Imagine That – Football (Paperback)

The History of Football Rewritten

Michael Sells

International football’s most intriguing stories are the tales of what might have been, those seemingly insignificant incidents that would have had the largest unforeseen effects.

Imagine That…

Messi is unable to afford growth hormone treatment … and Spanish football loses its charitable nature

Technology helps prevent decades of human error in football … and West Germany claims victory at Wembley in 1966

Substitutions are never introduced to football … and the game is rid of greed and disloyalty

Engaging, contentious and compulsively readable, each book in this new series takes the reader on a historical flight of fancy, imagining the consequences if history had gone just that little bit differently.

Michael Sells is a historian educated at the University of Chester. Captivated by history from a young age, he is especially interested in Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation and 1960s and 70s football. Outside of history, his passions include dystopian novels, animal sanctuaries and lower-league football. Born in the South East of England, he now lives in Cambridge and the Imagine That titles are his first books.

Imagine That – Film (eBook)

Michael Sells

The most intriguing stories from the history of cinema are the tales of what might have been, those seemingly insignificant incidents that would have had the largest unforeseen effects.

Imagine That…
The farmers of southern California revolt against plans for an aqueduct … and Chicago becomes the new home of American cinema

Casablanca’s writing committee takes total control … and the film’s greatest moments are whitewashed from history

Disney decides against collaborating with Hitler’s former engineer … and the USA never wins the ‘Space Race’

Engaging, contentious and compulsively readable, each book in this new series takes the reader on a historical flight of fancy, imagining the consequences if history had gone just that little bit differently.

Michael Sells is a historian educated at the University of Chester. Captivated by history from a young age, he is especially interested in Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation and 1960s and 70s football. Outside of history, his passions include dystopian novels, animal sanctuaries and lower-league football. Born in the South East of England, he now lives in Cambridge and the Imagine That titles are his first books.

Imagine That – Film (Paperback)

The History of Film Rewritten

Michael Sells

The most intriguing stories from the history of cinema are the tales of what might have been, those seemingly insignificant incidents that would have had the largest unforeseen effects.

Imagine That…
The farmers of southern California revolt against plans for an aqueduct … and Chicago becomes the new home of American cinema

Casablanca’s writing committee takes total control … and the film’s greatest moments are whitewashed from history

Disney decides against collaborating with Hitler’s former engineer … and the USA never wins the ‘Space Race’

Engaging, contentious and compulsively readable, each book in this new series takes the reader on a historical flight of fancy, imagining the consequences if history had gone just that little bit differently.

Michael Sells is a historian educated at the University of Chester. Captivated by history from a young age, he is especially interested in Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation and 1960s and 70s football. Outside of history, his passions include dystopian novels, animal sanctuaries and lower-league football. Born in the South East of England, he now lives in Cambridge and the Imagine That titles are his first books.

Welcome to the Jilted Generation (eBook)

Young Britain in 2013

Ed Howker

Shiv Malik

This the 44-page Preface to the 2013 edition of Ed Howker and Shiv Malik's Jilted Generation: How Britain Bankrupted Its Youth.

In 2010, 'Jilted Generation: How Britain Bankrupted It's Youth' revealed the plight of Britain's youngest adults for the first time while a new coalition government set out to solve them. The Tories said they would "fulfil a solemn promise to the next generation". The Liberal Democrats said they were "absolutely determined that we will be able to look our children and grandchildren in the eye and say we did the best we could for them". So how has that been working out?

In this trailblazing new analysis, the authors of Jilted Generation reveal the canyon between Britain's next generation and the politicians claiming to help them. In unemployment and homelessness rates, through the riots, student protests and workfare battles, a picture emerges of a generation in crisis, a government in stasis and an unprecedented opportunity to solve both problems.

Published here as an eBook Short, as well as in the fully updated new edition of Jilted Generation, this essay offers an insight into the issues – a clear and hard-hitting view of the situation in 2013 for Britain's young adults.

Ed Howker is a programme-maker for Channel 4’s Dispatches. Shiv Malik is an investigative journalist at the Guardian. Both live in London.

Hess, Hitler and Churchill (eBook)

The Real Turning Point of the Second World War - A Secret History

Peter Padfield

When Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess set off for Britain on a peace mission in May 1941, he launched one of the great mysteries of the Second World War. Had he really acted alone, without Hitler’s knowledge? Who were the British he had come to see? Was British intelligence involved?

Award-winning historian Peter Padfield presents striking new evidence that demands the wholesale reappraisal of the episode. For, allied to a powerful argument that Hess must have had both Hitler’s backing and considerable encouragement from Britain, Padfield demonstrates that he also brought with him a draft peace treaty committing Hitler to the evacuation of occupied European countries. Made public, this would have destroyed Churchill’s campaign to bring the United States into the war.

Expertly woven into a compelling narrative that touches on Lord (Victor) Rothschild and the Cambridge spy ring, possible British foreknowledge of Operation Barbarossa and the ‘final solution’, MI6’s use of Hess to prevent the bombing of London and the mysterious circumstances of his death in Spandau prison – including the previously unseen witness accounts from that day – Hess, Hitler and Churchill is among the most important history books of recent years.

Peter Padfield is an award-winning naval and Nazi-period historian whose most recent books were the Maritime Supremacy trilogy (John Murray), awarded the Mountbatten Maritime Prize.

A Broad Vision (eBook)

The Price Bailey Story

Peter Pugh

This is a book about the 75 years of a very successful accountancy practice.

They are 75 important years both in the history of the United Kingdom, encompassing the Second World War and all the recessions and periods of growth in the 60-year period following that war, and in the history of accountancy and how it has had to adapt to both the changes in accounting practices and in accounting technology.

As you will see, the Price Bailey story is one of growth from a single partner in one office to 22 partners in seven offices, not only in East Anglia but in the City and West End of London as well as in Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Price Bailey, which became a Limited Liability Partnership in 2004, is now the 29th biggest accountancy practice in the country. Its new Managing Director, Martin Clapson, is also Chairman of the European Board of the International Association of Professional Accountants (IAPA).

Many people view accountants as a necessary adjunct to their life because the law of the land demands that financial dealings, whether personal or corporate, be properly assessed and recorded and that the correct tax, if any is due, be paid.

There is no doubt that Price Bailey has always been meticulous in making sure this work is done properly and in due time. However, it has also always been the practice of the firm to carry out the above in an open and friendly manner and to offer more than the mere adding up of sums. As Richard Price, son of one of the original partners and a very long-serving member of Price Bailey, will tell you in the book, the firm has always made sure that they were close to the clients and often mixed with them socially.

As you will also see, Price Bailey, especially in the last twelve years under the leadership of Peter Gillman, has greatly increased the services it can offer. Most recently, it is now authorised to give legal advice.

PETER PUGH was educated at Oundle and Cambridge where he read History. He has written more than 40 books about companies including a three-volume history of Rolls- Royce. He also wrote a book on the Guinness Scandal, an Insider’s Guide to the City and guides to the philosophy of Maynard Keynes and the legacy of Margaret Thatcher in the well-known Introducing series. He is currently writing a book on Hunting plc.

A Practical Guide to Counselling (eBook)

Help Others Make Sense of Life

Alistair Ross

Talk, listen, support and understand better. 

Develop a hands-on understanding of how counselling works and how it can help people, viewing the subject from both a client’s and a trainee counsellor’s perspective.

Learn how to listen more attentively and be a better communicator, be more empathetic with a heightened perception of others, and improve your relationships with both those around you and yourself.

Providing expert insights, real-life case studies and useful skills, this Practical Guide offers an invaluable guide to anyone interested in learning more about counselling.

Dr Alistair Ross is a BACP accredited counsellor and supervisor, Chair of the BACP’s Professional Ethics and Quality Standards Committee, and a director of studies in Psychodynamic Studies and Psychology at the University of Oxford. Since 2002 he has also led the MA in Psychodynamic Counselling at the University of Birmingham.

The Elements of Eloquence (eBook)

How To Turn the Perfect English Phrase

Mark Forsyth

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER THE ETYMOLOGICON.

'An informative but highly entertaining journey through the figures of rhetoric … Mark Forsyth wears his considerable knowledge lightly. He also writes beautifully.' David Marsh, Guardian.

Mark Forsyth presents the secret of writing unforgettable phrases, uncovering the techniques that have made immortal such lines as 'To be or not to be' and 'Bond. James Bond.'

In his inimitably entertaining and witty style, he takes apart famous quotations and shows how you too can write like Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde or John Lennon.

Crammed with tricks to make the most humdrum sentiments seem poetic or wise, The Elements of Eloquence reveals how writers through the ages have turned humble words into literary gold – and how you can do the same.

Mark Forsyth is a blogger and author who was given a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary as a christening present and has never looked back. In 2009, he started the Inky Fool blog in order to share his heaps of useless information with a verbose world. His books have made him one of the UK’s best-known commentators on words. Follow Mark on Twitter @inkyfool.

Best Served Cold (eBook)

The Rise, Fall and Rise Again of Malcolm Walker - CEO of Iceland Foods

Malcolm Walker

This is the dramatic story of the ups and downs of a born entrepreneur.

Malcolm Walker was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1946. With fellow Woolworth’s trainee manager Peter Hinchcliffe, Walker opened a small frozen food shop called Iceland in the Shropshire town of Oswestry in 1970. Iceland became a public company 14 years later, through one of Britain’s most successful stock exchange flotations of all time, and by 1999 it had grown into a £2 billion turnover business with 760 stores.

In August 2000, Iceland merged with the Booker cash and carry business and Walker announced that he would step down as CEO in March 2001. In preparation for his retirement, he sold half his shares in the company and left for the holiday of a lifetime in the Maldives. However, while he was away the new management of the company slashed profit expectations, plunging Iceland into a £26m loss rather than the £130m profit the City had been expecting. Walker was fired and spent three years under investigation by the authorities before being cleared of any wrongdoing.

In Walker’s absence, Iceland’s sales collapsed as customers deserted the company – and, almost exactly four years after he had left the business, he returned as its boss. His amazing revival of Iceland has seen like-for-like sales grow by more than 50% and the business winning the accolade of Best Big Company To Work For In the UK. In March 2012 Walker led a £1.5bn management buyout of the company and is now personally worth over £200m.

The incredible story of Walker’s life – which he tells here for the first time – is as dramatic as any you will find in business, and it serves as a model for how, through hard work and intelligent risk-taking, it is possible from a relatively modest upbringing to build a national enterprise and a household name known to millions.

Malcolm Walker co-founded Iceland in 1970 and was its Chairman and Chief Executive through 30 years of continuous sales growth. He left Iceland under a cloud early in 2001, but returned four years later to lead a transformation in its performance. Iceland today has sales of £2.6 billion, 800 stores and 25,000 employees, and is recognised as one of the Best Companies to Work For in the UK.

How to be a Productivity Ninja – FREE SAMPLER (eBook)

Worry Less, Achieve More and Love What You Do

Graham Allcott

THIS IS A FREE EBOOK SAMPLER. IT INCLUDES THE FIRST 42 PAGES OF THE FULL BOOK. If you would like to purchase Graham Allcott's How to be a Productivity Ninja in full, you can do so with all good ebook retailers.

In the age of information overload, traditional time management techniques simply don’t cut it when it comes to overflowing inboxes, ever-expanding to-do lists and endless, pointless meetings. Thankfully there is a better way: The Way of the Productivity Ninja.
Using techniques including Ruthlessness, Mindfulness, Zen-like Calm and Stealth & Camouflage you will get your inbox down to zero, make the most of your attention, beat procrastination and learn to work smarter, not harder.
Written by one of the UK’s foremost productivity experts, How to be a Productivity Ninja is a fun, accessible and practical guide to staying cool, calm and collected, getting more done, and learning to love your work again.
If you enjoy this free sampler why not check out the complete book and learn the ways of the Productivity Ninja!

Graham Allcott is a productivity trainer, social entrepreneur and founder of Think Productive. Think Productive run public workshops throughout the UK and also run in-house workshops for staff at a diverse range of organizations, including the Cabinet Office (UK government), The National Trust, eBay, Heineken, BT, GlaxoSmithKline and the University of Bristol.

Prior to founding Think Productive, Graham’s career has been primarily focused on social action. He ran community volunteering projects for the University of Birmingham before becoming Chief Executive of the charity Student Volunteering England, and has since worked on a number of social enterprise and charity projects.

Graham lives in Brighton, UK.

You Are the Music (eBook)

How Music Reveals What it Means to be Human

Victoria Williamson

'You are the music / While the music lasts' T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

Do babies remember music from the womb? Can classical music increase your child’s IQ? Is music good for productivity? Can it aid recovery from illness and injury? And what is going on in your brain when Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht or Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Bonkers’ transports you back to teenage years?

In a brilliant new work that will delight music lovers of every persuasion, music psychologist Victoria Williamson examines our relationship with music across the whole of a lifetime.
Along the way she reveals the amazing ways in which music can physically reshape our brains, explores how ‘smart music listening’ can improve cognitive performance, and considers the perennial puzzle of what causes ‘earworms’.

Requiring no specialist musical or scientific knowledge, this upbeat, eye-opening book reveals as never before the extent of the universal language of music that lives deep inside us all.

Victoria Williamson is a lecturer and researcher in music psychology who holds academic posts in the UK and Switzerland. She has spoken at TED, the Latitude Festival, the British Science Festival and her writing has appeared in NME. Her academic research has been presented across national and international media including BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky (UK), CNN and MSNBC (USA), CBC (Canada), Radio New Zealand National, and 2SER and the Big Issue (Australia). Victoria also hosts the popular blog musicpsychology.co.uk

30-Second Brain (eBook)

The 50 most mind-blowing ideas in neuroscience, each explained in half a minute

Anil Seth

Are we all at the mercy of our brain chemistry? Do you think that the amygdala and the hippocampus are fantastical sea monsters? What can an MRI scan tell us? Could you explain to dinner-party guests why we don’t giggle when we tickle ourselves?

30-Second Brain is here to fill your mind with the science of exactly what’s happening inside your head. Using no more than two pages, 300 words and an illustration, this is the quickest way to understand the wiring and function of the most complex and intricate mechanism in the human body. Discover how the networks of 90 billion nerve cells work together to produce perception, action, cognition and emotion. Explore how your brain defines your personality, and what it gets up to while you are asleep.

Illustrated with mind-bending graphics and supported by biographies of pioneers in the field of neuroscience, it’s the book to get your grey matter thinking about your grey matter.

Dr Anil Seth is a Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at University of Sussex, where he leads multidisciplinary research across neuroscience, psychology, and computer science, with a focus on understanding the biological basis of conscious experience – a key challenge for 21st century science He is also Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He has published more than 100 scientific papers and book chapters, has lectured and written widely on neuroscience for a general audience, and his research has been covered in a wide range of media, including the Guardian and New Scientist.

A London Country Diary (eBook)

Mundane Happenings from the Secret Streets of the Capital

Tim Bradford

Stewart Lee

For fifteen years, Tim Bradford has meandered round the quiet streets of his North London home, seeking out
the ordinary and the extraordinary, the sublime and the ridiculous. A London Country Diary documents his wanderings – he attempts to rescue a deer in Clissold Park, talks to a magical old man in Holloway, breaks up a fight in Stoke Newington and has issues with foxes in Highbury. And that’s just the beginning.

All of life is in these pages. Well, some. OK, just a little bit. But with its idiosyncratic wit and charming illustrations, this book is a timely reminder that you can find beauty, humour and life, wherever you call home.

Tim Bradford is an illustrator, artist and writer. He is the author of The Groundwater Diaries (4th Estate, 2004) and Small Town England (Ebury, 2010), described as a 'warm, kaleidoscopic romp of a reminiscence' by Stuart Maconie. He frequently publishes illustrations in When Saturday Comes and the Guardian, and is otherwise to be found tramping the streets of London looking for musical instruments, old bookshops or lost rivers.

He lives in Stoke Newington and Co. Clare, Ireland. See more at timbradford.com.

Imagine That – Literature (eBook)

The History of Literature Rewritten

Michael Sells

How would society and communication have altered if the Gutenberg press had never been invented? Did George Eliot and the Bronte sisters do more harm than good for female writers? Are translators to blame for almost every war in modern history?

Literature has not simply been the favoured method of logging history; it has also been one of the greatest instigators and as such the world we live in could be wholly different without some of literature’s best-known names.

Michael Sells is a historian educated at the University of Chester. Captivated by history from a young age, he is especially interested in Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation and 1960s and 70s football. Outside of history, his passions include dystopian novels, animal sanctuaries and lower-league football. Born in the South East of England, he now lives in Cambridge and the Imagine That titles are his first books.

Lucky Planet (eBook)

Why Earth is Exceptional – and What that Means for Life in the Universe

David Waltham

Science tells us that life elsewhere in the Universe is increasingly likely to be discovered. But in fact the Earth may be a very unusual planet – perhaps the only one like it in the entire visible Universe. In Lucky Planet David Waltham asks why, and comes up with some surprising and unconventional answers.

Recent geological, biological, and astronomical discoveries are bringing us closer to understanding whether we might be alone in the Universe, and this book uses these to question the conventional wisdom and suggest, instead, that the Earth may have had ‘four billion years of good weather’ purely by chance.

If Earth-like worlds don’t have natural stabilising mechanisms, then intelligent observers such as ourselves will only ever look out onto those rare planets where, like the Earth, all the bad things that could have happened to the climate have fortunately cancelled each other out.

So before you prepare to meet the aliens, consider that we are probably alone …

David Waltham obtained a first-class degree and a PhD in Physics before moving into the oil industry in the early 1980s. This industrial experience led to his appointment, in 1986, as a lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he became Head of Earth Sciences from 2008–2012.

The Kitchen Magpie (eBook)

A delicious melange of culinary curiosities, fascinating facts, amazing anecdotes and expert tips for the food-lover

James Steen

Join award-winning writer James Steen for a feast of food and drink facts and culinary curiosities.

Delving into forgotten corners of gastronomic history, Steen reveals what Parmesan has to do with broken bones and why John Wayne kept a cow in a hotel. Laying bare the secrets of the kitchen, he concocts the ultimate hangover cure and explains how to cook perfect rib of beef with the oven off.

With much-loved cooks including Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood sharing passion and know-how, this mouth-watering miscellany will sate the appetite of every kitchen dweller, from the masterful expert to the earnest apprentice.

James Steen is an award-winning journalist, food writer, author and ghostwriter. He has a deep fascination for both the cook and cooking, and collaborates with great chefs. He ghosted the autobiographies of Marco Pierre White (The Devil in the Kitchen), Raymond Blanc (A Taste of My Life) and Keith Floyd (Stirred But Not Shaken). His other books include Marco Made Easy and Kitchen Secrets. He is a consultant to small-but-pioneering food companies, and contributes to a wide variety of publications. James lives in London with his wife Louise and their children, Charlie, Billy and Daisy.