Reading built the modern world. It helped create democracy, science and reason.Now, books are dying, and people everywhere are losing the ability to read deeply or think rationally.The golden chain of knowledge linking reader to reader through history is breaking.The screen has replaced the page. Our free time has been colonised by addictive, infantilising slop. A culture of distraction is replacing a culture of reasoned debate....

In a unique journey from the oil fields of the Caspian Sea to the refineries and financial centres of Northern Europe, James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello track the concealed routes along which flows the lifeblood of our economy. The stupendous resource of Azerbaijani crude has long inspired dreams of a world remade. From the revolutionary Futurism of the capital city, Baku, in the 1920s to the unblinking Capitalism of modern London, the drive to control the region's oil reserves-and he...

Pull back the curtain on more than a century of terrifying horror movies... if you dare.Packed with stills from the most terrifying scenes in cinema history, The Definitive Guide to Horror Movies is a comprehensive companion to the genre, tracing the story of horror film, decade-by-decade. Providing a witty and informative critique of more than 350 films and several TV series, this extensive handbook offers a superb introduction for newcomers to the genre ...

** THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMESBESTSELLER **'Without question the most important book of the year' MARINA HYDE'Superb' TOM HOLLANDReading built the modern world. It helped create democracy, science and reason.Now, books are dying, and people everywhere are losing the ability to read deeply or think rationally.The golden chain of...

'Dripping with delicious detail' - Aditya ChakraborttyTaking the reader on a journey through North East Scotland, Merseyside, South Wales, the Thames Estuary and London, this is the story of Britain’s oil-soaked past, present and future. Travelling the country, the authors discover how the financial power and political muscle of an industry built the culture of a nation from pop music to kitchen appliances, and how companies constructed an empire, extracting the wealth of the world...

sit back, get comfortable and get ready to enjoy seven spooky short stories. From a haunted mansion to a celestial garden, and from a crimean battleground to the trenches of world war one.

A gripping tale of a daring heroine testing her wits against a backdrop of secrets, spies and smugglers in perilous Far North Queensland in the late nineteenth century and based on a true story ...A daring heroine tests her wits against secrets, spies and smugglers on a remote Australian island 'It's peculiar, the assumptions we all make. For instance, how, in a diary, the truth bone's connected to the hand bone ... You shouldn't believe everything you read.' 1879, Queensland. Fleei...

The Human Novel opens during the Halifax Explosion....Tommy Joyce will never forget what he did in the mud-soaked trenches of Europe’s Great War, or the face of the comrade he betrayed.Halifax was supposed to bring peace in the arms of his wife Evie.Evie, already widowed once, risked her reputation when she became Mrs. Joyce, but her love for Tommy is her second chance at happiness.Their hopes are destroyed when a ship explodes in Halifax Harbour in the wint...

"People don't understand how desperate you have to be to eat a boot," he replied. "Exploration of uncharted territory is very demanding, especially in the arctic. They don't realise what we went through: the bitter cold, the scurvy, the unknown. Men died of starvation out there; they did desperate things. These were good men reduced to scraping moss from rocks to survive. Yes, we ate boot leather as well, but it was an act of desperation, a last ditch attempt at survival. They act like I a...

Marrying for money would save the career of a penurious young captain. But winning the daughter of The Wangler, an English tycoon, was a prospect to fear. Author John Ivor delights with this humorous account of bride-seeking in the early 1800s. The characters interact in an unusual, yet richly endowed, county mansion.

  Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson (17 February 1864 – 5 February 1941 was an Australian bush poet, journalist and author. He wrote many ballads and poems about Australian life, focusing particularly on the rural and outback areas, including the district around Binalong, New South Wales where he spent much of his childhood. Paterson's more notable poems include "Waltzing Matilda", "The Man from Snowy River" and "Clancy of the Overflow".

New York Times bestselling author Hazel Gaynor captivates with a beautifully rendered short story about the strength of a mother’s love as the Great War comes to an end at last . . .As the final moments tick down to the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, signaling the end of fighting, midwife Annie Rawlins is doing everything she can to save an infant’s life. Too many have lost too much and Annie prays that the time for sorrow has passed. Meanwhile ac...