Quercus Secret Intensity of Everyday Life Nicholson William

This collection of writings is famous for giving us the phrase 'Freudian slip'. It also builds up a strong social history of Vienna and the middle-class social milieu of Freud and his patients. Through a series of case histories, some no longer than a few lines long, Freud explores how it is that normal people make slips of speech, writing, reading and remembering in their everyday life, and reveals what it is that they betray about the existence of a sub-text or subliminal motive to our conscious actions. As he explains, most of these slips tend of be of a relatively anodyne nature, but some are a little more sinister, particularly those where pride or thwarted love are concerned

The second book in William Nicholson’s award-winning epic fantasy series, Wind on Fire • Five years have passed. The city of Aramanth has become kinder – weaker. When ruthless soldiers of the Mastery strike, the city is burned, and the Manth people taken into slavery. Kestrel is left, separated from her brother Bowman, and vowing revenge … Fantasy books for children don’t get more spectacular than Slaves of the Mastery • Since first publication, William Nicholson’s Wind on Fire trilogy has been translated into over 25 languages and won prizes including the Blue Peter Book Award and Smarties Prize Gold Award. One of the greatest writers of our time, William Nicholson has not only sold millions of children’s books worldwide, he also written for the screen and the stage, including the Oscar-winning film Gladiator and the BAFTA-winning play Shadowlands

Like it or not, our lives are dominated by mathematics. Our daily diet of news regales us with statistical forecasts, opinion polls, risk assessments, inflation figures, weather and climate predictions and all sorts of political decisions and advice backed up by supposedly accurate numbers. Most of us do not even pause and question such figures even to ask what they really mean and whether they raise more questions than they answer • In this simple guide for anyone numbed by numbers, William Hartston reveals with clarity and humour why the figures being flung at us may not tell the whole story. Along the way he explains commonly misused mathematical terms, solves everyday mathematical problems and shows how to steer a safe path through the minefield of mathematics that surrounds us

An entertaining guide to how maths is relevant to our everyday lives • Why is it better to buy a lottery ticket on Friday? Why are showers always too hot or too cold? And which classic puzzle was destroyed by Allied bombing in the war? These and many other questions are answers in this entertaining and highly informative book • Why do Buses Come in Threes? is for anyone who wants to remind themselves – or discover for the first time – that maths is relevant to almost everything we do. Dating, cooking, travelling by car, gambling and life-saving techniques all have links with intriguing mathematical problems that you will find explained here – including the odd coincidence of 4 July, the exponential growth of Australian rabbits and a surprising formula for running in the rain without getting wet

Our world is full of patterns. If you pour milk into your tea and give it a stir, you'll see a swirl, a spiral of two fluids, before the two liquids mix completely. The same pattern is found elsewhere too. Look down on the Earth from space, and you'll find similar swirls in the clouds, made where warm air and cold air waltz • In Storm in a Teacup, Helen Czerski links the little things we see every day with the big world we live in. Each chapter begins with something small - popcorn, coffee stains and refrigerator magnets - and uses it to explain some of the most important science and technology of our time • This is physics as the toolbox of science - a toolbox we need in order to make sense of what is around us and arrive at decisions about the future, from medical advances to solving our future energy needs

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

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

Inventory of a Life Mislaid follows Marina Warner’s beautiful, penniless young mother Ilia as she leaves southern Italy in 1945 to travel alone to London. Her husband, an English colonel, is still away in the war in the East as she begins to learn how to be Mrs Esmond Warner, an Englishwoman • With diamond rings on her fingers and brogues on her feet, Ilia steps fearlessly into the world of cricket and riding. But, without prospect of work in a bleak, war-ravaged England, Esmond remembers the glorious ease of Cairo during his periods of leave from the desert campaign. There, they start a bookshop, a branch of W. H. Smith’s. But growing resistance to foreign interests, especially British, erupts in the 1952 uprising, and the Cairo Fire burns the city clean

Нам хорошо знакомо морское побережье, и все же мало какие места хранят так много тайн и сюрпризов • Как кузнечики наследуют «компас» от своих родителей? Как крабы разбираются в приливах? Как смерть одной береговой улитке может спасти жизнь ее сородичей? Как много знает креветка? • В своей книге The Sea is Not Made of Water. Life Between the Tides Адам Николсон рассказывает о чудесах природы, которые можно найти на морском побережье. Физика морей, биология актиний и моллюсков, история Земли и всех, кто когда-то жил на ней – все это встречается в этом месте, где ищут смысл жизни и поэты, и философы • Это удивительная книга об экологии и о яркой человеческой истории. Любой желающий сможет оторвать взгляд от собственного отражения и обнаружить, что в дюйме от них ждет самое настоящее чудо

It is 1628, Charles 1 is on the throne, and the British Crown is finally taking control of Ulster • Returning to his rooms one night, Alexander Seaton is shocked to find a stranger standing there - a man who could be his double. His name is Sean O'Neill, and he carries a plea for help from Maeve O'Neill, forbidding matriarch of Alexander's mother's family in Ireland. All those who bear their blood have been placed under a poet's curse: one by one they are going to die. Only Alexander is immune, his O'Neill heritage a secret from all but his closest family • Alexander travels to Ulster, to find himself at the heart of a family divided by secrets and bitter resentments. As he seeks out the author of the curse, he becomes increasingly embroiled in the conflict until - confronted with murder within his own family - his liberty and, finally, his life, are at stake

The story of the Stuart dynasty is a breathless soap opera played out in just a hundred years in an array of buildings that span Europe from Scotland, via Denmark, Holland and Spain to England • Life in the court of the House of Stuart has been shrouded in mystery: the first half of the century overshadowed by the fall and execution of Charles I, the second half in the complete collapse of the House itself. Lost to time is the extraordinary contribution the Stuarts made to the fabric of sovereignty • Every palace they built, painting they commissioned, or artwork they acquired was a direct reflection of the lives that they led and the way that they thought. Palaces of Revolution explores this rich history in graphic detail, giving a unique insight into the lives of this famous dynasty

What if intelligent life on Earth evolved not once, but twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter? • In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells 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 from unruly clumps of seaborne cells to the first evolved nervous systems in ancient relatives of jellyfish, he explores the incredible evolutionary journey of the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous molluscs who would later abandon their shells to rise above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so - a journey completely independent from the route that mammals and birds would later take