How did photography bring about social reform? What connects refrigeration to Hollywood? And how did our battle against dirt help create smartphones? In this story of ingenious breakthroughs and unsung heroes, Steven Johnson explores the essential innovations that changed the world and how we live in it. Steven Johnson is the US bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, and Everything Bad Is Good for You,...

Medicine, education, psychology, health, parenting - wherever it really matters, we look to science for advice. Science Fictions reveals the disturbing flaws that undermine our understanding of all of these fields and more. While the scientific method will always be our best and only way of knowing about the world, in reality the current system of funding and publishing science not only fails to safeguard against scientists? inescapable biases and...

1914: Tom enlists to fight for his country, Thea is drawn onto the battlefield and the family farm becomes Kezia's responsibility. Each must find a way to endure the ensuing turmoil.

Supporters from every part of the globe are able to recount joyful tales about Brazil's unmatched achievements, especially ones of World Cup glory - not for them the almost fifty years of hurt endured by England fans. But few realise that the most crucial transformations undergone by Brazilian football came as a direct result of the Sele?̇o's failures. ; This updated edition of Shocking Brazil, which includes the 2014 tournament, looks at seven crucial...

In 1984 the pulsing electronics and soft vocals of Smalltown Boy would become an anthem uniting gay men. A month later, an aggressive virus, HIV, would be identified and a climate of panic and fear would spread across the nation, marginalising an already ostracised community. Yet, out of this terror would come tenderness and 30 years later, the long road to gay equality would climax with the passing of same sex marriage. Paul Flynn charts this astonishing...

The railways. Thousands of route-miles fenced off from the rest of the country, carved into landscapes barely changed since Shakespeare's time and ruled by their own mysterious rhythms and laws. From the classical architecture of Newcastle Station to the unrelenting traffic and expanse of Clapham Junction and the lost stations of Oban and Challow, Simon Bradley explores the landscape of the railways, the trains, and the passengers who pass through...

'Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language' On 10 June 2020, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria. In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy's girl, remembers her beloved...

Daniel Pitt was an RAF fighter in the First World War and an espionage agent for the SOE in the Second. Now the conflicts he faces are closer to home. Daniel's marriage has fractured beyond repair and Daniel's relationship with his son, Bertie, has been a failure since Bertie was a small boy. But after his brother Archie's death, Daniel is keen for new perspectives. He first travels to Peshawar to bury Archie in the place he loved best, and then finds...

Christmas time is approaching at the Phoenix Munitions Factory and Gladys, Kitty, Edna and the rest of the Bomb Girls are determined to make this a year to remember. With Myrtle's health in decline, Edna's love life beginning to take flight, a shy new arrival in their midst and continual hard work on the factory floor, life is never quiet in Pendle. But Gladys, back from performing for the troops on the front, is sullen and sad and her friends are...

Kim Philby was the most notorious British defector and Soviet mole in history. Agent, double agent, traitor and enigma, he betrayed every secret of Allied operations to the Russians in the early years of the Cold War. His two closest friends in the intelligence world, Nicholas Elliott of MI6 and James Jesus Angleton, the CIA intelligence chief, thought they knew Philby better than anyone - and then discovered they had not known him at all. With access...