William Collins Platypus Matters. The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals Ashby Jack

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

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

Новаторское расследование о том, как нацисты помогли немецким магнатам заработать миллиарды на ужасах Третьего рейха и Второй мировой войны - и как мир позволил им выйти сухими из воды • В 1946 году Гюнтер Квандт - патриарх самой культовой промышленной империи Германии, династии, которая сегодня контролирует BMW, - был арестован по подозрению в сотрудничестве с нацистами. Квандт утверждал, что его вынудил вступить в партию его заклятый соперник, министр пропаганды Йозеф Геббельс, и суды оправдали его. Но Квандт солгал. И его наследники, и наследницы других нацистских миллиардеров с тех пор становились только богаче, в то время как их расчеты с этим темным прошлым в лучшем случае остаются неполными. Жестокое наследие династий, которые доминировали в Daimler-Benz, были соучредителями Allianz и до сих пор контролируют Porsche, Volkswagen и BMW, оставалось скрытым на виду - до сих пор

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience – classics which will endure for generations to come • What if intelligent life on earth not only evolved on land, but also in the sea? • Other Minds is 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 over millennia, Other Minds explores the incredible evolutionary journey of the cephalopods. What kind of intelligence do they possess? And how did the octopus, a solitary creature with little social life, become so smart? • Heralded as the ‘scuba-diving philosopher’ when Other Minds first published, Peter Godfrey-Smith explores the underwater world and the concept of sentience to trace the question of inner life back to its roots

Coal is the commodity that made Britain. Dirty and polluting though it is, this black rock has acted as a midwife to genius. It drove industry, religion, politics, empire and trade. It powered the industrial revolution, turned Britain into the first urban nation and is the industry that made almost all others possible • In this brilliant social history, Jeremy Paxman tells the story of coal mining in England, Scotland and Wales from Roman times, through the birth of steam power to war, nationalisation, pea-souper smogs, industrial strife and the picket lines of the Miner’s Strike • Written in the captivating style of his bestselling book The English, Paxman ranges widely across Britain to explore stories of engineers and inventors, entrepreneurs and industrialists – but whilst coal inevitably helped the rich become richer, the story told by Black Gold is first and foremost a history of the working miners – the men, women and often children who toiled in appalling conditions down in the mines; the villages that were thrown up around the pit-head

A new, fully updated narrative edition of David Attenborough’s seminal biography of our world, The Living Planet • Nowhere on our planet is devoid of life. Plants and animals thrive or survive within every extreme of climate and habitat that it offers. Single species, and often whole communities adapt to make the most of ice cap and tundra, forest and plain, desert, ocean and volcano. These adaptations can be truly extraordinary: fish that walk or lay eggs on leaves in mid-air; snakes that fly; flightless birds that graze like deer; and bears that grow hair on the soles of their feet • In The Living Planet, David Attenborough’s searching eye, unfailing curiosity and infectious enthusiasm explain and illuminate the intricate lives of the these colonies, from the lonely heights of the Himalayas to the wild creatures that have established themselves in the most recent of environments, the city

9.07 a.m., April 12, 1961. A top-secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile – originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead – and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin and he is about to make history • Travelling at almost 18,000 miles per hour – ten times faster than a rifle bullet – Gagarin circles the globe in just 106 minutes. While his launch begins in total secrecy, within hours of his landing he has become a world celebrity – the first human to leave the planet • Beyond tells the thrilling story behind that epic flight on its sixtieth anniversary. It happened at the height of the Cold War as the US and USSR confronted each other across an Iron Curtain

For fans of Bad Blood and The Big Short, the story of how one reclusive trading prodigy manipulated Wall Street and amassed millions from his childhood bedroom - then short-circuited the global market • A real-life financial thriller, Flash Crash gives panoramic insight into our economic landscape - its weaknesses, its crooks and its exploitable loopholes - and uncovers the remarkable, behind-the-scenes narrative of a mystifying market crash, a globe-spanning investigation into international fraud, and the man - Navinder Singh Sarao - at the centre of it all • Depending on whom you ask, Sarao was a scourge, a symbol of a financial system run horribly amok, or a folk hero: an outsider who took on the tyranny of Wall Street and the high-frequency traders

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

Starting from the ocean and from the forgotten histories of ocean-facing communities, this is a new history of the making of our world • After revolutions in America and France, a wave of tumult coursed the globe from 1790 to 1850. It was a moment of unprecedented change and violence especially for indigenous peoples. By 1850 vibrant public debate between colonised communities had exploded in port cities. Yet in the midst of all of this, Britain struck out by sea and established its supremacy over the Indian and Pacific Oceans, overtaking the French and Dutch as well as other rivals • Cambridge historian Sujit Sivasundaram brings together his work in far-flung archives across the world and the best new academic research in this remarkably creative book

In August 1942, beleaguered Malta was within weeks of surrender to the Axis, because its 300,000 people could no longer be fed. Churchill made a personal decision that at all costs, the ‘island fortress’ must be saved. This was not merely a matter of strategy, but of national prestige, when Britain’s fortunes and morale had fallen to their lowest ebb • The largest fleet the Royal Navy committed to any operation of the western war was assembled to escort fourteen fast merchantmen across a thousand of miles of sea defended by six hundred German and Italian aircraft, together with packs of U-boats and torpedo craft. The Mediterranean battles that ensued between 11 and 15 August were the most brutal of Britain’s war at sea, embracing four aircraft-carriers, two battleships, seven cruisers, scores of destroyers and smaller craft

"Путешествие к центру Земли" - один из первых научно-фантастических романов Жюля Верна, рассказывающий о дерзком и опасном путешествии в недра Земли через жерло вулкана • Случайно выпавший из книги ветхий клочок пергамента стал отправной точкой небывалой экспедиции профессора Отто Лиденброка и его племянника Акселя. Стремление пройти по следам знаменитого алхимика Арне Сакнуссема, чтобы повторить его подвиг - достигнуть центра Земли, - оборачивается для путешественников проверкой на мужество, стойкость и взаимную поддержку • Книга на английском языке • In Verne's science-fiction classic, Professor Lidenbrock chances upon an ancient manuscript and pledges to solve the mysterious coded message that lies within it. Eventually he deciphers the story - that of an Icelandic explorer who travels to the centre of the earth, finding his way there via a volcano