A unique and all-encompassing exploration of the wonders of flight and the waydifferent species have evolved different solutions to the problem of defying gravity – including humans.Flight fascinates us. We thrill to birds, we adore butterflies, we're baffled by bats and we can hardly believe in pterodactyls. We worship angels and we compare love, religious ecstasy and artistic achievement to flight. We love the idea of flight so much we invented machines that at l...

In 1915 the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves (later to become The Wildlife Trusts) published a list of 284 places in Britain and Ireland 'worthy of preservation' as permanent nature reserves. The list was the brainchild of the Society's founder Charles Rothschild. It included shingle beaches, highland mountains, ancient woods, stretches of coastline, unspoilt heaths and marshes where Rothschild and his colleagues would search for rare insects and plants. It was the first list o...

THE BESTSELLING BIRDWATCHING CLASSIC - 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION'A delightful ode to the wild world outside the kitchen window - leaves you with the warm feeling that a shared love conquers all' The Daily TelegraphLook out the window. See a bird. Enjoy it. CONGRATULATIONS! You are now a bad birdwatcher.Anyone who has ever gazed up at the sky or stared out of the window knows something about birds. In this fu...

To understand Anna Karenina, Mellors, Molly Bloom, Dante, Romeo, Juliet and Bridget Jones you must also have loved and lost and won. To understand sport in the greatest arenas of them all you too must have played and lost and won, known shame, hope, joy, horror and glory.Simon Barnes has taken part in seven summer Olympic Games, five World Cups and ten Ashes series. Well, not exactly taken part, but certainly he was there and writing hard. And always, behind every ...

Praise for The Green Planet (BBC One)'David Attenborough's gobsmacking, awe-inspiring return' The Guardian'The Green Planet reveals the secret lives of plants in the same way The Blue Planet opened our eyes to the oceans' New ScientistThere's something new under the sunPlants live secret, unseen lives - hidden in their magical world and on their timescale. From the richest jungles to the harshest deserts, f...

Memories of expat life in pre-handover Hong Kong.Lyrical, wry, amusing, deceptively gentle, Simon Barnes’s second novel packs a powerful punch after it has crept up on the reader with the narrator’s fond reminiscences of expat life in pre-handover Hong Kong. The hazy and often hilarious memories of work and play in the heartstopping beauty and pulse-racing commercialism of the colony is suddenly flooded by darker memories of tragedy and loss, although Barnes, the most optimistic an...

Takes you on a journey from the Olympic Games in Athens to the World Cup in Germany - via the Ashes series, the Ryder Cup, Wimbledon, and more. This book examines why sport holds us all in such thrall, how it uplifts and crushes us - and can seem to matter more than life itself.

'A book that filled me from first to last with a rapture as transcendent and thrilling as that which spring yearly provides ... I absolutely adored it!' STEPHEN FRY'As dynamic and ebullient as the season it celebrates ... There is no one I'd rather spring into spring with than Simon Barnes' KATE HUMBLE'An endlessly illuminating love letter to the most beguiling of the seasons' LEE SCHOFIELD, author of the award-winning ...

We are all wild. It's just that civilisation keeps getting in the way. And the more civilised we become, the more we need the wild: wild places, wild creatures, and wild experiences. As every one who has patted a dog, smelled a rose, taken a walk, or even had a drink in the garden well knows, humans have a soul-deep need for non-human forms of life. This book is about pushing our birthright of wildness just that little bit further. In "How to be Wild", Barnes takes us on a journey through ...

One of our most eloquent nature writers offers a passionate and informative celebration of birds and their ability to help us understand the world we live in. As well as exploring how birds achieve the miracle of flight; why birds sing; what they tell us about the seasons of the year and what their presence tells us about the places they inhabit, The Wisdom of Birds muses on the uses of feathers, the drama of raptors, the slaughter of pheasants, the infidelities of geese, and the strangene...

A wonderfully engaging novel about a man and the horse he falls in love with – the idiosyncratic Miss Chance.‘Get a motorbike. Get laid. The order doesn’t matter.’When teacher Mark Brown’s celebrated wife leaves him, his best friend Callum prescribes a swift return to adolescence.Mark does indeed turn back the clock, but not towards motorbikes. He returns to his first passion – horses. Getting back into the swing of riding after twelve years, Mark begins to put toge...

Frontiers of Translation in Korean Language Education makes the case for the continuing relevance of translation in Korean as a Foreign Language (KFL) education.This book presents practical case studies of developing and implementing translation in KFL on scales ranging from extended programs – for example, the integration of a translation and interpreting internship program which responds to local community needs into the higher education curriculum – to single activities...