Of all the many things humans rely on plants for, surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate, calm, or completely alter the qualities of our mental experience. In This Is Your Mind On Plants, Michael Pollan explores three very different drugs - opium, caffeine and mescaline - and throws the fundamental strangeness of our thinking about them into sharp relie
The year is 1933. Hannah Arendt escapes Berlin, seeking refuge among the stateless gathering in Paris. Simone de Beauvoir reimagines the dance between consciousness and the world outside in a Rouen cafe. Ayn Rand labours in Hollywood exile on the novel she believes destined to reignite the flame of liberty in her adoptive nation. Simone Weil, disenchanted with the revolution's course in Russia,
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'Utterly brilliant . . . Authoritative, lively and profoundly human, it is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand post-World War II Europe' Julia Boyd
The latest volume in The New York Times bestselling physics series explains Einstein's masterpiece: the general theory of relativity
He taught us classical mechanics, quantum mechanics and special relativity. Now, physicist Leonard Susskind, assisted by a new collaborator, Andre Cabannes, returns to tackle Einstein's general theory of relativity. Starting from the equiv
The runaway success of the microchip processor may be nearing its end, with profound implications for our economy, society and way of life, even leaving Silicon Valley as a new Rust Belt, its technology obsolete. Step forward the quantum computer, which harnesses the power and complexity of the atomic realm, and may be useful in solving humanity's greatest challenges from climate change, to glo
A masterful new translation of Suetonius' renowned biography of the twelve Caesars, bringing to life a portrait of the first Roman emperors in stunning detail
The ancient Roman empire was the supreme arena, where emperors had no choice but to fight, to thrill, to dazzle. To rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world. No biography invites us int
'Interplanetary, quite extraordinary . . . awash with dark humour and scenes of intense beauty' Financial Times
'One of the greatest avant-garde Japanese writers of the twentieth century' New Yorker
Beautiful Star is a 1962 tale of family, love, nuclear war and UFOs, and was considered by Mishima to be one of his very best books.
Tr
'Truly wonderful... Anna Funder has written another brilliant human portrait.' - Claire Tomalin
A BLAZING, GENRE-BENDING MASTERPIECE FROM ONE OF THE MOST INVENTIVE WRITERS OF OUR TIME
Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to rem
What if moments of great difficulty are, in fact, opportunities for growth and self-discovery? What if they can serve as stepping stones to greater things in life?
Modern life doesn't always go our way. Loss, rejection, uncertainty and loneliness are unavoidable parts of the human experience -- but there is solace to be found.
In When Things Don't Go Your Way
From the bestselling, award-winning author of Middle England comes a profoundly moving, brutally funny and brilliantly true portrait of Britain told through four generations of one family
In Bournville, a placid suburb of Birmingham, sits a famous chocolate factory. For eleven-year-old Mary and her family in 1945, it's the centre of the world. The reason their streets s
From celebrated writer Robert Macfarlane comes this brilliant, perspective-shifting new book - which answers a resounding yes to the question of its title.
At its heart is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings - who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law. Is a River Alive? takes the reade
'One of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time' Arundhati Roy
In these incisive interviews, Chomsky addresses the urgent questions of this tumultuous time, speaking to the deterioration of democracy in the United States and rising tensions globally.
He examines the crumbling of the social fabric and the fractures of the Biden era, including the halti