Bradley Wiggins is the son of a professional cyclist & he first competed at twelve immediately realising that this was what he wanted to do as a career. By the age of twenty he won his first Olympic medal in Sydney before turning to professional road cycling in 2001. Since then Wiggins has developed into one of the UKs most successful cyclists of all time winning a gold in Athens & double gold in Beijing. However it was when his team Cofidis was suspended from the 2007 Tour de France that he made his most outspoken comments yet on the issue of doping in cycling & earned the respect of all followers of sport for his st&. Wiggins is an inspirational figure to many: immensely talented dedicated & cool he has brought his sport to a whole new audience & was awarded the OBE in 2004 for his efforts. This honest & compelling account of his life & career not only reveals the sheer hard work required to get to the very top but also provide a fascinating & controversial insight into the sometimes murky world of cycling. ...

Bradley Wiggins is a British sporting legend. Not only has he won seven World Track Championships & a record-equalling seven Olympic medals including double-gold in Beijing in 2008 & gold in the time trial in London in 2012 he is the first Briton to have won cycling's ultimate prize the Tour de France. He is an immensely talented & dedicated endurance athlete with a gritty down-to-earth persona
- cool outspoken respected inspiring
- & he has helped to bring track & road cycling to a new audience in the UK. With new material by Brendan Gallagher co-author of the original edition this is the story of a boy with bikes in his blood of a son abandoned by his father & of the journey from council estate to the very pinnacle of the sport. IN PURSUIT OF GLORY is a compelling no-holds-barred account of Wiggins' rise to global success & an extraordinary insight into the world of cycling.

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Indie experimentalists Radiohead are one of the most creative & ground-breaking bands of recent years. This their seventh studio album was controversially released as a pay-what-you-want digital album for online download courting publicity & creating a furore within the industry. Many are already calling this album the true heir to OK Computer" one of the best rock albums of all time. This songbook contains all the tracks arranged for piano voice & guitar with four pages of colour photographs." ...

A year living with ten scientists in a hut buried deeply within an ice shelf eight hundred miles from the South Pole is an unusual experience. Aside from the climatic problems & the care with interpersonal relationships essential in such circumstances the authors project was even more unusual & challenging. A few miles from this scientific station there was a rookery of about ten thousand Emperor Penguins. Captain Scotts friend & biologist Dr Edward Wilson was determined to discover whether these creatures were fish which could fly or birds which could swim like fish
- or even reptiles for they were primitive creatures in evolutionary development. Wilson died with Scott on the way back from the South Pole & the scientific puzzle drifted into obscurity. The author who was on National service fifty years later & certainly not a professional explorer was asked to provide a timed series of Emperor Penguin embryos at twelve hourly intervals for ten days. Ignorant of what the project entailed he agreed & so started an adventure which coloured the rest of his life. No one told him that the penguins laid their eggs in pitch darkness in the depth of the polar winter nor that the average temperature would be in the minus forties. Penguins like sheep are not easy to tell apart so how was he to time an embryo unless he saw the egg laid? How also was he to pick out the same penguin several days later to harvest the embryo? It was a mission which seemed close to impossible but then the challenge had been handed out to a daft Scotsman with the genes of a Scotch terrier.
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Written for the educated non-scientist & scientist alike it spans a variety of scientific disciplines from observational astronomy to particle physics. Concepts that the reader will encounter along the way are at the cutting edge of scientific research. However the themes are explained in such a way that no prior understanding of science beyond a high school education is necessary. ...

One of the worlds most renowned chefs Heston Blumenthal has made his name creating such original
- & some might say bizarre
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Rex Whistler was one of the most intriguing artists of the interwar years. His career lasted only from 1925 until his tragically early death in the Second World War when he was thirty-nine. But in those two decades he established himself as an artist in many different fields & especially as the outstanding mural painter of the period. His first big mural painted while he was still a student at the Slade School of Art was for the Tate Gallery restaurant. He went on to paint many others including those at Port Lympne in Kent Dorneywood in Buckinghamshire &
- his masterpiece
- Plas Newydd on the Isle of Anglesey. He was also an acclaimed portrait painter of people & of their houses. He designed sets for opera the theatre & ballet (most famously Fidelio at Covent Garden Victoria Regina on Broadway & the Royal Ballet's Rake's Progress) illustrations & book jackets for over a hundred books numerous advertisements greetings telegrams for the Post Office & even a toile de jouy that is still in production to this day. Among his most memorable portraits are those of the beautiful Lady Caroline Paget the love of his life. Amidst all this he found time to sparkle as one of the wittiest & most elegant of the 'bright young things'; until at the outbreak of war he joined the Welsh Guards & was transformed into a dedicated & outstandingly courageous tank troop commander in the Guards Armoured Division. He was killed by a mortar bomb blast in Normandy on 18 July 1944. Although Rex Whistler's reputation stand high today & his work is avidly collected much of it is in private hands & so comparatively little known. The authors Hugh & Mirabel Cecil have tracked down all of his murals in private collections & on public display. They have traced his later dramatic portraits & war art painted while he was in the army & have been given access to many unpublished sources both letters & the memories of his many devoted friends.

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The compelling story of Britain's best-ever cyclist
- one of the most enigmatic complex & contradictory athletes in any sport
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Quantum theory is so shocking that Einstein could not bring himself to accept it. It is so important that it provides the fundamental underpinning of all modern sciences. Without it wed have no nuclear power or nuclear weapons no TV no computers no science of molecular biology no understanding of DNA no genetic engineering. In Search of Schrodingers Cat tells the complete story of quantum mechanics a truth stranger than any fiction. John Gribbin takes us step by step into an ever more bizarre & fascinating place requiring only that we approach it with an open mind. He introduces the scientists who developed quantum theory. He investigates the atom radiation time travel the birth of the universe superconductors & life itself. & in a world full of its own delights mysteries & surprises he searches for Schrodingers Cat
- a search for quantum reality
- as he brings every reader to a clear understanding of the most important area of scientific study today
- quantum physics. In Search of Schrodingers Cat is a fascinating & delightful introduction to the strange world of the quantum
- an essential element in understanding todays world.



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This new edition of Michael Woods groundbreaking first book explores the fascinating & mysterious centuries between the Romans & the Norman Conquest of 1066. In Search of the Dark Ages vividly conjures up some of the most famous names in British history such as Queen Boadicea leader of a terrible war of resistance against the Romans & King Arthur the once & future king for whose riddle Wood proposes a new & surprising solution. Here too warts & all are the Saxon Viking & Norman kings who laid the political foundations of England
- Offa of Mercia Alfred the Great Athelstan & William the Conqueror whose victory at Hastings in 1066 marked the end of Anglo-Saxon Engl&. Reflecting recent historical textual & archaeological research this revised & updated edition of Michael Woods classic book overturns preconceptions of the Dark Ages as a shadowy & brutal era showing them to be a richly exciting & formative period in the history of Britain. With In Search of the Dark Ages Michael Wood wrote the book for history on TV.
- The Times Michael Wood is the maker of some of the best TV documentaries ever made on history & archaeology.
- Times Literary Supplement


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