Quercus/MacLehose Press

Gaze across history's bloodiest battlefields, as beautifully realised by the cartographers of the time. From the depiction of the battle of Pinkie Cleugh between England and Scotland in 1547 — the earliest map printed in the British Isles — to chartings of the American War of Independence, and from plans of the advance of the British fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar to the trench maps of World War I, this unique collection highlights the extraordinary influence cartography has had on the nature of warfare. Each illustration is accompanied by an extended caption on the background to the war, including the planning and conduct of the battle in question. Whether the map was used to plan a military campaign, or drawn just after the event to record the conflict, each provides a fascinating piece of military history, and brings the drama of the battle to life. This giant book not only allows these important cartographical documents to be showcased, but also provides a captivating illustrated history of the last 500 years of warfare.

This stunning collection of over 170 large-format colour illustrations includes paintings of ships at sea, in action, in convoy, and in siege; architectural drawings; battle diagrams; sea charts and signals; portraits of leading figures in naval history; and details of guns, sails, and life below deck. Taken from contemporary sources, they range from the Seven Years' War to the American Civil War. The book focuses on the navies of all the major Atlantic sea powers of the time, including Britain, America, France, Holland, Sweden and Russia. Arranged in chronological order, each illustration is accompanied by an extended caption that adds to this visual feast a compelling history of naval warfare in the last great age of sail. This volume is divided into eight chapters: The Seven Years' War 1755-62; The Napoleonic Wars 1803-15; The War of American Independence 1775-1783; The War of 1812; The Years of Exploration c.1770-1794; The Last Days of Sail; The French Revolutionary Wars 1792-1802; and Steam and Iron.

The magnificent vault of stars emblazoning Earth's night skies are but an infinitesimal fraction of the hundreds of billions that inhabit our galaxy — and there are at least as many galaxies in the universe as there are stars in the Milky Way. Cosmos makes sense of this dizzying celestial panorama by exploring it one step at a time, illustrating the planets, moons, stars, nebulae, white dwarfs, black holes and other exotica that populate the heavens with some of science's most spectacular photographs. The book opens with an orbital survey of planet Earth, before venturing into the solar system heading for interstellar space and the heart of our galaxy. As the journey unfolds, the rhythms of stellar life emerge: we pass through dark clouds of dust and gas ablaze with newly smelted stars and we witness dying stars bloom and fade as planetary nebulae, or tear themselves apart as supernovae. Having crossed the Milky Way, we enter intergalactic space. Out here we watch the hidden lives of galaxies: we see them flock and cluster, forming massive conglomerations that span millions of light years, visibly warping space with their tremendous gravity. After covering an almost unimaginable 13.4 billion light years, we approach the edge of space and the dawn of time where our voyage must end, but not before we consider how the universe was born, and how it might die.

Have you ever lain awake at night fretting over how we can be sure of the reality of the external world? Perhaps we are in fact disembodied brains, floating in vats at the whim of some deranged puppet-master? If so, you are not alone — and what's more, you are in exalted company. For this question and other ones like it have been the stuff of philosophical rumination from Plato to Popper. In a series of accessible and engagingly written essays, 50 Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know introduces and explains the problems of knowledge, consciousness, identity, ethics, belief, justice and aesthetics that have engaged the attention of thinkers from the era of the ancient Greeks to the present day.

Melander likes to do things flashy. When Parker finds himself working with Melander on a bank heist in a mid-sized midwestern city, his job is throwing a Molotov cocktail into a gas station. The resulting explosion sends the cops and fire trucks to the east side of town, while Melander and his gang plunder the bank on the west side. But Parker doesn't care for Melander's plan for a new heist, one that will clean out Palm Beach of a lot of very expensive jewelry. What Parker really dislikes is Melander's intention to use the proceeds from the bank job to capitalize the Palm Beach job... including Parker's cut. Melander is very polite about Parker's disinterest, and very sincere about paying him his share... with interest... after the jewelry job goes down. But that's not the way Parker works. Now he's tailing the gang down South, with a plan for getting his own back... and the entire swag of gems besides.

Merrily Watkins, parish priest, single mum and Deliverance Consultant to the Diocese of Hereford, heads for the Malvern Hills to investigate an alleged paranormal dimension to a spate of road accidents in the sleepy village of Wychehill. Merrily is called in when two people are killed in a head-on crash that is also linked to the revamped local pub which, it seems, has injected the valley with a shattering, strobing surge of inner-city nightlife... and drugs. When a dealer is found savagely murdered below the great earthen hillfort of Herefordshire Beacon, police ask: is it a ritual killing, a gangland disposal or a cry of outrage? As Merrily and the police follow separate paths towards the truth, Merrily's teenage daughter, Jane, faces the consequences of her own obsession with a possibly prehistoric site in their home village of Ledwardine. Until, on a night of frenzied violence, in a place at the centre of an ancient, universal mystery, the final, shocking connections are made.

From the reign of Alfred the Great — the first king of Wessex to call himself 'king of England' — in the 9th century, to the shock of Norman invasion in the 11th, and from the brutal vicissitudes of late medieval kingship to the comfortable ceremonial of modern-day constitutional monarchy, the story of England's kings and queens is to a large degree that of England herself. Kings and Queens of England offers readable profiles of 59 English monarchs from Harold II to Henry VIII, and from Ethelred the Unready to Elizabeth II. Each monarch is elegantly profiled and the impact of their rule on wider English history clearly and concisely described and analysed. For every king and queen there is a detailed timeline, and the narrative is further amplified by display quotations, feature boxes, panels of key biographical facts, and — last but not least — by 150 lavish full-colour images. Ian Crofton recounts a 1000-year tale of murder, invasion, usurpation, adultery, divorce, civil war and revolution in a manner that is as entertaining as it is informative. The Kings and Queens of England is the perfect choice for anyone looking for an illustrated account of the English monarchy from the Anglo-Saxon era to the present.

Combining the data from 18 of the most advanced Earth satellites ever built, NASA has constructed the most detailed global portrait of our planet ever created. The Complete Earth reproduces this photomap in its entirety and at full-resolution, living up to its title by revealing the whole planet, cloud-free, at a resolution of 500m to every pixel, or 90 miles to every inch. At this scale we can trace the Amazon from Andean headwaters to Atlantic mouth, or explore the trackless sand seas of the Sahara, or follow the corrugated ridges of hills and mountains that mark the front line of India's tectonic assault on Eurasia as if we were in low-Earth orbit. These images are supplemented by a wealth of even higher resolution satellite imagery that zooms in on noteworthy features — from volcanoes to cities, river deltas to glaciers. In addition, 12 double-page-spreads chart one year in the life of our planet as they follow the ebb and flow of the seasons across the globe: we watch snow fall in the North as it melts in the South, and desert lands bloom and fade as the rains come and go. Accompanying the images, a brief but informative text explores the history of each landscape, explaining the how and when of its mountain ranges, deserts and plains.

With an introduction by Tariq Ali. Now almost exclusively known as the author of the bestselling Trilogy, as a professional journalist Stieg Larsson was an untiring crusader for democracy and equality. As a reporter and editor-in-chief on the journal Expo he researched the extreme right both in Sweden and at an international level. Collected here for the first time are essays and articles on right-wing extremism and racism, on violence against women and women's rights, on homophobia and honour killings. Included also is an account written for Vagabond magazine of his travels aboard the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow to Beijing. His most important writings — perceptive, learned and committed texts — illustrate the breadth of his journalistic and political activities in connection with matters that were closest to his heart, and to which he devoted his life. Despite death threats and financial difficulties, Larsson never ceased to fight for and write about his most firmly held principles; it was his commitment to these which gave his best-selling novels their explosive force.

Drift through outer space with a doomed cosmonaut whose engine has cut out; return to an irradiated village with an elderly couple who want to go home; experience that sinking feeling common to all who visit Voromir, where graviatonal forces are 30 per cent higher than in the rest of the world; ask yourself, did Elvis really play a concert in Red Square? The ridiculous is rendered sublime in Francesc Seres' collection of twenty-one impish and outrageous stories by five imaginary Russian writers. Each story mines a discrete facet of Russian life, history or culture, and as a whole they sketch a historical arc that begins in the nineteenth century and ends in the age of budget airlines. Russian Stories is a virtuoso collection by a master of the genre, offering the reader a winning combination of daring, wit, dash and charm.