William Collins Islands of Abandonment. Life in the Post-Human Landscape Flyn Cal

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

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

История династии Стюартов - это захватывающая дух мыльная опера,разыгравшаяся всего за сто лет во множестве зданий, которые охватывают Европу от Шотландии, через Данию, Голландию и Испанию до Англии • Жизнь при дворе дома Стюартов была окутана тайной: первая половина столетия была омрачена падением и казнью Карла I, вторая половина - полным крахом самого дома. Затерянный во времени выдающийся вклад Стюартов в создание системы суверенитета • Каждый дворец, который они строили, картина, которую они заказывали, или приобретенное ими произведение искусства были прямым отражением жизни, которую они вели, и образа их мыслей. "Дворцы революции" исследуют эту богатую историю в графических деталях, давая уникальное представление о жизни этой знаменитой династии

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

An essential read for anyone who has encountered a crisis of confidence • Where does self-confidence come from? How does it work? Why are some people more confident than others? On the surface, these seem like simple questions – but answers can feel hard to come by when we need them most • In this bestselling book, Charles Pepin brings to light the strange alchemy that is self-confidence. Pepin examines the role confidence plays in the lives of our most respected public figures including the likes of Madonna, Mozart, Frieda Kahlo, Martin Luther King and Serena Williams, and argues that above all, to live a life of confidence is to live a life of action • Drawing on the collective wisdom of philosophers, psychologists and the lives of people we encounter on a daily basis, Pepin invites us to probe the mystery and mastery of self-confidence

Henry II conquered the largest empire of any English medieval king. Yet it is the people around him we remember: his wife Eleanor, whom he seduced from the French king; his son Richard the Lionheart; Thomas Becket, murdered in his cathedral. Who was this great, yet tragic king? For fans of Dan Jones, George RR Martin and Bernard Cornwell • The only thing that could have stopped Henry was himself • Henry II had all the gifts of the gods. He was charismatic, clever, learned, empathetic, a brilliant tactician, with great physical strength and an astonishing self-belief. Henry was the creator of the Plantagenet dynasty of kings, who ruled through eight generations in command of vast lands in Britain and Europe. Virtually unbeaten in battle, and engaged in a ceaseless round of conquest and diplomacy, Henry forged an empire that matched Charlemagne's

A fly-on-the-wall account of the greatest drama in modern sporting history by the New York Times cycling correspondent • As Lance Armstrong’s precipitous fall from grace continues, New York Times sports reporter Juliet Macur takes the reader behind the scenes to bring to life the astonishing twists and turns of the scandal that has rocked the world of cycling • With unprecedented access to the key players in the drama – from Armstrong’s fellow cyclists and top cycling officials to doctors, trainers and wives – Cycle of Lies reveals how Armstrong built a fortress of people around him to protect his image and upend the lives of anybody who stood in his way • As America’s fallen idol faces potential perjury charges, Cycle of Lies widens the focus to expose corruption at all levels of the sport in a thrilling, page-turning work of contemporary narrative history

This book celebrates the Arctic, exploring the natural history that has so inspired generations • Early travellers to the Arctic brought back tales of amazing creatures and of the endurance required of visitors, the Arctic becoming a land of inspiration and imagination. Adventurers test themselves against it. Its wildlife still amazes – when film and television show Earth’s natural wonders it is always the polar regions that draw the biggest audiences. But today the Arctic is in retreat. Humanity’s relentless exploitation of the Earth’s resources in the pursuit of progress has, it seems, altered the climate and threatens the ice and ice-living organisms. It is a cliche that the loss of a species diminishes us, but it is true nonetheless. Even to people who have never seen a Polar Bear its loss will be immeasurable as the bear is iconic, both defining and reflecting the Arctic

Humans are the only mammals to walk on two, rather than four, legs. From an evolutionary perspective, this is an illogical development, as it slows us down. But here we are, suggesting there must have been something tremendous to gain from bipedalism • First Steps takes our ordinary, everyday walking experience and reveals how unusual and extraordinary it truly is. The seven-million-year-long journey through the origins of upright walking shows how it was in fact a gateway to many of the other attributes that make us human-from our technological skills and sociality to our thirst for exploration • DeSilva uses early human evolution to explain the instinct that propels a crawling infant to toddle onto two feet, differences between how men and women tend to walk, physical costs of upright walking, including hernias, varicose veins and backache, and the challenges of childbirth imposed by a bipedal pelvis

Born into nobility and married into the royal family, Catherine Howard was attended every waking hour – secrets were impossible to keep. In this thrilling reappraisal of Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Gareth Russell’s history unfurls as if in real time to explain how the queen’s career ended with one of the great scandals of Henry’s reign. This is a grand tale of the Henrician court in its twilight, a glittering but pernicious sunset during which the king’s unstable behaviour and his courtiers’ labyrinthine deceptions proved fatal to many, not just to Catherine Howard

From award-winning historian Saul David, an action-packed and powerful new narrative of the Battle of Okinawa - the last great clash of the Second World War, and one that had profound consequences for the modern world • For eighty-three blood-soaked days, the fighting on the island of Okinawa plumbed depths of savagery as bad as anything seen on the Eastern Front. When it was over, almost a quarter of a million people had lost their lives, making it by far the bloodiest US battle of the Pacific. In Okinawa, the death toll included thousands of civilians lost to mass suicide, convinced by Japanese propaganda that they would otherwise be raped and murdered by the enemy. On the US side, David argues that the horror of the battle ultimately determined President Truman's choice to use atomic bombs in August 1945

Bestselling author Katrine Marcal reveals the shocking ways our deeply ingrained ideas about gender continue to hold us back. Every day, extraordinary inventions and innovative ideas are side-lined in a world that remains subservient to men • But it doesn’t have to be this way. From the beginning of time, women have been pivotal to our society, offering ingenious solutions to some of our most vexing problems. More recently, it is women who have transformed the way we shop online, revolutionised the lives of disabled people and put the climate crisis at the top of the agenda • Despite these successes, we still fail to find and fund the game-changing ideas that could alter the future of our planet, giving just 3% of venture capital to female founders