Vintage books The Almost Nearly Perfect People. Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia Booth Michael

In 2010, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, set himself an almost impossible task: to learn, in the space of a year, Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 – a piece that inspires dread in many professional pianists • His timing could have been better • The next twelve months were to witness the Arab Spring, the Japanese tsunami, the English riots, and the Guardian’s breaking of both WikiLeaks and the News of the World hacking scandal • In the midst of this he carved out twenty minutes’ practice a day – even if that meant practising in a Libyan hotel in the middle of a revolution as well as gaining insights and advice from an array of legendary pianists, theorists, historians and neuroscientists, and even occasionally from secretaries of state • But was he able to play the piece in time?

A lieutenant writes of digging through bodies that have the consistency of Camembert cheese; a mother sends flower seeds to her son at the Front, hoping that one day someone may see them grow; a nurse tends a man back to health knowing he will be court-martialled and shot as soon as he is fit. Edited by the bestselling author of Birdsong and Dr Hope Wolf, this is an original and illuminating non-fiction anthology of writing on the First World War • Diaries, letters and memories, testaments from ordinary people whose lives were transformed, are set alongside extracts from names that have become synonymous with the war, such as Siegfried Sassoon and T.E. Lawrence. A Broken World is an original collection of personal and defining moments that offer an unprecedented insight into the Great War as it was experienced and as it was remembered

We are living in the anthropocene – an epoch where everything is being determined by the activities of just one soft-skinned, warm-blooded, short-lived, pedestrian species • How do we make our way through the ruins that we have made? • This anthology tries to answer this as it explores new and enduring cultural landscapes, in a celebration of local distinctiveness that includes new work from some of our finest writers. We have memories of childhood homes from Adam Thorpe, Marina Warner and Sean O’Brien; we journey with John Burnside to the Arizona desert, with Hugh Brody to the Canadian Arctic; going from Tessa Hadley’s hymn to her London garden to caving in the Mendips with Sean Borodale to shell-collecting on a Suffolk beach with Julia Blackburn

Begin the new year with a fresh perspective on economics, capitalism, and the society we live in • Yanis Varoufakis, world renowned economist, writes to his daughter to teach her the hazards of capitalism • 'Why is there so much inequality?' asked Xenia to her father. Answering her questions in a series of accessible and tender letters, Varoufakis educates her to what economics and capitalism is and why it is so dangerous • Taking from memories of her childhood and a variety of well-known tales - from Oedipus and Faust to Frankenstein and The Matrix - Varoufakis turns Talking To My Daughter into an enjoyable and engaging read, without ever shying from the harder truths. Greece's former finance minister explains everything you need to know to understand why economics is the most important drama of our times

От автора книги «В тишине», лауреата премии Сэмюэля Джонсона в области научной литературы • В 1941 году Ричард Эванс Шультес взял отпуск в Гарвардском университете и исчез в Северной Амазонии Колумбии • Ведущий мировой специалист по галлюциногенам и лекарственным растениям этого региона, он вернулся после двенадцати лет путешествия по Южной Америке на каноэ, картографируя неизведанные реки, живя среди местных племен и документируя знания шаманов • Тридцать лет спустя его ученик Уэйд Дэвис приземлился в Боготе, чтобы пойти по стопам своего наставника, создав таким образом эпический рассказ о бесстрашных приключениях, захватывающий труд по естествознанию и свидетельство духа научных исследований • язык издания: Английский • From the author of Into The Silence, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction • In 1941, Richard Evans Schultes took a leave of absence from Harvard University and disappeared into the Northern Amazon of Colombia

How have feelings come to shape the world around us? Why has politics become so fractious and warlike? What might the future hold? • In this bold and compelling exploration of our new political reality, William Davies reveals how feelings have come to reshape our world. Drawing on history, philosophy, psychology and economics, Nervous States is an essential guide to the turbulent times we are living through

Mystery Files examines the science and technology behind the most fascinating unsolved mysteries-from Bigfoot to lost civilizations to UFOs-and more!

The Bass Rock has for centuries watched over the lives that pass under its shadow on the Scottish mainland. And across the centuries the fates of three women are linked: to this place, to each other • In the early 1700s, Sarah, accused of being a witch, flees for her life • In the aftermath of the Second World War, Ruth navigates a new house, a new husband and the strange waters of the local community • Six decades later, the house stands empty. Viv, mourning the death of her father, catalogues Ruth's belongings and discovers her place in the past - and perhaps a way forward • Each woman's choices are circumscribed by the men in their lives. But in sisterhood there is the hope of survival and new life

The Kibbutz of Metsudat Ram lies in the valley of Jordan, close to the border. Old and young, happy and discontented, the settlers go about their lives as the artillery rumbles in the distance and the war planes shriek overhead • Among them are Reuven, the school teacher whose true calling is poetry, his teenaged daughter, the capricious Noga, and Ezra, the Kibbutz’s truck-driver • As the seasons pass, so too do storms of love and passion, conflict and misunderstanding, gossip and scandal – all threatening to tear apart a community held together by necessity and idealism

Australia celebrated one hundred years as a nation in 2001. This book - part history, part travelogue, part memoir - tells the inspiring story of how a one-time British colony of convicts turned itself into a prosperous and confident country. Through the eyes of ordinary people, Phillip Knightley describes Australia's journey, from federation and the trauma of the First World War, the desperate poverty of the Depression, with its attendant spectres of secret armies and near-civil war, the threat of invasion in the Second World War and the immigration that followed it, and the slow but steady decline in the relationship with Britain, the 'Mother Country', as Australia forged its own unique identity

Reissued in electric new backlist style for October 2016, The Counterlife was lauded by the likes of John Updike, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, John Banville and James Wood, as well as winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction • Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction • The Counterlife is about people living their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter their destinies. Wherever they find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted by the prospect of an alternative existence • Illuminating these lives in free-fall and transformation is the acrobat mind of novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the sceptical, enveloping intelligence that calculates the price that's paid in the struggle to change personal fortune and reshape history, whether in a dentist's office in suburban New Jersey; a tradition-bound English Village in Gloucestershire; a church in London's West End; or in a tiny desert settlement in Israel's occupied West Bank

London, 1985. Joe, father to eleven-year-old Matty, has disappeared, and nobody will explain where he's gone, or why • In the long, hot summer that follows, Matty's hunt for Joe leads to the ponds at Hampstead Heath. Beneath the water, there is a new kind of freedom. Above the water, a welcoming community of men offer refuge from an increasingly rocky home life • Fourteen years later, a new revelation sees Matty set off alone in a campervan, driving westwards through Ireland, swimming its wild loughs and following the scant clues left behind about Joe. The trip takes a dangerous turn, and Matty is forced to rely on the kindness of strangers. But safety comes at a price, and with desire and fear running high, the journey turns into an explosive, heart-rending reckoning with the past