Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

'Psychologically, the latter part of Great Expectations is about the best thing Dickens ever did.'

George Orwell

A terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes.

A summons to meet the bitter, decaying Miss Havisham and her beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella.

The sudden generosity of a mysterious benefactor.

These form a series of events that change the orphaned Pip's life forever, and he eagerly abandons his humble origins to begin a new life as a gentleman.

Dickens's haunting late novel depicts Pip's education and development through adversity as he discovers thetrue nature of his 'great expectations'!

About the Author

Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812. He enjoyed his first commercial success with The Pickwick Papers in 1836, swiftly followed by the serialization of Oliver Twist a year later. By the publication of The Old Curiosity Shop in 1841, Dickens was internationally famous. Great Expectations was first published in serial form in All the Year Round magazine between 1860 and 1861. His novels, many now adapted for TV and film, continue to entertain readers all over the world.

In December the BBC will show a major new adaptation, forming part of their celebration of Dickens and the bicentenary of his birth in 2012.

Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth

A fascinating slice of social history - Jennifer Worth's tales of being a midwife in 1950s London has been commissioned as a major BBC TV series.

Jennifer Worth came from a sheltered background when she became a midwife in the Docklands in the 1950s.

The conditions in which many women gave birth just half a century ago were horrifying, not only because of their grimly impoverished surroundings, but also because of what they were expected to endure. But while Jennifer witnessed brutality and tragedy, she also met with amazing kindness and understanding, tempered by a great deal of Cockney humour. She also earned the confidences of some whose lives were truly stranger, more poignant and more terrifying than could ever be recounted in fiction.

Attached to an order of nuns who had been working in the slums since the 1870s, Jennifer tells the story not only of the women she treated, but also of the community of nuns (including one who was accused of stealing jewels from Hatton Garden) and the camaraderie of the midwives with whom she trained. Funny, disturbing and incredibly moving, Jennifer's stories bring to life the colourful world of the East End in the 1950s.

About the Author

Jennifer Worth trained as a nurse at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, Reading, and was later ward sister at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in London, then the Marie Curie Hospital, also in London. Music had always been her passion, and in 1973 she left nursing in order to study music intensively, teaching piano and singing for about twenty-five years. Jennifer died in May 2011 leaving her husband Philip, two daughters and three grandchildren. Her books have all been bestsellers.

Here's an introduction written by the author

Comedy and tragedy are the faces of the double mask of the ‘Commedia dell’Arte’. This is the Theatre of Life where the writer must start. Writers with no experience of life have nothing to say. The writer must dwell in the thick of human life and get the hands dirty. Truth is always richer and stranger than fiction.

What is more central to life than birth? A midwife is always present, yet a midwife’s role has never before been documented. I was a district midwife fifty years ago, going around the slums of the London Docklands on a bicycle.

The docks were fully operational and employed most of the men. The bug- infested tenements (those that were still standing after the Blitz) housed tens of thousands of people, and overcrowding was chronic. There was no Pill, and families were large, sometimes huge. None of the flats or houses had a telephone. Few of them had running water or even a lavatory. Babies were born by gaslight, lamplight, or the meter ran out in the middle of labour.

The setting is rich material for the Commedia dell’Arte tradition. The fever-ridden slums of Naples or the dark, sinister canals of mediaeval Venice could not be more redolent of atmosphere for drama and melodrama. Yet time and place alone are of limited interest. There can be no comedy or tragedy without people.

The Cockneys are the people I write about. I knew and loved them. I entered their crowded homes at the most intimate times of life – the birth of new babies. I saw their strengths and weaknesses, their open-heartedness and narrow prejudices, their humour and courage, their irresistible passion for enjoyment.

The book is teeming with unforgettable characters: Conchita and Len who produced twenty-five babies between them, the last one born prematurely in a London smog; Brenda who had rickets; Lilly who had syphilis; Molly, beaten up and on the game a fortnight after delivery; a breach delivery on Christmas day; Margaret, who died of eclampsia; Mary, a fourteen year-old Irish girl dragged into the seamy brothels of Cable Street (I am told that the strip show in a brothel is amongst my most powerful writing!); Fred, the boiler man at the Convent; and Mrs. Jenkins, who had spent eighteen years in the workhouse. And how does a white man deal with his wife (also white) after the birth of a half-black baby? How would any man react today? There are three such stories in Call the Midwife. We are not talking about an IVF error. This is not racism. This is adultery. This is the Commedia dell’Arte.

I have mentioned a convent. I worked with an order of nuns, heroic nuns who had been nursing in the slums of London since the 1870s, when no-one would go into those areas, except the police. The nuns are central to the book. They are saintly and wise, worldly and witty, sometimes infuriating, often eccentric. Sister Monica Joan’s verbal battles with Sister Evangelina are among the funniest things in the book, I am told.
The book is social history in story form. It is not a dull chronicle of events. It is about the living, breathing, suffering, laughing people whose lives were shaped by the docklands in which they lived fifty years ago.

As we grow older the days of our youth are illuminated by a golden glow that seems to grow ever brighter as the years pass. My memories of midwifery in Poplar approach high romance: the great cargo boats coming and going ceaselessly, with thousands of men entering the dock gates, loading and unloading; the pilots guiding a great white vessel as big as an iceberg through a narrow canal to her resting wharf; the constant deep-throated growls of the ships’ funnels and the shrill of the sirens. I recall the open-hearted friendliness of the people who lived cheerfully in grim conditions, who never locked their doors and who kept open house to just about everyone. I remember cycling home in the grey light of dawn when the docks were beginning to stir, my body tired after eighteen hours work, but my mind alight with the thrill of having achieved the safe delivery of a beautiful baby to a joyous mother.

And here's the trailer for the BBC series due in the New Year...

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

'So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible'

In preparation for the school play at the end of term this week's book is a Drama and English Department tie-in...

'I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole without the least idea what was to happen afterwards,' wrote Dodgson, describing how Alice was conjured up one 'golden afternoon' in 1862 to entertain his child-friend Alice Liddell.

In the magical world of Wonderland and the back-to-front Looking-Glass kingdom, order is turned upside-down: a baby turns into a pig; time is abandoned at a tea-party; and a chaotic game of chess makes a 7- year-old a Queen.

Bored on a hot afternoon, Alice follows a White Rabbit down a rabbit-hole - without giving a thought about how she might get out. And so she tumbles into Wonderland: where animals answer back, a baby turns into a pig, time stands still at a disorderly tea party, croquet is played with hedgehogs and flamingos, and the Mock Turtle and Gryphon dance the Lobster Quadrille.

In a land in which nothing is as it seems and cakes, potions and mushrooms can make her shrink to ten inches or grow to the size of a house, will Alice be able to find her way home again?

Here's an excerpt to tingle your tastebuds...

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do; once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures of conversation?’

So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
 
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!’ (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.
 
In another moment Alice went down after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.
 
The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
 
Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupbards and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labelled ‘orange marmalade’, but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.
 
‘Well!’ thought Alice to herself, ‘after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling downstairs! How brave they’ll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!’ (Which was very likely true.)
 
Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end! ‘I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?’ she said aloud. ‘I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think -’ (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the school-room, and though this was not a very good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to it, still it was good practice to say it over) ‘ – yes, that’s about the right distance – but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I’ve got to?’ (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.)
 
Presently she began again. ‘I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards! The Antipathies, I think – (she was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn’t sound at all the right word) ‘– but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma’am, is this New Zealand or Australia? (and she tried to curtsey as she spoke – fancy curtseying as you’re falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it!) And what an ignorant little girl she’ll think me for asking! No, it’ll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.’
 
Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again. ‘Dinah’ll miss me very much to-night, I should think!’ (Dinah was the cat.) ‘I hope they’ll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah, my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I’m afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that’s very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?’ And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, ‘Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?’ and sometimes, ‘Do bats eat cats?’ for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, ‘Now Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?’ when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.

About the Author

Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Born in 1832, he was educated at Rugby School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was appointed lecturer in mathematics in 1855, and where he spent the rest of his life. In 1861 he took deacon's orders, but shyness and a constitutional stammer prevented him from seeking the priesthood. He never married, but was very fond of children and spent much time with them. His most famous works, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872), were originally written for Alice Liddell, the daughter of the dean of his college. Charles Dodgson died in 1898.

Here's the trailer to Tim Burton's recent film version...

A Swift Pure Cry by Siobhan O'Dowd

An extraordinary story of one girl's courage in the face of prejudice and hardship within a small community in Ireland.

'Beautifully written and deeply moving.'

The Guardian

Jimmy and Trix were sleeping. Softly she drew the bottom bolt across the door, changed into her nightdress and got under the covers. She cuddled up to herself, listening to the sing-song breathing in the dark. Soon her mind was full of rainbows and lightning strikes... Father Rose was driving Jezabel over the cliff roads into the sky. Declan was tugging her by the arm to the top of Duggans' field. 'Would you, Shell, or wouldn't you?' She slept.

After Shell's mother dies, her obsessively religious father descends into alcoholic mourning and Shell is left to care for her younger brother and sister.

Her only release from the harshness of everyday life comes from her budding spiritual friendship with a naive young priest, and most importantly, her developing relationship with childhood friend, Declan, charming, eloquent and persuasive.

But when Declan suddenly leaves Ireland to seek his fortune in America, Shell finds herself pregnant and the centre of a scandal that rocks the small community in which she lives, with repercussions across the whole country.

The lives of those immediately around her will never be the same again.



About the Author

Human suffering frightens many people. Others, it ennobles and drives to action. The writer and human rights campaigner, Siobhan Dowd, who has died of cancer aged 47, was firmly in the latter category. A free spirit, with a zest for life, she was passionately committed to countering oppression and discrimination. She confronted the brutalities of the human condition head-on, with a rare blend of practical engagement and literary flair.

Click here to read The Guardian Obituary about this Carnegie prize winning author...

Click below to read The Guardian review

God and the Bottle - Jamila Gavin finds much to admire in Siobhan Dowd's story of sexual awakening, redemption and hope in 1980s Ireland...

Danny the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl

"My father, without the slightest doubt, was the most marvellous and exciting father any boy ever had."

Danny feels very lucky.

He adores his life with his father, living in a gypsy caravan, listening to his stories, tending their gas station, puttering around the workshop, and occasionally taking off to fly home-built gas balloons and kites.

His father has raised him on his own, ever since Danny's mother died when he was four months old. Life is peaceful and wonderful ... until he turns 9 and discovers his father's one vice.

Soon Danny finds himself the mastermind behind the most incredible plot ever attempted against nasty Victor Hazell, a wealthy landowner with a bad attitude.

Can they pull it off? If so, Danny will truly be the champion of the world. Danny is right up to Roald Dahl's impishly brilliant standards. An intense and beautiful father-son relationship is balanced with subtle escapades that will have even the most rigid law-abider rooting them on. Dahl's inimitable way with words leaves the reader simultaneously satisfied and itching for more.

Don't know much about the author? Where have you been for most of your childhood? Click the link to find out more...

Computing without Computers by Dr Paul Curzon

'It is a good idea to read as much as possible before starting any course. However text books can be daunting (and a bit boring). The booklets and articles contained in this book have been written to be suitable for complete newcomers. I wrote most of them partly for my own amusement - I hope you will find them fun too. You will definitely learn a lot of computer science.' Dr Paul Curzon

This book aims to be a gentle introduction to the main concepts of computer programming and the related subject of data structures and algorithms.

Rather than focussing on particular programming languages that can appear alien and incomprehensible to beginners, it concentrates on the underlying concepts common to a whole range of programming languages. Whatever language you might be learning it should be of use if you are struggling to understand. It is intended primarily for people with little background in the subject and for those for whom programming appears a little scary.

The approach taken is that of understanding by analogy. The idea behind this approach was very clearly captured by Hideki Yukawa: the first Japanese winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, here quoted from (Wilson 1999). “Suppose there is something which a person cannot understand. He happens to notice the similarity of this something to some other thing which he understands quite well. By comparing them he may come to understand the thing which he could not understand up to that moment.” He is discussing how scientists come to understand new areas at the frontiers of science. However, the words are just as applicable to those of us following behind and trying to understand things previously discovered by others. Computer Science text books full of programming fragments can be hard to read. The details of particular languages can obscure the things that are common.

It is the general concepts that matter most if a deep understanding of programming is to be obtained. Here I avoid discussing computer examples directly and instead explain the terminology and concepts using a variety of non-computing examples that should be familiar and understandable to all. By understanding how the concepts apply to everyday examples, I hope it will then be easier to follow the more technical details of a formal text book. Of course analogy has to be treated with care. If pushed too far, the analogy breaks down and we can be left drawing wrong conclusions. By looking at each topic from a variety of different examples and looking at their commonality, I hope that this problem can be at least reduced.

People do not learn just by being told things or reading about them. The fact that I have read a booklet telling me how to juggle does not mean I can then pick up juggling balls and immediately juggle them without dropping them. I can only learn properly by lots of practice. We learn best by actually doing. This book also therefore contains lots of puzzles.

If your aim in reading this book is to learn about programming you will help yourself achieve this if you actually try the puzzles rather than just reading them. If your aim is to learn how to program you will then need to actually go away and write programs. It is my hope that in reading this book before (or at the same time as) learning about programming more conventionally you will understand more deeply than otherwise.

Download the book for free here...

Find out more about Dr Curzon here...

The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

'Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence. His intriguing new book envisions a future in which information technologies have advanced so far and fast that they enable humanity to transcend its biological limitations - transforming our lives in ways we can't yet imagine.' Bill Gates

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil examines the next step in the evolutionary process of the union of human and machine.

Kurzweil foresees the dawning of a new civilization where we will be able to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity, combining our biological skills with the vastly greater capacity, speed and knowledge-sharing abilities of our creations.

In practical terms, human ageing and illness will be reversed; pollution will be stopped and world hunger and poverty will be solved. There will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality.

'The Singularity is Near' offers a view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.

Ray Kurzweil proposes a coming technological singularity, and how we would thus be able to augment our bodies and minds with technology. He describes the singularity as resulting from a combination of three important technologies of the 21st century: genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (including artificial intelligence).

Four central postulates of the book are as follows:

1. A technological-evolutionary point known as "the singularity" exists as an achievable goal for humanity.

2. Through a law of accelerating returns, technology is progressing toward the singularity at an exponential rate.

3. The functionality of the human brain is quantifiable in terms of technology that we can build in the near future.

4. Medical advancements make it possible for a significant number of his generation (Baby Boomers) to live long enough for the exponential growth of technology to intersect and surpass the processing of the human brain.

Want to find out more about the book? Click here...

Watch the video to find out how we're likely to develop in the future...

The Annals of Imperial Rome, Tacitus (Penguin Classics) translated by Michael Grant

'Nero was already corrupted by every lust, natural and unnatural.’

The Annals of Imperial Rome recount the major historical events from the years shortly before the death of Augustus to the death of Nero in AD 68.

With clarity and vivid intensity Tacitus describes the reign of terror under the corrupt Tiberius, the great fire of Rome during the time of Nero and the wars, poisonings, scandals, conspiracies and murders that were part of imperial life.

Despite his claim that the Annals were written objectively, Tacitus’ account is sharply critical of the emperors’ excesses and fearful for the future of imperial Rome, while also filled with a longing for its past glories.

About the Authors

Tacitus studied rhetoric in Rome and rose to eminence as a pleader at the Roman Bar. In 77 he married the daughter of Agricola, conqueror of Britain, of whom he later wrote a biography. His other works includethe Germania and the Historiae.

Michael Grant’s fine translation captures the moral tone, astringent wit and stylish vigour of the original. His introduction discusses the life and works of Tacitus and the historical context of the Annals. This edition also contains a key to place names and technical terms, maps, tables and suggestions for further reading.

The Iliad by Homer (Penguin Classics) translated by E V Rieu.

‘Look at me. I am the son of a great man. A goddess was my mother. Yet death and inexorable destiny are waiting for me.’

One of the foremost achievements in Western literature, Homer's Iliad tells the story of the darkest episode in the Trojan War.

At its centre is Achilles, the greatest warrior-champion of the Greeks, and his refusal to fight after being humiliated by his leader Agamemnon.

But when the Trojan Hector kills Achilles' close friend Patroclus, he storms back into battle to take revenge - although knowing this will ensure his own early death.

Interwoven with this tragic sequence of events are powerfully moving descriptions of the ebb and flow of battle, of the domestic world inside Troy's besieged city of Ilium, and of the conflicts between the Gods on Olympus as they argue over the fate of mortals.

About the Authors

Homer is thought to have lived c.750-700 BC in Ionia and is believed to be the author of the earliest works of Western Literature: The Odyssey and The Iliad.
E V Rieu was a celebrated translator from Latin and Greek, and editor of Penguin Classics from 1944-64. His son, D C H Rieu, has revised his work.
Peter Jones is former lecturer in Classics at Newcastle. He co-founded the 'Friends of Classics' society and is the editor of their journal and a columnist for The Spectator.

Greek Tragedy: Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Euripides' Medea

‘Man must suffer to be wise.’

The fifth century BC saw the fullest flowering of art, literature and philosophy in ancient Athens, and this major new selection brings the masterpieces of the great tragedians of that era – Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides – together in one volume.

Powerful and devastating, they depict complex characters locked in brutal conflict both with others and themselves in situations that offer no simple solutions.

Through the revenge-murder in Agamemnon, the hideous family secret revealed in Oedipus Rex, and a mother’s slaughter of her children in Medea, we see the wrenching dilemmas of humans living in a morally uncertain world.

This volume also includes extracts from Aristophanes’ comedy The Frogs – a comic satire on tragic playwrights – and a selection from Aristotle’s masterful Poetics, which presents a philosophical discussion of Greek tragedy.

Simon Goldhill’s introduction illuminates the plays’ cultural background and place in ritual ceremony, and illustrates their lasting effect on the Western imagination. This edition includes a preface, chronology, further reading and detailed notes on each work, while genealogical tables clarify the complex legends behind each tragedy.

About the Authors

Aeschylus (525-456 bc) wrote more than seventy plays, of which seven have survived.
Euripides (c. 484-406 bc) is believed to have written ninety-two dramas, fewer than twenty of which have survived.
Sophocles (496-406 bc) wrote more than one hundred plays for the Athenian theater.

Shomit Dutta (Editor) was educated at University College Oxford, and King's College London and teaches at Alleyn's School.
Simon Goodhill (Foreward) is a professor of Greek at Cambridge University and a fellow of King's College where he is director of studies in Classics.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

'Compared with almost everything being written now, it is vertiginously ambitious and brilliant...He can write as thrillingly about large-scale events as he can about the tiny details of the private world.' The Times

'Unquestionably a marvel - entirely original among contemporary British novels, revealing its author as, surely, the most impressive fictional mind of his generation.' Observer

David Mitchell's novels have captivated critics and readers alike, as his Man Booker shortlistings and Richard & Judy Book of the Year award attest. Now he has written a masterpiece.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the kind of book that comes along once in a decade - enthralling in its storytelling, imagination and scope.

Set at a turning point in history on a tiny island attached to mainland Japan, David Mitchell's tale of power, passion and integrity transports us to a world that is at once exotic and familiar: an extraordinary place and an era when news from abroad took months to arrive, yet when people behaved as they always do - loving, lusting and yearning, cheating, fighting and killing.

Bringing to vivid life a tectonic shift between East and West, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is dramatic, funny, heartbreaking, enlightening and thought-provoking. Reading it is an unforgettable experience.

The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there.

To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland.

But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings. As one cynical colleague asks, “Who ain’t a gambler in the glorious Orient, with his very life?”

A magnificent mix of luminous writing, prodigious research, and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the most impressive achievement of its eminent author.

Read The Guardian review here...

Find out more about the book and the author at his website here...

Here the author is interviewed about the novel on American radio:

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

'Wondrous. Brilliantly inventive, full of dazzling set pieces.

Not simply the most original novel I've read in years - it's one of the best'

The Times

'Original, moving and entertaining for adults

as well as for older children.'

Daily Express

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other.

The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone.

Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's, a form of autism.

He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched.

He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down.

Here's an extract from the opening of the novel to whet your dog-whistle...

It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs Shears’ house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer for example, or a road accident.

But I could not be certain about this.

I went through Mrs Shears’ gate, closing it behind me. I walked onto her lawn and knelt beside the dog. I put my hand on the muzzle of the dog. It was still warm.

The dog was called Wellington. It belonged to Mrs Shears who was our friend. She lived on the opposite side of the road, two houses to the left.

Wellington was a poodle. Not one of the small poodles that have hairstyles, but a big poodle. It had curly black fur, but when you got close you could see that the skin underneath the fur was a very pale yellow, like chicken.

I stroked Wellington and wondered who had killed him, and why.

Find out more...

Click here to go to the website dedicated to the book...

Click here to read The Guardian review...

To find out more about the author, click here...

Small is Beautiful by EF Schumacher

'A book of heart and hope and downright common sense about the future.' Daily Mail

A remarkable classic study of world economies, reissued to celebrate the centenary of E F Schumachers birth.

Small is Beautiful is E. F. Schumacher’s stimulating and controversial study of economics and its purpose.

This remarkable book examines our modern economic system - its use of resources and impact on how we live - questioning whether they reflect what we truly care about.

The revolutionary ideas are as pertinent, inspirational and thought-provoking today as when they were first published in 1973.

For those to whom economics means a book filled with numbers, charts, graphs, and formulae, together with much heady discussion of abstract technicalities like the balance of payments and gross national product, this remarkable collection of essays is certain to come either as a shock or a relief. E. F. Schumacher's economics is not part of the dominant style.

On the contrary, his deliberate intention is to subvert 'economic science' by calling its every assumption into question, right down to its psychological and metaphysical foundations. Theodore Roszak

About the Author

Before the publication of Small is Beautiful, his bestselling reappraisal of Western economic attitudes, Dr E. F. Schumacher was already well known as an economist, journalist and progressive entrepreneur.

 He was Economic Adviser to the National Coal Board from 1950 to 1970, and was also the originator of the concept of Intermediate Technology for developing countries and Founder and Chairman of the Intermediate Technology Development Group Ltd. He also served as President of the Soil Association (Britains largest organic farming organisation, founded thirty years ago) and as Director of the Scott-Bader Company (pathfinders in polymer chemistry and common ownership).

Born in Germany, he first came to England in 1930 as a Rhodes Scholar to study economics at New College, Oxford. Later, at the age of twenty-two, he taught economics at New College, Oxford.

Later, at the age of twenty-two, he taught economics at Columbia University, New York. As he found theorising without practical experience unsatisfying, he then went into business, farming and journalism. He resumed the academic life for a period at Oxford during the war, afterwards serving as Economic Adviser to the British Control Commission in Germany from 1946 to 1950. In later years, his advice on problems of rural development was sought by many overseas governments.

Dr Schumacher was awarded the CBE in 1974. He died in 1977.

To find out more about his legacy click on the E.F. Schumacher Society Website here...

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

'The shattering first novel by Khaled Hosseini a rich and soul-searching narrative a sharp, unforgettable taste of the trauma and tumult experienced by Afghanis as their country buckled' Observer

'A devastating, masterful and painfully honest story it is a novel of great hidden intricacy and wisdom, like a timeless Eastern tale. It speaks the most harrowing truth about the power of evil'

Daily Telegraph

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years...

The Kite Runner of Khaled Hosseini's deeply moving fiction debut is an illiterate Afghan boy with an uncanny instinct for predicting exactly where a downed kite will land. Growing up in the city of Kabul in the early 1970s, Hassan was narrator Amir's closest friend even though the loyal 11-year-old with "a face like a Chinese doll" was the son of Amir's father's servant and a member of Afghanistan's despised Hazara minority. But in 1975, on the day of Kabul's annual kite-fighting tournament, something unspeakable happened between the two boys.

Narrated by Amir, a 40-year-old novelist living in California, The Kite Runner tells the gripping story of a boyhood friendship destroyed by jealousy, fear, and the kind of ruthless evil that transcends mere politics.
 
Running parallel to this personal narrative of loss and redemption is the story of modern Afghanistan and of Amir's equally guilt-ridden relationship with the war-torn city of his birth. The first Afghan novel to be written in English, The Kite Runner begins in the final days of King Zahir Shah's 40-year reign and traces the country's fall from a secluded oasis to a tank-strewn battlefield controlled by the Russians and then the trigger-happy Taliban. When Amir returns to Kabul to rescue Hassan's orphaned child, the personal and the political get tangled together in a plot that is as suspenseful as it is taut with feeling.
 
The son of an Afghan diplomat whose family received political asylum in the United States in 1980, Hosseini combines the unflinching realism of a war correspondent with the satisfying emotional pull of master storytellers such as Rohinton Mistry. Like the kite that is its central image, the story line of this mesmerizing first novel occasionally dips and seems almost to dive to the ground. But Hosseini ultimately keeps everything airborne until his heartrending conclusion in an American picnic park.

About the Author

Khaled Hosseini was born in Afghanistan and his family received political asylum in the USA in 1980. He is a doctor and lives in California. The Kite Runner was his first novel.

To find out more about the author go to his website here...

The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a nonprofit, provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan. The Foundation supports projects which provide shelter to refugee families and economic and education opportunities and healthcare for women and children. In addition, the Foundation awards scholarships to students who have migrated to the United States under refugee status and to women pursuing higher education in Afghanistan. To find out more about the foundation click here...

Extracts from a Conversation with Khaled Hosseini

Where did the idea for this story come from?

That’s not an easy question to answer because it developed over time. During the past couple of years I had been mulling over the notion of writing a story set in Afghanistan but I couldn’t decide on the right story or the right time period. At first I considered writing about the Taliban but I felt that particular story had already been told—it’s an issue that has been well covered and by people far more qualified than myself. I knew if I was going to tell an Afghan story I’d have to tell one that had something new to offer. So I decided the story would have to take place, at least partially, in an Afghanistan that seemingly no one remembered anymore: the pre-Soviet War Afghanistan.

Why do you say it’s a time no one seems to remember anymore?

For most people in west Afghanistan had become synonymous with the war against the Soviets, the Taliban and repression. I wanted to remind people that it wasn’t always like that. I wanted to remind them that there was an Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion of 1979, and that Afghanistan had enjoyed decades of peace without anyone firing so much as a rocket. The old adage in writing is to write what you know. Having lived through that time period in Kabul—the final years of the monarchy, the birth of the Republic, and the first years of Daoud Khan’s leadership—I felt comfortable writing about it.

How much of THE KITE RUNNER is autobiographical?

Inevitably there will be bits and pieces of yourself, either consciously or subconsciously, that end up in your protagonist. Fortunately there aren’t that many autobiographical things in the book. I don’t have that much in common with Amir. I say "fortunately" because for a good portion of the story he’s not exactly the most savory of characters. But there certainly are things about him that come from my own life. Perhaps the most prominent is that, like Amir, I grew up admiring my father greatly and had a very intense desire to please him. Thankfully it was not with quite the same fervor that Amir had. I think his brand of admiration borders on the pathological. Fatherhood in Afghanistan is a greatly revered institution. When people identify someone they say, "He's the son of so-and-so..." and they always mention the father. Tribal identity also comes from the father. Even if your mother is a Pashtun you can’t inherit Pashtun status unless your father is one as well. So like a lot of Afghan kids I grew up revering my dad [to a certain extent]. Fortunately for me he reciprocated the affection and to this day we maintain a warm and wonderful relationship. And there are a couple of other things that might be worth mentioning. Amir and I also developed a love for reading and writing at an early age. And just like Amir, when I was a kid I used to love going to the theater to see Hindi and American films.

You’re planning a return trip to Afghanistan with your brother-in-law in March or April of this year. Where do you plan to go?

The places I really want to go back and see are the places where I have personal memories. I’m dying to see my father’s old house in Wazir Akbar Khan where I grew up and the hill north of the house with its abandoned graveyard where my brother and I used to play. I want to see the various bazaars in Kabul where we used to hang out and my old school. I’d also like to see the foreign ministry where my father used to work. I remember him taking us there when we were kids and how incredibly huge it looked to me then. I’d love to revisit the mosques my dad would sometimes take us to on Fridays and the kababi house in Shar-e-nau (the New City), which I recently learned is still standing and which is still owned and operated by the same guy who owned it when I was a kid. Then there are some places of general interest I’d like to visit: Bala Hissar in Southeast Kabul, the old city fortress and walls, a site of infighting between mujaheddin factions; Baghi Babur, the garden of the tomb of the 16th-century Mogul emperor Babu; Bagh-I-Bala, the home of a 19th-century king, now a posh restaurant, located high on a hill with a view of the city; and Darulaman, the old royal palace—once a beautiful building surrounding by trees and lawns. We used to go there for family picnics when I was a kid. I understand it has been pretty badly damaged.

This will be the first time you’re returning to Afghanistan in 27 years. What do you hope to accomplish?

Beyond wanting to go for purely nostalgic reasons I want to go back and talk to the people on the street. I want to get a sense of what life is like now in Kabul and a sense of where people think their country is headed. I want to see if I can put a finger on the emotional pulse of the city. I also hope to come back with a sense of optimism. I want to see the signs of reconstruction—concrete evidence that there may be hope for Afghanistan after all because for so long the only thing we ever heard from there were reports of killings, genocide, repression, natural disasters, poverty and hunger.

Here's the trailer to the recent film version of this powerful novel...

Touching the Void by Joe Simpson

'A truly astounding account of suffering and fortitude.' The Times

'Simpson touches a nerve of the mountaineering community and the hearts of others.' Los Angeles Times

Joe Simpson and his climbing partner, Simon Yates, had just reached the top of a 21,000-foot peak in the Andes when disaster struck.

Simpson plunged off the vertical face of an ice ledge, breaking his leg.

In the hours that followed, darkness fell and a blizzard raged as Yates tried to lower his friend to safety.

Finally, Yates was forced to cut the rope, moments before he would have been pulled to his own death.

The next three days were an impossibly gruelling ordeal for both men. Yates, certain that Simpson was dead, returned to base camp consumed with grief and guilt over abandoning him.

Miraculously, Simpson had survived the fall, but crippled, starving, and severely frostbitten was trapped in a deep crevasse. Summoning vast reserves of physical and spiritual strength, Simpson crawled over the cliffs and canyons of the Andes, reaching base camp hours before Yates had planned to leave.

How both men overcame the torments of those harrowing days is an epic tale of fear, suffering, and survival, and a poignant testament to unshakable courage and friendship.

About the Author

Want to find out more about the author? Click here to access his website No Ordinary Joe.

Watch the trailer to the BAFTA Award winning 2007 film.

So You Think You Know About Britain? by Danny Dorling

'Danny Dorling is a professor of geography who has dedicated his career to exposing the deep social costs of inequality.'

The Guardian

We don't live in the country we thought we lived in anymore; it has changed because we have changed.

When it comes to immigration, the population explosion, the collapse of the family, the north-south divide, or the death of the countryside, common wisdom tells us that we are in trouble; however, this is far from the truth. In his brilliant anatomy of contemporary Britain, leading geographer Daniel Dorling dissects the nation and reveals unexpected truths about the way we live today, contrary to what you might read in the news.

Exploring the key issues that make the headlines Dorling will change the way you think about the country and explain just why you should feel positive about the future.

Why there are more young women in London than men.

Why the North/South Divide is moving southwards.

Why we need more immigrants rather than less.

Why the population time bomb is a myth.

Why there are more divorced people in Blackpool than anywhere else.

Why young black people don't vote.

Read the full Guardian review here...

Professor Danny Dorling’s life expectancy calculator - Find out what affects your life expectancy, starting from the national average of 77 years here...

 About the Author

DANNY DORLING is the Professor of Geography at Sheffield University. He is the honorary president of the Society of Cartographers. In 2009 he was awarded the Gold Award of the Geographical Association and the Back Award of the Royal Geographical Society. He has appeared on the recent Story of Now series and will appear with Andrew Marr on a BBC2 programme to co-incide with the census in April 2011. He advises government and the office for national statistics on matters relating to the census.

Want to read more about Danny Dorkling's work? Click here to read a variety of his articles published in the Guardian.

His work in human geography shows the widening gap between rich and poor in the UK, and that where you live determines your chances in life. In this interview Mary O'Hara meets Danny Dorling, the man who maps the social reality behind raw data - Vital Statistics

Danny Dorling - Why Social Inequality Persists

Leading social commentators Danny Dorling and Kate Pickett discuss the persistence of injustice and the unacknowledged beliefs that propagate it.

Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy by Noam Chomsky

'Arguably the most important intellectual alive.'

The New York Times

'America’s most useful citizen.'

The Boston Globe

The United States asserts the right to use military force against ‘failed states’ around the globe. But as Noam Chomsky argues in this devastating analysis, America shares features with many of the regimes it insists are failing and constitute a danger to their neighbours.


Offering a comprehensive and radical examination of America past and present, Chomsky shows how this lone superpower – which topples foreign governments, invades states that threaten its interests and imposes sanctions on regimes it opposes – has stretched its own democratic institutions to breaking point. And how an America in crisis places the world ever closer to the brink of nuclear and environmental disaster.

The book examines how the United States is beginning to resemble a failed state that cannot protect its citizens from violence and has a government that regards itself as beyond the reach of domestic or international law.

Though Professor Chomsky also presents a series of solutions to help rescue the nation from turning into a failed state. They include: Accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court; Sign the Kyoto protocols on global warming; Let the United Nations take the lead in international crises; Rely on diplomatic and economic measures rather than military ones in confronting terror; and Sharply reduce military spending and sharply increase social spending.

Forceful, lucid, and meticulously documented, Failed States offers a comprehensive analysis of a global superpower that has long claimed the right to reshape other nations while its own democratic institutions are in severe crisis. Systematically dismantling the United States’ pretense of being the world’s arbiter of democracy, Failed States is Chomsky’s most focused—and urgent—critique to date.

Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky. Yes, you read that right. Ali G meets one of the most influential academics in America. For real. Here.

About the Author

Noam Chomsky is the author of numerous bestselling political works, from American Power and the New Mandarins in the 1960s to Hegemony or Survival in 2003. A professor of linguistics and philosophy at MIT, he lives outside Boston, Massachusetts. Widely regarded to be one of the foremost critics of U.S. foreign policy in the world. He has published numerous groundbreaking books, articles, and essays on global politics, history, and linguistics. Among his recent books are the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival and Failed States.

Want to find out more about this hugely influential and equally divisive academic? Check out his website here...

The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine

`An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot . . . it will march on the horizon of the world and it will conquer.'

Think political history's dull? Think again! The publication of Rights of Man caused uproar in England; Thomas Paine was tried and convicted for seditious libel against the Crown, but was unavailable for hanging, having smartly departed England for France, where the Revolution had earlier exploded on 14 July 1789.

Thomas Paine was the first international revolutionary.

His Common Sense (1776) was the most widely read pamphlet of the American Revolution; his Rights of Man (1791-2) was the most famous defence of the French Revolution and sent out a clarion call for revolution throughout the world.

He paid the price for his principles: he was outlawed in Britain, narrowly escaped execution in France, and was villified as an atheist and a Jacobin on his return to America. Paine loathed the unnatural inequalities fostered by the hereditary and monarchical systems.

He believed that government must be by and for the people and must limit itself to the protection of their natural rights. But he was not a libertarian: from a commitment to natural rights he generated one of the first blueprints for a welfare state, combining a liberal order of civil rights with egalitarian constraints.

This collection brings together Paine's most powerful political writings from the American and French revolutions in the first fully annotated edition of these works.

One of Paine's greatest and most widely read works, considered a classic statement of faith in democracy and egalitarianism, defends the early events of the French Revolution, supports social security for workers, public employment for those in need of work, abolition of laws limiting wages, and other social reforms. An inspiring book that paved the way for the growth and development of democratic traditions in American and British society.

Listen to everybody's favorite anti-theist Christopher Hitchens appears on NPR's Talk of the Nation on October 23, 2007 to talk about his new book on 'Thomas Paine's Rights of Man' here...

Or local author and stand-up comic Mark Steel gives a short and irreverent lecture on the importance of this book here...

About the Author

On January 29, 1737, Thomas Paine was born in Thetford, England. His father, a corseter, had grand visions for his son, but by the age of 12, Thomas had failed out of school. The young Paine began apprenticing for his father, but again, he failed. So, now age 19, Paine went to sea. This adventure didn't last too long, and by 1768 he found himself as an excise (tax) officer in England. Thomas didn't exactly excel at the role, getting discharged from his post twice in four years, but as an inkling of what was to come, he published The Case of the Officers of Excise (1772), arguing for a pay raise for officers. In 1774, by happenstance, he met Benjamin Franklin in London, who helped him emigrate to Philadelphia.

His career turned to journalism while in Philadelphia, and suddenly, Thomas Paine became very important. In 1776, he published Common Sense, a strong defense of American Independence from England. He traveled with the Continental Army and wasn't a success as a soldier, but he produced The Crisis (1776-83), which helped inspire the Army. This pamphlet was so popular that as a percentage of the population, it was read by more people than today watch the American Super Bowl. That's a lot of people.

But, instead of continuing to help the Revolutionary cause, he returned to Europe and pursued other ventures, including working on a smokeless candle and an iron bridge. In 1791-92, he wrote The Rights of Man in response to criticism of the French Revolution. This work caused Paine to be labeled an outlaw in England for his anti-monarchist views.

By 1793, he was imprisoned in France for not endorsing the execution of Louis XVI. During his imprisonment, he wrote and distributed the first part of what was to become his most famous work at the time, the anti-church text, The Age of Reason (1794-96). He was freed in 1794 (narrowly escaping execution) thanks to the efforts of James Monroe, then U.S. Minister to France. Paine remained in France until 1802 when he returned to America on an invitation from Thomas Jefferson. Paine discovered that his contributions to the American Revolution had been all but eradicated due to his religious views. Derided by the public and abandoned by his friends, he died on June 8, 1809 at the age of 72 in New York City.

The Prime Minister: The Office And Its Holders Since 1945 by Peter Hennessey

'One of the most penetrating and entertaining political books of the year.' The Times

'It must be tremendous fun being one of Professor Hennessy's pupils: he is the antithesis of the dry-as-dust academic historian. He laughs a great deal, and punctuates his writing with cheery and illuminating anecdotes. But he is also intensely scholarly, peppering his books with the kind of footnotes that all dons treasure.' The Guardian

Peter Hennessy, former journalist turned scholar of contemporary political history, is an academic aeolus whose infectious enthusiasm for his subject, Whitehall and Westminster, blows the dust off documents and reinflates a mandarin's minute with a telling topicality.

The holder of the Chair of Contemporary History at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, he has natural gift (and inclination) for grafting germane gossip onto the gravity of his subject and thus enlivening his expert exhumation of archives with appropriate anecdote.

His earlier work, Whitehall has become a classic, and in his latest study he turns his attention to the steady accretion of power by Prime Ministers since the last world war and makes an assessment of each occupant of 10 Downing Street. Hennessy delights in proceeding by exposure as well as explication, throwing up fascinating insights on Premiers as they arrive at crucial decisions.

He is undoubtedly happiest when chronicling the manoeuvrings of the backroom boys in Whitehall rather than those in the corridors of the Palace of Westminster, but then the shift of power away from the legislature to the executive is becoming all too apparent. In each of his studies, Hennessy shows how individual Prime Ministers struggled and shaped the governance of the nation to their different personalities, and then their day of hard graft and glory is gone. As Harold Macmillan, one of the more charismatic holders of the office, said after his resignation, "nothing rolls up more quickly than a red carpet" Michael Hatfield

In this major study, Peter Hennessy explores the formal powers of the Prime Minister and how each incumbent has made the job his or her own.

Drawing on unparalleled access to many of the leading figures, as well as the key civil servants and journalists of each period, he has built up a picture of the hidden nexus of influence and patronage surrounding the office. From recently declassified archival material he reconstructs, often for the first time, precise prime ministerial attitudes towards the key issues of peace and war.

He concludes with a controversial assessment of the relative performance of each Prime Minister since 1945 and a new specification for the premiership as it enters its fourth century.

About the Author

Peter Hennessy is Attlee Professor of History at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. Among many other books, he is the author of WHITEHALL ('Much the best book on the British civil service ever to appear', Anthony King, Economist) and NEVER AGAIN: BRITAIN 1945-1951, which in 1993 won the NCR Award for Non-Fiction and the Duff Cooper Prize.

Read his biography on his staff page from QMaWC School of History page here...

Want to know what smart people think? Read the Guardian review here...

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is populated by a cast as strange as that of the most fantastic fiction. The subject of this strange and wonderful book is what happens when things go wrong with parts of the brain most of us don’t know exist . . . Dr Sacks shows the awesome powers of our mind and just how delicately balanced they have to be.’

Sunday Times

‘Who is this book for? Who is it not for? It is for everybody who has felt from time to time that certain twinge of self-identity and sensed how easily, at any moment, one might lose it.’

The Times

One book almost everyone interested in psychology will enjoy is Oliver Sack's The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. Sacks, a neurologist by training, describes some of the fascinating patients he has treated over the years.

From the eponymous Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, through The Man Who Fell out of Bed, The Lost Mariner and The Dog Beneath the Skin, each chapter tells the story of ordinary human experience touched by unusual brain diseases.

Mercifully the narrative is devoid of medical terminology as what Sacks is most interested in is the patient's perspective on the world. As a result the reader gains personal, subjective insight into the inability to recognise objects (visual agnosia), the experience of a dense amnesia stretching back decades (Korsakov's), what it feels like to be completely disembodied and many other conditions.


Sacks captures the effects of damage to the brain not by reducing it to diagnoses and categories, but by expanding it to include all the vagaries of the individual. This book is not so much a series of case notes as a collection of parables about the brain.

Each one shows us what certain deficits or excesses can do to our experience - how it can be reduced in one dimension and rapidly expanded in another. Each, ever so gently suggesting that what we take for granted as reality is really just one more dream our brains have manufactured.

Above all, people's stories - for they are stories about real people - are all told with warmth; a kind, philosophical eye, searching not for what has been lost, but for what has been added. A scientist's attention to detail without the stereotypical austerity.

Sacks is most concerned with finding out what his patients can do, what they enjoy, what it is possible for them to get out of life. He realises their personhood is vital to understanding their condition. Sacks is engaged in what he refers to as the 'neurology of identity'.

It's this centrality of human experience and identity that makes this book such a rewarding and frequently touching read. Jeremy Dean, PsyBlog

About the Author

Oliver Sacks is well known as a physician, a neurologist and the author of nine other books. He wrote the book of Awakenings which inspired the Oscar-nominated film.

His most recent writing is Musicophilia:Tales of Music and the Brain which explores the power of music and its influences to the brain based on his patient experiences. Currently, he is living in New York City as a professor of Clinical Neurology at Columbia University.

Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there by Professor Richard Wiseman

'Experiments that investigate the paranormal are bizarre and entertaining, and Wiseman is a witty guide in what is often a mind-boggling read. Ultimately you'll discover why your brain is far more extraordinary than any of the supernatural claims in this book.'

New Scientist

'People are emotionally drawn to the supernatural. They actively want weird, spooky things to be true . . . Wiseman shows us a higher joy as he deftly skewers the paranormal charlatans, blows away the psychic fog and lets in the clear light of reason.'

Richard Dawkins

Professor Richard Wiseman is clear about one thing: paranormal phenomena don't exist. But in the same way that the science of space travel transforms our everyday lives, so research into telepathy, fortune-telling and out-of-body experiences produces remarkable insights into our brains, behaviour and beliefs.

Paranormality embarks on a wild ghost chase into this new science of the supernatural and is packed with activities that allow you to experience the impossible. So throw away your crystals, ditch your lucky charms and cancel your subscription to Reincarnation Weekly. It is time to discover the real secrets of the paranormal.

Learn how to control your dreams -- and leave your body behind!

Convince complete strangers that you know all about them!

Unleash the power of your unconscious mind!

About the Author

"Richard Wiseman is arguably the most interesting experimental psychologist working today"
Michael Shermer, Scientific American.

Prof Richard Wiseman is based at the University of Hertfordshire, where he holds Britain's only Chair in the Public Understanding of Psychology. He has gained an international reputation for research into unusual areas of psychology, including luck, deception, and the science of self-help.

There of his books, The Luck Factor, Quirkology and 59 Seconds, have all topped the best-seller lists and have been translated into over thirty languages. He has presented keynote addresses at The Royal Society, Microsoft, Caltech, and Google. Over 2 million people have taken part in his mass participation experiments, and his YouTube channel has received over 11 million views.

He is one of the most frequently quoted psychologists in the British media, and was recently listed in the Independent on Sunday's top 100 people who make Britain a better place to live.

Here's an interview with Professor Wiseman from BBC Breakfast News in March 2011

Want to learn more? Here's a link to Professor Wiseman's website...


Here's a link to the book's website...

Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century by Lauren Slater

'Makes for fascinating reading, helped along by Slater's charm and resourcefulness' Sunday Telegraph

'The experiments Slater describes are fascinating in their own right, but made more so by the rich social and personal context in which Slater places them' Daily Mail

'An unusual and compelling personal journey combining the emotional and the scientific ... a warm narrative flow achieved through a mixture of research, intuition, anecdote, reconstruction and engagingly haphazard interviews'

Time Out

A century can be understood in many ways - in terms of its inventions, its crimes or its art. In Opening Skinner's Box, Lauren Slater sets out to investigate the twentieth century through a series of ten fascinating, witty and sometimes shocking accounts of its key psychological experiments. Starting with the founder of modern scientific experimentation, B.F. Skinner, Slater traces the evolution of the last hundred years' most pressing concerns - free will, authoritarianism, violence, conformity and morality.

Previously buried in academic textbooks, these often daring experiments are now seen in their full context and told as stories, rich in plot, wit and character.

About the Author

Lauren Slater is the author of Welcome to My Country, Prozac Diary and Love Works Like This, and has written articles and contributed pieces to the New York Times, Harper's, Elle and Nerve.

Her essays are widely anthologized and she is a frequent guest on US radio shows, including 'The People's Pharmacy' on NPR.

Read The Guardian review here - ...Box pop - Opening Skinner's Box is an intriguing attempt by Lauren Slater to 'bring to life' 10 psychological experiments...

The book proved highly controversial in America - read the NY Times review of the controversy here - Unpacking Skinner's Box

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

'Dawkins's first book, was a smash hit... Best of all, he laid out this biology - some of it truly subtle - in stunningly lucid prose. It is, in my view, the best work of popular science ever written.'

H. Allen Orr, New York Review of Books

'A genuine cultural landmark of our time.'

 The Independent

US TV talk-show host Jay Leno, interviewing a passer-by:
Leno: How do you think Mount Rushmore was formed?
Passerby: Erosion?
Leno: Well, how do you think the rain knew to not only pick four presidents — but four of our greatest presidents? How did the rain know to put the beard on Lincoln and not on Jefferson?
Passerby: Oh, just luck, I guess.

Richard Dawkins is the doyen of the new evolutionary biologists, and puts his message across with masterly ease. The topic of evolution is not just one that causes controversies on the news, it is fundamentally important to us all, and when Dawkins wrote this book back in 1976, he was to have a huge impact on the general public. Dawkins writes very smoothly - this is not only a classic of popular science, it is one of the most beautiful examples.

Evolution, and its impact on genetics is indeed crucial to us all, but it has also been fundamentally important to biologists and zoologists. Before evolution they were very much second class scientists, more concerned with collating information and categorizing species than applying any scientific theory to explain what was observed. Because of this, biologists were said to suffer from "physics envy", because they felt inferior to the hard sciences. Evolution was to change all that - which is great, but the only irritating side effect that comes through a little in this book (and more so in the works of some other writers like Daniel Dennett) is the idea that evolution is not only a very important theory, but actually is MORE important than everything else. Dawkins opens the book by saying "If superior creatures from space ever visit earth [sic], the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is 'Have they discovered evolution yet?'" This is just plain silly. But don't let it put you off the rest of the book, because it is superb.

The only part of the book that is open to significant question is the chapter or memes - Dawkins' idea of a conceptual equivalent of genes that allow anything from ideas to advertising jingles spread through society. It was a nice thought, but has been too often taken as scientific fact in popular science writing, where it is anything but a proven concept. But that's a minor part of the book.

Anyone who has any doubts that "evolution is just a theory" needs to read this. And I stress to read it. All too often, people have just come across the title, or heard it being talked about and assumed that Dawkins is literally suggesting that genes have conscious will, and act in order to make things better for themselves. In fact, Dawkins is master of metaphor, and that's all it was ever intended to be. As he points out, there is no suggestion that we are puppets to our genes, and have to act in a manner that furthers the benefit of our genes. Many of us choose to act differently. But there is equally no doubt of the power of genetic evolutionary pressure. Also, a lot of the problem is that most people have a very poor grasp of probability and statistics, and find it difficult to see evolution, and its impact on genetic action in these terms. Some will always struggle against the concepts here, but everyone should have this book on their reading list.

The Selfish Gene is now in a third edition, also known as the 30th anniversary edition, which has extra prefaces in the front, but unless you are particularly interested in the development of the attitude to evolution and genetics, our advice is to skip these and get onto the main text.

Yes, genes can be selfish - To mark the 30th anniversary of Richard Dawkins’s book, OUP is to issue a collection of essays about his work. Here, professor of psychology at Harvard University, wonders if Dawkins’s big idea has not gone far enough…click here to read what Prof. Steven Pinker has to say on the matter and the man.

Want to find out more? Of course you do. Click here to visit the Richard Dawkins Foundation site.

And you can click here to listen to the man himself discussing the book on the BBC World Service on the 30th anniversary of its first edition.