25 Years of Big Ideas

In this enthralling cosmic journey through space and time, astrophysicist Jillian Scudder locates our home planet within its own 'family tree'. Our parent the Earth and its sibling planets in our solar system formed within the same gas cloud.

Without our grandparent the Sun, we would not exist, and the Sun in turn relies on the Milky Way as its home. The Milky Way rests in a larger web of galaxies that traces its origins right back to tiny fluctuations in the very early universe.

Following these cosmic connections, we discover the many ties that bind us to our universe.

Based around readers' questions from the author's popular blog 'Astroquizzical', the book provides a quirky guide to how things work in the universe and why things are the way they are, from shooting stars on Earth, to black holes, to entire galaxies.

For anyone interested in the 'big picture' of how the cosmos functions and how it is all connected, Jillian Scudder is the perfect guide.

'Queer: A Graphic History Could Totally Change the Way You Think About Sex and Gender' Vice

Activist-academic Meg-John Barker and cartoonist Jules Scheele illuminate the histories of queer thought and LGBTQ+ action in this groundbreaking non-fiction graphic novel.

From identity politics and gender roles to privilege and exclusion, Queer explores how we came to view sex, gender and sexuality in the ways that we do; how these ideas get tangled up with our culture and our understanding of biology, psychology and sexology; and how these views have been disputed and challenged.

Along the way we look at key landmarks which shift our perspective of what's 'normal' — Alfred Kinsey's view of sexuality as a spectrum, Judith Butler's view of gendered behaviour as a performance, the play Wicked, or moments in Casino Royale when we're invited to view James Bond with the kind of desiring gaze usually directed at female bodies in mainstream media.

Presented in a brilliantly engaging and witty style, this is a unique portrait of the universe of queer thinking.

Epigenetics is the most exciting field in biology today, developing our understanding of how and why we inherit certain traits, develop diseases and age, and evolve as a species.

This non-fiction comic book introduces us to genetics, cell biology and the fascinating science of epigenetics, which is rapidly filling in the gaps in our knowledge, allowing us to make huge advances in medicine. We'll look at what identical twins can teach us about the epigenetic effects of our environment and experiences, why certain genes are 'switched on' or off at various stages of embryonic development, and how scientists have reversed the specialization of cells to clone frogs from a single gut cell.

In Introducing Epigenetics, Cath Ennis and Oliver Pugh pull apart the double helix, examining how the epigenetic building blocks and messengers that interpret and edit our genes help to make us, well, us.

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.

Lionel Messi, Neymar Júnior and Cristiano Ronaldo have risen from humble beginnings in Argentina, Brazil and Portugal to rank among the most exciting talents football has ever seen.
Now Luca Caioli, author of biographies Messi, Ronaldo and Neymar, asks: 'Who is the greatest of them all?' Comparing their contrasting styles, stories, records and awards, he gives you everything you need to decide who comes out on top.
With exclusive insights from their friends, families, teammates and managers — including interviews with managers Luiz Felipe Scolari and Vicente del Bosque — Caioli presents a unique insight into what makes a modern player not just successful, but truly great.

'A work of engaging pop philosophy and accessible social science [and] a boisterous dissection of the forces jellifying our minds' Sunday Times
Includes brand new material covering the US election and Brexit
Every day, many people will try to change your mind, but they won't reason with you. Instead, you'll be nudged, anchored, incentivised and manipulated in barely noticeable ways. It's a profound shift in the way we interact with one another.
Philosopher James Garvey explores the hidden story of persuasion and the men and women in the business of changing our minds. From the covert PR used to start the first Gulf War to the neuromarketing of products to appeal to our unconscious minds, he reveals the dark arts practised by professional persuaders.
How did we end up with a world where beliefs are mass-produced by lobbyists and PR firms? Could Google or Facebook swing elections? Are new kinds of persuasion making us less likely to live happy, decent lives in an open, peaceful world?
Is it too late, or can we learn to listen to reason again? The Persuaders is a call to think again about how we think now.

From Plato to Virginia Woolf, Structuralism to Practical Criticism, Introducing Literary Criticism charts the history and development of literary criticism into a rich and complex discipline.
Tackling disputes over the value and meaning of literature, and exploring theoretical and practical approaches, this unique illustrated guide will help readers of all levels to get more out of their reading.

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.

'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.

The Magic of a Name tells the story of the first 40 years of Britain's most prestigious manufacturer — Rolls-Royce.
Beginning with the historic meeting in 1904 of Henry Royce and the Honourable C.S. Rolls, and the birth in 1906 of the legendary Silver Ghost, Peter Pugh tells a story of genius, skill, hard work and dedication which gave the world cars and aero engines unrivalled in their excellence.
In 1915, 100 years ago, the pair produced their first aero engine, the Eagle which along with the Hawk, Falcon and Condor proved themselves in battle in the First World War. In the Second the totemic Merlin was installed in the Spitfire and built in a race against time in 1940 to help win the Battle of Britain.
With unrivalled access to the company's archives, Peter Pugh's history is a unique portrait of both an iconic name and of British industry at its best.

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…

Among the military leaders of the Second World War, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz remains a deeply enigmatic figure. As chief of the German submarine fleet he earned Allied respect as a formidable enemy. But after he succeeded Hitler — to whom he was unquestioningly loyal — as head of the Third Reich, his name became associated with all that was most hated in the Nazi regime.
Yet Doenitz deserves credit for ending the war quickly while trying to save his compatriots in the East — his Dunkirk-style operation across the Baltic rescued up to 2 million troops and civilian refugees.
Historian Barry Turner argues that while Doenitz can never be dissociated from the evil done under the Third Reich, his contribution to the war must be acknowledged in its entirety in order to properly understand the conflict.
An even-handed portrait of Nazi Germany's last leader and a compellingly readable account of the culmination of the war in Europe, Karl Doenitz and the Last Days of the Third Reich gives a fascinating new perspective on a complex man at the heart of this crucial period in history.

WHEN BUSINESSMAN John Timpson started his retailing career in 1960, there were no supermarkets, no out-of-town shopping centres and not even a hint of internet shopping. The British high street was full of made-to-measure tailors and traditional grocers. Among the household names were Mac Fisheries, Dewhurst, John Collier and Timothy Whites & Taylors.
In this enjoyable new book, Timpson shows how successive generations of forward-thinking shopkeepers and inspirational entrepreneurs have led the major retailers through a period of rapid change — people such as Ken Morrison, Ralph Halpern, Terence Conran and Anita Roddick, without whom our high streets would have looked very different.
This unique survey — from a man who knows a few things about success in retail — paints a compelling, personal and vivid picture of how shops have changed over the last 100 years and reveals who Timpson thinks has had the biggest influence on the shape of shopping in the 'retail revolution' that we have witnessed since the 1970s.

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.

Mario Balotelli has a reputation like no other in football. Since exploding on to the scene at Inter Milan in 2007, he has won league titles in both Italy and England, moving between Europe's elite clubs.
Yet for all his undoubted talent, he is better known for his off-field antics — not least his infamous run-ins with both the police and Manchester's firefighters. Once described by José Mourinho as 'unmanageable', match-winning performances at the highest level have continued to convince clubs such as AC Milan and Liverpool to give him a chance.
With exclusive access to friends, teammates and coaches, acclaimed football biographer Luca Caioli talks to the people best placed to explain the mystery that is Mario Balotelli.

The Science Magpie is Simon Flynn's bestselling collection of enthralling facts, stories, poems and more from science's history, from the Large Hadron Collider rap to the sins of Isaac Newton.
With Antiques Roadshow regular Marc Allum as your guide, go in search of stolen masterpieces, explore the first museums, learn the secrets of the forgers and brush up on your auction technique with The Antiques Magpie.
And with acclaimed nature writer Daniel Allen, join naturalists, novelists and poets as they explore the most isolated parts of the planet and discover which plants can be used to predict the weather in The Nature Magpie.

Carl Gustav Jung was the enigmatic and controversial father of analytical psychology. This updated edition of Introducing Jung brilliantly explains the theories that underpin Jung’s work, delves into the controversies that led him to break away from Freud and describes his near psychotic breakdown, from which he emerged with radical new insights into the nature of the unconscious mind — and which were published for the first time in 2009 in The Red Book.

Step by step, Maggie Hyde demonstrates how it was entirely logical for him to explore the psychology of religion, alchemy, astrology, the I Ching and other phenomena rejected by science in his investigation of his patients’ dreams, fantasies and psychic disturbances.

INTRODUCING guide to the hugely influential German thinker. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is one of the greatest thinkers of all time. No other philosopher has had such a profound impact on the ideas and political events of the 20th century. Hegel's influential writings on philosophy, politics, history and art are parts of a larger systematic whole. They are also among the most difficult in the entire literature of philosophy. Introducing Hegel guides us through a spectacular system of thought which aimed to make sense of history. The book also provides new perspectives on contemporary postmodern debates about 'metanarratives' (Lyotard) and the 'end of history' (Fukuyama). It is an ideal introduction to this crucial figure in the history of philosophy, and is indispensable for anyone trying to understand such key modern thinkers as Marx, Lacan, Satre and Adorno.

“Introducing Aristotle” guides the reader through an explosion of theories, from the establishment of systematic logic to the earliest rules of science. Aristotle's authority extended beyond his own lifetime to influence fundamentally Islamic philosophy and medieval scholasticism. For fifteen centuries, he remained the paradigm of knowledge itself. But can Aristotelian realism still be used to underpin our conception of the world today?

The Magic of a Name tells the story of the first 40 years of Britain's most prestigious manufacturer — Rolls-Royce.
Beginning with the historic meeting in 1904 of Henry Royce and the Honourable C.S. Rolls, and the birth in 1906 of the legendary Silver Ghost, Peter Pugh tells a story of genius, skill, hard work and dedication which gave the world cars and aero engines unrivalled in their excellence.
In 1915, 100 years ago, the pair produced their first aero engine, the Eagle which along with the Hawk, Falcon and Condor proved themselves in battle in the First World War. In the Second the totemic Merlin was installed in the Spitfire and built in a race against time in 1940 to help win the Battle of Britain.
With unrivalled access to the company's archives, Peter Pugh's history is a unique portrait of both an iconic name and of British industry at its best.