A legendary record producer-turned-brain scientist explains why you fall in love with music. This Is What It Sounds Like is a journey into the science and soul of music that reveals the secrets of why your favourite songs move you. But it's also a story of a musical trailblazer who began as a humble audio tech in Los Angeles to became Prince's chief engineer for Purple Rain,...

John Locke (1632-1704) was perhaps the most influential English writer of his time. His Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Two Treatises of Government (1690) weighed heavily on the history of ideas in the eighteenth century, and Locke’s works are often − rightly − presented as foundations of the Age of Enlightenment. Both the Essay and the Second Treatise (by far the more...

Ich kann nichts Wesentliches finden, das ich an diesem Buch heute andern wurde, wohl auch deshalb, weil nicht ich mich im Besitz des Schussels fur die Zukunft der Sowjetunion fuhle. Daher wage ich keine Prognosen, sondern ziehe es vor, festzuhalten und lebensfahigen Krafte sind, die zur Formund dieser Zukunft in der Lage sein konnten. Und die Photographien, heute viellecht sogar mehr denn...

As one of Britain’s leading newspapers for more than 200 years The Times has covered every major world events as they happened. This book profiles the ones that have had the most impact on the world today from the fall of the Berlin Wall to stepping onto the Moon. News-breaking stories as told from The Times with commentary setting each event in context. Historian and editor, James Owens,...

The Legendary Philanthropist Tackles the Dangers We Must Face for the Survival of Civilisation 'Soros has become a standard bearer for liberal democracy' - Financial Times George Soros - universally known for his philanthropy, progressive politics and investment success, and now under sustained attack from the far right, nationalists, and anti-Semites around the world - gives an impassioned...

When did humans develop spiritual thought? What is religion's evolutionary purpose? And in our increasingly secular world, why has it endured? Every society in the history of humanity has lived with religion. In How Religion Evolved, evolutionary psychologist Professor Robin Dunbar tracks its origins back to what he terms the 'mystical stance' - the aspect of human psychology that...

In 1990, a country disappeared. When the Iron Curtain fell, East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different German identity to anything that had come before, and anything that exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a...

'This is one of those rare books that have something really important to say. Anatol Lieven, one of the most original and independent-minded foreign policy thinkers, is telling his fellow realists that at this moment the world's great powers are far more threatened by climate change than they are by each other.' - Ivan Krastev, author of The Light That Failed In the past two...

We leven in tijden van angst. Wat kunnen we doen om IS te stoppen? Hoe voorkomen we dat ze jongeren indoctrineren en rekruteren? Hoe verdedigen we onze samenleving? Met verwijten en simplistische oorlogstaal komen we er niet. Deze tijd verdraagt geen lichtzinnigheid. We hebben een coherente aanpak nodig, die veiligheid verzoent met vrijheid en die opnieuw hoop biedt aan alle burgers...

In 1961, a Douglas DC-6B aeroplane transporting the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, disappeared over the Congolese jungle at the height of the Cold War. Soon afterward, Hammarskjöld was discovered in the smoking wreckage, an Ace of Spades playing card placed on his body. He had been heralded as the Congo's best hope for peace and independence. Now he was dead. The...

As the market consolidates under fewer and larger companies, it's increasingly in the interest of private companies to behave like nations. And when the government is bogged down in bureaucratic negotiations and culture wars, people begin to look to nimble, powerful companies to solve society's problems - and to be our moral standard-bearers. It shouldn't be like this. New York Times...

A top crime journalist reveals precisely how the world-shattering murder of John Lennon happened--and why In Let Me Take You Down, Jack Jones penetrates the borderline world of dangerous fantasy in which Mark David Chapman stalked and killed Lennon: Mark David Chapman rose early on the morning of December 8 to make final preparations. . . . Chapman had neatly arranged...

Coffee is one of the most valuable commodities in the history of the global economy and the world's most popular drug. The very word 'coffee' is one of the most widespread on the planet. Augustine Sedgewick's brilliant new history tells the hidden and surprising story of how this came to be, tracing coffee's 400-year transformation into an everyday necessity. The story is one...

In Wild Grass, Pulitzer Prize-winning Ian Johnson describes a China caught between the desire for change percolating up from below and the ossified political structure above. He recounts the stories of three ordinary people who find themselves finding oppression and government corruption, risking imprisonment and even death. A young architecture student, a bereaved daughter, and a peasant...

The history of British Railways in the late 1950s/early 1960s is characterised by change; massive change, as its management attempted to meet statutory obligations against a background of social, economic and political influences. The Modernisation Plan of 1955 paved the way for the electrification of the route from Manchester to London Euston, with a consequential effect of the Midland route...

Edycja dwujezyczna polsko-angielska / Polish-English bilingual edition "Skrzydła Romantyzmu" to swoisty pamiętnik erudyty. Posłużenie się esejem zwolniło autora od przedstawiania treści w sposób encyklopedyczny. Dzięki temu natomiast mógł sobie pozwolić na efektowne lawirowanie, posługując się plastycznym językiem i często sięgając po anegdoty. Wszyscy, którzy wolą zamiast faktów przyjrzeć...

The Wall Street Journal's award-winning business reporter unveils the bizarre and sinister story of how a math genius named Tom Hayes, a handful of outrageous confederates, and a deeply corrupt banking system ignited one of the greatest financial scandals in history. The paperback edition includes a new chapter discussing further fallout from the scandal. In 2006, an oddball...

2017 marked three important anniversaries for the Palestinian people: 100 years since the Balfour Declaration; 50 years since the Six-day War; and ten years since the Blockade of Gaza. As an act of penance, solidarity and hope, actor and musician Justin Butcher - along with ten other companions for the full route, plus another hundred joining him for various stretches along the way - walked...

A brilliant, revelatory account of the Cold War origins of the data-mad, algorithmic twenty-first century, from the acclaimed and internationally bestselling author. 'Back in the 1960s, long before the denizens of Silicon Valley were infiltrating every facet of our lives, the smart men and women of The Simulmatics Corporation were creating algorithms to predict and even influence human...

1968 saw an extraordinary range of protests across much of the western world. Some of these were genuinely revolutionary - around ten million French workers went on strike and the whole state teetered on the brink of collapse. Others were more easily contained, but had profound longer-term implications - terrorist groups, feminist collectives, gay rights activists could all trace important...