Vintage books Himalaya. A Human History Douglas Ed

The story of the city is the story of civilisation. From Uruk and Babylon to Baghdad and Venice, and on to London, New York, Shanghai and Lagos, Ben Wilson takes us through millennia on a thrilling global tour of the key urban centres of history • Rich with individual characters, scenes and snapshots of daily life, Metropolis is at once the story of these extraordinary places and of the vital role they have played in making us who we are

Bright, photographic, evocative new covers for Greene's backlist, to celebrate one of the keystone writers of the Vintage Classics list • ‘Graham Greene's beautiful and disturbing novel is filled with tenderness, humour, excitement and doubt’ The Times • A leak is traced to a small sub-section of the secret service, sparking off the inevitable security checks, tensions and suspicions. The sort of atmosphere, perhaps, where mistakes could be made? For Maurice Castle, it is the end of the line anyway, and time for him to retire to live peacefully with his wife and child. But no-one escapes so easily from the lonely, isolated, neurotic world of the SIS

Read this specially designed new edition of Jared Diamond's Pulitzer-prize winning exploration of what makes us human • Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe? In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Jared Diamond puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians. An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel remains a groundbreaking and humane work of popular science • Patterns of Life: Special Editions of Groundbreaking Science Books

Nothing experienced in human history, before or since, eclipses the terror, tragedy and scale of the Black Death, the disease which killed millions of people in Medieval Europe • The Scourging Angel tells the story of Britain immediately before, during and after this catastrophe. Against a backdrop of empty homes, half-built cathedrals and pestilence-saturated cities, we see communities gripped by unimaginable fear, shock and paranoia. By the time it completed its pestilential journey through the British Isles in 1350, the Black Death had left half the population dead. Despite the startling toll of life, physical devastation and sheer human chaos it inflicted, Britain showed an impressive resilience. Amid disaster many found opportunity, and the story of the Black Death is ultimately one of survival

Jennifer Doudna, the world-famous scientist behind CRISPR, 'one of the most monumental discoveries in biology' (New York Times), describes its power to reshape the future of all life and warns of its use • A handful of discoveries have changed the course of human history. This book is about the most recent and potentially the most powerful and dangerous of them all • It is an invention that allows us to rewrite the genetic code that shapes and controls all living beings with astonishing accuracy and ease. Thanks to it, the dreams of genetic manipulation have become a stark reality: the power to cure disease and alleviate suffering, to create new sources of food and energy, as well as to re-design any species, including humans, for our own ends

For thousands of years the human heart remained the deepest of mysteries; both home to the soul and an organ too complex to touch, let alone operate on. Then, in the late nineteenth century, medics began going where no one had dared go before • In eleven landmark operations, Thomas Morris tells us stories of triumph, reckless bravery, swaggering arrogance, jealousy and rivalry, and incredible ingenuity, from the trail-blazing ‘blue baby’ procedure to the first human heart transplant. The Matter of the Heart gives us a view over the surgeon’s shoulder, showing us the heart’s inner workings and failings. It describes both a human story and a history of risk-taking that has ultimately saved millions of lives

This is the secret history of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland • Wonderland is part of our cultural heritage. But beneath the fairy tale lies the complex history of the author and his subject. Charles Dodgson was a quiet academic but his second self, Lewis Carroll, was a storyteller, innovator and avid collector of "child-friends". Carroll's imagination was to give Alice Liddell, his "dream-child", a fictional alter ego that would never let her grow up • This is a biography that beautifully unravels the magic of Alice. It is a history of love and loss, innocence and ambiguity. It is the story of one man's need to make a Wonderland in a changing world

Discover one of the most admired, best loved and influential novels in the history of English literature. The perfect long read to lose yourself in • ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life…’ • Dorothea is bright, beautiful and rebellious. Lydgate is the ambitious new doctor in town. Both of them long to make a positive difference in the world. But their stories do not proceed as expected and both they, and the other inhabitants of Middlemarch, must struggle to reconcile themselves to their fates and find their places in the world • Middlemarch contains all of life: the rich and the poor, the conventional and the radical, literature and science, politics and romance, but above all it gives us a vision of what lies within the human heart, the roar on the other side of silence

Процессы, происходившие в недрах Земли, стали движущей силой эволюции в Восточной Африке • Древних греков подтолкнул к демократии гористый рельеф • Результаты выборов в США объясняют границы древнего моря • Отправьтесь в удивительное путешествие по прошлому нашей планеты вместе с профессором Льюисом Дартнеллом, чтобы узнать, с чего наша история началась на самом деле. Объединяя естествознание и историю, он рассказывает о феноменальных масштабах влияния Земли на ход развития цивилизации и помогает понять, какие трудности и возможности ждут нас в будущем • Книга на английском языке • Human evolution in East Africa was driven by geological forces • Ancient Greece developed democracy because of its mountainous terrain • Voting behaviour in the United States today follows the bed of an ancient sea

The full inside story of the detection of gravitational waves at LIGO, one of the most ambitious feats in scientific history • 'This is empirical poetry. A fascinating tale of human curiosity beautifully told, and with black holes and lasers too' Robin Ince • In 1916 Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves: miniscule ripples in the very fabric of spacetime generated by unfathomably powerful events. If such vibrations could somehow be recorded, we could observe our universe for the first time through sound: the hissing of the Big Bang, the low tones of merging galaxies, the drumbeat of two black holes collapsing into one… • In 2016 a team of hundreds of scientists at work on a billion-dollar experiment made history when they announced the first ever detection of a gravitational wave, confirming Einstein’s prediction a century ago

Почему мы исключительны? Почему мы смертоносны? Почему мы разумны? • Этот научно-популярный бестселлер предлагает читателям переосмыслить всё, что мы знаем о природе нашего вида • Земле 4,5 миллиарда лет • Всего за малую толику этого времени один вид среди бесчисленного множества других покорил его: мы • В смелой и провокационной книге «Sapiens. Краткая история человечества» Юваль Ной Харари рассказывает, кто мы, какой путь мы прошли и что нас ждёт в будущем • Одна из 100 лучших книг XXI века по версии журнала Guardian • «Краткая история человечества» была адаптирована в формате комикса • Книга на английском языке • The Million Copy Bestseller • What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens? This bestselling history challenges everything we know about being human

A thrillingly original, labyrinthine journey through myth, art, literature, history, archaeology and memoir • The tale of how the hero Theseus killed the Minotaur, finding his way out of the labyrinth using Ariadne's ball of red thread, is one of the most intriguing, suggestive and persistent of all myths, and the labyrinth - the beautiful, confounding and terrifying building created for the half-man, half-bull monster - is one of the foundational symbols of human ingenuity and artistry • Charlotte Higgins, author of the Baillie Gifford-shortlisted Under Another Sky, tracks the origins of the story of the labyrinth in the poems of Homer, Catullus, Virgil and Ovid, and with them builds an ingenious edifice of her own. Along the way, she traces the labyrinthine ideas of writers from Dante and Borges to George Eliot and Conan Doyle, and of artists from Titian and Velazquez to Picasso and Eva Hesse