Vintage books Origins. How the Earth Shaped Human History Dartnell Lewis

Our biology will change how you see the world. Lewis Dartnell explores how human biology has shaped relationships, societies, economies and wars across the globe • How did haemophilia bring down the Russian royal family? And scurvy give rise to the Mafia? • We are a wonder of evolution. Our exceptional abilities created life as we know it, but we're also deeply flawed. This extraordinary contradiction between our faculties and frailties is the essence of what it means to be human. And history has played out in the balance between them • Here, Lewis Dartnell tells our story through the lens of this uniquely fragile nature for the first time. From cognitive biases to endemic diseases, he explores how human biology has shaped relationships, societies, economies and wars across the globe - and considers how, importantly, it continues to challenge and define our progress

On Boxing Day 1962, when Juliet Nicolson was eight years old, the snow began to fall. It did not stop for ten weeks • The threat of nuclear war had reached its terrifying height with the recent Cuban Missile Crisis, unemployment was on the rise, and yet, underneath the frozen surface, new life was beginning to stir • From poets to pop stars, shopkeepers to schoolchildren, and her own family's experiences, Juliet Nicolson traces the hardship of that frozen winter and the emancipation that followed. That spring, new life was unleashed, along with freedoms we take for granted today

How does the novel represent human consciousness on the page? • In eleven sparkling essays on some of the great novelists of the last 200 years – from Charles Dickens to Martin Amis, Henry James to Philip Roth – David Lodge pursues this question with characteristic verve and wit. One of the best novelists and critics of his generation, Lodge is the perfect guide to look afresh at the mysterious workings of the creative mind

‘A brilliant book about singing… I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I hope you take it’ Nick Hornby in The Believer • What happens when we fall in love with a voice; the siren call of someone singing? • The history of post-war popular music is traditionally told sociologically or in terms of musicological influence and innovation in style. Voices takes a different tack. In ten discrete but cohering essays Coleman tackles the arc of that history as if it were an emotional experience with real psychological consequences – as chaotic, random, challenging and unpredictable as life itself • Voices is the story of what it is to listen and learn

Extra-special futuristic 3D edition! Each book comes with 3D glasses! • From the grandpere of science fiction - a perilous and astonishing adventure into the earth's core that details encounters with natural hazards, forty foot mushrooms and prehistoric beasts • Read this perilous and astonishing adventure into the earth's core • After decoding a scrap of paper in runic script, the intrepid Professor Lidenbrock and his nervous nephew Axel travel across Iceland to find the secret passage to the centre of the earth. Enlisting the silent Hans as a guide, the trio encounter a perilous and astonishing subterranean world of natural hazards, curious sights, prehistoric beasts and sea monsters

'Our very best writer today' Milan Kundera • Sparkling with comic genius and narrative exuberance, I Served the King of England is a story of how the unbelievable came true. Its remarkable hero, Ditie, is a hotel waiter who rises to become a millionaire and then loses it all again against the backdrop of events in Prague from the German invasion to the victory of Communism. Ditie's fantastic journey intertwines the political and the per

The essential crime book of our times, from the author of the bestselling McMafia • Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2012 • We live our lives online - banking, shopping, working, dating - but have we become complacent? • Who's got your money? • We share our personal details, our thoughts and movements with a faceless screen, with no real idea what lies behind it • Who's got your identity? • DarkMarket exposes the shocking truth about what lurks behind our computers: an underground crime network that invades our privacy and threatens our security on a daily basis • Who's got your life? • Glenny tracks down the key players - including criminals, national and international security experts, police, crack addicts, the Saudi Royal Family, and most importantly, victims - to reveal the true scale of this new global threat

The daughter of a Buddhist priest, Tsuneno was born in 1804 in a village in Japan's snow country and was expected to lead a life much like her mother's. Instead - after three divorces and with a temperament much too strong-willed for her family's approval - she ran away to follow her own path in Edo, the city we now call Tokyo • Stranger in the Shogun's City is a rare, captivating portrait of one woman as she endeavours to recreate herself and her life, and provides a window into the drama and excitement of Japan at a pivotal moment in history

The official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley • Alan Turing was the mathematician whose cipher-cracking transformed the Second World War. Taken on by British Intelligence in 1938, as a shy young Cambridge don, he combined brilliant logic with a flair for engineering. In 1940 his machines were breaking the Enigma-enciphered messages of Nazi Germany's air force. He then headed the penetration of the super-secure U-boat communications • But his vision went far beyond this achievement. Before the war he had invented the concept of the universal machine, and in 1945 he turned this into the first design for a digital computer • Turing's far-sighted plans for the digital era forged ahead into a vision for Artificial Intelligence

The pre-eminent study of the six wives of Henry VIII by a master historian • Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived • CATHERINE OF ARAGON: the pious Spanish Catholic who suffered years of miscarriages and failed to produce a male heir • ANNE BOLEYN: the pretty, clever, French-educated Protestant whose marriage to Henry changed England forever • JANE SEYMOUR: the demure and submissive contrast to Anne Boleyn's radical and vampish style • ANNE OF CLEVES: 'the mare of Flanders' whose short marriage to the overweight Henry followed a farcical 'beauty contest' • CATHERINE HOWARD: the flirtatious teenager whose adulteries made a fool of the ageing king... CATHERINE PARR: the shrewd, religiously radical bluestocking who outlived him

The next round in the beloved Two Pints series from the ever-brilliant, always hilarious imagination of bestselling author of The Commitments and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha • Two men meet for a pint - or three - in a Dublin pub. They chew the fat, set the world to rights and mourn friends gone: David Bowie, Prince, Princess Leia and Young Frankenstein. Around them the world of Brexit, Trump, and referendums storm, but some things - good things - never change • Inspired by the last five years of news, Roddy Doyle's Two for the Road offers a strong brew of Roddy Doyle's comic genius - to be downed in one riotous sitting, or savoured over, laugh after laugh

The untold story of Britain's most secretive special forces unit • June 1942. The shadow of the Third Reich falls across Europe. In desperation, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form an unusual plan - a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees. This top secret unit becomes known as X Troop. Others simply call them a suicide squad • From British internment camps, to the beaches of Normandy, the battlefields of Italy and Holland, and the hellscape of Terezin concentration camp, Leah Garrett follows this band of brothers who will stop at nothing to defeat the Nazis