A murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth & Verity Browne When the Nazis seize Austria in March 1938 Verity Browne is one of the first to be deported from Vienna as a well-known anti-Fascist Before she leaves she is able to arrange for a young Jew George Dreiser to escape to England But where he expects to find safety he finds danger & sudden death instead Lord Edward Corinth also finds death where he least expects it in the grounds of Lord Mountbatten's country house There his nephew Frank stumbles on a corpse Although the police are satisfied that the man died of natural causes Edward's niece persuades Edward that all is not as it seems In this classic investigation Verity & Edward find that death comes more often than not to the innocent & that many lives are left to the mercy of strangers Praise for David Roberts'A gripping richly satisfying whodunit with finely observed characters sparkling with insouciance & stinging menace' Peter James'A really well-crafted & charming mystery story' Daily Mail'A perfect example of golden-age mystery traditions with the cobwebs swept away' Guardian ...

This satirical novel recounts the effect on human & corporate behaviour of a brand new metric a"ient that ranks companies not on share price or earnings per share or return on capital invested but on care compassion & social responsibility Companies come to see that having a high Bevill"ient gives them competitive advantage No one is allowed to know the underlying factors that make up this"ient as Anthony Bevill its author is quick to point out if the factors were known they would be open to manipulation So companies pay more attention to diversity in the workplace playing fields for employees care in the transportation of hazardous wastes charitable contributions
- & anything else they think might earn them a high Bevill"ient score Not only companies but ethical investment funds charities & eventually even the government itself compete to be ranked highly for caring' How the Bevill"ient came about through a succession of mishaps & disasters & its effects on business & society is narrated in the first person by Anthony Bevill himself a struggling self-deluding no-hoper who finds himself becoming a high-profile high-earning proprietor of a significant market research company whose"ient is in increasing demand In fact of course his"ient has no real basis in quantifiable fact; the numbers he issues & apportions to his paying clients are largely inventions of his own He justifies this deception on the grounds that the existence of his"ient prompts all companies & organisations to be more thoughtful caring & generous; which is indeed the case Hence How I Made the World a Better Place Much of the tension in the story stems from the growing influence of the Bevill"ient & the growing sense that its totally spurious basis is bound to be eventually uncovered One of the very few people to have read this book in manuscript wrote I haven't enjoyed a novel for a long time as much as I have this
- & that's not for the want of reading novels It's a very serious idea which is possibly why I laughed so much an original idea beautifully developed & tricked' I"e this comment because it sums up exactly what I set out to write & how I hope others will find it

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In 1939 Richard Feynman a brilliant graduate of MIT arrived in John Wheeler's Princeton office to report for duty as his teaching assistant A lifelong friendship & enormously productive collaboration was born despite sharp differences in personality The soft-spoken Wheeler though conservative in appearance was a raging nonconformist full of wild ideas about the universe The boisterous Feynman was a cautious physicist who believed only what could be tested Yet they were complementary spirits Their collaboration led to a complete rethinking of the nature of time & reality It enabled Feynman to show how quantum reality is a combination of alternative contradictory possibilities & inspired Wheeler to develop his landmark concept of wormholes portals to the future & past Together Feynman & Wheeler made sure that quantum physics would never be the same again ...

The twentieth century was defined by physics From the minds of the world's leading physicists there flowed a river of ideas that would transport mankind to the pinnacle of wonderment & to the very depths of human despair This was a century that began with the certainties of absolute knowledge & ended with the knowledge of absolute uncertainty It was a century in which physicists developed weapons with the capacity to destroy our reality whilst at the same time denying us the possibility that we can ever properly comprehend it Almost everything we think we know about the nature of our world comes from one theory of physics This theory was discovered & refined in the first thirty years of the twentieth century & went on to become quite simply the most successful theory of physics ever devised Its concepts underpin much of the twenty-first century technology that we have learned to take for granted But its success has come at a price for it has at the same time completely undermined our ability to make sense of the world at the level of its most fundamental constituents Rejecting the fundamental elements of uncertainty & chance implied by quantum theory Albert Einstein once famously declared that ' God does not play dice' Niels Bohr claimed that anybody who is not shocked by the theory has not understood it The charismatic American physicist Richard Feynman went further he claimed that nobody understands it This is quantum theory & this book tells its story Jim Baggott presents a celebration of this wonderful yet wholly disconcerting theory with a history told in forty episodes
- significant moments of truth or turning points in the theory's development From its birth in the porcelain furnaces used to study black body radiation in 1900 to the promise of stimulating new quantum phenomena to be revealed by CERN's Large Hadron Collider over a hundred years later this is the extraordinary story of the quantum world Oxford Landmark Science books are 'must-read' classics of modern science writing which have crystallized big ideas & shaped the way we think
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Now available in paperback The Quantum Theory of Fields is a self-contained comprehensive & up-to-date introduction to quantum field theory from Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg The first volume introduces the foundations of quantum field theory the second volume examines modern applications & finally the third volume presents supersymmetry 1600 pages Weinberg Steven (University of Texas Austin) ...

The Quantum Thief is a dazzling hard SF novel set in the solar system of the far future
- a heist novel peopled by bizarre post-humans
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From the bestselling authors of Why does Emc 2? comes The Quantum Universe in which Brian Cox presenter of the BBC's Wonders of the Solar System & Wonders of the Universe & Jeff Forshaw go on a brilliantly ambitious mission to show that everyone can understand the deepest questions of science But just what is quantum physics? How does it help us understand our amazing world? Where does it leave Newton & Einstein? & why above all can we be sure that the theory is good? Here Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw give us the real science behind the bizarre behaviour of the atoms & energy that make up the universe & reveal exactly how everything that can happen does happen ...

When Martha accepts a place at university her decision is met with a mixture of hostility & pride by her uncomprehending family This is the story of a young woman's journey to maturity & independence struggling to cope with the intellectual & emotional challenges that surround her at a time when such space was rarely given freely to women In The Quarry Wood Nan Shepherd's subtle prose is matched with intense & memorable descriptions of the natural world & a dry sense of humour Ninety years after the first publication it remains as fresh & original today ...

The Royals they're just like us The Queen & I is a hilarious satire on modern Britain & an exploration of what it really means to be human by the bestselling author of the Adrian Mole series THE MONARCHY HAS BEEN DISMANTLEDWhen a Republican party wins the General Election their first act in power is to strip the royal family of their assets & titles & send them to live on a housing estate in the Midlands Exchanging Buckingham Palace for a two-bedroomed semi in Hell Close (as the locals dub it) caviar for boiled eggs servants for a social worker named Trish the Queen & her family learn what it means to be poor among the great unwashed But is their breeding sufficient to allow them to rise above their changed circumstance or deep down are they really just like everyone else? Bestselling author Sue Townsend has been Britain's favourite comic writer for over three decades' No other author could imagine this so graphically demolish the institution so wittily & yet leave the family with its human dignity intact' The Times' Absorbing entertaining the funniest thing in print since Adrian Mole' Ruth Rendell Daily Telegraph' Kept me rolling about until the last page' Daily Mail Sue Townsend is Britain's favourite comic author Her hugely successful novels include eight Adrian Mole books The Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman (Aged 5534) Number Ten Ghost Children The Queen & I Queen Camilla & The Woman Who Went to Bed For a Year all of which are highly acclaimed bestsellers She has also written numerous well-received plays She lives in Leicester where she was born & grew up ...

On the morning of 20th June 1837 an eighteen-year-old girl is called from her bed to be told that she is Queen of England The Victorian age has begun The young queen's first few years are beset with court scandal & malicious gossip there is the unsavoury Flora Hastings affair a source of extreme embarrassment to the queen; the eternal conflict between Victoria & her mother & the young queen's hatred of Sir John Conroy her mother's close friend Then there is the Prime Minister Lord Melbourne
- ' Lord M'
- worldly cynic & constant companion to the queen himself a veteran of many a latter-day scandal He proves to be her guiding light
- until the dashing Prince Albert appears & she falls hopelessly in love


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