Profile Books Are We Having Fun Yet? Mangan Lucy

Following up 2016's hit Go Figure and 2018's Sunday Times bestseller Seriously Curious, another collection of astonishing bite-sized explainers from the Economist • The world can be an amazing place if you know the right questions to ask • How did carrots become orange? What's stopping us from having a four-day week? How can we remove all the broken bits of satellite from orbit? If everything is so terrible, why is the global suicide rate falling? • The keen minds of the Economist love to look beyond everyday appearances to find out what really makes things tick. In this latest collection of The Economist Explains, they have gathered together the juiciest fruits of their never-ending quest for answers. For an uncommonly interesting read, take a peek at some Uncommon Knowledge - and pass it on! The world only gets more amazing when discoveries are shared

From the best-selling author of Cosmopolitanism comes this revealing exploration of how the collective identities that shape our polarised world are riddled with contradiction • We often think identity is personal. But the identities that shape the world, our struggles, and our hopes, are social ones, shared with countless others. Our sense of self is shaped by our family, but also by affiliations that spread out from there, like our nationality, culture, class, race and religion • Taking these broad categories as a starting point, Professor Appiah challenges our assumptions about how identity works. In eloquent and lively chapters, he weaves personal anecdote with historical, cultural and literary example to explore the entanglements within the stories we tell ourselves

In business - as in life - the right behaviours matter. But getting it right is tricky. Even when we acknowledge the need to change what we do and how we do it, life has a habit of getting in the way, upsetting even the best-laid plans. And just how do we manage those situations that can provoke even the most rational among us into behaving in ways we would rather forget? Triggers confronts head-on the challenges of behaviour and change, looking at the external factors (or 'triggers') - both negative and positive - that affect our behaviours, our awareness of when we need to change, our willingness (or otherwise) to do so and our ability to see the change through. Drawing on his unparalleled experience as an international executive educator and coach, Marshall Goldsmith invites us to understand how our own beliefs and the environments in which we operate can trigger negative behaviours, or a resistance to the need to change

Here are Alan Bennett's four hugely admired, triumphantly reviewed and bestselling stories, brought together in one book for the first time • Like everything Bennett does, these stories are playful, witty and painfully observant of ordinary people's foibles. They all have brilliant twists, are immensely entertaining and highly moral. And all are modern classics • The Laying on of Hands • The painfully observant account of a memorial service for a masseur to the famous • The Clothes They Stood Up In • The comic tale of an elderly couple's trials after their flat is stripped completely bare • Father! Father! Burning Bright • The savage satire on the family of a dying man who rules over them from his hospital bed • The Lady in the Van • The true story of the eccentric old woman who is invited to live in a homeowner's front garden

In 1974, the homeless Miss Shepherd moved her broken down van into Alan Bennett's garden. Deeply eccentric and stubborn to her bones, Miss Shepherd was not an easy tenant. And Bennett, despite inviting her in the first place, was a reluctant landlord. And yet she lived there for fifteen years • This account of those years was first published in 1989 in the London Review of Books. The play premiered in 1999, directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring Dame Maggie Smith, who reprise their roles in this new film adaptation. Shot on location at Bennett's house, Alex Jennings plays the author, alongside household names including Frances de la Tour, Jim Broadbent and Dominic Cooper

A unique history of humanity told through its seventeen defining equations; from Pythagoras to Calculus • From Newton's Law of Gravity to the Black-Scholes model used by bankers to predict the markets, equations, are everywhere - and they are fundamental to everyday life.Seventeen Equations that Changed the World examines seventeen ground-breaking equations that have altered the course of human history. He explores how Pythagoras's Theorem led to GPS and Satnav; how logarithms are applied in architecture; why imaginary numbers were important in the development of the digital camera, and what is really going on with Schrodinger's cat • Entertaining, surprising and vastly informative, Seventeen Equations that Changed the World is a highly original exploration - and explanation - of life on earth

Ten years on from first publication, a new edition of this invaluable and entertaining guide that shows just what effect everything has on carbon emissions, from a Google search to a plastic bag, from a flight to a volcano • How Bad Are Bananas? was a groundbreaking book when first published in 2009, when most of us were hearing the phrase 'carbon footprint' for the first time. Mike Berners-Lee set out to inform us what was important (aviation, heating, swimming pools) and what made very little difference (bananas, naturally packaged, are good!) • This new edition updates all the figures (from data centres to hosting a World Cup) and introduces many areas that have become a regular part of modern life - Twitter, the Cloud, Bitcoin, electric bikes and cars, even space tourism

A magnificent work of original research, unwinding history through cloth - how we make it, use it and what it means to us • Bestselling author Victoria Finlay spins us round the globe in a vibrant exploration of cloth through the ages. She beats the inner bark of trees into cloth in Papua New Guinea, fails to handspin cotton in Guatemala, visits tweed weavers at their homes in Harris, and has lessons in patchwork-making in Gee's Bend, Alabama. And through it all she uncovers the hidden histories of fabric: how and why people have made it, worn it, invented it and made symbols of it • Interlaced with Victoria's own story of grief and recovery, Fabric is a lush patchwork of travel, history, memoir and culture - an unforgettable look into how we have made fabric, and how it has made us

Over two decades ago we set up Sort of Books to help our friend, the some-time Genesis drummer Chris Stewart, bring his sunlit stories of life on a Spanish mountain farm to print. Ever the optimist, Chris hoped to earn enough money to buy a second-hand tractor for his farm. He got his tractor, as the book spent a year on the Sunday Times Top 10 charts and went on to sell a million and a half copies • His story is a classic. A dreamer and an itinerant sheep shearer, he moves with his wife Ana to a mountain farm in Las Alpujarras, an oddball region in the south of Spain. Misadventures gleefully unfold as Chris discovers that the owner had no intention of leaving. He meets their neighbours, an engaging mix of farmers, shepherds and New Age travellers, and their daughter Chloe is born, linking them irrevocably to their new life

A glittering and gruesome history of the body in the Middle Ages, loved by critics and readers alike • Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different to our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule • In this richly-illustrated and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fascinating ways in which people thought about, explored and experienced their physical selves in the Middle Ages, from Constantinople to Cairo and Canterbury

A short history of one of Ancient Britain's most enigmatic civilisations • Who were the Celts? Were they a people, a civilisation, an empire, or a fiction of historical imagination? They flit as ghosts through Europe's ancient past, purported ancestors of the Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Cornish and Bretons • Yet they have never been identified with any one land, or with any one history or language • Simon Jenkins argues compellingly that the 'Celts' is a misleading concept, bundling together quite distinct peoples. The word keltoi first appears in Greek, applied generally to aliens or 'barbarians' - and theories of Celticism continue to fuel many of the prejudices and misconceptions that divide the British Isles to this day • Fascinating and increasingly relevant, who the Celts were - or weren't - goes to the heart of the ongoing argument over the future of a dis-United Kingdom

Murder is best served ... ice cold • It's only the afternoon, but dusk is already falling and a log fire burning in the grate. Outside, frost coats the tree branches and snow sparkles on the ground. And somewhere in the darkness, a murderer is making plans • Here are ten classic crime stories for the winter months, from the greatest minds of the mystery genre. So bundle up, grab a glass of mulled wine, and get ready to be puzzled, astonished and entertained by these festive stories of murder and mayhem