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...

'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 ...

Learn the venture capital process and industry from the inside-outIn Building Value: The Business of Venture Capital, renowned professor and venture capital (VC) firm partner Simon Barnes delivers an easy-to-read guide to the often-mysterious world of venture capital and how entrepreneurs and venture capitalists should engage with each other to arrive at constructive start-up investment deals. In the book, you'll discover why successful entrepreneurial fin...

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...

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...

Reflections on the natural world and our place within it from one of our finest natural history writers – nature writing at its very best.We've all got one. A secret, special place. Hidden. Enclosed. A little greener and more fertile than the world outside. Here the birds are slightly more exotic, slightly more confiding, the grass greener and the fruit sweeter. To know such a place, to love such a place, is part of being human.Sometimes it's a place of myt...

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 ...

Simon Barnes is the leading sports writer on horses in Britain. This is a selection of his work.Whether writing in The Times about the extraordinary racing operation of Sheikh Mohammed, or the achievements of the Riding for the Disabled movement, in the Spectator about the social nuances of the hunting debate, in Horse and Hound about riding his own two horses or about the appearance of that magazine in Hugh Grant’s cover story in Notting Hill, Simon Barnes is a charming, incisive,...

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...

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...

A funny, romantic, evocative novel set against the safari tourism business in East Africa, written by an award-winning journalist.After the death of his beloved, bankrupt gambler of a father, Dan Lynch follows his university degree in zoology to a run-down safari camp, where he can work as a trainee guide and, most important, be near George Sorensen, the owner. George is a wildlife genius, but no great businessman, and the camp is threatened by lack of visitors, competition from th...

Life on planet earth is not weirder than we imagine. It"s weirder than we are capable of imagining. In this breathtakingly audacious book, Simon Barnes opens our eyes to the real marvels of the planet we live on.