Risultati letto da "Alan Turton" in Tutte le categorie

Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of the anxious traveller, where panic strikes in the most serene situations, where each time you're convinced that the symptoms are in fact physical and your lungs or heart will stop working, and the only relief is a paramedic telling you that you won't die...

Dostoevsky’s most revolutionary novel Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between 19th- and 20th-century fiction and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence.

After his great portrayal of a guilty man in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky set out in The Idiot to portray a man of pure innocence. The 26-year-old Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss sanatorium, returns to Russia to collect an inheritance and “be among people”. Even before he reaches home, he meets the dark Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose obsession with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three of them into a tragic denouement.

The more he gains, the more he has to lose. William Shakespeare is moving up in the world, his name respected both at court and the theatre. Accepted by Queen Elizabeth, he is trusted to write plays for her, so long as she likes them...

Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"—deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them—we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials.

Twenty-nine-year-old teacher Emily needs her father to believe her life is a success. He may have walked out on the family when she was a child and let her down when she needed him most, but her life is perfect despite him.

Has any war in history gone according to plan? Monarchs, dictators and elected leaders alike have a dismal record on military decision-making, from over-ambitious goals to disregarding intelligence, terrain, or enemy capabilities. This not only wastes the lives of civilians, the enemy and one's own soldiers, but also fails to achieve geopolitical objectives and usually lays the seeds for more wars down the line.

It's 1978 and Nick Du Pont, one-time PR man to Sixties rock behemoths the Helium Kids, is back in London and bent on founding his own record label. A new kind of music—sharp, hard and dangerous—is bursting onto the airwaves on both sides of the Atlantic and Nick wants a slice of the action—in particular, the work of The Flame Throwers, the most provocative assemblage of street-smart desperadoes ever to hail from downtown Los Angeles.

Do you remember Pathe News? Taking the train to the seaside? The purple stains of iodine on the knees of boys in short trousers? Knitted bathing costumes? Then the chances are you were born in or around 1950. To the young people of today, the 1950s seems like another age. But for those born around then, this era of childhood seems like yesterday. From waking up to ice on the inside of the windows, washing in a tin bath by the fire and spoonfuls of cod-liver oil, home life was very different to today.

Do you remember collecting shrapnel and listening to Children's Hour? Carrying gas masks or sharing your school with evacuees from the city? The 1940s was a decade of challenges for everyone who lived through it. The hardships and fear created by a world war were immense. Britain's towns and cities were being bombed on an almost nightly basis, and many children faced the trauma of being parted from their parents and sent away to the country to live with strangers. For just over half of this decade the war continued, meaning food and clothing shortages became a way of life.

Ever wondered why we yawn and have eyebrows, what happens at absolute zero and why some tunes get stuck in our heads? If you’ve spent your days searching for the answers to these and life’s other big questions then look no further. Why We Yawn From the bestselling author of Why Don't Penguin's Feet Freeze and Farts Aren’t Invisible is the gift of enlightenment that you never knew you needed! Shining a light on some of life’s trickiest questions across science, history, society and the universe. 

May 1941. One of the senior choristers of St Paul's Cathedral choir, Dr Edwin Roberts, is found beaten to death in the crypt of the Cathedral. Coburg and Lampson are called in to investigate, and when they get there, Coburg is pleasantly surprised to be greeted there by Arthur Waterson, now sporting a dog collar, someone he was at Eton with many years before. Waterson believes that there may be a connection between the very precious books that are houses in the Crypt and Dr Roberts' work at Bletchley Park.

A Serpent in the Garden is set in London in 1592, with a young Will Shakespeare struggling to pen his newest play, Richard III, made more difficult by the closure of the theatres due to a plague outbreak. Via association with the outspoken Christopher Marlowe, Will is drawn into the shadowy world of Elizabethan espionage. Caught between two of the most powerful men in the country, he’s tasked with uncovering the truth behind the mysterious death of a high-ranking lady and rooting out a suspected Popish plot.

A thoroughly updated edition of the 2003 classic that home and professional bartenders alike refer to as their cocktail bible. Gary Regan, the "most-read cocktail expert around" (Imbibe), has revised the original edition with many more cocktail recipes and fascinating information on the drink-making revival that has popped up in the past decade, confirming once again that this is the only cocktail reference you need.

In 2009, Notts County FC were on the brink of bankruptcy when they were taken over by a mysterious company supposedly backed by the Bahraini royal family. The club was promised millions of pounds worth of investment and a list of marquee players, including Sol Campbell and Kasper Schmeichel were signed, in a recruitment drive led by former England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson, who was appointed to take the club all the way to the Premier League.

What if our understanding of capitalism and climate is back to front? What if the problem is not that transitioning to renewables is too expensive, but that saving the planet is not sufficiently profitable? This is Brett Christophers' claim. The global economy is moving too slowly toward sustainability because the return on green investment is too low.

Insects are the most successful group of animals ever to have lived. They comprise a million species and perhaps 10 quintillion individuals: one in every four animals on the planet is a beetle; one in every ten is a butterfly or moth. Much of life on earth depends on the activities of these busy, teeming arthropods, from pollination to the breaking down of waste matter. In Alien Worlds, Steve Nicholls draws on a lifetime of writing about, photographing and filming the natural world to create an ambitious account of insect evolution and biology

To the young people of today, the 1960s seems like another age. But for those who grew up in this decade, school life, "mod" fashions and sixties pop music are still fresh in their minds. From James Bond to Sindy dolls and playing hopscotch in the street, life was very different to how it is now. After the tough and frugal years of the fifties, the sixties was a boom period, a time of changed attitudes and improved lifestyles. With chapters on home and school life, games and hobbies, music and fashion, this delightful compendium of memories will appeal to all who grew up in this lively era.

The book has a unique status as an emblem of human culture and civilization. It is a vessel for sharing stories, dispersing knowledge, examining the nature of our extraordinary species and imagining what lies beyond our known world. Books ultimately provide an invaluable and comprehensive record of what it means to be human. This volume takes a curated list of fifty of the most influential books of all time, putting each into its historical context. 

Robert is a struggling writer living in Berlin with his wife and two young daughters. One night he meets Patrick, an enigmatic stranger with a sensational story to tell: a ghostwriter for a Russian oligarch - recently found hanged - who is now being followed. But is he really in danger? Patrick's life strikes Robert as a fabrication, but one that comes to obsess him. He decides to use the other man, and his story....