How Thinking About Sex Helps You Write Essays (eBook)

From How to be a Knowledge Ninja

Graham Allcott

Essay writing is a drag, right? Not if it’s done the ninja way!

In this short ebook, an edited extract from Graham Allcott’s brilliant How to be a Knowledge Ninja, you’ll learn how to write an essay – whether it’s for an article, a dissertation or an assignment.

Allcott shows how the best way to start an essay is by not writing anything at all, and how Ninja Preparedness can save countless headaches further down the track. He reminds us that the best essays are those where our personalities shine through, and also shares his Ninja cheats – expert tips for last-minute essay crise

Graham Allcott is the author of How to be a Productivity Ninja, How to be a Knowledge Ninja and Introducing Productivity. He is the founder of Think Productive, one of the world’s leading productivity training companies, whose diverse list of clients include eBay, the British Library and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Einstein's Masterwork (eBook)

1915 and the General Theory of Relativity

John Gribbin

In 1915, Albert Einstein unveiled his masterwork – a theory, in his words, ‘of incomparable beauty’: the General Theory of Relativity. It is sometimes overshadowed – wrongly, argues John Gribbin – by his work of 1905, the Special Theory of Relativity and E = mc≤.

Just over 100 years later, the first direct detection of gravitational radiation is seen as the ultimate proof of the General Theory’s accuracy.

The General Theory describes the evolution of the Universe, black holes, the behaviour of orbiting neutron stars, and why clocks run slower on Earth than in space. It even suggests the possibility of time travel.

In this ‘beautifully written and highly accessible account of the genesis of a great theory’ (Physics World), Gribbin vividly illustrates what an incomparable scientist Albert Einstein really was.

JOHN GRIBBIN is one of the world’s best-known and bestselling popular science authors, described as ‘one of the finest and most prolific writers of popular science around’ by the Spectator. His numerous books include In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat (Bantam, 1984), Science: A History (Penguin, 2010), Erwin Schrödinger and the Quantum Revolution (Black Swan, 2013) and many more. He lives with his wife Mary in Sussex.

30-Second Twentieth Century (eBook)

The 50 most significant ideas and events, each explained in half a minute

Jonathan T. Reynolds

You probably know, or think you know, quite a bit about what happened in the 20th century – chances are, if you’re reading this, you lived through at least some of it – and you may have referenced the Cuban Missile Crisis, the double helix, or the Wall Street Crash in conversation. But even for people who were there, it was the fastest-moving hundred years in history, so refresh your memory with these pacey profiles on everything from Sputnik to Stonewall.

Twentieth Century presents a unique approach to modern history, condensing 100 years of innovation and art, politics and conflict, triumph and disaster, into 50 graphic snapshots that offer an instant appreciation of the way the world revolves and evolves. Consider which events define a period of history and why. From the Red Army to Black Monday, from Woodstock to the World Wide Web, this is the fastest way to travel in time.

Editor Jonathan T. Reynolds is Professor of History at Northern Kentucky University, USA. He is a Fulbright Scholar, and has received the Aggrey Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Milburn Outstanding Professor Award. He is the author of several books, including Africa in World History (with Erik Gilbert) and Sovereignty and Struggle: Africa and Africans in the Era of the Cold War. He teaches courses in African History, History of Imperialism, World History, the History of Food and Historical Methodology.

30-Second Evolution (eBook)

The 50 most significant ideas and events, each explained in half a minute

Mark Fellowes

Nicholas Battey

Adapt or die: it’s nature’s most famous imperative. But how does evolution actually happen? It’s too slow to see, but it’s going on all around you, all the time. Even if you’re on top of the key terms – variation? Natural selection? Parent-offspring conflict? – you still need some context to put them in. From populations to speciation and polymorphism to evolutionary psychology, here’s the one-stop source for all you need to know.

Evolution unlocks the laboratory of life, dissecting it into the 50 most significant topics that provide the missing links to understand the natural world’s four-billion-year ancestry and the process of natural selection in which species either adapt in myriad ways – mutation, ingenuity, and intelligence – to meet the challenges of a changing environment, or die. Unravel the development of living organisms, at micro and macro level – from genes to geniuses.

Mark Fellowes is Head of the School of Biological Sciences and Nicholas Battey is Head of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Reading, England. Together, their expertise spans the diversity of their subject: Professor Battey’s background is in cells, genes, and plants; Professor Fellowes’s is in ecology, evolution, animals, and the interactions between species.

Finding Home (eBook)

The Real Stories of Migrant Britain

Emily Dugan

Award-winning reporter Emily Dugan’s Finding Home follows the tumultuous lives of a group of immigrants, all facing intense challenges in their quest to live in the UK.

Syrian refugee Emad set up the Free Syrian League and worked illegally in the UK to pay for his mother to be smuggled across the Mediterranean on a perilous trip from Turkey. Even if she survives the journey, Emad knows it will be an uphill struggle to get her into Britain.

Australian therapist Harley risks deportation despite serving the NHS for ten years and being told by the Home Office she could stay. Teaching assistant Klaudia is one of thousands of Polish people now living in Boston, Lincolnshire – a microcosm of poorly managed migration. Aderonke, a leading Manchester LGBT activist, lives in a tiny B&B room in Salford with her girlfriend, Happiness, and faces deportation and persecution.

Dugan’s timely and acutely observed book reveals the intense personal dramas of ordinary men and women as they struggle to find somewhere to call home. It shows that migration is not about numbers, votes or opinions: it is about people.

Emily Dugan is Social Affairs Editor at the Independent, i and the Independent on Sunday. Her investigations into human trafficking have twice been awarded Best Investigative Article at the Anti-Slavery Day Media Awards and her human rights journalism was shortlisted for the Gaby Rado Memorial prize at the 2012 Amnesty Media Awards. This is her first book.

The Collector's Cabinet (eBook)

Tales, Facts and Fictions from the World of Antiques

Marc Allum

Explore the wonderful world of antiques and collectables with Antiques Roadshow regular, Marc Allum.

Go in search of stolen masterpieces, learn the secrets of the forgers, track down Napoleon’s toothbrush and meet the garden gnome insured for £1 million.

Eclectic, eccentric and brimming with remarkable tales from history, The Collector’s Cabinet is for all those who are fascinated by the relics of the past.

Marc Allum is a freelance art and antiques writer, broadcaster, consultant and lecturer based in Wiltshire. He has been a miscellaneous specialist on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow since 1998. He writes regularly for magazines, has contributed to numerous books and is the author of Allum's Antiques Almanac (Icon, 2014).

Atomic (eBook)

The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb 1939-49

Jim Baggott

Spanning ten historic years, from the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939 to ‘Joe-1’, the first Soviet atomic bomb test in August 1949, Atomic is the first fully realised popular account of the race between Nazi Germany, Britain, America and the Soviet Union to build atomic weapons.

Rich in personality, action, confrontation and deception, Jim Baggott’s book tells an epic story of science and technology at the very limits of human understanding.

Jim Baggott is an award-winning science writer. A former academic chemist,he runs an independent management consultancy practice but maintains a broad interest in science, philosophy and history and continues to write on these subjects in his spare time, for, amongother publications, New Scientist magazine. His previous bookshave been widely acclaimed and include A Beginner's Guide to Reality (Penguin, 2005) and Beyond Measure: Modern Physics,Philosophy and the Meaning of Quantum Theory (OUP, 2004).

Platform Souls (eBook)

The Trainspotter as 20th-Century Hero

Nicholas Whittaker

Nicholas Whittaker’s much-loved classic recollects the long sunny days of his childhood when, notepad in hand, jam sandwiches in the duffel bag, he happily spent his time jotting down train numbers during the Indian summer of steam and the heyday of diesel.

Whittaker returns to his roots in this updated edition, casting a sceptical eye over recent developments, catching up with old acquaintances and considering the toll that half a century of ridicule and a couple of decades of privatisation have wrought upon his beloved pastime.

As Andrew Martin notes in his Foreword, this is ‘one of the best books ever written about rail enthusiasm’. Equally it is a poetically written memoir of growing up in a more innocent age, a hymn to British eccentricity and to the virtues of observing the world around you: ‘Spotters – of trains, planes, buses or birds – are a last redoubt for something rapidly vanishing from our lives: looking outward, seeing, observing. People notice things less and less these days, while watching things more and more.’

Praise for the first edition:

‘An elegy: for the steam trains already vanishing when Whittaker’s hobby began in 1964; for the short-lived diesel age which followed; for an era of near innocence.’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Whittaker writes with humour and considerable evocative power … For anyone who will admit to having a childhood brush with this now derided hobby, Platform Souls brings it all rushing back.’ Independent

‘Destined to become the Fever Pitch of the sidings and embankments’ Publishing News

Nicholas Whittaker is the author of well-received histories of confectionery (Sweet Talk) and toys (Toys Were Us), as well as an account of life in the offices of Fiesta and Razzle magazines in the 1980s (Blue Period). He has written for the Telegraph, Guardian, Daily Mail and the Sunday Times. He lives in London.

How to Win a Roman Chariot Race (eBook)

Lives, Legends and Treasures from the Ancient World

Jane Hood

Who first thought of atoms? How much can you learn about archaeology from an oil lamp? Who came up with the theory of the ‘wandering womb’?

Oxford Classicist Jane Hood delves into the history, culture, literature, mythology and philosophy of ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt, using her expert eye to unearth unexpected gems, glittering fragments and quotable nuggets from a lost world.

From ancient cosmetics to the earliest known computer, from the deciphering of ancient languages to the amazing things the Romans did with concrete, this is the essential miscellany for all curious minds, whether you learned the Classics at school or not.

Jane Hood is an expert in Classical languages, literature and philosophy, having held positions in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford and in Ancient Medicine at the Wellcome Institute.

The Heart of the Matter (eBook)

How Papworth Hospital transformed modern heart and lung care

Peter Pugh

Papworth Hospital in Cambridgeshire, founded in 1916 to tackle the great killer disease of tuberculosis, is famous for carrying out the UK’s first heart transplant operation in 1979. It followed this up not only with many other heart transplants but also with the UK’s first heart and lung operation in 1984 and the world’s first heart, lung and liver transplant in 1986.

With unique access to Papworth’s archives, historian Peter Pugh here tells the story of this ground-breaking hospital for the first time. Alongside the background to that first UK heart transplant – and the ethical controversies that surrounded it – Pugh explores the opposition to heart operations in general, Papworth's difficulties dealing with NHS authorities especially over funding, and the discussions for over 50 years as to whether the hospital should move alongside Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge.

As an insight into the history of medicine and surgery in the UK, as well as a story literally of life and death, The Heart of the Matter will be compelling reading.

Peter Pugh was educated at Oundle and Cambridge, where he read History. He has written more than 50 official histories, including The Magic of a Name, a three-volume history of Rolls-Royce. He lives in Cambridge and Norfolk.

Rolls-Royce: The Magic of a Name (eBook)

The First Forty Years of Britain’s Most Prestigious Company, 1904-1944

Peter Pugh

The acclaimed history of the birth and growth of Britain’s most famous luxury brand.

So, You Think You're Clever? (eBook)

Taking on The Oxford and Cambridge Questions

John Farndon

From the ever-curious mind that brought you the bestselling Do You Think You’re Clever? comes a brand-new trip to the far reaches of the intellectual universe, courtesy of even more notoriously provocative Oxbridge interview questions.

How would you poison someone without the police finding out? (Medicine, Cambridge)
What makes a strong woman? (Theology, Oxford)
Instead of politicians, why don’t we let the managers of IKEA run the country? (Social and Political Sciences, Cambridge)
How do you organise a successful revolution? (History, Oxford)

Whether you’re interested in going to Oxbridge or just want to give your brain a workout, join polymath John Farndon on another exhilarating journey through the twists and turns of thought, and explore just what it means to be genuinely clever – rather than just smart.

John Farndon is the author of numerous bestsellers on science, ideas and the natural environment, as well as being a playwright, composer and poet.

He has been shortlisted a record five times for the Royal Society Junior Science Book Prize. Do You Think You’re Clever? was shortlisted for the Society of Authors Education Award. Canada’s Globe and Mail named his Atlas of Oceans as a 2011 top ten science book. He is currently writing The Omnipaedia for Square Peg.

The Sceptical Gardener (eBook)

The Thinking Person’s Guide to Good Gardening

Ken Thompson

How are birds linked to house prices?

How can a gardener improve the

flavour of their vegetables?

Do wildflowers really thrive in poor soil?

In this collection of articles from The Telegraph, biologist and gardening columnist Ken Thompson takes a scientific look at some of the greater – and lesser – questions faced by gardeners everywhere in a bid to sort the genuine wisdom from the hokum.

What is the ideal temperature for a compost heap? What do bees do that improves strawberries? Why are gardeners in literature always such dummies? This is an expert’s gardening miscellany, aimed at making you not necessarily a better gardener, but probably a far more thoughtful one.

Ken Thompson was for twenty years a lecturer in the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield. He writes regularly on gardening for the Daily Telegraph. His previous book, Where Do Camels Belong? (Profile, 2014), was described as ‘lively and punchy’ by the Sunday Times.

How to Sound Cultured (eBook)

Master The 250 Names That Intellectuals Love To Drop Into Conversation

Hubert Van Den Bergh

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

'Damn, all my cheating secrets revealed. In book form' Stephen Fry

Which philosopher had the maddest hairstyle? Which novelist drank 50 cups of black coffee every day? What on earth did Simone de Beauvoir see in Jean-Paul Sartre?

How to Sound Cultured offers a wry and yet profoundly useful look inside the mirrored palaces of high culture. Covering such inscrutable characters as Heidegger, Montaigne, Kahlo and Lévi-Strauss (apparently not just a designer of jeans), inscrutable polymaths Thomas W. Hodgkinson and Hubert van den Bergh – the author of the acclaimed How to Sound Clever – have done the hard work of sorting the cultural wheat from the chaff.

Read this book and you’ll never again mistake Rimbaud for Rambo or Georg Lukacs for George Lucas, you’ll know precisely when to drop Foucault’s name into a conversation and how to pronounce ‘Borgesian’, and you’ll learn many more essential pointers for the intellectual life.

Hubert van den Bergh is the author of How to Sound Clever (Bloomsbury, 2010). He has written for The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian and appeared on Vanessa Feltz’s BBC Radio 2 show.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson is the author of the novel Memoirs of a Stalker (Silvertail, 2015). He writes regularly for The Spectator and the Daily Mail, and is a contributing editor at The Week.

How Many Moons Does the Earth Have? (eBook)

The Ultimate Science Quiz Book

Brian Clegg

Why did Uuq become Fl?
Why is the sky blue? Why is the sky black?
What is spaghettification?

There’s a problem with the typical quiz. It always features far too much sport, 1980s pop and celebrity gossip – and not nearly enough science.

How Many Moons Does the Earth Have? is the ultimate solution. Test your knowledge to the limit with a sizzling collection of brain-stretching, science-based questions in two eight-round quizzes.

Turn the page to get the answer immediately – and as each answer page explores the subject in more depth, this the only quiz that’s just as entertaining to read from beginning to end as it is to play competitively.

Where was the Big Bang? What links the elephant Tusko and Timothy Leary? What is the significance of 6EQUJ5? Science explainer extraordinaire Brian Clegg tells all…

Science writer Brian Clegg studied physics at Cambridge and specialises in making the strangest aspects of the universe accessible to the general reader. He is editor of popularscience.co.uk and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. His previous books include Inflight Science, The Universe Inside You and Science for Life.

Allum's Antiques Almanac 2016 (eBook)

An Annual Compendium of Stories and Facts From the World of Art and Antiques

Marc Allum

From BBC Antiques Roadshow specialist and author Marc Allum comes the second instalment of his annual almanac, revealing the current news, tall tales and tasty titbits from the year in art, antiques and collectables:

What do London Bridge and a £40,000 corkscrew have in common?

Which famous pop star depicted by Andy Warhol realised £51.6 million at a recent auction?

How much did Oliver Cromwell’s coffin plate sell for, and what happened to his famous wart?

Which Hollywood film led to the recovery of a Hungarian avant garde masterpiece?

What would a collector pay for the real Batmobile?

Why did a tiny portrait of Mozart – only four centimetres high – sell for £218,500?

Answers to these and many other fascinating questions make this the essential guide this autumn for all ardent fans of art, antiques and collectables.

Marc Allum is a freelance art and antiques writer, broadcaster, consultant and lecturer based in Wiltshire. He has been a miscellaneous specialist on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow since 1998. He writes regularly for magazines, has contributed to numerous books and is the author of Allum's Antiques Almanac 2015 (Icon, 2014) and The Collector's Cabinet (Icon, 2015).

Mindfulness (eBook)

Your step-by-step guide to a happier life

Tessa Watt

Mindfulness is the popular practice that helps you to appreciate your life, and to live with more joy and less stress.

By bringing mindfulness into everyday actions – by listening to your body, becoming more aware of what’s happening in the present moment and letting go of negativity – you can reduce stress and anxiety, focus better at work, find your own source of calm and discover genuine contentment.

Mindfulness introduces you to new techniques with straightforward advice, case studies and lots of practical exercises for newcomers to get their teeth into right away. It also gives a sense of the depth of mindfulness practice for those who wish to take it further.

Tessa Watt is a mindfulness teacher and consultant and a founding director of Slow Down London in the UK. She is the author of Mindful London and is part of the Mindfulness Initiative, supporting the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Mindfulness at Westminster.

I, Superorganism (Paperback)

Learning to love your inner ecosystem

Jon Turney

Every human body carries a secret cargo: a huge population of microorganisms living in the mouth, on the skin, in the gut. They help digest our food. They make essential vitamins. They break down toxins and metabolise drugs. They exert an invisible influence on our hormones, our immune systems, perhaps even our brains.

This is the human microbiome – a living, shifting system of previously unimagined importance and complexity.

In this first book-length account of this new realm of human biology, award-winning science writer Jon Turney explores the microbiome in detail, charting its birth and development, investigating how it works, and assessing its many implications for our health, including its potential to shed new light on conditions such as bowel diseases, cancer, allergies and asthma. He considers the potential impacts of our modern disinfectant and antibiotic obsessions, and ponders a future of designer microbiomes and mood-altering probiotics.

This book will make you think again about your relationship with your body, your habits – even your sense of who and what you are – as it reveals what it means to be a 21st century superorganism.

Jon Turney is a science writer and former features editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement. He has taught at Imperial College and was head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at UCL. He was popular science editor at Penguin Press and is the author, among much else, of The Rough Guide to the Future (Rough Guides, 2010) and Lovelock and Gaia (Icon, 2003), and editor of A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science (Faber, 2000).