The 50 Greatest Westerns (eBook)

Barry Stone

Author Barry Stone has served his apprenticeship as a western movie geek and aficionado. The Magnificent Seven, The Wild Bunch, Red River – for 50 years the western has been the only genre in a life that ‘just ain’t big enough for two’. He has written on the history of cinema for the illustrated reference book Historica, is a regular attendee to western premieres for FOX Studios Australia, and was recently a guest of the Museum of Western Film History in Independence, California.

Intrigued by the idea of frontier wilderness, of law and order vs lawlessness, and a firm belief that ‘the better the bad guy, the better the film’, he goes beyond the American south-west to pay homage to the Italian and even Australian western – and, after much deliberation, he ranks them in order…

Barry Stone is a an established travel writer and author of nine books on subjects ranging from religious hermits to mutinies in the age of sail and military history titles, for publishers including Hardie Grant, Allen & Unwin and HarperCollins. He is also the author of The 50 Greatest Walks of the World in this series. He lives in Sydney, Australia.

The 50 Greatest Beers of the World (eBook)

Tim Hampson

On just about every continent, from Boston’s strong ale to Norwegian stout, there are people brewing great beer. From English ales to Czech lager, Belgian sour to American pale ale, German Berliner Weisse to Australian Adelaide sparkling ale, the number of brewed beers is big and increasing daily. 

Award-winning author Tim Hampson explores beers from four continents, marvelling at how from such simple notes – malt, hops, water and yeast – a symphony of tastes and colours can be created. He discovers dark beers, light beers, sour beers, imperial stouts, beers flavoured with honey, herbs and spices, and beers that have been matured in wooden barrels that once stored some of the world’s best whiskies. 

The world of beer is undergoing a revolution. This wide-ranging selection will give any beer fan a tour of the world through their favourite drink. 

Tim Hampson has travelled the world in search of the perfect beer, a quest he hopes will continue for many more years. His previous books include World Beer, The Beer Book, the Haynes Beer Manual, London’s Best Pubs, 101 Beer Days Out and Great Beers. He is the Chairman of the British Guild of Beer Writers, and in 2015 he was knighted by the Belgian Brewers’ Guild for services to beer culture. Tim lives in Oxford together with his family, three dogs and a parrot.

From Bags to Blenders (eBook)

The Journey of a Yorkshire Businessman

Gordon Black

This is a book about success and how to achieve it. 

While there are many books about eminent retailers, From Bags to Blenders tells the story from a different angle – from the point of view of a supplier. 

Gordon Black’s career at Peter Black spanned over 40 years. He led a team with his brother which built a substantial business with sales of approximately £300 million and 3,000 employees. His revealing book faces up to the difficulties of supplying retailers today, and contrasts that with the close and fruitful relationship the Blacks enjoyed in the 1980s and 1990s with their main customer, Marks & Spencer. 

This fascinating and amusing book explains why the biggest challenge in building a successful company is the development of a culture of teamwork and passion for the business while, at the same time, avoiding arrogance and taking advice from those with experience. 

In Gordon’s opinion, exiting a business is as big a challenge as building a business. He pinpoints the different options and the pitfalls to be avoided, and emphasises the need for first-class products: ‘You can have the most modern factories and the best systems, but, without the right product, you’re dead!’ 

Gordon Black CBE DL was born in 1943 and educated at Bootham School, York and Clare College, Cambridge, where he took a degree in History.

He joined Peter Black in 1965 and became Chairman in 1977. Peter Black Holdings was a major supplier of footwear, toiletries, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and logistics to the UK’s leading retailers, with annual sales of £300 million and around 3,000 employees. It was a plc for 25 years and was then taken private in 2000. The remaining companies were sold to Li & Fung, a Hong Kong-based global trading company, in 2007.

Gordon Black now runs Black Family Investments with his brother Thomas, and was awarded a CBE in 2005 for services to business and charity. He is married to Louise, with three children and nine grandchildren, and lives in Ilkley, Yorkshire. 

Love Voltaire Us Apart (eBook)

A Philosopher’s Guide to Relationships

Julia Edelman

Hallie Bateman

What would Kant’s sexts look like? How would Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir break up? What would Confucius think of Tinder?

Love Voltaire Us Apart is a hilarious spoof relationship guide with a philosophical edge, made up of philosophers’ love letters, advice columns and breakup letters.

From Confucius learning the Golden Rules of dating to Simone de Beauvoir considering bangs after breaking up with Jean-Paul Sartre, comedy writer Julia Edelman views the love lives of prominent philosophers through a clever and contemporary lens. She points out that Margaret Fuller is the “Carrie” of transcendentalism, and Nietzsche will always find a way to make a bad breakup infinitely worse.

“Getting Meta(Physical)—Who is Your Philosopher Crush?” is the only quiz you’ll need to find your soul mate, and “How To Know if Your Man is Writing a Manifesto” will show you how to avoid losing your relationship to imminent revolution.

Based on Edelman’s New Yorker article, “Excerpts from Philosophers’ Breakup Letters Throughout History”, Love Voltaire Us Apart is funny, smart, refreshingly original, and brought to life with charming illustrations by Hallie Bateman.

Julia Edelman grew up in New York. She studied film theory and philosophy at McGill University. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York magazine, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, VICE, Cosmopolitan, Playboy, CollegeHumor and the Believer. She lives in Brooklyn.

Hallie Bateman is a Los Angeles-based writer and illustrator. Her work can be seen on halliebateman.com

What Colour is the Sun? (eBook)

Mind-Bending Science Facts in the Solar System's Brightest Quiz

Brian Clegg

Why do your fingers go wrinkly in the bath? What kind of animal can have 21 limbs? Who would really win a fight between a T.Rex and Godzilla?

Test your knowledge of all things scientific with the biggest, brightest and most mind-bending quiz book this side of the Big Bang. Featuring 100 brain-melting Q&As, with enlightening explanations provided throughout, this is the ultimate examination of what you know about space, chemistry, quantum physics, science fiction and much more.

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.

Jane Austen, the Secret Radical (eBook)

Helena Kelly

‘A sublime piece of literary detective work that shows us once and for all how to be precisely the sort of reader that Austen deserves.’ Caroline Criado-Perez, Guardian

Almost everything we think we know about Jane Austen is wrong. Her novels don’t confine themselves to grand houses and they were not written just for readers’ enjoyment. She writes about serious subjects and her books are deeply subversive. We just don’t read her properly – we haven’t been reading her properly for 200 years. 

Jane Austen, The Secret Radical puts that right. In her first, brilliantly original book, Austen expert Helena Kelly introduces the reader to a passionate woman living in an age of revolution; to a writer who used what was regarded as the lightest of literary genres, the novel, to grapple with the weightiest of subjects – feminism, slavery, abuse, the treatment of the poor, the power of the Church, even evolution – at a time, and in a place, when to write about such things directly was seen as akin to treason. 

Uncovering a radical, spirited and political engaged Austen, Jane Austen, The Secret Radical will encourage you to read Jane, all over again.

Helena Kelly holds degrees in Classics and English from Oxford and King’s College London. She teaches Austen at an Oxford summer school, and for a programme for American visiting students in Bath. She has taught Austen to hundreds of people, of all ages, nationalities, and backgrounds. Jane Austen, The Secret Radical is her first book.

How to be Cool (eBook)

The 150 Essential Idols, Ideals and Other Cool S***

Thomas W Hodgkinson

Cool can’t be taught. That’s the received wisdom, yet this wry, entertaining compendium by Thomas W. Hodgkinson (author of the indispensable How to Sound Cultured) shows that, on the contrary, anyone can increase their cool quotient by learning from the masters and the methods of the past.

It’s never an easy journey. But to set yourself on the path to true cool, you’ll need this invaluable roadmap.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson is the co-author of How to Sound Cultured (Icon, 2015) and 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. He lives in North London.

Fucking Apostrophes (eBook)

Simon Griffin

'At last, a book that tells you exactly where to stick your apostrophe … funny and useful, the perfect stocking filler.' David Marsh, Guardian

Apostrophes are a pain. The rules about how to use them are complicated, and have evolved haphazardly. Originally written as advice by a copywriter for designers – wont to insert and remove apostrophes at will, for visual effect – this is a light-hearted pocket-sized guide to getting the things right.

Simon Griffin lets off steam so that we don't have to, showing precisely why 'Rhianna and Jennifer's photos were all over the internet' is quite different to 'Rhianna's and Jennifer's photos' or what words apostrophes are replacing in sentences such as 'He'd like you to buy him some cocaine', or 'They've got it all on camera.'

Elegantly produced, this is the perfect gift for any pedant, as well as an indispensable guide in all our moments of grammar-related frustration.

Simon Griffin is the founder of copywriting agency Hyperbolic (www.thisishyperbolic.com) and lives with his wife and two children in Leeds. He currently has no plans to learn how to touch type and can happily write whole paragraphs without realising he’s left caps lock on.

The Brontesaurus (eBook)

An A–Z of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë (and Branwell)

Jon Sutherland

John Crace

Did Charlotte Brontë take opium? Did the Reverend Brontë carry a loaded pistol? What, precisely, does ‘wuthering’ mean?

Distinguished literary critic John Sutherland takes an idiosyncratic look at the world of the Brontës, from the bumps on Charlotte’s head to the nefarious origins of Mr Rochester’s fortune, by way of astral telephony, letterwriting dogs, an exploding peat bog, and much, much more.

Also features ‘Jane Eyre abbreviated’ by John Crace, author of the Guardian’s ‘Digested Reads’ column – read Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece in five minutes!

John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus at University College London and an eminent scholar in the field of Victorian fiction, author of many works including The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction. He has also written the bestselling popular titles Is Heathcliff a Murderer? and Can Jane Eyre be Happy?, and such scholarly jeux d’esprit as Curiosities of Literature. His most recent books include How Good is Your Grammar?, Stars, Cars, and Crystal Meth and Orwell’s Nose.

John Crace is the parliamentary sketch writer for the Guardian newspaper, for which he also writes the regular Digested Read feature. He is the author of several books including, with John Sutherland, the multi-volume The Incomplete Shakespeare.

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.