Introducing Chomsky (Paperback)
A Graphic Guide
John Maher Judy Groves
Archives: Titles
Introducing Child Psychology
Introducing Child Psychology (Paperback)
A Practical Guide
Kairen Cullen
Embrace the ups and downs of parenting.
Guided by experts in children’s development, explore new approaches to parenting, understand how they can benefit your family and learn how to put them into practice straight away.
Accepting that every child is unique, and that parenting is a continuous learning process, educational psychologist and parenting expert Dr Kairen Cullen explains how best to understand your child and respond to their needs.
Dr Kairen Cullen
is a chartered psychologist with, and a previous chair of, the Division of
Educational and Child Psychology, British Psychological Society (BPS). She has
written for a number of academic and educational publications including The
Times Educational Supplement and 5 to 7 and Childcare
magazines.
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Introducing Thatcherism
Introducing Thatcherism (Paperback)
A Graphic Guide
Peter Pugh Carl Flint
Unique graphic introductions to big ideas and thinkers, written by experts in the field.
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Introducing Slavoj Zizek
Introducing Slavoj Zizek (Paperback)
A Graphic Guide
Christopher Kul-Want Piero Pierini
Charting his meteoric rise in popularity, Christopher Kul-Want and Piero explore Zizek's timely analyses of today's global crises concerning ecology, mounting poverty, war, civil unrest and revolution.
Covering topics from philosophy and ethics, politics and ideology, religion and art, to literature, cinema, corporate marketing, quantum physics and virtual reality, Introducing Slavoj Zizek deftly explains Zizek's virtuoso ability to transform apparently outworn ideologies – Communism, Marxism and psychoanalysis – into a new theory of freedom and enjoyment.
Christopher Kul-Want is the course director of M.A. Fine Art at the Byam Shaw School of Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London.
Piero is an illustrator, artist, and graphic designer whose work has been exhibited in the Royal College of Art, London.
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Introducing Philosophy of Science
Introducing Philosophy of Science (Paperback)
A Graphic Guide
Ziauddin Sardar Borin Van Loon
Unique graphic introductions to big ideas and thinkers, written by experts in the field.
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Introducing Mathematics
Introducing Mathematics (Paperback)
A Graphic Guide
Jerry Ravetz Ziauddin Sardar Borin Van Loon
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Introducing Genetics
Introducing Genetics (Paperback)
A Graphic Guide
Steve Jones Borin Van Loon
Unique graphic introductions to big ideas and thinkers, written by experts in the field.
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Introducing Chomsky
Introducing Chomsky (Paperback)
A Graphic Guide
John Maher Judy Groves
Can it be that the human brain possesses an in-built faculty for language?
Noam Chomsky, one of the most brilliant linguists of the 20th century, believes that it does- that there exists a 'universal grammar' common to all languages. Around the world children learn, in very similar ways, languages that seem entirely different. This is possible, Chomsky argues, because all human languages and their grammatical structures are linked in the human brain.
Chomsky is controversial and yet highly influential, both in his pioneering work in linguistics and in his unrelenting critique of international power and his commitment to freedom and justice. These two 'Chomskys' are heirs to the Enlightenment tradition, and this book is the ideal introduction to them both.
John Maher studied philosophy and linguistics in London, Michigan and Edinburgh. He has published ten books on: bilingualism, Ainu, language rights, and the languages of Japan.
Judy Groves is an artist, illustrator and designer. She has also illustrated introductory guides to Jesus, Lacan, Wittgenstein, Levi-Strauss and Philosophy.
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Origins of the Second World War
Origins of the Second World War (Paperback)
The Instant Guide
Instant Guides
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The Book of Potentially Catastrophic Science
The Book of Potentially Catastrophic Science (Paperback)
50 Experiments for Daring Young Scientists
Sean Connolly
Einstein, Galileo, Newton … and now YOU! PARACHUTE an egg from an upstairs window! DISTIL DNA from a half-eaten banana! SPARK lightning in your mouth! Here are fifty awesome experiments that demonstrate the principles behind the greatest scientific breakthroughs in human history.
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Magic Tricks
Magic Tricks (Paperback)
The Instant Guide
Instant Guides
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The Human Body
The Human Body (Paperback)
The Instant Guide
Instant Guides
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Greek Gods and Monsters
Greek Gods and Monsters (Paperback)
The Instant Guide
Instant Guides
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The Highest Perfection
The Highest Perfection (Hardback)
A History of De La Rue
Peter Pugh
De La Rue, a company celebrating its 200th anniversary in 2013, and Portals, which will be 300 years old in 2012, both have magnificent histories of which they can be proud. Very few large firms have lived and thrived for so long.
De La Rue is the largest commercial currency printer and papermaker in the world, involved in the production of more than 150 currencies as well as a wide range of security documents such as passports and fiscal stamps. De La Rue is also a leading provider of cash-sorting equipment and software solutions to central banks, helping them to reduce the cost of handling cash.
Portals can trace its history back to Henri Portal, a refugee from France who settled at Bere Mill on the River Test in Hampshire in 1712 with a number of other Huguenot papermakers. He founded the company, and through hard work, skill and the shrewd move of tying itself to the Bank of England, Portals thrived and grew through the 18th and 19th centuries, continuing to prosper in the 20th century. It was acquired by De La Rue in the 1990s.
Thomas de la Rue had a very humble start in life. Born in Guernsey in 1793, he worked as a printer and eventually moved to London as a straw hat manufacturer. By 1830 he was convinced that he was not going to make his fortune in hats, and he moved into the stationery business and playing cards.
From cards Thomas progressed to postage stamps and then in the 1850s to banknotes. Thomas had two very talented sons, Warren and William Frederick. They took the company forward and, by the end of the 19th century, De La Rue was printing stamps and banknotes for countries throughout the world. The fourth generation of de la Rues were not as successful as their predecessors, and in the early 1920s the company had to be rescued by a financier, Sidney Lamert, and a very able businessman, Bernard Westall. These two stabilised the situation and took the company forward until it grew again under the guidance of Arthur (known as Gerry) Norman. In the years since the end of the Second World War, De La Rue has grown steadily into the worldwide operation it is today.
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Perfect Rigour
Perfect Rigour (Paperback)
A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of a Lifetime
Masha Gessen
In 2006, an eccentric Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman solved one of the world's greatest intellectual puzzles. The Poincare conjecture is an extremely complex topological problem that had eluded the best minds for over a century. In 2000, the Clay Institute in Boston named it one of seven great unsolved mathematical problems, and promised a million dollars to anyone who could find a solution. Perelman was awarded the prize this year – and declined the money. Journalist Masha Gessen was determined to find out why. Drawing on interviews with Perelman's teachers, classmates, coaches, teammates, and colleagues in Russia and the US – and informed by her own background as a math whiz raised in Russia – she set out to uncover the nature of Perelman's astonishing abilities. In telling his story, Masha Gessen has constructed a gripping and tragic tale that sheds rare light on the unique burden of genius.
Gessen provides a thorough account of the circumstances that led to Perelman's rise in the 'vicious, backstabbing little world of Soviet mathematics and a brilliant reconstruction of the twisted logic that might have led to his mysterious exit. In so doing she has written something rare: an accessible book about an unreachable man.
Perelman and the world of Soviet maths training make a fascinating, moving tale, and in 'Perfect Rigour' Masha Gessen tells it brilliantly.
Perelman possessed and developed a perfect mathematical mind with which he achieved a unique triumph in maths. But having a perfect mind in an imperfect world, is almost bound to end in tragedy, as Masha Gessen's brilliant book reveals.
Gessen gives us a long and vivid description of the world of Soviet mathematics in the 1970s…. Gessen paints a memorable picture of a Soviet sub-culture in which the great players of the mathematical game were nurtured much like the most promising young tennis stars… Gessen's research and reportage portrays the ultimate misfit mathematician…
This strange tale highlights the intensity of the world of modern mathematics and the nature of some of the semi-autistic savants who live in it…. 'Perfect Rigour' is readable, coherent, and enjoyable and we get a distinct image of a man crippled by his inabilities to empathize with or understand other men or women.
[I] hugely enjoyed reading Masha Gessen's book. It gives the reader such an insight into Perelman, mathematics and Soviet education. The book will sit on my shelves between Simon Singh's Fermat's 'Last Theorem' and Graham Farmelo's 'The Strangest Man'.
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hardback)
Light and Dark Verse
Martin Bell
Martin Bell OBE has been many things – an icon of BBC war reporting, Britain’s first independent MP for 50 years, a UNICEF ambassador, and ‘the man in the white suit’ – a tireless campaigner for honesty and accountability in politics.
But as For Whom the Bell Tolls reveals, he’s also a poet of light verse, and here Bell’s poems continue his war by other means on duplicitous politicians, our all-consuming media, the venality of celebrity culture and much more.
Bell presents poems on Tony Blair and Iraq, on Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic, on his hero, Reuters reporter Kurt Schork, and colourful episodes from his work and life, from being starstruck by Angelina Jolie, to a mordant epitaph on Margaret Thatcher, to his being a guest at Idi Amin’s wedding:
‘… that by God / Was well worth doing, if distinctly odd.’
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Introducing Bertrand Russell
Introducing Bertrand Russell (Paperback)
A Graphic Guide
Dave Robinson Judy Groves
Unique graphic introductions to big ideas and thinkers, written by experts in the field.
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The Etymologicon
The Etymologicon (Hardback)
A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language
Mark Forsyth
'Witty and erudite … stuffed with the kind of arcane information that nobody strictly needs to know, but which is a pleasure to learn nonetheless.' Nick Duerden, Independent.
'Particularly good … Forsyth takes words and draws us into their, and our, murky history.' William Leith, Evening Standard.
The Etymologicon is an occasionally ribald, frequently witty and unerringly erudite guided tour of the secret labyrinth that lurks beneath the English language.
What is the actual connection between disgruntled and gruntled? What links church organs to organised crime, California to the Caliphate, or brackets to codpieces?
Mark Forsyth's riotous celebration of the idiosyncratic and sometimes absurd connections between words is a classic of its kind: a mine of fascinating information and a must-read for word-lovers everywhere.
'Highly recommended' Spectator.
Mark Forsyth is a writer, journalist and blogger. His book The Etymologicon was a Sunday Times Number One Bestseller and his TED Talk 'What's a snollygoster?' has had more than half a million views. He is also the author of The Horologicon and The Elements of Eloquence, and wrote a specially commissioned essay The Unknown Unknown for Independent Booksellers Week. He lives in London with his dictionaries, and blogs at blog.inkyfool.com.
[Forsyth] riff[s] very entertainingly on the hidden connections of words (from brackets and codpieces, to cappuccinos and monkeys).
I'm hooked on Forsyth's book – Crikey, but this is addictive.
Kudos should go to Mark Forsyth, author of The Etymologicon – Clearly a man who knows his onions, Mr Forsyth must have worked 19 to the dozen, spotting red herrings and unravelling inkhorn terms, to bestow this boon – a work of the first water, to coin a phrase.
This year's must-have stocking filler – the angel on the top of the tree, the satsuma in the sock, the threepenny bit in the plum pudding, the essential addition to the library in the smallest room is Mark Forsyth's The Etymologicon.
The stocking filler of the season.
Witty and erudite … stuffed with the kind of arcane information that nobody strictly needs to know, but which is a pleasure to learn nonetheless.
This witty book liberates etymology from the dusty pages of the dictionary and brings it alive.
'The Etymologicon' contains fascinating facts
From Nazis and film buffs to heckling and humble pie, the obscure origins of commonly-used words and phrases are explained.
A collection of verbal curiosities … fascinating.
A perfect bit of stocking filler for the bookish member of the family, or just a cracking all-year-round read. Highly recommended.
Light, entertaining and fascinating … This is really one of those books where you have to fight hard to resist telling anyone in earshot little snippets every five minutes.
An absolute gem … a pleasure to read.
I want this book to be never-ending … a real winner.
It makes for a very good read … a perfect Christmas gift for anyone who might be interested in where our words come from.
I adored this book. I read and read and then I read some more until it was all gone. It was just my cup of tea, well presented, engaging, witty, wonderful. Full of usable facts and great anecdotes, it's one of the only 'history' books I've read this year that was anything other than dull as dishwater. Full marks.
Mark Forsyth, who blogs as 'The Inky Fool,' is an extreme and hugely entertaining practitioner.
The subtitle … 'A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language' … is a misdescription. It is not a stroll; it is a plunge on a toboggan where the only way to stop is to fall off.
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The Dead Hand
The Dead Hand (Paperback)
Reagan, Gorbachev and the Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race
David E. Hoffman
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
The Dead Hand is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative history of Reagan, Gorbachev and the final decade of the Cold War. Washington Post journalist David E. Hoffman draws on exclusive interviews in both Russia and the US, as well as classified documents from deep inside the Kremlin, piecing together the first full – and intensely dramatic – account of how the US/Soviet arms race came to a close, and revealing the previously unheralded collection of scientists, soldiers, diplomats and spies that made it happen.
A stunning feat of research and narrative. Terrifying.
Authoritative and chilling … a readable, many-tentacled account of the decades-long military standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union … The Dead Hand is deadly serious, but this story can verge on pitch-black comedy – Dr. Strangelove as updated by the Coen Brothers.
'The Dead Hand' is a brilliant work of history, a richly detailed, gripping tale that takes us inside the Cold War arms race as no other book has…a story so riveting and scary that you feel like you are reading a fictional thriller.
An extraordinary achievement.
This is a tour de force of investigative history.
A thought-provoking book which reads like a thriller. A gripping chronicle of the second half of the last century and a brilliant analysis of the single strategic conflict that more than any other shaped today's world.
I found 'The Dead Hand' extremely stimulating. As a Foreign Office Minister I was involved in Gorbachev's meeting with Margaret Thatcher; and as Defence Secretary from 1992-95 I was very much associated with the safe removal of post-Soviet states' nuclear weapons. This book is an excellent history of that period.
This book, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and is soon to be published in the UK, is in the best traditions of American long-form reportage… Key characters are evoked in enough detail to make us care and then carry the narrative through to the end. It involves simplifications and elisions: but in this case, these are less important than the horrified fascination Hoffman – a former Washington Post Moscow correspondent, later foreign editor – succeeds in rousing through a story at once journalistically detailed and morally alive.
Hoffman's magisterial, human, vividly readable account of a remarkable time doesn't stop in 1991.
[Hoffman] has compiled a fascinating narrative of the last phase of the cold war and the era of Mikhail Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika, which ended amid the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This is an important well-written volume that makes a major contribution to our understanding of the last decade of the Cold War and its aftermath.
['The Dead Hand'] has important things to say… It is exceptionally well informed. Anyone interested in the Cold War will learn something new from this fascinating, if rather depressing, read.
If you like your history told James Bond style, you'll love this book.
David E. Hoffman bagged a Pulitzer for 'The Dead Hand: Reagan, Gorbachev and the Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race' (Icon Books, €11.99). The book reads with the pace of a political thriller and includes wonderful insight into the relationship between the Cold War's two central characters who managed to pull their empires back from the brink at a time when they shared an arms arsenal with the explosive power of 1 million Hiroshimas.
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Messi – 2013 Edition
Messi – 2013 Edition (Paperback)
The Inside Story of the Boy Who Became a Legend
Luca Caioli
El Pibe de Oro. The Golden Boy. Diego Maradona’s unwaning shadow looms large over world football. In 2007 the brilliant Argentine chose Lionel Messi as his successor to the famous No. 10 shirt. But you can never be sure that potential will be fulfilled.
Three years later, Messi – El Pulga, the Flea – is a European Champion, Olympic Gold Medallist, the most naturally gifted footballer on the planet and a hero to millions of fans across the globe. Champions, reporters and coaches blunder time and time again in their haste to find superstars. This time they got it right.
Aged only 22, he shows a degree of maturity rarely seen on the soccer pitch. Yet underneath the layers of footballing brilliance, he is still the shy boy who describes his Maradona moment with disarming simplicity: ‘I saw the gap and I went for it.’ Transcending both club and country, he is a sporting god who prefers homemade cookies to brand name perfumes.
Author Luca Caioli draws on exceptional testimonies. Messi’s parents, Celia and Jorge, his bother Rodrigo and his uncles and aunts; his coaches at Grandoli and Newell’s Old Boys; Charly Rexach, Alex García, Frank Rjikaard, Gianluca Zambrotta from Barcelona; Hugo Tocalli, Pancho Ferrero, el Coco Basile, Roberto Perfumo from Argentina. And to conclude, Leo Messi himself sizes up his life so far.
