Showing results by narrator "John Sackville" in All Categories

Set entirely on a London bus travelling from Hoxton to Highbury and taking place over just 36 minutes, the events of The 392 unfold through a cast of charismatic characters coming from very different worlds. On the 392 are all the familiar faces you might expect to see on any bus ride through inner-city London in the grip of gentrification; delinquent school kids, the high-flyers, the weird, the wonderful and the homeless. These Londoners share two things: a bus journey and a threat. A threat which is ready to blow apart everything they know.

In a saga reminiscent of Game of Thrones and The Last Kingdom, Battle for the Island Kingdom reveals the life-and-death struggle for power which changed the course of history. The six decades leading up to 1066 were defined by bloody wars and intrigues, in which three peoples vied for supremacy over the island kingdom. In this epic retelling, Don Hollway (The Last Viking) recounts the clashes of Vikings, Anglo-Saxons and Normans, their warlords and their conniving queens.

Kingsley Amis' authoritative and witty guide to the use and abuse of the English language. A scourge of illiteracy and a thorn in the side of pretension, Amis provides indispensable advice about the linguistic blunders and barbarities that lie in wait for us, from danglers, four-letter words to jargon and even Welsh rarebit. By turns reflective, acerbic and provocative, The King's English is for anyone who cares about how the English language is used.

How to See is about our misperceptions, how we can gain insight and how mindfulness practices can help us see our real selves. Thich Nhat Hanh brings his signature clarity, compassion and humour in showing us how to achieve an awakened, more relaxed state of self-awareness so we can understand ourselves and the world around us. This is a perfect guide to life by the most renowned Zen master in the world, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was only by accident that Peter as a child discovered that his father, Fred Bradley, was in fact born Fritz Brandes. And it was only after his father’s death in 2004 that Peter was able to begin to piece together the family’s story and set out on the journey—literally and figuratively—that forms the basis of his book.

Everyone craves retirement from the Civil Service, don’t they? That time for an ageing patriarch to enjoy the fruits of a well-earned pension and the respect of his family; maybe even to indulge in a love of music halls and metropolitan life. If only people would listen and do as they were told… His fourth son William, the long-suffering narrator, is the constant butt of his father’s jokes and victim of his brother’s indifference. But as death, divorce and other darker dramas follow, father and son slowly establish a strange harmony.

Narcoball uncovers the incredible story of Colombian football during the early 1990s - shaped by drug lords, rivalries, and ambition. It uncovers a football empire backed by cartels - where victory was a currency of its own, and defeat, a matter of life and death. This is a different story of Pablo Escobar and his rivals.

In the early 1960s scientists at the University of California, Berkeley set out to establish the key factors affecting health and longevity. Their results, known as the ‘Alameda 7’, you already know: don’t smoke, drink in moderation, sleep seven to eight hours a night, exercise, eat regular meals, maintain a moderate weight, eat breakfast. Years later, however, the same team discovered an eighth factor, one that proved more important than all the others: social connection.

For over a century we saw Neanderthals as inferior to Homo Sapiens. After new discoveries, the pendulum swung the other way and they are generally seen as our relatives: not quite human, but similar enough, and still not equal. Now, thanks to an ongoing revolution in palaeoanthropology in which he has played a key part, Ludovic Slimak shows us that they are something altogether different - and they should be understood on their own terms rather than by comparing them to ourselves. As he reveals in this stunning book, the Neanderthals had their own history, their own rituals, their own customs.

History is swamped by patriotic myths about the aerial combat fought between the RAF and the Luftwaffe over the summer of 1940. In his gripping history of the Battle of Britain, Len Deighton drew on a decade of research and his own wartime experiences to puncture these myths and point towards a more objective, and even more inspiring, truth.

What if everything we thought we knew about history was wrong? From the global best-selling author of Empire, The Ascent of Money and Civilization, this is a whole new way of looking at the world. Most history is hierarchical: it's about popes, presidents, and prime ministers. But what if that's simply because they create the historical archives? What if we are missing equally powerful but less visible networks-leaving them to the conspiracy theorists, with their dreams of all-powerful Illuminati?

Homecoming draws on over a hundred firsthand interviews, archival recordings and memoirs by the women and men who came to Britain from the West Indies between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. In their own words, we witness the transition from the optimism of the first postwar arrivals to the race riots of the late 1950s. We hear from nurses in Manchester; bus drivers in Bristol; seamstresses in Birmingham; teachers in Croydon; dockers in Cardiff; inter-racial lovers in High Wycombe, and Carnival Queens in Leeds.

For months, the omens had pointed in one scarcely believable direction: Russia was about to invade Ukraine. And yet, the world was stunned by the epochal scale of the assault that began in February 2022. It was an attempt by one nation to devour another. The Kremlin wanted nothing less than a new world order. Invasion is Luke Harding's gripping chronicle of the war that changed everything.

In Brexit Britain, a young transgender doctor called Ry is falling in love - against their better judgement - with Victor Stein, a celebrated professor leading the public debate around AI. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with Mum again, is set to make his fortune launching a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere. Across the Atlantic, in Phoenix, Arizona, a cryogenics facility houses dozens of bodies of men and women who are medically and legally dead...but waiting to return to life.

What is it really like to be a racer? What is it like to be swept along at 60kmh in the middle of the pack? How does it feel to be reeled in from a solo breakaway metres from the line? What happens to the body during a high-speed chute? What tactics must teams employ to win the day, the jersey, the grand tour? How does a domestique keep going to the end of a stage once his job is done and his body exhausted?

Drawing on half a century of interviews and experience, Homelands tells the story of Europe in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries - how, having emerged from its wartime hell in 1945, it slowly recovered and rebuilt, liberated and united to come close to the ideal of a Europe 'whole, free and at peace'. And then faltered.

Can anyone really own a culture? This magnificent account argues that the story of global civilisations is one of mixing, sharing, and borrowing. It shows how art forms have crisscrossed continents over centuries to produce masterpieces. From Nefertiti's lost city and the Islamic Golden Age to twentieth century Nigerian theatre and Modernist poetry, Martin Puchner explores how contact between different peoples has driven artistic innovation in every era - whilst cultural policing and purism have more often undermined the very societies they tried to protect.

Record-breaking England cricketer, wartime RAF hero, Tottenham Hotspur footballer, and husband to five wives... this is the captivating life of one of England's most remarkable yet often overlooked cricketing heroes. A history of cricket victories, explosive controversies, wartime glory and a life lived to the fullest, this compelling biography reveals the story of one of cricketing’s greatest characters.

We are a wonder of evolution. Powerful yet dextrous, instinctive yet thoughtful, we are expert communicators and innovators. Our exceptional abilities have created the civilisation we know today. But we're also deeply flawed. Our bodies break, choke and fail, whether we're kings or peasants. Diseases thwart our boldest plans. Our psychological biases have been at the root of terrible decisions in both war and peacetime. This extraordinary contradiction is the essence of what it means to be human - the sum total of our frailties and our faculties.

Bisexuality is the largest sexual minority in the world and the least well understood. This book sets out to answer some of the questions that many people have about bisexuality. In Bi, Julia Shaw explores how people have defined and measured bisexuality during its long and important history. She looks at behavioural bisexuality in animals, and investigates whether there is a bi gene. She introduces some famous bi activists and scholars whom everyone should know.