Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller: but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. A Short History of Nearly Everything is his quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization
- how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us.

Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry & particle physics, & see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out?

On his travels through time & space, he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive & foolish scientists, like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish who worked out many conundrums like how much the Earth weighed, but never bothered to tell anybody about many of his findings. In the company of such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye-opening journey, & reveals the world in a way most of us have nevr seen it before.




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Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller: but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. A Short History of Nearly Everything is his quest to find out everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization
- how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us.

Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry & particle physics, & see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out?

On his travels through time & space, he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive & foolish scientists, like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish who worked out many conundrums like how much the Earth weighed, but never bothered to tell anybody about many of his findings. In the company of such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye-opening journey, & reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.




...

Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller: but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. A Short History of Nearly Everything is his quest to find out everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization
- how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us.

Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry & particle physics, & see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out?

On his travels through time & space, he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive & foolish scientists, like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish who worked out many conundrums like how much the Earth weighed, but never bothered to tell anybody about many of his findings. In the company of such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye-opening journey, & reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.




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In the bestselling, prize-winning A Short History of Nearly Everything Bill Bryson achieved the seemingly impossible by making ...

Much of the history of philosophy is the history of ethics. From Plato to Sartre, the great philosophers have returned to the central ethical questions of how we are to live good lives; how is it appropriate & virtuous for us to behave, both to ourselves & to others? In addressing these questions, Andr- Comte-Sponville returns to the mainstream of much of the Western philosophical tradition with an utterly original exploration of the timeless human virtues. A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues takes as its starting point eighteen human virtues
- ranging from politeness, prudence & humour to compassion, tolerance & love
- to help us understand 'what we should do, who we should be, & how we should live'. Comte-Sponville offers the reader both a thoughtful & accessible introduction to the history of Western ethics & an exploration of the ways in which the views & claims of the great philosophers can apply
- & fail to apply
- to our lives & our moral choices & decisions today.



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The newest Pentium chip powering PCs & laptops contains 40 million electronic switches packed onto a piece of silicon about the size of a thumbnail. Several years from now, if this incredible shrinking continues, a single chip will hold a billion switches, then a trillion. The logical culmination is a computer in which the switches are so tiny that each consists of an individual atom. At that point something miraculous happens: Quantum mechanics kick in. Anyone who follows the science news or watches ' Star Trek' has at least a notion of what that means: particles can be in two or more places at once. Atoms obey a peculiar logic of their own
- & if it can be harnessed society will be transformed. Problems that would now take forever would be solved almost instantly. Quantum computing promises nothing less than a shortcut through time.
...

The newest Pentium chip powering PCs & laptops contains 40 million electronic switches packed onto a piece of silicon about the size of a thumbnail. Several years from now, if this incredible shrinking continues, a single chip will hold a billion switches, then a trillion. The logical culmination is a computer in which the switches are so tiny that each consists of an individual atom. At that point something miraculous happens: Quantum mechanics kick in. Anyone who follows the science news or watches ' Star Trek' has at least a notion of what that means: particles can be in two or more places at once. Atoms obey a peculiar logic of their own
- & if it can be harnessed society will be transformed. Problems that would now take forever would be solved almost instantly. Quantum computing promises nothing less than a shortcut through time.
...

In his most eloquent & formally satisfying collection to date, Alan Jenkins plays a series of powerful & haunting variations on love & loss. The themes that run through our lives are relatively few, for all that they sound subtly different to each of us, with their own rich freight of places & faces. In poems that pay homage to what is unique to his own past experience
- a suburban fifties upbringing, a heady youth of rebellion & exploration
- Jenkins reminds us vividly of what is experienced by us all. The search for love (or failing that, sex), the passing of time & the inevitability of pain & grief, the struggle for transcendence against our awareness of limitation: these are the things that can suddenly seem to compose a life
- a life not so much reduced to essentials as seen in its passionate essence, a 'shorter' life. Though not in any formal sense a sequel, this poignant book recapitulates some of the motifs of The Drift (2000) & earlier volumes, to offer an extended meditation on memory & recurrence, & a statement
- compelling, candid, sorrowful & subtle
- of life's beauty & brevity.




...

In his most eloquent & formally satisfying collection to date, Alan Jenkins plays a series of powerful & haunting variations on love & loss. The themes that run through our lives are relatively few, for all that they sound subtly different to each of us, with their own rich freight of places & faces. In poems that pay homage to what is unique to his own past experience
- a suburban fifties upbringing, a heady youth of rebellion & exploration
- Jenkins reminds us vividly of what is experienced by us all. The search for love (or failing that, sex), the passing of time & the inevitability of pain & grief, the struggle for transcendence against our awareness of limitation: these are the things that can suddenly seem to compose a life
- a life not so much reduced to essentials as seen in its passionate essence, a 'shorter' life. Though not in any formal sense a sequel, this poignant book recapitulates some of the motifs of The Drift (2000) & earlier volumes, to offer an extended meditation on memory & recurrence, & a statement
- compelling, candid, sorrowful & subtle
- of life's beauty & brevity.




...