The 50 Greatest Wonders of the World (eBook)

Aaron Millar

Machu Picchu, the Acropolis, the Great Rift Valley: these are some of the most beautiful, mysterious and awe-inspiring places on the planet. 

Award-winning travel writer Aaron Millar reveals the greatest wonders of the world and the insider secrets on how to see them. From where to catch the perfect sunrise over the Grand Canyon to how to swim up to the very edge of the Victoria Falls, this is a road map for discovering the greatest experiences of your life. 

There are wonders of our future too: the Large Hadron Collider, the most complicated machine ever built; the International Space Station, the greatest international peacetime collaboration in history; the Rio Carnival, the biggest party on the planet. 

The 50 Greatest Wonders of the World reminds us how fantastically inspiring our planet really is, and how we're a part of it. 

Aaron Millar is an award-winning travel writer. He contributes regularly to The Times, the Guardian, the Independent and many other national and international publications. He has presented travel documentaries for National Geographic and is the 2014 British Guild of Travel Writers, Travel Writer of the Year. He grew up in Brighton, England and is currently hiding out in the Rocky Mountains of Boulder, Colorado.

Yours Always (eBook)

Letters of Longing

Eleanor Bass

Love letters are potent. They breathe. They speak. They can arouse, comfort, captivate. They can also cut deep. 

The powerful, deeply personal letters collected here reveal the painful underside of love. Witness Winston Churchill 'growl with anger to be treated with benevolent indifference' and Edith Piaf reel in the throes of a 'terrible' passion. 

Through the letters of literary icons Charlotte Brontë, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf, Hollywood stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and statesmen Henry VIII and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Yours Always offers an unusually intimate insight into the lives of such illustrious figures. 

Love is revealed here in its many shades of disharmony and confusion: unrequited, uncertain, imbalanced, unconventional, thwarted, failed and forbidden. Love is not always rose-tinted, and Yours Always illuminates the sorrows that can accompany falling in, falling out, and staying in love. 

Includes letter to and from: Charlotte Brontë, Richard Burton, Lord Byron, Winston Churchill, Marie Curie, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Henry VIII, Ted Hughes, Graham Greene, Franz Kafka, Marilyn Monroe, Iris Murdoch, Edith Piaf, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Elizabeth Taylor, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats 

Eleanor Bass is a freelance researcher and writer. Having previously read Theology at the University of Cambridge, she obtained her doctorate in English Literature from King’s College London in 2015. Her academic interests include life writing, letter writing, and the writing of wartime. Eleanor lives in South-East London with her husband and daughter.

Saving Capitalism (Paperback)

For The Many, Not The Few

Robert Reich

'A very good guide to the state we’re in' Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books

'A well-written, thought-provoking book by one of America’s leading economic thinkers and progressive champions.' Huffington Post

Do you recall a time when the income of a single schoolteacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family?

Robert Reich does – in the 1950s his father sold clothes to factory workers and the family earnt enough to live comfortably. Today, this middle class is rapidly shrinking: American income inequality and wealth disparity is the greatest it’s been in eighty years.

As Reich, who served in three US administrations, shows, the threat to capitalism is no longer communism or fascism but a steady undermining of the trust modern societies need for growth and stability.
With an exclusive chapter for Icon’s edition, Saving Capitalism is passionate yet practical, sweeping yet exactingly argued, a revelatory indictment of the economic status quo and an empowering call to action.

Robert Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and senior fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He has served in three national administrations and has written fourteen books, including the bestsellers Supercapitalism and Locked in the Cabinet. His articles have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. He is co-creator of the award-winning 2013 film Inequality for All.

Eureka! (Icon Science) (eBook)

The Birth of Science

Andrew Gregory

Medicine, anatomy, astronomy, mathematics and cosmology, science began with the Greeks, and Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes and Hippocrates were amongst its stars. That man ever managed to develop a 'scientific' attitude to the natural world at all is one of the true wonders of human thought.

Eureka! shows how, free from intellectual and religious dogma, these early thinkers rejected myths and capricious gods and, in distinguishing between the natural and supernatural, effectively discovered nature.

Andrew Gregory, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London, unravels the genesis of science in this fascinating exploration of the origins of Western civilisation, and our desire for a rational, legitimating system of the world.

Andrew Gregory is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London. His specialisms are in ancient and early modern science, ancient philosophy, and the relation of magic and science. He is also the author of Harvey's Heart: The Discovery of Blood Circulation (Icon, 2001) and Plato's Philosophy of Science (Bloomsbury, 2001).

Written in Stone (Icon Science) (eBook)

Brian Switek

Darwin’s theory of evolution was for more than a century dogged by a major problem: the evidence proving the connections between the main groups of organisms was nowhere to be found.

By the 1970s this absence of ‘transitional fossils’ was hotly debated; some palaeontologists wondered if these ‘missing links’ had been so quick that no trace of them was left. However, during the past three decades fossils of walking whales from Pakistan, feathered dinosaurs from China, fish with feet from the Arctic Circle, ape-like humans from Africa, and many more bizarre creatures that fill in crucial gaps in our understanding of evolution have all been unearthed.

The first account of the hunt for evolution’s ‘missing links’, Written in Stone shows how these discoveries have revolutionised palaeontology, and explores what its findings might mean for our place on earth.

Brian Switek is a science writer and research associate at the New Jersey State Museum. He writes the blog Laelaps for Wired Science (‘Brilliant writing about palaeontology and evolution’ The Times) and Dinosaur Tracking for Smithsonian. He has been a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Material World and written for The Times and The Guardian as well as the Wall Street Journal and Scientific American.  This is his first book.

The Reality Frame (eBook)

Relativity and our place in the universe

Brian Clegg

Weaving together the great ideas of science, The Reality Frame takes us on a thrilling journey from empty space all the way to the human mind.

Acclaimed science writer Brian Clegg builds up reality piece by piece, from space, to time, to matter, movement, the fundamental forces, life, and the massive transformation that life itself has wrought on the natural world. He reveals that underlying it all is not, as we might believe, a system of immovable absolutes, but the ever-shifting, amorphous world of relativity.

From religion to philosophy, humanity has traditionally sought out absolutes to explain the world around us, but as science has developed, relativity has swept away many of these certainties, leaving only a handful of unchangeable essentials – such as absolute zero, nothingness, light – leading to better science and a new understanding of the essence of being human.

This is an Ascent of Man for the 21st century, the gripping story of modern science that will fill you with wonder and give you a new insight into our place in the universe.

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.

The Other Exile (eBook)

The Remarkable Story of Fernão Lopes, the Island of St Helena and the meaning of human solitude

Abdul Rahman Azzam

The first known inhabitant of St Helena – long before
Napoleon –  was a 16th-century Portuguese renegade.

In 1506 Fernão Lopes, a member of his country’s minor nobility,
travelled to Goa in search of honour and wealth. There he converted to Islam,
married a Muslim, fought his former countrymen, and was eventually captured –
his nose and hands publicly cut off for treachery. Eventually sailing for home,
he jumped ship at St. Helena, becoming the island’s first inhabitant, with only
a black cockerel for company.

News of Lopes reached the King of Portugal. Picked up by a ship sent
especially for him, Lopes so impressed the King, and the Pope in Rome, that he
was granted one wish. He requested his return to St Helena.

Based on brand new research by A R Azzam, author of the acclaimed Saladin (Longman,
2007), The Other Exile is at once a historical
adventure story and a meditation on solitude. It is a story about redemption in
one of the darkest periods in Europe and the tale of the haunting relationship
between man and wild nature.

Abdul Rahman Azzam has a BA and PhD in History from Oxford University. He is the author of Rumi and the Kingdom of Joy (2000) and the bestselling Saladin (published in English in 2007 by Longman), which was selected in Jordan as one of the top one hundred books on Islam.

Rooms of One's Own (eBook)

50 Places That Made Literary History

Adrian Mourby

Writers’ relationships with their surroundings are seldom straightforward. While some, like Jane Austen and Thomas Mann, wrote novels set where they were staying (Lyme Regis and Venice respectively), Victor Hugo penned Les Misérables in an attic in Guernsey and Noël Coward wrote that most English of plays, Blithe Spirit, in the Welsh holiday village of Portmeirion.

Award-winning BBC drama producer Adrian Mourby follows his literary heroes around the world, exploring 50 places where great works of literature first saw the light of day. At each destination – from the Brontës’ Yorkshire Moors to the New York of Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin to the now-legendary Edinburgh café where J.K. Rowling plotted Harry Potter’s first adventures – Mourby explains what the writer was doing there and describes what the visitor can find today of that great moment in literature.

Rooms of One’s Own takes you on a literary journey from the British Isles to Paris, Berlin, New Orleans, New York and Bangkok and unearths the real-life places behind our best-loved works of literature.

Adrian Mourby was an award-winning BBC drama producer before turning to full-time writing. He has published three novels, two AA travel guides and a book of humour based on his Sony Award-winning Radio 4 series Whatever Happened To…? In recent years Adrian has won two Italian awards for his travel journalism. He also writes extensively on opera and has produced operas by Mozart, Handel and Purcell, both in the UK and in Europe.

Headline Britons 1926-1930 (eBook)

Peter Pugh

Headline Britons paints a unique picture of British life in the 20th and 21st centuries by re-examining some of the country’s most notable characters. Each book covers a five-year span, telling the stories of a number of people who, in that time, stood out among their contemporaries.

As the General Strike of 1926 starkly illustrated, economic hardship continued to be the lodestone of the decade. An American import, the movies, revolutionised entertainment, while William Morris rapidly developed the motor car in Oxford.

Peter Pugh brings these five years vividly to life through the stories of gay author Radclyffe Hall – whose seminal The Well of Loneliness also made people think again about sexual norms – John Logie Baird, whose development of the his television in these years presaged another great revolution in everyday life, and the comedian who captured many hearts, Noel Coward.

Peter Pugh is a businessperson and company historian who has written more than 50 company histories on businesses from Rolls-Royce to Iceland. He is also the author of Introducing Thatcherism and Introducing Keynes, and lives by the sea in north Norfolk, and in Cambridge.

Economyths (eBook)

11 Ways Economics Gets it Wrong

David Orrell

When Economyths was first published in 2010, David Orrell showed how mainstream economics is based on key myths such as fair competition, rational behaviour, stability and eternal growth – and how these myths lead paradoxically to their opposites: inequality, an irrational economy, financial instability and a collision with nature’s limits.

Since then, we’ve had Occupy, political upheaval, flash crashes in financial markets, the warmest few years in recorded history – and a growing chorus demanding fundamental reform. So how has economics responded?

In this revised and expanded edition, Orrell shows how the ten myths still dominate economics. He reveals their roots in thought that goes back to the ancient Greeks, making them hard to dislodge. And he uncovers, demolishes and develops an alternative to the greatest economyth of all – the one that will lead to the collapse of orthodox economics.

David Orrell studied mathematics at the University of Alberta, and obtained his doctorate from Oxford University on the prediction of nonlinear systems. His work in applied mathematics and complex systems research has since led him to diverse areas such as weather forecasting, economics, and cancer biology. His work has been featured in the New Scientist, the Financial Times and on BBC Radio.

Destination Mars (eBook)

The Story of our Quest to Conquer the Red Planet

Andrew May

Mars is back. Suddenly everyone – from Elon Musk to Ridley Scott to Donald Trump – is talking about going to the Red Planet.

When the Apollo astronauts walked on the Moon in 1969, many people imagined Mars would be next. However NASA’s Viking 1, which landed in 1976, was just a robot. The much-anticipated crewed mission failed to materialise, defeated by a combination of technological and political challenges.

Four decades after Viking and almost half a century after Apollo technology has improved beyond recognition – as has politics. As private ventures like SpaceX seize centre stage from NASA, Mars has undergone a seismic shift – it’s become the prime destination for future human expansion and colonisation.

But what’s it really like on Mars, and why should anyone want to go there? How do you get there and what are the risks? Astrophysicist and science writer Andrew May answers these questions and more, as he traces the history of our fascination with the Red Planet.

Andrew May is a freelance writer and former scientist, with a PhD in astrophysics. He has written five books in Icon's Hot Science series: Destination Mars, Cosmic Impact, Astrobiology, The Space Business and The Science of Music. He lives in Somerset.

The 50 Greatest Musical Places (eBook)

Sarah Woods

A trip around the world, played out to the most eclectic soundtrack, discovering hidden musical gems along the way.

From mosh pits to cabarets, Berlin’s beatnik band haunts to Korea’s peppy k-pop clubs, from visiting the infamous Dollywood, to tracing Freddie Mercury’s childhood in Zanzibar, The 50 Greatest Musical Places of the World has something for music fans of all genres.

Discover the places where iconic songs were written, groups were formed, music legends were born and extraordinary talent is celebrated.

Sarah Woods is the author of over a dozen travel books, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the British Guild of Travel Writers. She writes for national newspapers and travel magazines and appears regularly on TV and radio. She has been awarded the BGTW ‘Travel Guide Writer of the Year’.

Sex, Botany and Empire (Icon Science) (eBook)

The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks

Patricia Fara

When the imperial explorer James Cook returned from his first voyage to Australia, scandal writers mercilessly satirised the amorous exploits of his botanist Joseph Banks, whose trousers were reportedly stolen while he was inside the tent of Queen Oberea of Tahiti. Was the pursuit of scientific truth really what drove Enlightenment science?

In Sweden and Britain, both imperial powers, Banks and Carl Linneaus ruled over their own small scientific empires, promoting botanical exploration to justify the exploitation of territories, peoples and natural resources. Regarding native peoples with disdain, these two scientific emperors portrayed the Arctic North and the Pacific Ocean as uncorrupted Edens, free from the shackles of Western sexual mores.

In this ‘absorbing’ (Observer) book, Patricia Fara reveals the existence, barely concealed under Banks' and Linnaeus' camouflage of noble Enlightenment, of the altogether more seedy drives to conquer, subdue and deflower in the name of the British Imperial state.

Patricia Fara is a Senior Tutor at Clare College at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches history of science. Her other books include Newton: The Making of Genius (Macmillan, 2001) and An Entertainment for Angels (Icon, 2002).

An Entertainment for Angels (Icon Science) (eBook)

Electricity in the Enlightenment

Patricia Fara

Electricity was the scientific fashion of the Enlightenment, 'an Entertainment for Angels, rather than for Men'. Lecturers attracted huge audiences to marvel at sparkling fountains, flaming drinks, pirouetting dancers and electrified boys. Enlightenment optimists predicted that this new-found power of nature would cure illnesses, improve crop production, even bring the dead back to life. 

Benjamin Franklin, better known as one of America's founding fathers, played a key role in developing the new instruments and theories of electricity during the eighteenth century. Celebrated for drawing lightning down from the sky with a kite, Franklin was an Enlightenment expert on electricity, developing one of the most successful explanations of this mysterious phenomenon.

But Patricia Fara, Senior Tutor of Clare College Cambridge, reveals how the study of electricity became intertwined with Enlightenment politics. By demonstrating their control of the natural world, Enlightenment philosophers hoped to gain authority over society. And their stunning electrical performances provided dramatic evidence of their special powers.

Patricia Fara is a Senior Tutor at Clare College at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches history of science. She is also the author of Newton: The Making of Genius (Macmillan, 2002) and Sex, Botany and Empire (Icon, 2003).

Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century (Icon Science) (eBook)

Iwan Rhys Morus

The only scientist to ever appear on the British twenty pound note, Michael Faraday is one of the most recognisable names in the history of science.

Faraday's forte was electricity, a revolutionary force in nineteenth-century society. The electric telegraph had made mass-communication possible and inventors looked forward to the day when electricity would control all aspects of life. By the end of the century, this dream was well on its way to being realised. But what was Faraday's role in all this? How did his science come to have such an impact on the lives of the Victorians (and ultimately on us)?

Iwan Morus tells the story of Faraday’s upbringing in London and his apprenticeship at the Royal Institution under the supervision of the flamboyant chemist, Sir Humphry Davy, all set against the backdrop of a vibrant scientific culture and an empire near the peak of its power.

Iwan Rhys Morus is a professor of history at Aberystwyth University. He is the author, most recently, of William Robert Grove: Victorian Gentleman of Science (University of Wales Press, 2017) and the editor of the Oxford Illustrated History of Science (OUP, 2017).

Big Data (eBook)

How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives

Brian Clegg

Is the Brexit vote successful big data politics or the end of democracy? Why do airlines overbook, and why do banks get it wrong so often? How does big data enable Netflix to forecast a hit, CERN to find the Higgs boson and medics to discover if red wine really is good for you? And how are companies using big data to benefit from smart meters, use advertising that spies on you and develop the gig economy, where workers are managed by the whim of an algorithm?

The volumes of data we now access can give unparalleled abilities to make predictions, respond to customer demand and solve problems. But Big Brother’s shadow hovers over it. Though big data can set us free and enhance our lives, it has the potential to create an underclass and a totalitarian state.

With big data ever-present, you can’t afford to ignore it. Acclaimed science writer Brian Clegg – a habitual early adopter of new technology (and the owner of the second-ever copy of Windows in the UK) – brings big data to life.

Brian Clegg’s most recent books are What Colour is the Sun (Icon, 2016) and Ten Billion Tomorrows (St. Martins, 2016). His Dice World and A Brief History of Infinity were both longlisted for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books. Brian has written for numerous publications including The Wall Street Journal, Nature, BBC Focus, Physics World, The Times, The Observer, Good Housekeeping and Playboy. Brian is editor of popularscience.co.uk and blogs at brianclegg.blogspot.com.