Showing results by narrator "Peter Noble" in All Categories

The idea that people are basically driven by individualism and economic incentives and that prosperity and good societies come from top-down leadership has dominated politics for the last 30 years (from some perspectives, much longer). This book shows that the age of homo economicus and centralisation is coming to an end. Instead, Collier and Kay argue that community and mutuality will be the drivers of successful societies in the future - as they are already in some parts of the world.

The mercurial, self-mythologizing novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, author of the twentieth-century masterpiece The Radetzky March, was the finest observer and chronicler of his age. Endless Flight travels with Roth from his childhood in the town of Brody on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an unsettled life spent roaming Europe between the wars, including spells in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. His decline mirrored the collapse of civilized Europe: in his last decade, he opposed Nazism in exile from Germany, his wife succumbed to schizophrenia, and he died an alcoholic.

Astronomers have recently discovered thousands of planets that orbit stars throughout the Milky Way. Much of what has captured the imagination of planetary scientists and the public is the unexpected strangeness of these distant worlds. The quest to find other worlds brims with possibility, and Donald Goldsmith presents the science of exoplanets and the search for extraterrestrial life in a way that even Earthlings with little to no background in astronomy or astrophysics can understand and enjoy.

By the long-time art critic of The Daily Telegraph, Warhol After Warhol tells the David-and-Goliath story of collector Joe Simon and his struggles with the [Andy] Warhol Authentication Board, a tale of power, corruption and lies, a Bad Blood for the art world.

Humans are pattern-matching creatures, and astrology is our grandest pattern-matching game. In this ingenious work of history, data scientist Alexander Boxer examines a treasure trove of esoteric classical sources to expose the deep imaginative framework by which - for millennia - we made sense of our fates. Astrology, he argues, was the ancient world's most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis enterprise sustained by some of history's most brilliant minds, from Ptolemy to al-Kindi to Kepler.

In the North Sea, far from what remains of the coastline, a wind farm stretches for thousands of acres. The Boy, who is no longer really a boy, and the Old Man, whose age is unguessable, are charged with its maintenance. They carry out their never-ending work, scoured by wind and salt, as the waves roll, dragging strange shoals of flotsam through the turbine fields. Land is only a memory. So too is the Boy’s father, who worked on the turbines before him, and disappeared.

When Vale Moonwing returns to Darkwood Forest, he discovers that her old friend, the wizard Yaztromo, has vanished...himself?

Antoine is 12 years old. His parents are divorced, and he lives with his mother in Beauval, a small backwater town surrounded by forests, where everyone knows everyone's business and nothing much ever happens. But in the last days of 1999, a series of events unfolds, culminating in the shocking vanishing without trace of a young child. The adults of the town are at a loss to explain the disappearance, but for Antoine, it all begins with the violent death of his neighbour's dog.

During the oppressive heat wave of 1976, a young journalist, Ed Peters, finds an Edwardian photograph in a junk shop in the Brighton Lanes. It shows an alluring dark-haired girl, an actress whose name was Leda Grey. Leda Grey is living still, in a decaying clifftop house once shared with a man called Charles Beauvois, a director of early silent film. As Beauvois' lover and his muse, Leda often starred in scenes where stage magic and trick photography were used to astonishing effect.

With Germany in the World, award-winning historian David Blackbourn radically revises conventional narratives of German history, demonstrating the existence of a distinctly German presence in the world centuries before its unification—and revealing a national identity far more complicated than previously imagined.

The gripping story of a young boy and his family, driven from their home by war and indiscriminate violence. Like millions of others, they attempt the treacherous journey across their war-torn continent, trying to reach the safety of Europe. The truth is, Europe doesn't want them, and thousands die every month at the hands of thieves and profiteering men to whom life is cheap. Kalu believes that he can lead his family to safety. They have money and a plan, and Kalu is, after all, the smartest man in Monguno.

Paris, 1938. A shadow edges over Europe, while in Spain the war has already begun. Cristián Ferrar, a handsome Spanish lawyer in Paris, is approached to help a clandestine agency supply weapons to beleaguered Republican forces and agrees, putting his life on the line. Joining Ferrar is an unlikely group of allies: including Max de Lyon, a man hunted by the Gestapo, and the Marquesa Maria Cristina, a refined beauty with a taste for danger.

In From Darwin to Derrida, evolutionary biologist David Haig explains how a physical world of matter in motion gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning. Natural selection, a process without purpose, gives rise to purposeful beings who find meaning in the world. The key to this, Haig proposes, is the origin of mutable “texts”―genes―that preserve a record of what has worked in the world. These texts become the specifications for the intricate mechanisms of living beings.

How deep do sharks swim? Have more people been into space than the deep ocean? And what effect are we having on the health of our seas? In Ask an Ocean Explorer, marine biologist of over 20 years and advisor for the BBC's Blue Planet II, Dr Jon Copley, explains the science and wonder of the deep ocean.

On a cold November night in rural Sweden, a farmhouse burns to the ground. Inside, a young woman is found dead—murdered. To the people of Marbäck, the fire becomes a before and after. For ten-year-old Isak, it sets in motion something he cannot control, igniting his future into an inferno. The police immediately focus their attention on Edvard, the boyfriend of the murdered woman and Isak’s beloved uncle. After a quick investigation, Edvard is found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, and Marbäck believes it can return to its innocence.

It is 1920, and DI Albert Lincoln is still reeling from the disturbing events of the previous year. Before the war, he'd investigated the murder of a child in a Cheshire village, and now a woman has been murdered there and another child is missing. With the help of the village schoolmistress, Albert closes in on the original prewar killer. He soon realises the only witness is in grave danger, possibly from somebody he calls 'the Shadow Man'. And as he discovers more about the victims he finds information that might bring him a step closer to solving a mystery of his own.

Summer, 1918: Twenty-nine officers crawled into a 16-inch-high, 55-metre tunnel dug only with spoons. This was the culmination of nine months gruelling toil in oxygen-starved darkness. Of the 29 escapees, just 10 would make their way back to Britain. When captured Royal Flying Corps pilots Captain David Gray, Captain Caspar Kennard and 2nd Lieutenant Cecil Blain had arrived at Holzminden - or 'Hellminden' as its occupants called it - the Germans' highest-security prison complex had seemed impregnable.

Lorenzo and Lucia, both from peasant families, are planning their wedding. However, after meeting the villainous Don Rodrigo, the couple are forced to flee their village. Their dangerous journey in exile takes them through one of the most dramatic eras in Italian history, filled with war, famine, and plague. Will they ever be able to find happiness together?

In Radical Product Thinking (RPT), product development is led by the vision for the change it’s intended to create. This methodology helps leaders reimagine the problems they face and align their team to find creative solutions using five elements: Vision, Strategy, Prioritization, Execution, and Culture. R. Dutt guides listeners through these elements so they develop a clear process for achieving their desired change, incorporate it into daily activities, and turn RPT skills into muscle memory.

Ted Bailey thought his days as an Intelligence Operative were long gone. He certainly wasn't expecting to be blackmailed back into action, especially not by his own side. But then Bailey is the only person left who ever encountered Berger, the KGB master-spy. Berger is running a major operation on US soil and both the CIA and SIS are desperate to track him down. So Bailey returns to the arena of international espionage and finds that little has changed.