Showing results by narrator "Julian Elfer" in All Categories

Just when you thought that it was safe to start showing off again, John Lloyd and John Mitchinson are back with another busload of mistakes and misunderstandings. Here is a new collection of simple, perfectly obvious questions you'll be quite certain you know the answers to. Whether it's history, science, sports, geography, literature, language, medicine, the classics, or common wisdom, you'll be astonished to discover that everything you thought you knew is still hopelessly wrong.

Much has been made of - and written about - August 1914. There has been comparatively little focus on August 1918 and the lead-up to November. Because of the fixation on the Great War's opening moves and the great battles that followed over the course of the next four years, the endgame seems to come as a stunning anticlimax. At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the guns simply fell silent. The Last Battle definitively corrects this misperception. As Hart shows, a number of factors precipitated the Armistice.

Far too often, public discussion of science is carried out by journalists, voters, and politicians who have received their science secondhand. The Story of Western Science shows us the joy and importance of reading groundbreaking science writing for ourselves and guides us back to the masterpieces that have changed the way we think about our world, our cosmos, and ourselves.

Farm animals have been disappearing from our fields as the production of food has become a global industry. We no longer know for certain what is entering the food chain and what we are eating - as the UK horsemeat scandal demonstrated. We are reaching a tipping point as the farming revolution threatens our countryside, health, and the quality of our food wherever we live in the world.

He lives in your community, in a nice house with a well-tended garden. He shops in your grocery store, bumping shoulders with you and apologizing with a smile. He drives beside you on the highway, politely waving you into the lane ahead of him. What you don't know is that he has an elaborate cage built into a secret basement under his garage. And the food that he's carefully shopping for is to feed a young woman he's holding there against her will - one in a string of many, unaware of the fate that awaits her.

It's Luka Kane's 16th birthday and he's been inside The Loop for over two years. Every inmate is serving a death sentence with the option to push back their execution date by six months if they opt into "delays", scientific and medical experiments for the benefit of the elite in the outside world. But rumors of a war on the outside are spreading amonst the inmates, and before they know it, their tortuous routine becomes disrupted. The government issued rain stops falling. Strange things are happening to the guards. And it's not long until the inmates are left alone inside the prison.

The Unquiet Englishman braids the narratives of Greene's extraordinary life. It portrays a man who was traumatized as an adolescent and later suffered a mental illness that brought him to the point of suicide on several occasions; it tells the story of a restless traveler and unfailing advocate for human rights exploring troubled places around the world, a man who struggled to believe in God and found himself described as a great Catholic writer; it reveals a private life in which love almost always ended in ruin, alongside a larger story of politicians, battlefields, and spies.

In The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Luce makes a larger statement about the weakening of western hegemony and the crisis of liberal democracy - of which Donald Trump and his European counterparts are not the cause, but a terrifying symptom. Luce argues that we are on a menacing trajectory brought about by ignorance of what it took to build the West, arrogance towards society's economic losers, and complacency about our system's durability.

Thirty years ago, ecstasy and torment took hold of John Rivers, shocking him out of "half-baked imbecility into something more nearly resembling the human form." He had an affair with the wife of his mentor, Henry Maartens - a pathbreaking physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize, and a figure of blinding brilliance - bringing the couple to ruin. Now, on Christmas Eve while a small grandson sleeps upstairs, John Rivers is moved to set the record straight about the great man and the radiant, elemental creature he married, who viewed the renowned genius through undazzled eyes.

Almost anyone who has read or written science fiction or fantasy has been inspired by the work of Michael Moorcock. His literary flair and grand sense of adventure have been evident since his controversial first novel Behold the Man, from the stories and novels featuring his most famous character, Elric of Melniboné, to his fantasy masterpiece, Gloriana, winner of both the Campbell Memorial and World Fantasy awards for best novel.

When someone says they hear voices in their head, they are often thought to be mentally ill. But, as Charles Fernyhough argues in The Voices Within, such voices are better understood as one of the chief hallmarks of human thought. Our inner voices can be self-assured, funny, profound, hesitant, or mean; they can appear in different accents and even in sign language. We all hear them - and we needn't fear them. Indeed, we cannot live without them.

Andrew Lambert, author of The Challenge - winner of the prestigious Anderson Medal - turns his attention to Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic, and Britain, examining how their identities as "seapowers" informed their actions and enabled them to achieve success disproportionate to their size. Lambert demonstrates how creating maritime identities made these states more dynamic, open, and inclusive than their lumbering continental rivals. Only when they forgot this aspect of their identity did these nations begin to decline.

The word capitalism is one that is heard and used frequently, but what is capitalism really all about, and what does it mean? This Very Short Introduction audiobook addresses questions such as, "what is capital?" before discussing the history and development of capitalism through several detailed case studies, ranging from the tulipomania of 17th-century Holland, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and, in this new edition, the impact of the global financial crisis that started in 2007-08.

A provocative account showing that "China" - and its 5,000 years of unified history - is a national myth, created only a century ago with a political agenda that persists to this day. China's current leadership lays claim to a 5,000-year-old civilization, but "China" as a unified country and people, Bill Hayton argues, was created far more recently by a small group of intellectuals.

Since its publication in 2003, the first edition of Black Garden has become the definitive study of how Armenia and Azerbaijan, two southern Soviet republics, were pulled into a conflict that helped bring them to independence, spell the end the Soviet Union, and plunge a region of great strategic importance into a decade of turmoil. This important volume is both a careful reconstruction of the history of the Nagorny Karabakh conflict since 1988 and on-the-spot reporting of the convoluted aftermath.

Princess Margaret was one of the most controversial royal figures of the twentieth century. Widely admired as a young woman, she was famous for her beauty and charisma, but also for her sense of loyalty and duty. The charismatic Princess not only brought color and sex appeal into an otherwise colorless royal family, but did much to help bring the monarchy and its attitudes into the modern world. In recent years, dogged by accidents and ill-health, much of the Princess's youthful vigor and charm, not to mention her hard work, has been forgotten.

Hitler's Collaborators focuses the spotlight on one of the most controversial aspects of the Nazi wartime occupation of Europe: the citizens of those countries who helped Hitler. Author Philip Morgan moves away from the usual suspects and focuses instead on the businessmen and civil servants who felt obliged to cooperate with the Nazis. These were the people who faced the most difficult choices and dilemmas by dealing with the various Nazi authorities and agencies, and it was their choices which had the greatest impact on the lives and livelihoods of their fellow countrymen.

This is a history of the King James Version of the Bible over the 400 years from its remote beginnings to the present day and helps to explain the enduring popularity of the King James Version throughout the world today. Gordon Campbell, expert in Renaissance literatures, tells the fascinating and complex story of how this translation came to be commissioned, of who the translators were, and of how the translation was accomplished. The story does not end with the printing of that first edition, but introduces the subsequent generations who edited and interacted with the text.

In the aftermath of Germany's defeat in World War I and the failed November Revolution of 1918-19, the conservative government of Bavaria identified Jews with left-wing radicalism. Munich became a hotbed of right-wing extremism, with synagogues under attack and Jews physically assaulted in the streets. It was here that Adolf Hitler established the Nazi movement and developed his anti-Semitic ideas. Michael Brenner provides a gripping account of how Bavaria's capital city became the testing ground for Nazism and the Final Solution.

Despite the immense popularity of yoga today, there is surprisingly little knowledge of its roots among practitioners. This book brings together the core teachings of yoga in the words of their authors, rather than in the secondary versions of modern interpreters. Including key passages from the Upanishads, the Buddhist and Jaina traditions, the yoga sections of the Indian Tantras, and many texts that are being critically translated for the first time, Roots of Yoga provides a comprehensive and immediate insight into the essential texts of the Indian traditions of yoga.