spaces where people can exchange information and goods have been at the heart of every economy and every civilization in history, but today’s global platforms - as provided by Amazon, Google, Apple, Meta and others - are different: instead of providing value they extract it, creating vast disparities in wealth and power between the haves and have-nots. For the first time in history, we have the ability to create sustainable prosperity for all, but currently that wealth is concentrated in a tiny number of hands. It isn't abundance that's the problem; it is distribution. 
 
In this brilliantly engaging, frequently surprising account, Tim Wu, one of the world’s foremost experts on anti-monopoly law, draws on fascinating case studies in the history of technology's explosive rise to demonstrate emphatically that breaking monopolies will ultimately unleash creativity and growth - and reduce the vast inequality that inevitably leads to social upheaval and political chaos. Wu also sets out an alternative blueprint that preserves the economic flourishing that platforms catalyze, allowing tech platforms to play a major role in creating and sustaining an economic model of prosperity not just for the few but for the many.

The Age of Extraction

How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

Elizabeth Kolbert

Urgent and inspiring lessons from the frontlines of the climate catastrophe – by one of our most important and influential environmental writers. 
 
From Greenland’s melting ice sheets to New Zealand’s protected mountaintops, we join Kolbert on the road as she travels to the places most dramatically affected by climate change – revealing a world which is both dangerously fragile and remarkably resilient. 
 
We encounter newly discovered species and meet the last surviving members of others, witness the power of rewilding up close and are reminded of the abounding wonders of our natural world. Along the way we also meet countless brilliant individuals who are steering us towards a better future: scientists harnessing AI to commune with whales; activists successfully lobbying for the rights of nature; and ordinary people making extraordinary moves, such as the Samsø islanders leading completely carbon-neutral lives. 
 
The natural world is changing profoundly, and the threats to our planet are only growing more serious. Now is the time to deepen our understanding of this incredible world we are in danger of losing – and to act, while we still can.

Life on a Little-Known Planet

Dispatches from a Changing World

Marc Priestley

From the high-octane, high stakes world of F1, these are the key lessons learned at the top level of the sport – and how to take them out of the pitlane and make them work for you 
 
Foreword by Jake Humphrey, author of HIGH PERFORMANCE. 
 
F1 teams operate at the highest level of competitive sport. With huge sums of money, global prestige and even lives on the line, they work under constant pressure to survive and succeed. 
 
Drawing on his World Championship-winning experience working for McLaren – one of the most storied and successful F1 teams in history – and his work as a high performance coach and mentor, Marc Priestley shows you lessons learned from and amongst the world’s best. He helps you to think about the challenges you face in work or life the way a world-class F1 team might think about those same challenges. 
 
From conquering stress to building a winning team; from responding to failure to celebrating success – and much more – Marc Priestley takes you inside the pitlane to reveal the secrets of F1 success – and how they can work for you.

Pitlane Lessons

What F1 Can Teach You About Life and Work

Aleks Krotoski

From the epic of Gilgamesh to the alchemy of the philosopher’s stone, humanity’s eternal quest for immortality – and its rejuvenation tricks, therapies and tinctures – has always been our most mortal endeavour. 
 
But now the giants of invention and investment are building a fountain of youth of their own creation: one they not only engineer, but also own and control. Death is simply their next problem to solve, the latest expression of a hubris that regards humans as appliances to be fixed and machines to be upgraded. By harnessing technology to ‘cure’ ageing, and funding cutting-edge – and often controversial – research, today’s immortalists are locked in an arms race to be the first to pocket the profits of longevity. 
 
What was once a wild west of experimentation has wormed its way into Washington’s corridors of power. Award-winning broadcaster and academic Aleks Krotoski journeys from those cult fringes to the heartlands of government to meet the moguls, effective altruists, geroscientists and entrepreneurs who are disrupting death. Along the way she encounters radical life extensionists transfusing their teenage son’s blood, transhumanists who want to upload consciousness to the cloud, biohackers flogging AI-powered wellness apps and billionaire kingmakers building brand-new nations. 
 
This razor-sharp, powerful and at times chilling investigation empowers us to consider what it truly means to be human, asking: do we really want a handful of Silicon Valley techno-fundamentalists to be the architects of our forever?

The Immortalists

The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal Life

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Nate Soares

AI is the greatest threat to our existence that we have ever faced. 
 
The scramble to create superhuman AI has put us on the path to extinction – but it’s not too late to change course. Two pioneering researchers in the field, Eliezer Yudkowsy and Nate Soares, explain why artificial superintelligence would be a global suicide bomb and call for an immediate halt to its development. 
 
The technology may be complex, but the facts are simple: companies and countries are in a race to build machines that will be smarter than any person, and the world is devastatingly unprepared for what will come next. 
 
How could a machine superintelligence wipe out our entire species? Will it want to? Will it want anything at all? In this urgent book, Yudkowsky and Soares explore the theory and the evidence, present one possible extinction scenario, and explain what it would take for humanity to survive. 
 
The world is racing to build something truly new – and if anyone builds it, everyone dies.

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

The Case Against Superintelligent AI

Nick Clegg

The global, open internet is fragmenting. 
 
As democracies seek to rein in the power of Big Tech, as Silicon Valley pivots to an America-first agenda, as authoritarian regimes such as China and Russia segregate their populations from the rest of the internet, the most powerful tool ever created for bringing the world together risks being dismantled. 
 
Taking us behind the scenes at Meta and his interactions with world leaders, Nick Clegg, Meta’s former President, Global Affairs, sets out where Big Tech has gone wrong, how Silicon Valley’s insularity has blinded it to its missteps, and the radical reforms of the global platforms that are now needed if they are to secure a long-term future. 
 
But he also makes the case that many of the charges against them – including that their algorithms polarise, manipulate and harm – are vastly overstated or simply untrue. And while new laws that regulate these corporations are essential, imposing national borders on the internet cannot be the answer. That will fatally undermine its capacity for knowledge-sharing, collaboration, education, trade, medical and scientific research, and ultimately for the improvement and empowerment of billions of lives. 
 
Radical, reasonable, deeply felt and disarmingly honest, How To Save the Internet sets out a blueprint for the global cooperation we need in order to reform Big Tech while preserving the fundamental openness of the internet on which our future so depends.

How to Save the Internet

The Threat to Global Connection in the Age of AI and Political Conflict

Liam Shaw

Antibiotics: one of humanity’s greatest achievements – but invented by microbes. 
 
An epic narrative of discovery and innovation – but also of extraction and exploitation. 
 
This is the spellbinding story of how we have burned through the fossil fuels of medicine. 
 
Since their advent, antibiotics have saved millions of lives, marking one of the greatest medical advances in our history. Dangerous Miracle weaves together the grand arc of the evolution of antibiotics over millions of years with a history of the past century: first as we mined the earth for naturally occurring antibiotic molecules, then as we learned to synthesise our own. 
 
But like fossil fuels, antibiotics are a finite resource which we’ve regarded as a cheap, everlasting fuel. They are unlike other drugs: every time we use them we increase the possibility of antibiotic resistance emerging, risking their future effectiveness. If we want antibiotics to have a future, we need to prepare to adapt. And fast. 
 
Rich with pioneering characters, great breakthroughs and grave risks, Dangerous Miracle is a grand drama of science, history and politics. It is a revelatory account of the miraculous history and uncertain future of antibiotics from a gifted writer.

Dangerous Miracle

A natural history of antibiotics – and how we burned through them

Tim Gregory

What if climate change isn't an environmental challenge, but an energy challenge? 
 
In this visionary book, Dr Tim Gregory urges us to rethink the path to net zero. He argues that the solution to climate change lies not simply in replacing fossil fuels with renewables, but in fully embracing another energy source that emits zero carbon dioxide: nuclear power. 
 
Gregory dismantles the conventional wisdom that renewables such as wind and solar are completely ‘green’, and debunks myths surrounding nuclear waste and radiation, demonstrating that nuclear power is not only reliable, safe and potent, but the most environmentally responsible way to harvest energy. 
 
Going Nuclear calls for decarbonisation to be the twenty-first century's Apollo programme. By interweaving scientific optimism, myth-busting data, and ambitious policy ideas, Gregory illustrates the boundless potential of the atom beyond just clean energy: from advanced medicine and forensics to atomic gardening and space exploration. 
 
This is a bold case for an alternative, sustainable and prosperous future: a world in which abundant energy is available to all.

Going Nuclear

How the Atom Will Save the World

How the Atom Will Save the Planet

Daniel M Davis

Is it true that orange juice can help ward off colds? How does age affect our immune system? Is mental health really connected to inflammation? 
 
We are surrounded by bold claims and quick fixes for ‘boosting’ our immune health. But one thing the science is clear on is that everyone’s immune system is completely unique – what is good for one person may not work well for another. So how do we separate the bogus claims from the useful advice? And given its sheer complexity, is there anything we can do to improve our immune system? 
 
In this expert guide, world-leading immunologist Daniel M. Davis examines the effects of stress, diet, age, exercise, the microbiome and more on the immune system, punctures the key myths, sorts the fact from the fiction and equips us to make informed choices for ourselves.

Self Defence

A Myth-busting Guide to Immune Health

Emily M. Bender

Alex Hanna

A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing the real harm these technologies do to our jobs, health, society and environment, who stands to gain from them, and how to fight back. 
 
Is AI going to take over the world? Have scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to replace all our jobs, even creative ones, like doctors, teachers and care-workers? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything? 
 
The answers to these questions, as the expert authors of The AI Con make clear, are 'no', 'they wish', 'LOL', and 'definitely not'. In fact, these fears are all symptoms of the hype being used by tech corporations to justify data theft, motivate surveillance capitalism, and devalue human creativity so they can replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. Meanwhile, across healthcare, education, media, government and law-enforcement, ‘AI’ products are already being introduced that are unreliable, ineffective, unjust and dangerous. 
 
Packed with real-world examples, pithy arguments and expert insights, The AI Con arms you to spot AI hype in all its guises, expose the exploitation and power-grabs it aims to hide, and push back against it at work and in your daily life.

The AI Con

How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want

Drew Harvell

A transporting exploration of the deep sea, and how our planet’s strangest, most ancient and astonishing creatures have urgent relevance to cutting-edge science today. 
 
Hundred-year-old giant clams, coral kingdoms the size and shape of cities, and jellyfish that glow in the dark: ocean invertebrates are among the oldest and most diverse organisms on Earth, seeming to bend the rules of land-based biology. Although sometimes unseen in the deep, these incredible spineless creatures contain 600 million years of adaptation to problems of disease, energy consumption, nutrition, and defence. 
 
Marine ecologist Dr Drew Harvell takes us diving from Hawaii to the Salish Sea, from the Caribbean to Indonesia, to uncover the incredible underwater ‘superpowers’ of spineless creatures: we meet corals many times stronger than steel or concrete, sponges who create potent chemical compounds to fight off disease, and sea stars who garden the coastlines, keeping all the other nearby species in perfect balance. As our planet changes fast, the biomedical, engineering and energy innovations of these wondrous creatures hold ever more important secrets to our own survival. 
 
The Ocean’s Menagerie is a tale of biological marvels, a story of a woman’s passionate connection to an adventurous career in science and a call to arms to protect the world’s most ancient ecosystems.

The Ocean's Menagerie

How Earth's Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life

Eric Klinenberg

What unites us? What divides us? What do we value? Sociologist Eric Klinenberg had been studying what crises reveal about societies for over two decades when his home of New York became the deadliest hot spot of the global pandemic. In this book he tells the deeply reported stories of seven ordinary people trying to survive at the epicentre of the crisis, and combines them with data gathered from around the world to provide unprecedented insights into what societies are made of, why they come together or fall apart, and how they shape our lives.

2020

A Reckoning

Merlin Sheldrake

The smash-hit Sunday Times bestseller now illustrated with over 100 spectacular full-colour images, showcasing this wondrous and wildly various lifeform as never before 
 
'Astonishing ... it seems somehow to tip the natural world upside down' Observer 
 
'Completely mind-blowing ... reads like an adventure story' Sunday Times 
 
*WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY BOOK PRIZE 2021* 
*WINNER OF THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR CONSERVATION WRTITING 2021* 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2021* 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021* 
 
The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them. They can change our minds, heal our bodies and even help us avoid environmental disaster; they are metabolic masters, earth-makers and key players in most of nature's processes. In Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake takes us on a mind-altering journey into their spectacular world, and reveals how these extraordinary organisms transform our understanding of our planet and life itself. 
 
'Dazzling, vibrant, vision-changing' Robert Macfarlane 
'Urgent, astounding and necessary' Helen Macdonald 
'Gorgeous!' Margaret Atwood (on Twitter) 
'Wonderful' Nigella Lawson 
'This book is like one surprise after another' David Byrne 
'Uplifting' Jeanette Winterson 
 
* A Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Times, Evening Standard, Mail on Sunday, BBC Science Focus and Time Book of the Year *

Entangled Life (The Illustrated Edition)

What does it take to care for a stranger? Really care. 
 
The Case for Love is a reflection on a career treating patients with brain trauma - people whose thoughts and feelings are largely unknowable - and how and why those treatments failed. 
 
It is a reconstruction of three haunting cases in which the patients were tragically misunderstood - and an attempt through the power of the imagination to understand and make amends. 
 
It then describes the author's abandonment of his career and his tumultuous quest for healing and redemption. 
 
It is also a story of intimate relationships, pets, fatherhood and heartbreak, culminating in a moment of psychedelic transcendence and rebirth. 
 
It is about the overpowering need for connection - and how, increasingly, we are trapped in ourselves. 
 
It is a meditation on empathy and an act of atonement. 
 
It is a unique, hybrid work of clinical case study and pure invention that destroys the boundary between fact and fiction in order to bring us face-to-face with the shocking, liberating truth. 
 
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Praise for Let Me Not Be Mad 
 
'Imagine a gonzo Oliver Sacks communing with Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose, R.D. Laing and the spirit of Kafka's 'The Country Doctor', and you still won't quite have the flavour of this wild and strikingly original book' William Fiennes 
 
'Stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest; one of the best portraits of madness and clinical practice I've read' Olivia Laing 
 
'A perfectly extraordinary - not to mention extraordinarily perfect - tense Hitchcockian psychodrama. I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness. An important, profound and fascinating book' Stephen Fry 
 
'Blackly comic, warmly compassionate, a unique take on the human mind offering uncomfortable universal truths' Stewart Lee 
 
'A slow-burn belter of a book ... terrific ... so finely described, the result has the terse force of a classic short story' Roddy Doyle 
 
'Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat' Guardian

The Case for Love

My Adventures In Other Minds

KATAPULT

'Terrifying yet funny, surprising yet predictable, simple yet poignant' Chris Packham 
 
A shocking but informative, eye-catching and witty book of maps that illustrate the perilous state of our planet. 
 
The maps in this book are often shocking, sometimes amusing, and packed with essential information: 
 
· Did you know that just 67 companies worldwide are responsible for 67 per cent of global greenhouse emissions? 
 
· Or that keeping a horse has the same carbon footprint as a 23,500-kilometre road trip? 
 
· Did you know how many countries use less energy than is consumed globally by downloading porn from the internet? 
 
· Do you know how much of the earth's surface has been concreted over? 
 
· Or how many trees would we have to plant to make our planet carbon-neutral? 
 
Presenting a wealth of innovative scientific research and data in stunning, beautiful infographics, 99 Maps to Save the Planet provides us with instant snapshots of the destruction of our environment. At one glance, we can see the precarious state of our planet - but also realise how easy it would be to improve it 
 
 Enlightening, a bit frightening, but definitely inspiring, 99 Maps to Save the Planet doesn't provide practical tips on how to save our planet: it just presents the facts. And the facts speak for themselves. Once we know them, what excuse do we have for failing to act?

99 Maps to Save the Planet

With an introduction by Chris Packham

Timothy Snyder

A virus is not human, but the reaction to it is a measure of humanity. 
 
America has not measured up well. Tens of thousands are dead for no reason. America is supposed to be about freedom, yet illness and fear make its citizens less free. After all, freedom is meaningless if we are too ill to think about our right to happiness or too weak to pursue it. So, if a government is making its people unhealthy it is also making them unfree. 
 
 On December 29, 2019, Timothy Snyder fell gravely ill. As he clung to life he found himself reflecting on the fragility of health, not recognized in America as a human right, but without which all rights and freedoms have no meaning. And that was before the pandemic. We have since watched understaffed and undersupplied hospitals buckling under waves of coronavirus patients. The federal American government made matters worse through wilful ignorance, misinformation, and profiteering. 
 
This passionate intervention outlines the lessons we must all learn, wherever we are, and finds glimmers of hope in dark times. Only by enshrining healthcare as a human right, elevating the authority of doctors and truth, and planning for our children's future, can everyone be properly free. 
 
Freedom belongs to individuals. But to be free we need our health, and for our health we need one another.

Our Malady

Lessons in Liberty and Solidarity

Jane Jacobs

In this classic text, Jane Jacobs set out to produce an attack on current city planning and rebuilding and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed. The result is one of the most stimulating books on cities ever written. 
 
Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to cities have been let loose on our urban environment. Inspired by the ideals of the Garden City or Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they have dreamt up ambitious projects based on self-contained neighbourhoods, super-blocks, rigid 'scientific' plans and endless acres of grass. Yet they seldom stop to look at what actually works on the ground. 
 
The real vitality of cities, argues Jacobs, lies in their diversity, architectural variety, teeming street life and human scale. It is only when we appreciate such fundamental realities that we can hope to create cities that are safe, interesting and economically viable, as well as places that people want to live in. 
 
'Perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning... Jacobs has a powerful sense of narrative, a lively wit, a talent for surprise and the ability to touch the emotions as well as the mind' New York Times Book Review

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Philip Caputo

The first memoir of the Vietnam War and an all-time classic of war literature 
|40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION| 
 
In March 1965, Marine Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo landed in Danang with the first ground combat unit committed to fight in Vietnam. Sixteen months later, having served on the line in one of modern history's ugliest wars, he returned home - physically whole but emotionally destroyed, his youthful idealism shattered. 
 
A decade later, having reported first-hand the very final hours of the war, Caputo sat down to write ‘simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to them’. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest war memoirs of all time. 
____________________ 
 
‘A singular and marvellous work – a soldier’s-eye account that tells us, as no other book that I can think of has done, what it was actually like to be fighting in this hellish jungle’ The New York Times 
 
‘Unparalleled in its honesty, unapologetic in its candour and singular in its insights into the minds and hearts of men in combat, this book is as powerful to read today as the day it was published in 1977. Caputo has more than earned his place beside Sassoon, Owen, Vonnegut, and Heller’ Kevin Powers 
 
‘To call this the best book about Vietnam is to trivialize it. A Rumour of War is a dangerous and even subversive book, the first to insist that readers asks themselves the questions: How would I have acted? To what lengths would I have gone to survive? A terrifying book, it will make the strongest among us weep’ Los Angeles Times Book Review 
 
‘Caputo’s troubled, searching meditations on the love and the hate of war, on fear and the ambivalent discord warfare can create in the hearts of decent men are amongst the most eloquent I have read in modern literature’ New York Review of Books 
 
‘Superb. At times it is hard to remember that this is not a novel’ New Statesman

A Rumor of War

Colin Turnbull

The Forest People is an astonishingly intimate and life-enhancing account of a hunter-gatherer tribe living in harmony with nature -- and an all-time classic of anthropology. 
 
For three years, Colin Turnbull lived with an isolated group of Pygmies deep in the forest of the African Congo, experiencing their daily life first-hand. He attended their hunting parties and initiation ceremonies, witnessed their music and their rituals, observed their quarrels and love affairs. He documented them as an anthropologist but was accepted among them as a friend. 
 
A ground-breaking work in its time, The Forest People made him one of the most famous intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s. It remains a transporting account of an earthly paradise and of a legendary and fascinating people. 
 
With a new foreword by Horatio Clare.

The Forest People

John D. Barrow

'If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.' John von Neumann 
 
Mathematics can tell you things about the world that can't be learned in any other way. This hugely informative and wonderfully entertaining Brain Shot answers a few essential questions about existence. It unravels the knotty, clarifies the conundrums and sheds light into dark corners. From winning the lottery, financial investment with Time Travelers and the weirdest football match ever to Sherlock Holmes, Elections, game theory, drunks, packing for your holiday and the madness of crowds; from chaos to infinity and everything in between, Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know has all the answers! 
 
BRAIN SHOTS: The byte-sized guide to all the things you didn't know you didn't know...

100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know

Frances A Yates

This unique and brilliant book is a history of human knowledge. 
 
Before the invention of printing, a trained memory was of vital importance. Based on a technique of impressing 'places' and 'images' on the mind, the ancient Greeks created an elaborate memory system which in turn was inherited by the Romans and passed into the European tradition, to be revived, in occult form, during the Renaissance. 
 
Frances Yates sheds light on Dante’s Divine Comedy, the form of the Shakespearian theatre and the history of ancient architecture; The Art of Memory is an invaluable contribution to aesthetics and psychology, and to the history of philosophy, of science and of literature.

The Art of Memory

Lisa Randall

On July 4th, 2012, one of physics' most exhilarating results was announced: a new particle – and very likely a new kind of particle – had been discovered at the Large Hadron Collider, the huge particle accelerator designed to reproduce energies present in the universe a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. The particle's existence had been speculated on for nearly fifty years: here, finally, was proof. 
 
Professor Lisa Randall of Harvard University is one of the world's most influential theoretical physicists, and author of the bestselling Knocking on Heaven's Door and Warped Passages. In Higgs Discovery she deftly explains both this epochal discovery and it's startlingly beautiful implications.

Higgs Discovery

The Power of Empty Space

Richard Fortey

'A very well written book about geology and geological history' Sir David Attenborough, The Times 
 
'I travelled to Haverfordwest to get to the past. From Paddington Station a Great Western locomotive took me on a journey westwards from London further and further back into geological time, from the age of mammals to the age of trilobites...' 
 
So begins this enthralling exploration of time and place in which Richard Fortey peels away the top layer of the land to reveal the hidden landscape - the rocks which contain the story of distant events, which dictate not only the personality of the landscape, but the nature of the soil, the plants that grow in it and the regional characteristics of the buildings. We travel with him as our guide throughout the British Isles and as the rocks change so we learn to read the clues they contain: that Britain was once divided into two parts separated by an ocean, that Scottish malt whisky, Harris tweed, slate roofs and thatched cottages can be traced back to tumultuous events which took place many millions of years ago. The Hidden Landscape has become a classic in popular geology since its first publication in 1993. This new edition is fully updated and beautifully illustrated.

The Hidden Landscape

A Journey into the Geological Past

Roger Penrose

Eschermatics

Joshua Roebke

No one has ever seen an electron, quark or neutrino. Yet, no physicist has any doubt as to the existence of these particles. Through mathematics, physicists have opened up the world of the invisible, they have, quite literally, taught us another way to 'see' the world. 
 
The Invisible World illuminates the social and cultural history of particle physics in the twentieth century, describing the invisible objects and forces that have shaped our world and chronicling the lives of the people who first revealed them; physicists whose discoveries changed the courses of nations. From the coincident revelations of x-rays and the cinema to the rise of string theory and exotic financial instruments, The Invisible World is a sweeping history of the twentieth century and the physics that shaped the world we know today. 
 
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the first particle had only just been observed and physicists were still not sure of the existence of atoms or molecules. Since then, physics has unleashed profound changes on our world. From X-rays to transistors to TVs to atomic weapons, we have learned to live with these new realities and have forged our culture and politics around them. 
 
Never before has there been a single record, one narrative history, of what physicists have accomplished in the twentieth century in their quest to understand the fundamental laws and fabric of the universe - and no cultural history that illuminates what that tumultuous century, in all its beauty and terror, had in turn done to them. The Invisible World brilliantly examines the larger role of history and culture in the lives and work of physicists and reveals the stories of how physics left a profound mark on culture and society. The history of the twentieth century, the political shifts between Europe and the United States, the changes in art and popular culture, can all be understood through the lens of physics.

The Invisible World

The Stories of Physics in the Twentieth Century

Patricia Kingori

‘Original, fascinating and shocking’ BERNARDINE EVARISTO 
 
You may well know someone who has gone overseas and put their future in the hands of a stranger to pursue their dream of becoming a parent; you may even know someone who has resorted to the services of an exam mill or shadow scholar to get themselves through their finals. But do you know anything about the women who provide these services, let alone where they live? 
 
They call themselves the surrogates. 
 
Patricia Kingori, Professor at Oxford, uncovers a world where the parentally and academically desperate seek help, with few questions asked, from the entrepreneurial surrogates, who sacrifice their bodies and minds at the peak of their most productive years, to give birth to someone else’s baby and write someone else’s assignment. At its heart are Millicent and Rose, the brilliant, unforgettable and resourceful women who embody the pressures and precarity, humour and heartache, corruption and empty choices of these twin trades, on which so many in the Global North depend. 
 
The Surrogates is the first ever in-depth examination of the lives of African women entangled in these booming, multi-billion-dollar industries of biological and intellectual surrogacy. With unprecedented access, drawing on four years of on-the-ground research and interviews with 80 women, it confronts the inequalities and contradictions woven into the fabric of education, technology, globalization, and the pursuit of personal agency. Kingori also holds up a mirror to our own societies, engaging with the thorny issues of medical tourism, AI and offshoring labour, and illuminating the resilience of those largely unheard in the ongoing conversation about empowerment and choice.

The Surrogates

The Hidden Lives and Invisible Labour of the Women for Hire in Kenya

Lucie Green

The Universe In Your Pocket takes the reader on a journey through space and time using ten of the most game-changing and perspective-shifting maps ever created - each representing a major scientific advance and a startling new way of thinking about the universe. 
 
From the celestial maps of the ancients to a cutting-edge visualisation of the shape of the entire universe, we journey through its magnetic fields, along the fluctuating rivers of the solar winds to gravitational oases known as Lagrange points and the surface of Mars, through Black Holes and the enigma of Dark Energy, all the way to the very edges of the cosmos. Each chapter describes the theoretical leaps and feats of exploration that went into the creation of each map, the aspect of the universe it lays bare as well as the mysteries it reveals. 
 
Written by an astrophysicist at the forefront of this adventure, The Universe In Your Pocket is a small book about human curiosity on the grandest scale. Like the maps themselves, it offers a way to grasp the unimaginable and apprehend the unknown.

The Universe In Your Pocket

Ten Cosmic Maps that Explain Everything

Jerry White

How the turmoil of revolution and war created the London we know today – the world’s first truly global city. 
 
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars changed London beyond recognition, turning it into the capital of the world – the focal point of international finance and trade. Victory over France in 1815 ushered in the ‘British Century’: the next hundred years would be defined by Britain’s capitalist innovation and financial might, naval supremacy and imperial ambition. 
 
In this brilliant portrait of these pivotal years, Jerry White looks at how revolution and war on the Continent transformed the capital. While the manufacture of war materials brought wealth for some, high food prices led to bread riots. The war divided public opinion, with ultra-patriots clamouring for the defeat of ‘Bony’, while others sought to emulate the democratic reforms pioneered across the Channel. Crucially, the chaos and uncertainty on the Continent led to a mass flight of foreign bankers and merchants to London, which would help turn London into the world’s leading financial centre -- contemporaries called it ‘The Modern Rome’. 
 
Yet Birth of a Global City takes in the wider world too. Who was feeding London, in the British Isles and across the empire? How instrumental was Britain’s financial might in victory over France? What impact did the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 have on London, Britain and its empire? And how dangerous were the political ideas coming from the Continent? It was this turbulent period of war and political turmoil that created London as we know it today.

Birth of a Global City

London in a Revolutionary World, 1789-1815

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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