* 'Great art has dreadful manners...' Simon Schama observes at the start of his epic exploration of the power, and whole point, of art. 'The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality...' * With the same disarming force,...

WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY MARGARET ATWOOD AND DAVID BRADSHAWFar in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his distress...Huxley's ingenious fantasy of th...

Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)Abundant, ecstatic, generous, courageous - this is the first American epic poem, a celebration of selfhood and a catalogue of nineteenth-century American life of all ages and races.

One of the world’s greatest scientists of human behaviour, the bestselling author of Behave, shows that free will does not exist - and sets out the disturbing yet liberating implications of accepting this fact.

‘One of the best scientist-writers of our time’ OLIVER SACKS

What if free will is an illusion? As Robert Sapolsky shows in this masterful account of the science of human behaviour, everything we think and do is caused by the luck of our biology and the influence of our environmen...

WITH A NEW EPILOGUE BY THE AUTHORLike Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, The Noonday Demon digs deep into personal history, as Andrew Solomon narrates, brilliantly and terrifyingly, his own agonising experience of depression.

Jennifer Doudna, the world-famous scientist behind CRISPR, 'one of the most monumental discoveries in biology' (New York Times), explains its discovery, describes its power to reshape the future of all life and warns of its use. 'Urgent, riveting and endlessly fascinating, this book is destined to become an instant classic.

WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY MARGARET ATWOOD AND DAVID BRADSHAWFar in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free.

A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his distress... Huxley's ingenious fantasy of t...

Vintage Voyages: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mindWhat begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia becomes the great, constellated story of people and cultures past and present: of Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms.

History does not repeat, but it does instruct. European history shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances. Today, we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the twentieth century. This book deals with this topic.