William Collins No Boys Play Here. A Story of Shakespeare and My Family’s Missing Men Bayley Sally

A luminous journey through a thousand years of folklore and English history • Once upon a time in a Hertfordshire field, an ancient yew tree hid a dragon hunted by a giant named Piers Shonks. Today, the dragon and its slayer are the survivors of an 800-year battle between rural legend and national record, storytellers and sceptics • In this brilliant and lyrical history, Christopher Hadley journeys from churches to tombs to manuscript margins, to explore history, memory and legend, and the magical spaces where all three meet

Увлекательный, забавный рассказ из первых рук о удивительно уникальных млекопитающих Австралии и о том, как наше восприятие влияет на их будущее • Представьте себе утконосов: они откладывают яйца (из которых вылупляются утконосы), они производят молоко без сосков и яд без клыков, и они могут улавливать электричество. Или вомбат: у них никогда не перестают расти зубы, они какают кубиками и защищаются усиленными задними лапами. Утконосы, поссумы, вомбаты, ехидны, дьяволы, кенгуру, кволлы, дибблеры, даннарты, ковари: в Австралии есть поистине удивительные млекопитающие с невероятными, незнакомыми чертами лица. Но как мир относится к этим существам? И что это значит для их сохранения? • В книге "Утконосы" натуралист Джек Эшби делится своей любовью к этим часто неправильно понимаемым животным

До того, как Нил Армстронг ступил на Луну, группа профессионалов работала как "человеко-компьютеры", рассчитывая траектории полета, которые позволили бы осуществить эти исторические достижения. Среди них была группа ярких, талантливых афроамериканских женщин. Отделенные от своих белых коллег, они использовали карандаш и бумагу для написания уравнений, которые должны были запускать ракеты и астронавтов в космос • Переходя от Второй мировой войны к золотому веку НАСА, затрагивая эпоху гражданских прав, космическую гонку, холодную войну и движение за права женщин, книге Марго Ли Шеттерли "Скрытые фигуры. Нерассказанная история афроамериканских женщин, которые помогли выиграть космическую гонку" переплетают богатую историю величайшего приключения человечества с личными историями пяти сильных женщин, чья работа навсегда изменила мир

What makes a scientist? • Charming, funny and wise, in this memoir Richard Fortey shows how restless curiosity about the natural world led him to become a leading scientist and writer, with adventures and misadventures along the way • From a garden shed laboratory where he manufactured the greatest stink in the world to a tent high in the Arctic in pursuit of fossils, this is a story of obsession and love of nature, flavoured with the peculiarities and restrictions of post-war Britain. Fortey tells the story of following his father down riverbanks to fish for trout, and also of his father's shocking death. He unfolds his early passions - fungi, ammonite hunting and eyeing up bird's eggs. He evokes with warmth and wit how the natural world started out as his playground and refuge, then became his life's work

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

A story of poverty, generosity and worlds colliding in modern Britain • When Covid-19 hit the UK and lockdown was declared, Mike Matthews wondered how his four-star hotel would survive. Then the council called. The British government had launched a programme called ‘ Everyone In ’ and 33 rough sleepers – many of whom had spent decades on the street – needed beds.The Prince Rupert Hotel would go on to welcome well over 100 people from this community, offering them shelter, good food and a comfy bed during the pandemic • This is the story of how that luxury hotel spent months locked down with their new guests, many of them traumatised, addicts or suffering from mental illness. As a world-leading foreign correspondent turning her attention to her own country for the first time, Christina Lamb chronicles how extreme situations were handled and how shocking losses were suffered, how romances emerged between guests and how people grappled with their pasts together

Einstein’s Fridge tells the story of how scientists uncovered the least known and yet most consequential of all the sciences, and learned to harness the power of heat and ice • The laws of thermodynamics govern everything from the behaviour of atoms to that of living cells, from the engines that power our world to the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. Not only that, but thermodynamics explains why we must eat and breathe, how the lights come on, and ultimately how the universe will end. The people who decoded its laws came from every branch of the sciences – they were engineers, physicists, chemists, biologists, cosmologists and mathematicians • Their discoveries, set over two hundred years, kick-started the industrial revolution, changed the course of world wars and informed modern understanding of black holes

From the foremost historian of 20th century Spain, A People Betrayed is the story of the devastating betrayal of Spain by its political class, its military and its Church • This comprehensive history of modern Spain chronicles the fomenting of violent social division throughout the country by institutionalised corruption and startling political incompetence. Most spectacularly during the Primo de Rivera and Franco dictatorships, grotesque and shameless corruption went hand-in-hand with inept policies that prolonged Spain's economic backwardness well into the 1950s • A People Betrayed looks back to the years prior to 1923 when electoral corruption excluded the masses from organized politics and gave them a choice between apathetic acceptance and violent revolution

This is an astonishing new account of Alexander the Great – one of the most important figures of the ancient world, whose earlier years have until now been a mystery • Alexander the Great’s story often reads like fiction: son to a snake-loving mother and a battle-scarred father; tutored by Aristotle; a youth from the periphery of the Greek world who took part in his first campaign aged sixteen, becoming king of Macedon at twenty and king of Asia by twenty-five; leading his armies into battle like a Homeric figure • Each generation has peered through the frosted glass of history and come to their own conclusion about Alexander, be it enlightened ruler, military genius, megalomaniac, drunkard or despot. Yet the first two decades of his life have until now been a mystery – a matter of legend and myth

A cutting-edge examination of what it means to be human and to have a 'self' in the face of new scientific developments in genetic editing, cloning and neural downloading • After seeing his own cells used to grow clumps of new neurons – essentially mini-brains – Philip Ball begins to examine the concepts of identity and consciousness. Delving into humanity's deep evolutionary past to look at how complex creatures like us emerged from single-celled life, he offers a new perspective on how humans think about ourselves • In an age when we are increasingly encouraged to regard the 'self' as an abstract sequence of genetic information, or as a pattern of neural activity that might be 'downloaded' to a computer, he return us to the body – to flesh and blood – and anchors a conception of personhood in this unique and ephemeral mortal coil

There may be no insect with a worse reputation than the wasp, and none guarding so many undiscovered wonders • Where bees and ants have long been the darlings of the insect world, wasps are much older, cleverer and more diverse. They are the bee’s evolutionary ancestors – flying 100 million years earlier – and today they are just as essential for the survival of our environment. A bee, ecologist Professor Seirian Sumner argues, is just a wasp that has forgotten how to hunt • For readers of Entangled Life, Other Minds and The Gospel of Eels, this is a book to upturn your expectations about one overlooked animal and the wider architecture of our natural world • With endless surprises, this book might teach you about the wasps that spend their entire lives sealed inside a fig, about stinging wasps, about parasitic wasps, about wasps that turn cockroaches into living zombies, about how wasps taught us to make paper

In her groundbreaking debut, Anna Malaika Tubbs tells the incredible stories of three women who raised three world-changing men • Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin Luther and Louise Little's son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary women who raised them, each fighting their own battles, born into the beginning of the twentieth century and a deadly landscape of racial prejudice, Jim Crow, exploitation, unpoliced violence and open police vitriol • It was a society that would deny their sons' humanity from the beginning as it had denied theirs, but Berdis, Alberta and Louise were extraordinary women who instilled resilience, resistance and greatness in their sons