'The point of the Churchill Factor is that one man can make all the difference.' Marking the fiftieth anniversary of Winston Churchill's death, Boris Johnson explores what makes up the 'Churchill Factor' - the singular brilliance of one of the most important leaders of the twentieth century. Taking on the myths and misconceptions along with the outsized reality, he portrays - with characteristic wit and passion-a man of multiple contradictions, contagious bravery, breath-taking eloquence, matchless strategizing, and deep humanity.
Fearless on the battlefield, Churchill had to be ordered by the King to stay out of action on D-Day; he embraced large-scale strategic bombing, yet hated the destruction of war and scorned politicians who had not experienced its horrors. He was a celebrated journalist, a great orator and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was famous for his ability to combine wining and dining with many late nights of crucial wartime decision-making. His open-mindedness made him a pioneer in health care, education, and social welfare, though he remained incorrigibly politically incorrect.
Most of all, as Boris Johnson says, 'Churchill is the resounding human rebuttal to all who think history is the story of vast and impersonal economic forces'. THE CHURCHILL FACTOR is a book to be enjoyed not only by anyone interested in history: it is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what makes a great leader.
@2@@20@'A LOT OF US WOULD LIKE A RUBIN IN OUR LIVES'@21@ @18@The Times Magazine@19@ - @20@'JUST READ THIS BOOK... IT'S EXCELLENT'@21@ Viv Groskop - @20@'FASCINATING, PERSUASIVE'@21@ @18@Guardian@19@@3@@2@ Many experts suggest one-size-fits-all solutions for habit change, but as we all know from experience, there's no single magic answer. @18@Better Than Before@19@ shows us how to understand habits and to change them for good, and gives us the thrill of recognition and relief, because at last, we'll have the vocabulary and framework to change our habits successfully. Solutions exist!@16@Along the way, Rubin uses herself as a guinea pig, tests her theories on family and friends, and answers some of the most pressing questions - oddly, questions that other writers and researchers tend to ignore: @16@- Why do I find it tough to create a habit for something I love to do?@16@- I want to help someone else make a change. But how?@16@- Why do practically all dieters gain the weight back - plus more?@16@- How quickly can I change a habit?@16@- Why can I make time for everyone else, but can't make time for myself?@16@Whether you want to get more sleep, finish a project, maintain a healthy weight, or stop checking devices, habits make it possible. With Rubin's signature mix of rigorous research and easy humour, @18@Better Than Before@19@ will make us eager to start work on our own habits - even before we've finished the book.@3@
In this completely revised and updated edition of international bestseller WATCHING THE ENGLISH, anthropologist Kate Fox takes a revealing look at the quirks, habits and foibles of the English people. Now with new survey data to add weight to her original fieldwork findings, and more extensive field-research and experiments to back up earlier observations, Kate Fox has deciphered yet more enigmatic behaviour codes, adding new rules, new subcultures, new chapters and over 100 updates. If you're English, this new edition of Kate Fox's acclaimed international bestseller will make you stand back and re-examine everything you take for granted - and if you aren't English you'll finally understand all our peculiar little ways. WATCHING THE ENGLISH has sold more than half a million copies and has been translated into many languages. Not only a worldwide bestseller, but also a set text for university anthropology courses, WATCHING THE ENGLISH has been widely praised as a revealing and entertaining dissection of the English national character.
A scuba diving company faces bankruptcy because sharks have infested the area. Solution? Open the world's first extreme diving school. The Art of Creative Thinking reveals how we can transform ourselves, our businesses and our society through a deeper understanding of human creativity. Rod Judkins, of the world-famous St Martin's College of Art, has studied successful creative thinkers from every walk of life, throughout history. Drawing on an extraordinary range of reference points - from the Dada Manifesto to Nobel Prize Winning economists, from Andy Warhol's studio to Einstein's desk - he distils a lifetime's expertise into a succinct, surprising book that will inspire you to think more confidently and creatively. You'll realise why you should be happy when your train is cancelled; meet the most successful class in educational history (in which every single student won a Nobel prize); discover why graphic nudity during public speaking can be both a hindrance and surprisingly persuasive; and learn why, in the twenty-first century, it's technically illegal to be as good as Michelangelo. Be stubborn about compromise. Plan to have more accidents. Be mature enough to be childish. Contradict yourself more often. Discover the Art of Creative Thinking. *From the publishers of the international bestseller The Art of Thinking Clearly*
John Follain, who covers Italy for the Sunday Times, tells the definitive inside story of this extraordinary case.
Shortly after 12.30pm on 2 November 2007, Italian police were called to the Perugia home of 21-year-old British student Meredith Kercher. They found her body on the floor under a beige quilt. Her throat had been cut.
Four days later, the prosecutor jailed Meredith's flatmate American student Amanda Knox, and Raffaele Sollecito, her Italian boyfriend. He also jailed Rudy Guede, an Ivory Coast drifter. Four years later Knox and Sollecito were acquitted amid chaotic scenes in front of the world's media.
Uniquely based on four years of reporting and access to the complete case files, Death In Perugia takes readers on a riveting journey behind the scenes of the investigation, as John Follain shares the drama of the trials and appeal hearings he lived through.
Including exclusive interviews with Meredith's friends and other key sources, Death in Perugia reveals how the Italian dream turned into a nightmare.
The royal family's darkest secret and the establishment cover-up. Half a century before Dodi and Diana, another Prince of Wales would be involved in a deadly love triangle with a fabulously wealthy Egyptian "prince." Prince Edward was the future King of England, a destiny he would famously forsake over his love for Wallis Simpson. But two decades prior he was involved in another love affair that threatened to jeopardize the royal family. The story took place in maisons de rendezvous, luxurious chateaux in the French countryside providing hospitality for the British upper classes, the richest food, the finest wines and the most beautiful women, the violent and dangerous Paris demi-monde - where many of the women came from - and the Savoy hotel in London, where a murder was committed. This major royal scandal, superbly covered up by the Royal family, the government and the judiciary has remained secret ever since. This is the story of a passionate and deadly love affair set against the dramatic backdrop of the Great War. Edward was enthralled by the 'crazy physical attraction' of Marguerite Alibert, queen of the Paris demi-monde. When he broke off their hidden relationship, Edward thought that he was free of Marguerite. He was wrong. After the war, as a violent thunderstorm raged outside the luxurious Savoy Hotel in London Marguerite fired three shots from a semi-automatic pistol. Her husband, and Egyptian multimillionaire and playboy, was shot dead at point blank range. Marguerite stood trial for murder at the Old Bailey. As Prince Charming and poster boy of the British Empire, Edward now risked exposure as a degenerate wastrel, partying behind the lines while thousands were blown away on the Western Front. Andrew Rose, using his long experience as a barrister and judge, has uncovered a royal scandal carefully airbrushed from history. Edward never quite escaped from Marguerite who had taught the arts of love to a once and future King. The Prince, the Princess and the Perfect Murder is the product of several years' research, accessing unpublished documents held in the Royal Archives and private collections in England and France.
Does our shopping addiction contribute to climate change? What's so special about organic cotton? Who are the real fashion victims behind the GBP3 jeans? From the truth about fast fashion to the best biodegradable shoes, this guide explains the principles of ethical fashion, from why it matters to how to do it.
TV's queen of transformation, Nicky Hambleton-Jones, shares unmissable beauty secrets, and her top 10 recipes for style: the best wardrobe investment you'll make all year.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama interprets the ancient wisdom of the Buddha for the modern world. He speaks to us abour the paths to self- realisation, and the need to overcome negative emotions in order to develop one's inner consciousness.
'I asked Jai what she has learned since my diagnosis,' Randy Pausch wrote about his wife in The Last Lecture. 'Turns out, she could write a book titled Forget the Last Lecture; Here's the Real Story.' In Dream New Dreams, Jai Pausch shares her own journey, from wife and mother to caregiver, widow and parent to three young children. She paints a vivid portrait of a vital, challenging relationship between two strong people who faced a grim prognosis and the gut-wrenching decisions it often required.
With advice artfully woven into a personal narrative, Dream New Dreams will resonate note only with the legions of readers who made The Last Lecture an international bestseller, but also to all those who are embarking on a journey of loss and recovery themselves.
In MAFIA REPUBLIC, John Dickie, Professor of Italian Studies at University College, London and author of the international bestsellers COSA NOSTRA and MAFIA BROTHERHOODS, shows how the Italian mafias have grown in power and become more and more interconnected, with terrifying consequences. The Financial Times described John Dickie's MAFIA BROTHERHOODS as 'Powered by the sort of muscular prose that one associates with great detective fiction' and in MAFIA REPUBLIC John Dickie again marries outstanding scholarship with compelling storytelling. In 1946, Italy became a democratic Republic, thereby entering the family of modern western nations. But deep within Italy there lurked a forgotten curse: three major criminal brotherhoods, whose methods had been honed over a century of experience. As Italy grew, so did the mafias. Sicily's Cosa Nostra, the camorra from Naples, and the mysterious 'ndrangheta from Calabria stood ready to enter the wealthiest and bloodiest period of their long history. Italy made itself rich by making scooters, cars and handbags. The mafias carved out their own route to wealth through tobacco smuggling, construction, kidnapping and narcotics. And as criminal business grew exponentially, the mafias grew not just more powerful, but became more interconnected. By the 1980s, Southern Italy was on the edge of becoming a narco-state. The scene was set for a titanic confrontation between heroic representatives of the law, and mafiosi who could no longer tolerate any obstacle to their ambitions. This was a war for Italy's future as a civilized country. At its peak in 1992-93, the 'ndrangheta was beheading people in the street, and the Sicilian mafia murdered its greatest enemies, investigating magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, before embarking on a major terrorist bombing campaign on the Italian mainland. Today, the long shadow of mafia history still hangs over a nation wracked by debt, political paralysis, and widespread corruption. While police put their lives on the line every day, one of Silvio Berlusconi's ministers said that Italy had to 'learn to live with the mafia'; suspicions of mafia involvement still surround some of the country's most powerful media moguls and politicians. The latest investigations show that its reach is astonishing: it controls much of Europe's wholesale cocaine trade, and representatives from as far away as Germany, Canada and Australia come to Calabria to seek authorisation for their affairs. Just when it thought it had finally contained the mafia threat, Italy is now discovering that it harbours the most global criminal network of them all.
@2@Graham Hancock's multi-million bestseller @18@Fingerprints of the Gods@19@ remains an astonishing, deeply controversial, wide-ranging investigation of the mysteries of our past and the evidence for Earth's lost civilization. Twenty years on, Hancock returns with the sequel to his seminal work filled with completely new, scientific and archaeological evidence, which has only recently come to light...@3@@2@Near the end of the last Ice Age 12,800 years ago, a giant comet that had entered the solar system from deep space thousands of years earlier, broke into multiple fragments. Some of these struck the Earth causing a global cataclysm on a scale unseen since the extinction of the dinosaurs. At least eight of the fragments hit the North American ice cap, while further fragments hit the northern European ice cap. @3@@2@The impacts, from comet fragments a mile wide approaching at more than 60,000 miles an hour, generated huge amounts of heat which instantly liquidized millions of square kilometers of ice, destabilizing the Earth's crust and causing the global Deluge that is remembered in myths all around the world.@3@@2@A second series of impacts, equally devastating, causing further cataclysmic flooding, occurred 11,600 years ago, the exact date that Plato gives for the destruction and submergence of Atlantis. @3@@2@The evidence revealed in this book shows beyond reasonable doubt that an advanced civilization that flourished during the Ice Age was destroyed in the global cataclysms between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.@3@@2@But there were survivors - known to later cultures by names such as 'the Sages', 'the Magicians', 'the Shining Ones', and 'the Mystery Teachers of Heaven'. They travelled the world in their great ships doing all in their power to keep the spark of civilization burning. They settled at key locations - Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, Baalbek in the Lebanon, Giza in Egypt, ancient Sumer, Mexico, Peru and across the Pacific where a huge pyramid has recently been discovered in Indonesia. Everywhere they went these 'Magicians of the Gods' brought with them the memory of a time when mankind had fallen out of harmony with the universe and paid a heavy price.@3@@2@A memory and a warning to the future... For the comet that wrought such destruction between 12,800 and 11,600 years may not be done with us yet. Astronomers believe that a 20-mile wide 'dark' fragment of the original giant comet remains hidden within its debris stream and threatens the Earth. An astronomical message encoded at Gobekli Tepe, and in the Sphinx and the pyramids of Egypt,warns that the 'Great Return' will occur in our time...@3@
FUTURE-PROOFING FOR THINKERS. 'What skills and abilities will a student need to prosper in five, ten, or fifteen years' time?' In a world of change, where skills become out of date quickly, it is ideas that last. We all need to be prepared for a world that is fluid, global and interdisciplinary. Distinctions between specialties will blur and overlap. Change is happening at electrifying speed. In this vortex there are no maps. Featuring 100 interactive chapters to inspire groundbreaking new ideas, this is perfect for fans of Keri Smith's Wreck this Journal , Paul Arden's It's Not How Good You Are and Rolf Dobelli's global bestseller The Art of Thinking Clearly.
