William Collins Listen. How to Find the Words for Tender Conversations Mannix Kathryn

The beautiful aurorae, or northern lights, are the stuff of legends. The ancient stories of the Sami people warn that if you mock the lights they will seize you, and their mythical appeal continues to capture the hearts and imagination of people across the globe • Aurora explores the visual beauty, ancient myths and science of the northern lights and challenges the popular theory of how the lights are formed. Plasma physicist Melanie Windridge explains this extraordinary and evocative phenomenon, a scientific marvel unlike any other in which the powers of astronomy, geology, magnetism and atomic physics combine to create one of the wonders of the natural world • As Melanie travels in search of the perfect aurora, she uncovers the scientific realities of this plasmic phenomenon full of natural power

An unprecedented history of the personality test conceived a century ago by a mother and her daughter - fiction writers with no formal training in psychology - and how it insinuated itself into our boardrooms, classrooms, and beyond • The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It has been harnessed by Fortune 100 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, and the military. Its language - of extraversion vs. introversion, thinking vs. feeling - has inspired online dating platforms and Buzzfeed quizzes alike. And yet despite the test's widespread adoption, experts in the field of psychometric testing, a $500 million industry, struggle to account for its success - no less validate its results. How did the Myers-Briggs insinuate itself into our jobs, our relationships, our internet, our lives? • First conceived in the 1920s by the mother-daughter team of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, a pair of aspiring novelists and devoted homemakers, the Myers-Briggs was designed to bring the gospel of Carl Jung to the masses

From the bestselling author Simon Winchester, a human history of land around the world: who mapped it, owned it, stole it, cared for it, fought for it and gave it back • In 1889, thousands of hopeful people raced southward from the Kansas state line and westward from the Arkansas boundary to stake claims on the thousands of acres of unclaimed pastures and meadows. Across the twentieth century, water was dammed and drained in Holland so that a new province, Flevoland, rose up, unchartered and requiring new thinking. In 1850, California legislated the theft of land from Native Americans. An apology came in 2019 from the governor, but what of the call for reparations or return? What of government confiscation of land in India, or questions of fairness when it comes to New Zealand’s Maori population and the legacy of settlers? • The ownership of land has always been complicated, opaque, and more than a little anarchic when viewed from the outside

From Aristotle to Ada Lovelace: a brief history of the mathematical ideas that have forever changed the world and the everyday people and pioneers behind them. The story of our best invention yet • From our ability to calculate the passing of time to the algorithms that control computers and much else in our lives, numbers are everywhere. They are so indispensable that we forget how fundamental they are to our way of life • In this international bestseller, Mickael Launay mixes history and anecdotes from around the world to reveal how mathematics became pivotal to the story of humankind. It is a journey into numbers with Launay as a guide. In museums, monuments or train stations, he uses the objects around us to explain what art can reveal about geometry, how Babylonian scholars developed one of the first complex written languages, and how ‘Arabic’ numbers were adopted from India

Gem GI is a clear introduction to what a GI diet is and how it works. It explains the difference between the glycemic index of a food and its glycemic load. The GI food counter rates hundreds of foods using a simple traffic-light system: red for foods to avoid, amber for foods to eat occasionally and green for foods to focus on • Contains a clear introduction to GI diets and how they work. Cuts through the jargon associated with technical sounding terms such as glycemic index and loads • The food rater operates as in the Gem Calorie and Carb counters giving the GI rating as well as calories and carbs for hundreds of different foods • Provides tips and advice on how to use GI dieting most effectively and helps you maintain a healthy eating regime

A frank and witty memoir of life at the Bar and on the Bench, from former High Court Judge The Hon. Sir Harry Ognall • For many years, Harry Ognall enjoyed a formidable reputation as an advocate at the criminal Bar. As counsel, and later as judge, he was involved in numerous high-profile trials, both in Britain and abroad • Among many cases as a QC, he prosecuted Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called 'Yorkshire Ripper'. He successfully defended six officers of the Air Force of Zimbabwe at their trial in Harare, where they faced a charge of treasonable sabotage • As a judge, he presided over the trial of Colin Stagg (the alleged 'Wimbledon Common murderer'), the trial arising from the Lyme Bay canoe tragedy and the trial for the first time in the United Kingdom of a doctor's alleged involvement in euthanasia

‘For awhile after you quit Keats,’ Fitzgerald once wrote, ‘All other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.’ • John Keats died two hundred years ago, in February 1821. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined a decade that began one hundred years ago, the Jazz Age • In this biography, prizewinning author Jonathan Bate recreates these two shining, tragic lives in parallel. Not only was Fitzgerald profoundly influenced by Keats, titling Tender is the Night and other works from the poet’s lines, but the two lived with echoing fates: both died young, loved to drink, were plagued by tuberculosis, were haunted by their first love, and wrote into a new decade of release, experimentation and decadence • Luminous and vital, this biography goes through the looking glass to meet afresh two of the greatest and best-known Romantic writers in their twinned centuries

The latest adventure from bestselling author Ben Fogle explores what we can learn from nature about living well and living wild • What can rowing across the Atlantic teach us about boredom and about patience? • Can coming down from Everest take more resilience than climbing up in the first place? • How can the isolation of the South Pole highlight what’s most important? And how can we tap into the same reflective state in our daily lives? • Writing during the unprecedented period of the coronavirus pandemic and drawing on a wealth of personal stories, Ben reflects on the significance of nature to all our lives and shows us how we can benefit from living a little more wild • Drawing on his greatest adventures, he shares what his time spent in the wilderness has taught him about life

What if intelligent life on Earth evolved not once, but twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter? • In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself - a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared • Tracking the mind's fitful development from unruly clumps of seaborne cells to the first evolved nervous systems in ancient relatives of jellyfish, he explores the incredible evolutionary journey of the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous molluscs who would later abandon their shells to rise above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so - a journey completely independent from the route that mammals and birds would later take

From award-winning historian Saul David, an action-packed and powerful new narrative of the Battle of Okinawa - the last great clash of the Second World War, and one that had profound consequences for the modern world • For eighty-three blood-soaked days, the fighting on the island of Okinawa plumbed depths of savagery as bad as anything seen on the Eastern Front. When it was over, almost a quarter of a million people had lost their lives, making it by far the bloodiest US battle of the Pacific. In Okinawa, the death toll included thousands of civilians lost to mass suicide, convinced by Japanese propaganda that they would otherwise be raped and murdered by the enemy. On the US side, David argues that the horror of the battle ultimately determined President Truman's choice to use atomic bombs in August 1945

An intimate, revealing and profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea • An obsessive and troubled genius, Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling and unnerving writers of the twentieth century. Memories of a conflicted Caribbean childhood haunt the four fictions that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England. Rhys's experiences of heartbreak, poverty, notoriety, breakdowns and even imprisonment all became grist for her writing, forming an iconic 'Rhys woman' whose personality - vulnerable, witty, watchful and angry - was often mistaken, and still is, for a self-portrait • Many details of Rhys's life emerge from her memoir, Smile Please and the stories she wrote throughout her long and challenging career

A classic of travel writing, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is Eric Newby’s iconic account of his journey through one of the most remote and beautiful wildernesses on earth • It was 1956, and Eric Newby was earning an improbable living in the chaotic family business of London haute couture. Pining for adventure, Newby sent his friend Hugh Carless the now-famous cable – CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE? – setting in motion a legendary journey from Mayfair to Afghanistan, and the mountains of the Hindu Kush, north-east of Kabul • Inexperienced and ill prepared (their preparations involved nothing more than some tips from a Welsh waitress), the amateurish rogues embark on a month of adventure and hardship in one of the most beautiful wildernesses on earth – a journey that adventurers with more experience and sense may never have undertaken