Showing results for "laura spinney"

Named a Best Book of 2025 by the Guardian, Scientific American, and the Washington Independent Review of BooksProto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.Daughter. Duhitár-. Dustr. Dukte. Listen to these English, Sanskrit, Armenian and Lithuanian words, all meaning the same thing, and you hear echoes of one of history's most unlikely journeys. All four languages-along with hundreds of others, ...

Read the devastating story of the Spanish flu - the twentieth century's greatest killer – and discover what it can teach us about the current Covid-19 pandemic.'Both a saga of tragedies and a detective story... Pale Rider is not just an excavation but a reimagining of the past' GuardianWith a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people and a global reach, the Spanish flu of 1918–1920 was the greatest human disaster, no...

Bloomsbury presents Proto by Laura Spinney, read by Emma Spurgin-HusseyThe enthralling story of how today’s largest language family, spoken by nearly half the world’s population, descended from one ancient dialect.Daughter. Duhitár-. Dustr. Dukte. Listen to these English, Sanskrit, Armenian and Lithuanian words, all meaning the same thing, and you hear echoes of one of history’s most unlikely journeys. All four languages—along with hundreds of othe...

The writers behind New Scientist explore the baffling concept of nothingness from the fringes of the universe to our minds' inner workings.It turns out that nothing is as curious or as enlightening as nothingness itself. What is nothing? Where can it be found? The writers of the world's top-selling science magazine investigate—from the big bang, dark energy, and the void, to superconductors, vestigial organs, hypnosis, and the placebo effect. And they disco...

Brought to you by Penguin.With a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people and a global reach, the Spanish flu of 1918–1920 was the greatest human disaster, not only of the twentieth century, but possibly in all of recorded history. And yet, in our popular conception it exists largely as a footnote to World War I.In Pale Rider, Laura Spinney recounts the story of an overlooked pandemic, tracing it from Alaska to Brazil, from Persia to Spain, ...

An Oxford mathematician, playwright, and musician reveals how creative people can harness the profound and productive relationship between mathematics and the artsWhen Shakespeare has the Three Witches cast Macbeth’s lot, he uses something very weird to do it: not simply “eye of newt and toe of frog,” but the number seven. And when Hamlet claims, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” Shakespeare reaches for eleven. For Shakespeare, prime numbers were magical....

This is the story of the fall of an Empire – and the rise of another.Who spread Christianity, how, and why? In her quest to find the answer, Professor Alice Roberts takes us on a gripping investigative journey. From a secluded valley in south Wales to the shores of Brittany; from the heart of the Roman Empire in a time of political turmoil to the ancient city of Corinth in the footsteps of the apostle Paul; from Alexandria in the fourth century to Constantinople.

**Brought to you by Penguin.From bestselling author and astronaut Tim Peake, the captivating story of humans in space.**Only 628 people in human history have left Earth. In Space: The Human Story, astronaut Tim Peake traces the lives of these remarkable men and women who have forged the way, from Yuri Gagarin to Neil Armstrong, from Valentina Tereshkova to Peggy Whitson.Full of exclusive new stories, and astonishing detail only an astronaut would know, the ...

Brought to you by Penguin.Blessed by the gods with unparalleled beauty, Andromeda lives a life of ease within her Aethiopian palace walls. Content with her sanctuary, the young princess has no concerns other than the royal expectations her parents have for her – until a single, fateful proclamation changes everything.When the queen defies the gods with a blasphemous claim, Poseidon, fearsome God of the Seas, delivers a deadly ultimatum that puts the queen’s...

Ancient trees, some over a thousand years old, are dotted around the British Isles, the last survivors of a lost world. Now, new scientific studies of these trees and of fossilised forests and of our oldest wooden artifacts can help us to understand the many woodlands that have disappeared from our landscapes.Locked in ice for more than twenty thousand years, the lands that now make up Britain and Ireland were some of the last settled by humans. The earliest people...

Read by the incredible John LeeWinner of the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, a World Fantasy award, and a BSFA Award.Blending weird fiction with the police procedural, The City & The City is an existential thriller like no other.When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary decaying city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine cas...

A tour of an ancient library transports us to Mesopotamia, introducing us to its people, their ideas, and their humanity.The library of Ashurbanipal, Assyria’s last great king, held an astonishing collection at the forefront of knowledge in its day, from ancient traditions in religion and literature to the latest developments in magic and medicine. When the Assyrian empire fell, the library burned to the ground, and its contents, clay tablets inscribed with cuneifo...