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Where the land meets the sea, life clings to the margins in a world of relentless change. The intertidal zone is a place of extremes-where creatures endure crashing waves, scorching sun, and the constant ebb and flow of the tides. It is a place of resilience and adaptation and home to some of the most extraordinary organisms on the planet. Blending marine biology, oceanography, and evolutionary science, marine biologist Ruth Searle takes us on a journey through the deep history of the intertidal zone - from its ancient origins as the possible cradle of life to the remarkable adaptations of the species that inhabit it today. Exploring the geological forces that shape coastlines, the mechanics of tides and waves, and the evolutionary arms race that has unfolded on the shore, this book reveals how the intertidal has not only survived mass extinctions but has driven some of nature's most extraordinary innovations. The Intertidal Zone: Life on the Edge is a celebration of one of Earth's most dynamic ecosystems - its beauty, its mysteries, and its fragility. As climate change and human activity reshape coastlines across the planet, understanding the intertidal has never been more urgent.

Based on the hit BBC 5Live podcast series, The Trillion Dollar Conman is a tale of audacious international fraud that is stranger than fiction. In 2009, Notts County FC were struggling to survive in League Two when they were taken over by a mysterious company supposedly backed by the Bahrain royal family. The club was promised millions of pounds worth of investment and marquee players, including Sol Campbell and Kasper Schmeichel, were signed by former England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson, who had been appointed to take the club all the way to the Premier League. However, within months, the dream turned into a nightmare as it transpired that the club, the players and the fans had been duped by a convicted fraudster called Russell King. The world's oldest professional football club found itself at the centre of one of the most outlandish frauds in sporting history, which spanned the globe from Nottingham to North Korea, involving fake sheikhs, fast cars, broken promises and a trail of destruction.

Oscar Piastri is a rising star in the world of Formula One. Laser-focused, talented and with a huge future ahead of him, he represents the new breed of drivers hungry for success. After just a few seasons at the top, he has shown himself to be a driver of exceptional ability. In this book, motorsport writer Anthony Meredith charts Piastri's remarkable rise from the suburbs of Melbourne to the pinnacle of his sport. Documenting Piastri's trials and successes across his entire racing career, this is an essential read for fans everywhere.

When Del Ellis was growing up, he lost his way. Turning to crime, he was on the wrong path -a one-way ticket to a life of regret and pain for himself and those around him. Today he runs a successful youth outreach programme and charity, advocating for young people. How did he get her? n this book, Del tells his story with searing honesty and directness. Reflecting on his former life, he explores the mistakes made and the lessons learnt while examining his own character, seeking reason in the contours of his life. With remarkable self-awareness, Del never shies away from the conflicting feelings and tensions that exist within us all. Del managed to turn his life around, and doing so awakened a deep sense of duty to his community - he knew he had to give back and to stop others from making the same mistakes he did. Today, through YES Mentoring and Increase The Peace, he enables young people reach their potential and avoid a life of regret. This book is his inspiring story, told in his own inimitable voice.

Laying your head in water is what you do when you're having a bad day. The water is where you go when you need time to think. It's where you go when you reach a crossroads in your life. Living in Copenhagen had been a dream for Laura Hall and it was working out - until it wasn't. She discovered that the trials of life will follow you anywhere, as she felt herself disintegrating into stress and burn out. She was unmoored and unsure of how to find her place in the world. What followed was a year swimming the cold seas of Scandinavia in search of answers and meaning. She swam in iceberg-filled seas in Greenland, visited Viking spas in Iceland, and beaches and piers all over Norway, Denmark and Sweden. During this year of discovery, Laura met other people doing the same thing and swapped notes, discovering ways to use the water to strengthen a bond with nature and get back to a more human way of life. A love letter to the sea and the people of Scandinavia, this book is also a clarion call for anybody stuck in a rut who needs to rekindle their lust for life. It's time to reconnect with the natural world. It's time to lay your head in the water.

Where does the myth of the refrigerator mother come fro? o vaccines cause autis? o autistic people lack empath? iscover the most common myths and legends about autism with Vera and her companions from the Autism Dream Team and the Equality All Stars. This book challenges preconceptions about autism and explains complex ideas with a range of superb illustrations and easy to understand language, making it an essential guide for anybody looking to gain a deeper understanding of the topic. This fun, accessible and illuminating book takes the reader on a journey of discovery and is a celebration of the difference and variety of humanity.

''A delicious, gossipy and thoroughly engaging romp ... heartily recommended.'' Tim Tate, author of Hitler''s British Traitors and The Spy Who Was Left Out in the ColdAmbassador''s daughter, Nazi love interest, Soviet spy, FBI most wanted.Accompanying her parents to Berlin in the 1930s, Martha Dodd knew almost nothing about Adolf Hitler or the Nazis. Yet almost overnight, she stepped into the spotlight, and found herself at the over-heated centre of Hitler''s ''New Germany'', befriending and dating several high-ranking Nazis, including the head of the Gestapo.An affair with a dashing Russian diplomat saw her recruited as a spy, and so began a long and tumultuous career in both Berlin and America, including attempts to infiltrate First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt''s inner circle and playing a key role in Henry Wallace''s disastrous 1948 presidential campaign.Betrayed by a Hollywood-hustler-turned-double-agent, Martha spent years under deep FBI surveillance - escaping twice - and went to ground in Cold War Prague, sad, lonely, rich and bored, living out her final decades in a Communist Sunset Boulevard.Largely forgotten, Martha Dodd began to emerge as an iconic historical figure in the early 2000s. While her scandalous behaviour and pro-Soviet leanings were never much in dispute, the actual matter of her guilt remained unresolved. Now, using recently released KGB archived information and FBI files, author and journalist Brendan McNally sets the record straight in Traitor''s Odyssey, telling the full epic tale of Martha Dodd''s life for the first time, casting her in a new and bright light.

*''A TIMELY AND IMPORTANT BOOK'' - ORLANDO FIGES**''SPELLBINDING'' - ANDREI KURKOV**ONE OF HISTORY TODAY''S BEST BOOKS OF 2024*For more than a millennium, the Russian Orthodox Church has shown astonishing survival skills - from the Mongol yoke to tsarist demagoguery and enlightenment, from Soviet atheism to the chaotic 1990s. Now again, it is at the right hand of power, sanctifying Vladimir Putin''s invasion of Ukraine.In this provocative new book, Lucy Ash reveals how, under Putin, religion is being stripped of its spiritual content and used as a weapon to control the population. Orthodox clerics and their acolytes distort theology as they preach Slav Christian supremacy and drag Russia backwards into a new Middle Ages.Combining historical research with vivid present-day reportage, The Baton and the Cross explores the impact the Church is having on millions of lives - from the tower blocks of big cities to far-flung villages in Siberia. Delving into the underbelly of politics, state security and big money, Ash shows how these forces have formed an unholy alliance with Orthodoxy in the dystopia of twenty-first century Russia.

Brad Fox takes us on a wild exploration of plants and people, imagination and matter, over an unexpected year-long waylay in the high jungle of northeastern Peru. In Another Bone-Swapping Event, Brad Fox tells the story of a year he spent stuck in the high jungles of Peru living with a family of Quechua-speaking curanderos responsible for a hundred-hectare stretch of jungle four hours' walk from the nearest dirt road. In the care of local maestro Miguel Tapullima, Fox gets a crash course in traditional medicine and takes readers on a labyrinthine tour, in turn contemplative and comic, navigating the coexisting realities of the human and more-than-human world. Through it all, the lush prose that made The Bathysphere Book so distinct turns this book into its own rich and multi-layered experience, because with Brad Fox as our guide we're able to stretch our minds to encompass histories and meanings, metaphysical questions at the base of phenomena, and the shattering ironies of the moment, all during peak COVID, when no one knew how our collective future might unfold.

James Briggs had never known what David Bowie''s Life on Mars? meant. And twenty-five years later with a career stealing his soul, a relationship in stasis and a hairline in furious retreat, life on earth had him cornered. So when a lightning bolt of inspiration strikes, he leaves everything behind to cycle one of the song''s lyrics, ''From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads'' to discover what life, love and Life on Mars? really mean. What followed was life-affirming, inspirational and often hilarious. Criss-crossing Europe, he visited French chateaus where Bowie recorded, Spanish Olympic stadiums he played, former communist states where his music was banned, and the Berlin Wall he helped topple - all while navigating angry Soviet ballerinas, suspicious village mayors, and an irate Cliff Richard fan. James found kindred spirits and a new love (and occasionally hatred) for cycling as he discovered what happens when, instead of following the crowd, you follow the lyrics and music of the greatest artist of the 20th century. As the world reconsiders its priorities, From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads is a clarion call to embrace the strange, blaze your own path, and live as fearlessly as the Starman himself.

From the mind behind YouTube sensation Into the Fog with Peter Laws. The Frighteners follows the quest of Peter Laws, a Baptist minister with a penchant for the macabre, to understand why so many people love things that are spooky, morbid and downright repellent. He meets vampires, hunts werewolves in Hull, talks to a man who has slept on a mortuary slab to help him deal with a diagnosis, and is chased by a chainsaw-wielding maniac through a farmhouse full of hanging bodies. Staring into the darkness of a Transylvanian night, he asks: What is it that makes millions of people seek to be disgusted and freaked out? And, in a world that worships rationality and points an accusing finger at violent video games and gruesome films, can an interest in horror culture actually give us safe ways to confront our mortality? Might it even have power to re-enchant our jaded worl? rab your crucifixes, pack the silver bullets, and join the Sinister Minister on his romp into our morbid curiosities.

A secluded country house. A rogue Anglican priest. Ceremonial sex and mislaid fortunes.This is the almost-forgotten story of Victorian Britain''s strangest religious sect and its wealthy, mostly female, followers who believed they could ascend directly to heaven. Henry James Prince was a rogue Anglican priest with a flare for the dramatic, and the founder of the Agapemone, or ''Abode of Love''. He also claimed to be the immortal conduit of the Holy Spirit and purportedly engaged in free love and ceremonial sex with his female followers. But Prince''s eventual death didn''t mark the end of this strange sect... he was promptly replaced by another: John Hugh Smyth-Pigott - otherwise known as the Clapton Messiah.The Abode transformed a sleepy, rural corner of Somerset into one of England''s most notorious locations. While the followers shut themselves away and waited patiently for the end of the world, outrage grew - the word ''Agapemone'' became a byword for licentiousness or idleness, used by Charles Dickens and Ford Madox Ford. The reclusive Clapton Messiah became a fixture in the nation''s papers, with frenzied efforts to discredit the organisation and undermine its leader. And still the cult grew.Expertly drawing on primary sources to tell the story of the Agapemonites in details for the first time, Stuart Flinders shines a light on the people drawn to the cult - the forced marriages; the swindled fortunes; the women condemned to asylums; and those who managed to escape from the Abode. It is also the story of two extraordinary men, whose claims of divinity were at the heart of this very British cult.

Beginning with the rise of modern Pentecostalism before tracking back 2,500 years, author and academic Gavin Evans traces the history of the Abrahamic faiths, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In this book he explores the New Testament, Hebrew Bible and the Qur''an.Delving into recent archaeological research, Bible Stories presents evidence that tales such as those of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and also Moses, Joshua and the Exodus, were entirely mythological. Robust interrogation of the evidence allows Evans to go further still, casting doubt on the Jesus story and arguing that even if he did exist as a historical figure, we know next to nothing about him. As well as examining these key religious texts, Bible Stories also holds modern atheism to account. Critiquing the work of some of its most ardent advocates, Evans rejects a militant approach and makes a compelling argument for a softer, more tolerant atheism.

Government agencies and rival factions were closing in. His look-alike had already fallen victim to professional hitmen and his once-powerful allies in Cuban intelligence and the DEA could no longer guarantee his safety. How did a boy from Manchester revolutionise the criminal world and become the largest marijuana trafficker in history?This is the never-before-told story of Harold Derber, the debonair British Merchant Navy veteran who invented the modern drug trade with his groundbreaking invention: the drug mothership. Through his ghost fleet of drug ships, Derber eventually become the chief supplier of marijuana to post-war America. This gripping true tale follows Derber from humble beginnings in Manchester, England to his assassination in the sun-kissed streets of Miami. Along the way, Derber''s story takes in some of the most significant events of the twentieth century - the Second World War''s Battle of the Atlantic, the Cuban Revolution and the murky shadows of the Cold War.Shedding light on a litany of plots including arms and refugee smuggling, large-scale stock fraud and Derber''s rise to the pinnacle of the drug world, this remarkable transatlantic story paints a complex picture of a singular figure and brings his extraordinary life into focus for the first time.

WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARDThis tech could change everything for women - here's how. From periods and childbirth to menopause, female pain has been normalized, as society shrugs and says 'welcome to being a woman' instead of coming up with better solutions. But it doesn't have to be this way. In The Vagina Business, award-winning journalist Marina Gerner takes an eye-opening look at the innovators challenging the status quo to deliver the healthcare solutions women need. With interviews from 100 entrepreneurs, researchers and investors across 15 countries, The Vagina Business explores the future of women's health, where female-focused companies are developing products to help women at every stage of life. From a life-saving bra to non-hormonal contraception and new takes on fertility and menopause, it shines a light on innovation that matters. Women should not be denied solutions to health issues just because people are embarrassed to talk about vaginas. We deserve much better.

Septimius Severus was Rome''s black emperor. Born in the blistering heat of a North African spring in Leptis Magna AD 145, he died in the freezing cold of a northern British winter in York in AD 211. A giant of an emperor, whose career can be counted in superlatives, Severus was in power at the height of Rome''s might. He led the largest army to ever campaign in Britain, comprising 50,000 men, part of a Roman military establishment which peaked at 33 legions under his rule.Born into the richest family, in the richest part of the Roman Empire, Severus monumentalised his rule across the empire. He visited - and often fought in - every region. Where he did, he left a mighty legacy in the built environment, for example in Rome where much of the Forum Romanum and most of the imperial palaces are Severan. In North Africa, his hometown of Leptis Magna is all Severan, as are the Roman cities at the Atlas mountains. In London, the land walls that still define the City''s Square Mile were delineated under his rule. Visitors to the under croft at York Minster can stand where he died. Septimius Severus was one of the greatest warrior emperors, a hard man who almost died in battle several times and whose attitude is reflected in his deathbed advice to two sons: ''Be of one mind with your family, enrich the soldiers, and despise the rest.''