The pitch is the absolute essence of modern business. Ideas are the most valuable commodity in the modern economy & it is human skill which develops them. In pitching for new business, ideas & emotional intelligence dominate. However the skills of the pitch are not only relevant to the world of business, rather they apply to just about every significant personal transaction in your life...

Life's a Pitch is the ultimate how-to book
- a mixture of mechanics & magic. Nothing like it has been written before. A mixture of mentoring, graphics, anthropology, market research & modern Machiavellianism, this book will prepare you for success. So whether at a sales conference in corporate conference room hell or over lunch at a glamourous restaurant, Life's a Pitch tells you how to handle human transactions. A pitch is not a meeting, it's a drama. A pitch is not about transferring information, it's about transferring power. It is business, but it is also theatre. & the results of a successful pitch are
- quite simply but rather persuasively
- money & power.

Part inspirational manual for business, part guidebook to a successful & happy social life, Life's a Pitch is written as the result of an accumulated half century of (mostly successful) pitching by the authors. Ground-breaking & genre-busting, it will transform the way you think about the art of persuasion for ever.






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At the age of five, Ingrid Pitt found herself in a concentration camp. Ingrid & her mother escaped from the guards while on a forced march & presented themselves to the partisans, unsure if they would kill them. They spent the rest of the war in the forests. Ingrid fell in love for the first time & watched in despair as British bombers flew overhead. She still cannot see the vapour trials of planes without being transported back to her childhood vigil. After the war Ingrid came to London, where she developed a career as a Hammer House of Horror movie star, but, as she proundly says, `I was always the biter, never the bitten!' She also acted in mainstream films, such as WHERE EAGLES DARE. She had a child by her first marriage & a grand passion which lead to her marrying a racing driver. They lived in Argentina for a while & were good friends of President Peron & Isabelits Peron. Ingrid even spent an evening with the embalmed body of Eva Peron. Written with great passion & warmth, this is a rare childhood memoir & the story of Hammer`s most galmorous actress. Above all, this is a story of a survivor. ...

In his characteristically iconoclastic & original way, Stephen Jay Gould argues that progress & increasing complexity are not inevitable features of the evolution of life on Earth. Further, if we wish to see grandeur in life, we must discard our selfish & anthropocentric view of evolution & learn to see it as Darwin did, as the random but unfathomably rich source of 'endless forms most beautiful & wonderful'. Any rational view of nature tells us that we are a simple branch on an immense bush; & that life on Earth is remarkable not for where it is leading, but for the fullness & constancy of its variety, ingenuity & diversity. ...

Today, genes are called upon to explain almost every aspect of our lives, from social inequalities to health, sexual preference, political orientation & criminality. In this incisive & original account, Steven Rose confronts the fashionable ideology of ultra-Darwinism, which reduces humans to little more than machines for the replication of DNA. Whilst recognising the importance of genes & natural selection, Professor Rose argues that the trajectory of life (lifeline) depends on the complex interactions that occur within cells, organisms & ecosystems through time & space. By placing the organism rather than the gene at the centre of life, he offers a bold new perspective on biology that acknowledges the essentially complex nature of life. ...

Two men meet by chance in a caf- in Krakow; one is an elderly Pole & one is a young man obsessively searching across Europe for the love of his life who has disappeared. They talk all night & when they part the older man find himself beset by questions. He recalls his youth in pre-war Pol&, his time in the Communist party & his own life-altering love affair which also ended in his lover abandoning him without explanation. He begins to piece together his own & the young man's stories & find himself on an unexpected quest. ...

An elderly Pole sits in a cafe in Krakow. At another table a young man with a ravaged face is drinking wine & reading Werner Heisenberg's Physics & Philosophy. They begin to talk. All through the night as they go from bar to bar the young man tells the story of the great love of his life, of how in the midst of their rapture the woman inexplicably disappeared, & of how he is now driving across Europe in a desperate attempt to find her. After they part in the pre-dawn light the old man returns to his rooms & finds himself beset by questions. Why can he not forget this young man? Who was the woman he was with & why did she leave him? These questions lead him back through his own life, from pre- & post-war Pol&, to his membership of the Communist Party & his own life-altering love affair with a woman he met in Berlin & then ran away with to the sand dunes of the Baltic coast until she, too, left him without explanation. Through the years that followed he wandered the world trying to escape from the memory of her. Now, back in a small town in Pol&, he begins to assemble stories both from his own past & that of the young man & the woman he loved & lost until he finds himself on an unexpected quest. Light traverses Europe & parts of America, the history of physics & political changes in Central Europe. It is about love & ruin, East & West, friendship & betrayal, the search for certainty & the consequent disillusionment. It is, too, about the making of stories & how they can lead, inadvertently, to revelation. ...

A man goes on a journey in search of love & returns to his village carrying death, in the form of a plague-ridden rabbit. The village is ravaged by sickness &, when the dead have been buried, the only survivors are three men, three women, a pig, a few cows, goats & countless rabbits. But no one is left who knows anymore how things are supposed to be ...

A man goes on a journey in search of love & returns to his village carrying death, in the form of a plague-ridden rabbit. The village is ravaged by sickness &, when the dead have been buried, the only survivors are three men, three women, a pig, a few cows, goats & countless rabbits. But no one is left who knows anymore how things are supposed to be ...