Engelska

A 'Best Book of the Year 2023' in the New Statesman, Spectator and Waterstones 'From plans for flying machines to philosophy - the remarkable joy of jotting things down' Guardian 'Surprisingly revealing' The Sunday Times We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did this simple invention come from? How did they revolutionise our lives, and why are they such powerful tools for creativity? And how can using a notebook help you change the way you think? In this wide-ranging story, Roland Allen reveals all the answers. Ranging from the bustling markets of medieval Florence to the quiet studies of our greatest thinkers, he follows a trail of dazzling ideas, revealing how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of artists like Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, scientists from Isaac Newton to Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James. We watch Darwin developing his theory of evolution in tiny pocketbooks, see Agatha Christie plotting a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books, and learn how Bruce Chatwin unwittingly inspired the creation of the Moleskine. On the way we meet a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers and mathematicians, who all used their notebooks as a space for thinking and to shape the modern world.

<p><b>Why is playing games a universal human instinct?</b><br/><b>Why did the same games evolve across wildly different civilisations?</b><br/><b>And how can those games make your life happier, healthier and more fulfilled?</b><br/><br/>The history of board games is really the history of human civilisation. Through it we see how our species has learned to live with one another, make deals, take on different roles and manage the ups and downs of luck.<br/><br/>In this entertaining and thought-provoking look at games through the ages, Tim Clare explores the legal highs of a good dice roll, the thrills of a predatory race game and the tactile pleasures of the games that age with us through our lives to discover how, through play, we become fully ourselves.<br/><br/>Drawing on Roman anti-cheating devices, organised crime card syndicates and the combative domestic bonding ritual of Monopoly, <i>The Game Changers</i> explains why games are more popular now than ever, and how playing them helps us learn to be better losers, make smarter decisions and become more human.</p>

<b>A compelling and fascinating portrait of the continuing intellectual tradition of Greek writers and thinkers in the Age of Rome.</b> In 146 BC, Greece yielded to the military might of the Roman Republic; sixty years later, when Athens and other Greek city-states rebelled against Rome, the general Lucius Cornelius Sulla destroyed the city of Socrates and Plato, laying waste to the famous Academy where Aristotle had studied. However, the traditions of Greek cultural life would continue to flourish during the centuries of Roman rule that followed, in the lives and work of a distinguished array of philosophers, doctors, scientists, geographers, travellers and theologians. Charles Freeman's accounts of such luminaries as the physician Galen, the geographer Ptolemy and the philosopher Plotinus are interwoven with contextual 'interludes' that showcase a sequence of unjustly neglected and richly influential lives. Like the author's <i>The Awakening</i>, <i>The Children of Athena</i> is a cultural history on an epic scale: the story of a rich and vibrant tradition of Greek intellectual inquiry across a period of more than five hundred years, from the second century BC to the start of the fifth century AD.

<p><b>**A <i>Telegraph</i> Best History Book of 2023*<br/><br/>'An astonishing achievement' </b>ANTONY BEEVOR<br/><br/><b>An intimate history of the most important month of the Second World War as experienced by those who lived through it, completely based on their diaries, letters and memoirs.</b><br/><br/>At the beginning of November 1942, it looked as if the Axis powers could win the war; at the end of that month, it was obviously just a matter of time before they would lose.<br/><br/>In between came el-Alamein, Guadalcanal, the French North Africa landings, the Japanese retreat in New Guinea, and the Soviet encirclement of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. In this innovatively kaleidoscopic and riveting historical marvel, Peter Englund reduces these epoch-making events to their basic component: the individual experience.<br/><br/>In thirty memorable days we meet characters including a Soviet infantryman at Stalingrad; an Italian truck driver in the North African desert; a partisan in the Belarussian forests; a machine gunner in a British bomber; a twelve-year-old girl in Shanghai; a university student in Paris; a housewife on Long Island; a prisoner in Treblinka; Albert Camus, Vasily Grossman, and Vera Brittain. We also witness the launch of <i>SS James Oglethorpe</i>; the fate of U-604, a German submarine; the building of the first nuclear reactor; and the making of <i>Casablanca.</i><br/><br/><b>Not since Englund's own <i>The Beauty and the Sorrow </i>has a book given us one of the most dramatic periods of human history in all its immensity and emotional range.</b><br/><br/><b>'Thought-provoking' </b><i>SUNDAY TIMES</i><br/><b>'Thoroughly worth reading' </b><i>TELEGRAPH</i></p>

<p>In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, morally and materially. The German people stood condemned by history, responsible for a horrifying genocide and a war of extermination. But by 2015 Germany looked to many to be the moral voice of Europe, welcoming almost one million refugees. At the same time, it pursued a controversially rigid fiscal discipline and made energy deals with a dictator. Many people have asked how Germany descended into the darkness of the Nazis, but this book asks another vital question: how, and how far, have the Germans since reinvented themselves?<br/><br/>Trentmann tells the dramatic story of the Germans from the middle of the Second World War, through the Cold War and the division into East and West, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunited nation's search for a place in the world. Their journey is marked by extraordinary moral struggles: guilt, shame and limited amends; wealth versus welfare; tolerance versus racism; compassion and complicity. Through a range of voices - German soldiers and German Jews; environmentalists and coal miners; families and churches; volunteers, migrants and populists - Trentmann paints a remarkable and surprising portrait over 80 years of the conflicted people at the centre of Europe.</p>

Forged In War [Bok / Inbunden]

Naples 1343 [Bok / Inbunden]