In 1859, Charles Darwin shocked the world with a radical theory – evolution by natural selection. One hundred and fifty years later, his theory still challenges some of our most precious beliefs. Introducing Evolution provides a step-by-step guide to ‘Darwin’s dangerous idea’ and takes a fresh look at the often misunderstood concepts of natural selection and the selfish gene. Drawing on the latest findings from genetics, ecology and animal behaviour- as well as the work of best-selling science writers such as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker- this book reveals how the evidence in favour of evolutionary theory is stronger than ever.
Islam is one of the world’s great monotheistic religions. Islamic culture, spanning 1,500 years, has produced some of the finest achievements of humanity. Yet the religion followed by a fifth of humankind is too often seen in the West in terms of fundamentalism, bigotry and violence- a perception that couldn’t be more wrong. Introducing Islam recounts the history of Islam from the birth of Prophet Muhammad in the 6th century to its status as a global culture and political force today. Charting the achievements of Muslim civilisation, it explains the nature and message of the Qur’an, outlines the basic features of Islamic law, and assesses the impact of colonialism on Muslim societies. Ziauddin Sardar and Zafar Abbas Malik show how Muslims everywhere are trying to live their faith and are shaping new Islamic ideas and ideals for a globalised world.
Capitalism now dominates the globe, both in economics and ideology, shapes every aspect of our world and influences everything from laws, wars and government to interpersonal relationships. Introducing Capitalism tells the story of its remarkable and often ruthless rise, evolving through strife and struggle as much as innovation and enterprise.
Dan Cryan and Sharron Shatil, with Piero’s brilliant graphics, cover the major economic, social and political developments that shaped the world we live in, such as the rise of banking, the founding of America and the Opium Wars.The book explores the leading views for and against, including thinkers like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Theodor Adorno and Milton Friedman, the connections between them and their historical context.
Few ideas have had as much impact on our everyday lives as capitalism. Introducing Capitalism is the essential companion.
Can it be that the human brain possesses an in-built faculty for language? Noam Chomsky, one of the most brilliant linguists of the 20th century, believes that it does- that there exists a ‘universal grammar’ common to all languages. Around the world children learn, in very similar ways, languages that seem entirely different. This is possible, Chomsky argues, because all human languages and their grammatical structures are linked in the human brain. Chomsky is controversial and yet highly influential, both in his pioneering work in linguistics and in his unrelenting critique of international power and his commitment to freedom and justice. These two ‘Chomskys’ are heirs to the Enlightenment tradition, and this book is the ideal introduction to them both.
Was Marx himself a ‘Marxist’? Was his visionary promise of socialism betrayed by Marxist dictatorship? Is Marxism inevitably totalitarian? What did Marx really say? “Introducing Marxism” provides a fundamental account of Karl Marx’s original philosophy, its roots in 19th century European ideology, his radical economic and social criticism of capitalism that inspired vast 20th century revolutions. It assesses Marxism’s Russian disciples, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin who forged a ruthless dogmatic Communism. The book examines the alternative Marxist approaches of Gramsci, the Frankfurt School of critical theory and the structuralist Marxism of Althusser in the 1960s. It marshals postmodern interpretations of Marxism and raises the spectre of ‘post-Marxism’ in Derrida’s confrontation with Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ doctrine.
After 70 years, open the next chapter of record breaking!
Filled with thousands of awesome facts and feats for the whole family, this year's edition celebrates Guinness World Records 70th anniversary.
Learn how record breaking has changed over the years and what incredible looks like today.
Celebrate the ICONS that shaped our world from Taylor Swift to the Tallest Man EVER.
A 30-page bumper SPORTS section with records from Ronaldo and Messi.
A section on pop culture and social media, including Instagram superstars, TikTok celebrities and Twitch heroes.
Discover the next generation of record breakers and how you can become one, with a dedicated KIDS ZONE.
Chart the history and ultimate limits of record breaking with poster-style FLASHBACKS including speedy Rubik's cube solves, eye-watering football transfers and more.
Travel through 70 YEARS of the famous book with an opening chapter filled with retro features.
Look out for DEAR GWR an affectionate tribute to some of the funniest record applications that didn't quite make the cut.
What do we mean by social class in the 21st century?
University of Brighton sociologists Laura Harvey and Sarah Leaney and award-winning comics creator Danny Noble present an utterly unique, illustrated journey through the history, sociology and lived experience of class.
What can class tell us about gentrification, precarious work, the role of elites in society, or access to education? How have thinkers explored class in the past, and how does it affect us today? How does class inform activism and change?
Class: A Graphic Guide challenges simplistic and stigmatising ideas about working-class people, discusses colonialist roots of class systems, and looks at how class intersects with race, sexuality, gender, disability and age. From the publishers of the bestselling Queer: A Graphic History, this is a vibrant, enjoyable introduction for students, community workers, activists and anyone who wants to understand how class functions in their own lives.
Dr Laura Harvey and Dr Sarah Leaney are senior lecturers in sociology at the University of Brighton. Laura’s work draws on sociology, gender studies, social psychology and cultural studies. Sarah’s work explores the connection between class and housing, with a focus on social housing and stigma.
Danny Noble is an illustrator and writer. In 2020 she published Shame Pudding, a graphic memoir, and won a Comedy Women in Print Award for her comic ‘Was It…Too Much For You?‘. She has illustrated children’s books by Adrian Edmondson.
For most people, quantum theory is a byword for mysterious, impenetrable science. And yet for many years it was equally baffling for scientists themselves. In this magisterial book, Manjit Kumar gives a dramatic and superbly-written history of this fundamental scientific revolution, and the divisive debate at its core. Quantum theory looks at the very building blocks of our world, the particles and processes without which it could not exist. Yet for 60 years most physicists believed that quantum theory denied the very existence of reality itself.
In this tour de force of science history, Manjit Kumar shows how the golden age of physics ignited the greatest intellectual debate of the twentieth century. Quantum theory is weird. In 1905, Albert Einstein suggested that light was a particle, not a wave, defying a century of experiments. Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Erwin Schrodinger's famous dead-and-alive cat are similarly strange. As Niels Bohr said, if you weren't shocked by quantum theory, you didn't really understand it.
While Quantum sets the science in the context of the great upheavals of the modern age, Kumar's centrepiece is the conflict between Einstein and Bohr over the nature of reality and the soul of science. 'Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of physicists into believing that the problem had been solved', lamented the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann. But in "Quantum", Kumar brings Einstein back to the centre of the quantum debate. "Quantum" is the essential read for anyone fascinated by this complex and thrilling story and by the band of brilliant men at its heart.
Illustrator Jules Scheele teams up with Dr Laura Locker in this comic-book introduction to the political history of the Land of Opportunity. How did a political outsider like Trump win the 2016 presidential election? Why do some Americans feel so strongly about gun rights? Is there a role for more than two political parties in the system?Politics isn't something that just occurs in the West Wing or the gleaming Capitol building - it comes from the interaction between state and society, the American people living their daily lives. In this unique graphic guide, we follow modern citizens as they explore everything from the United States' political culture, the Constitution and the balance of power, to social movements, the role of the media, and tensions over race, immigration, and LGBT rights.
Step right up, and see what lies beneath the pageantry and headlines of this great nation.
Why is psychiatry such big business? Why are so many psychiatric drugs prescribed - 47 million antidepressant prescriptions in the UK alone last year - and why, without solid scientific justification, has the number of mental disorders risen from 106 in 1952 to 374 today?The everyday sufferings and setbacks of life are now 'medicalised' into illnesses that require treatment - usually with highly profitable drugs. Psychological therapist James Davies uses his insider knowledge to illustrate for a general readership how psychiatry has put riches and medical status above patients' well-being. The charge sheet is damning: negative drug trials routinely buried; antidepressants that work no better than placebos; research regularly manipulated to produce positive results; doctors, seduced by huge pharmaceutical rewards, creating more disorders and prescribing more pills; and ethical, scientific and treatment flaws unscrupulously concealed by mass-marketing.
Cracked reveals for the first time the true human cost of an industry that, in the name of helping others, has actually been helping itself.
Imagine freewheeling through tufted French vineyards, scaling the rocky, cloud-topped tracks in the Himalayas or rattling past whitewashed sugar-cube houses in narrow Spanish valleys. From surviving the peaks of the Yorkshire Dales to tackling truly hair-raising descents in rural Cuba, the sheer variety of routes in The 50 Greatest Bike Rides of the World will have you reaching for your bicycle clips, helmet and gloves. Sarah Woods tells tales of scenic single tracks, switchback climbs and routes newly discovered from around the world, each with valuable tips and details to satisfy every cycling enthusiast. It’s time to get those panniers packed and sprockets checked and to climb into the saddle.
A trip around theworld, played out to the most eclectic soundtrack, discovering hidden musical gemsalong the way. From mosh pits tocabarets, Berlin's beatnik band haunts to Korea's peppy k-pop clubs, fromvisiting the infamous Dollywood, to tracing Freddie Mercury's childhood inZanzibar, The 50 Greatest Musical Places of the World hassomething for music fans of all genres. Discover the placeswhere iconic songs were written, groups were formed, music legendswere born and extraordinary talent is celebrated.
When Nicolaus Copernicus claimed that the Earth was not stationary at the centre of the universe but circled the Sun, he brought about a total revolution in the sciences and consternation in the Church. Copernicus’ theory demanded a new physics to explain motion and force, a new theory of space, and a completely new conception of the nature of our universe. He also showed for the first time that a common-sense view of things isn’t necessarily correct, and that mathematics can and does reveal the true nature of the material world. As John Henry reveals, from his idea of a swiftly moving Earth Copernicus sowed the seed from which science has grown to be a dominant aspect of modern culture, fundamental in shaping our understanding of the workings of the cosmos.
Francis Bacon – a leading figure in the history of science – never made a major discovery, provided a lasting explanation of any physical phenomena or revealed any hidden laws of nature. How then can he rank as he does alongside Newton? Bacon was the first major thinker to describe how science should be done, and to explain why. Scientific knowledge should not be gathered for its own sake but for practical benefit to mankind. And Bacon promoted experimentation, coming to outline and define the rigorous procedures of the ‘scientific method’ that today from the very bedrock of modern scientific progress. John Henry gives a dramatic account of the background to Bacon’s innovations and the sometimes unconventional sources for his ideas. Why was he was so concerned to revolutionize the attitude to scientific knowledge – and why do his ideas for reform still resonate today?
Long before the European Enlightenment, scholars and researchers working from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan to Cordoba in Spain advanced our knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine and philosophy.
From Musa al-Khwarizmi who developed algebra in 9th century Baghdad to al-Jazari, a 13th-century Turkish engineer whose achievements include the crank, the camshaft and the reciprocating piston,
Ehsan Masood tells the amazing story of one of history’s most misunderstood yet rich and fertile periods in science, via the scholars, research, and science of the Islamic empires of the middle ages.
This book tells the story of romantic companionship in one hundred works of art. Chronologically arranged and emotionally driven, this study of couples runs through many cultures, civilizations, and epochs. With examples from across the globe, it portrays iconic and lesser-known (yet fascinating) couples immortalized in the history of art. Whether affectionately embracing, engaged in flirtatious exchanges, seducing one another, or simply enjoying each other's company, readers are invited into their complex world of passion, lust, and love. This celebration of these romantic relationships is expressed through sculptures, paintings, photographs, tapestries, stained glass, and illustrations.
Gathered together are representations of couples from ancient cultures (Amenophis IV and Nefertiti), the Middle Ages (Tristan and Isolde), and the Renaissance (Paolo and Francesca). The book also covers contemporary pairs such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono or Gilbert and George, and artists such as Manet, Gainsborough, Renoir, Metsys, Rembrandt, Rubens, Blake, Moore, and Munch, to name but a few. The artists offer us an extensive selection of couples: from history, folklore, and legend, to pairs of a purely fictional nature. This variety of artistic means and vision results in a charming and irresistible collection.
Art historian Agata Toromanoff has written several books on design. After running a contemporary art gallery and participating in the launch of a fashion brand, she founded a book packaging agency, Fancy Books. She also curates photography shows across Europe.
Medicine, anatomy, astronomy, mathematics and cosmology, science began with the Greeks, and Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes and Hippocrates were amongst its stars. That man ever managed to develop a ‘scientific’ attitude to the natural world at all is one of the true wonders of human thought.
Eureka! shows how, free from intellectual and religious dogma, these early thinkers rejected myths and capricious gods and, in distinguishing between the natural and supernatural, effectively discovered nature.
Andrew Gregory, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London, unravels the genesis of science in this fascinating exploration of the origins of Western civilisation, and our desire for a rational, legitimating system of the world.
Weaving together the great ideas of science, in this, his magnum opus, Brian Clegg builds up reality piece by piece, from space, to time, to matter, movement, the fundamental forces, life, and the massive transformation that life itself has wrought on the natural world. He reveals that underlying it all is not, as we might believe, a system of immovable absolutes, but the ever-shifting, amorphous world of relativity. From religion to philosophy, humanity has traditionally sought out absolutes to explain the world around us, but as science has developed, relativity has swept away many of these certainties, leaving only a handful of unchangeable essentials - such as absolute zero, nothingness, light - leading to better science and a new understanding of the essence of being human. This is an Ascent of Man for the 21st century, the gripping story of modern science that will fill you with wonder and give you a new insight into our place in the universe.
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