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HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'From that hour we had no further occasion for the exercise of reason, or judgment, or skill, or contrivance. We were henceforth to be hurled along, the playthings of the fierce elements of the deep.' In Verne's science-fiction classic, Professor Lidenbrock chances upon an ancient manuscript and pledges to solve the mysterious coded message that lies within it. Eventually he deciphers the story - that of an Icelandic explorer who travels to the centre of the earth, finding his way there via a volcano. Inspired by the manuscript, The Professor is determined to follow in the explorer's footsteps and builds a crew of men which includes his nervous nephew Axel. Together they begin their journey to the centre of the earth, facing fearsome danger and adventure at every turn.

Adam Zamoyski first wrote his history of Poland two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. This substantially revised and updated edition sets the Soviet era in the context of the rise, fall and remarkable rebirth of an indomitable nation. In 1797, Russia, Prussia and Austria divided Poland among themselves, rewriting Polish history to show that they had brought much-needed civilisation to a primitive backwater. But the country they wiped off the map had been one of Europe's largest and most richly varied, born of diverse cultural traditions and one of the boldest constitutional experiments ever attempted. Its destruction ultimately led to two world wars and the Cold War. Zamoyski's fully revised history of Poland looks back over a thousand years of turmoil and triumph, chronicling how Poland has been restored at last to its rightful place in Europe.

Human life is a staggeringly strange thing. On the surface of a ball of rock falling around a nuclear fireball in the blackness of a vacuum the laws of nature conspired to create a naked ape that can look up at the stars and wonder where it came from. What is a human being? Objectively, nothing of consequence. Particles of dust in an infinite arena, present for an instant in eternity. Clumps of atoms in a universe with more galaxies than people. And yet a human being is necessary for the question itself to exist, and the presence of a question in the universe - any question - is the most wonderful thing. Questions require minds, and minds bring meaning. What is meaning? I don't know, except that the universe and every pointless speck inside it means something to me. I am astonished by the existence of a single atom, and find my civilisation to be an outrageous imprint on reality. I don't understand it. Nobody does, but it makes me smile. This book asks questions about our origins, our destiny, and our place in the universe. We have no right to expect answers; we have no right to even ask. But ask and wonder we do. Human Universe is first and foremost a love letter to humanity; a celebration of our outrageous fortune in existing at all. I have chosen to write my letter in the language of science, because there is no better demonstration of our magnificent ascent from dust to paragon of animals than the exponentiation of knowledge generated by science. Two million years ago we were apemen. Now we are spacemen. That has happened, as far as we know, nowhere else. That is worth celebrating.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. First published in 1898, 'Moonfleet' is a riveting adventure story full of drama, mystery, revenge, pursuit, smuggling, pirates and romance, with a place in the literary canon alongside 'Treasure Island' and 'Kidnapped'. The tiny village of Moonfleet nestles on the English coast, and every one of its inhabitants lives off the sea in one way or another. When local young man John Trenchard accidentally stumbles upon treasure stashed in the local crypt, he unknowingly enters the murky world of the smuggling trade and the local secret of Colonel John Mohune's treasure. Trenchard is soon forced to flee England with a price on his head, leaving behind his beloved Grace and the life he hoped for. But the adventures, trials and tribulations that befall him on his personal journey back to Moonfleet and ultimately redemption are written with such intensity and hope, as well as love for the history and landscape of Dorset, that the story never loses pace or power on its epic journey. 'Moonfleet' is a classic adventure story to be read again and again.

Eddy Merckx. Fausto Coppi. Jacques Anquetil. Bernard Hinault. Beryl Burton. Marianne Vos. A sole cyclist battling over a pass high in the mountains is one of the most romantic of sporting images. In the past 150 years road cycling has been dominated by a series of iconic people who have redefined endurance and fortitude. Every decade has pushed human limits, until limits were extended by inhuman pharmacology. And these battles have not been fought over just one race, but an annual series beginning with the Spring Classics and then culminating in the three great tours - the Giro d'Italia, Vuelta d'Espagne and the Tour de France - before the cyclists retire to lick their wounds and start on another winter of training. The Call of the Road is the definitive story of cycle road racing, from the first race in 1868 to the present day. It is a story that has never been told as the professionals experience it - as a whole energy-sapping year. It looks at the beginning and development of the sport, it explains the tactics and looks at the different physical types that succeed. It explains why some nations have dominated this sport and why, until recently, British riders have underperformed. It also looks at the way the great races were founded and developed, and how the great riders stamped their authority on them through the ages. Sidwells doesn't shy away from controversy: dissecting the vexed and seemingly ever-present question of doping. The final chapter brings the story of road racing completely up to date with insight into jiffy bags and salbutamol levels. Truly international in scope, looking at road racing in North and Latin America, Australia, Africa and Asia, as well as continental Europe, The Call of the Road is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the history, tactics or personalities of cycle road racing.

From the ultimate insider – a former General Motors executive and current advisor to the Google Self-Driving Car project – comes the definitive story of the race between Google, Tesla and Uber to create the driverless car. We stand on the brink of a technological revolution. In the near future, most of us will not own automobiles, but will travel instead in driverless electric vehicles summoned at the touch of an app. We will be liberated from driving, so that the time we spend in cars can be put to more productive use. We will prevent more than 90 percent of car crashes, provide freedom of mobility to the elderly and disabled and decrease our dependence on fossil fuels. Autonomy tells the story of the maverick engineers and computer experts who triggered the revolution. Lawrence Burns – long-time adviser to the Google self-driving car project (now Waymo) and former corporate vice president of research, development and planning at General Motors – provides the perfectly timed history of how we arrived at this point, in a character-driven and vivid account of the unlikely thinkers who accomplished what billion-dollar automakers never dared. Beginning at a 2004 off-road robot race across the Mojave Desert with a million-dollar purse and continuing up to the current stampede to develop driverless technology, Autonomy is a page-turning chronicle of the past, a diagnosis of the present and a prediction of the future – the ultimate guide to understanding the driverless car and to navigating the revolution it has sparked.

Our understanding of the `tree of life', with powerful implications for human genetics, human health and our own human nature, has recently completely changed. This book is about a new method of telling the story of life on earth - through molecular phylogenetics. It involves a fairly simple method - the reading of the deep history of life by looking at the variation in protein molecules found in living organisms. For instance, we now know that roughly eight per cent of the human genome arrived not through traditional inheritance from directly ancestral forms, but sideways by viral infection. In The Tangled Tree, acclaimed science writer David Quammen chronicles these discoveries through the lives of the researchers who made them - such as Carl Woese, the most important little-known biologist of the twentieth century; Lynn Margulis, the notorious maverick whose wild ideas about `mosaic' creatures proved to be true; and Tsutomu Wantanabe, who discovered that the scourge of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a direct result of horizontal gene transfer, bringing the deep study of genome histories to bear on a global crisis in public health. Quammen explains how molecular studies of evolution have brought startling recognitions about the tangled tree of life - including where we humans fit into it. Thanks to new technologies, we now have the ability to alter even our genetic composition - through sideways insertions, as nature has long been doing. The Tangled Tree is a brilliant exploration of our transformed understanding of evolution and of life's history itself.

A fresh, opinionated history of all the brilliant women you should have learned about in school but didn't.In this freewheeling history of modern Britain, Cathy Newman writes about the pioneering women who defied the odds to make careers for themselves and alter the course of modern history; women who achieved what they achieved while dismantling hostile, entrenched views about their place in society. Their role in transforming Britain is fundamental, far greater than has generally been acknowledged, and not just in the arts or education but in fields like medicine, politics, law, engineering and the military.While a few of the women in this book are now household names, many have faded into oblivion, their personal and collective achievements mere footnotes in history. We know of Emmeline Pankhurst, Vera Brittain, Marie Stopes and Beatrice Webb. But who remembers engineer and motorbike racer Beatrice Shilling, whose ingenious device for the Spitfires' Rolls-Royce Merlin fixed an often-fatal flaw, allowing the RAF's planes to beat the German in the Battle of Britain? Or Dorothy Lawrence, the journalist who achieved her ambition to become a WW1 correspondent by pretending to be a man? And developmental biologist Anne McLaren, whose work in genetics paved the way for in vitro fertilisation?Were it not for women, significant features of modern Britain like council housing, municipal swimming pools and humane laws relating to property ownership, child custody and divorce wouldn't exist in quite the same way. Women's drive and talent for utopian thinking created new social and legislative agendas. The women in these pages blazed a trail from the 1918 Representation of the People Act - which allowed some women to vote - through to Margaret Thatcher's ousting from Downing Street.Blending meticulous research with information gleaned from memoirs, diaries, letters, novels and other secondary sources, Bloody Brilliant Women uses the stories of some extraordinary lives to tell the tale of 20th and 21st century Britain. It is a history for women and men. A history for our times.

A new, beautifully illustrated edition of David Attenborough's groundbreaking Life on Earth. David Attenborough's unforgettable meeting with gorillas became an iconic moment for millions of television viewers. Life on Earth, the series and accompanying book, fundamentally changed the way we view and interact with the natural world setting a new benchmark of quality, influencing a generation of nature lovers. Told through an examination of animal and plant life, this is an astonishing celebration of the evolution of life on earth, with a cast of characters drawn from the whole range of organisms that have ever lived on this planet. Attenborough's perceptive, dynamic approach to the evolution of millions of species of living organisms takes the reader on an unforgettable journey of discovery from the very first spark of life to the blue and green wonder we know today. Now, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the book's first publication, David Attenborough has revisited Life on Earth, completely updating and adding to the original text, taking account of modern scientific discoveries from around the globe. He has chosen beautiful, completely new photography, helping to illustrate the book in a much greater way than was possible forty years ago. This special anniversary edition provides a fitting tribute to an enduring wildlife classic, destined to enthral the generation who saw it when first published and bring it alive for a whole new generation.

The indispensable, illustrated pocket guide to New York movies, from Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen to Lena Dunham and Noah Baumbach. ALSO AVAILABLE: Close-Ups: Wes Anderson Close-Ups: Vampire Movies New York has always been one of the world's most filmed cities, with its apartments housing tenants like Rosemary's baby and the Royal Tenenbaums, its skyscrapers scaled by the likes of King Kong and graffiti artists and its rubble-strewn streets prowled by everyone from Travis Bickle to Carrie Bradshaw. In this illustrated pocket guide to New York and its movies, Mark Asch explores the Big Apple block by block and neighbourhood by neighbourhood, jogging past the iconic bench from Manhattan, eating at Katz's Deli from When Harry Met Sally and mooching around the Coney Island boardwalk like one of The Warriors. Retracing the steps of countless iconic actors, cinematographers and directors, he draws up a unique cinematic map of The City That Never Sleeps.

The indispensable, illustrated pocket guide to the films of Wes Anderson, from Bottle Rocket to Isle of Dogs. ALSO AVAILABLE: Close-Ups: Vampire Movies Close-Ups: New York Movies Wes Anderson is a distinctive auteur of modern American cinema, known for having created a personal universe out of pastel colour palettes, meticulous set design, nostalgic soundtracks and a troupe of familiar actors - all seen in films such as Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Isle of Dogs. In this illustrated pocket guide Sophie Monks Kaufman delves beneath Anderson's pristine surfaces to examine his emotional preoccupations with family, romance, failure, adventure and death. She carefully unspools the cultural threads that inform his aesthetic to explain why this precocious arthouse film nerd from Texas has become one of the most popular directors of his generation.

Between 1941 and 1944, sixteen thousand plucky homing pigeons were dropped in an arc from Bordeaux to Copenhagen as part of 'Columba' – a secret British operation to bring back intelligence from those living under Nazi occupation. The messages flooded back written on tiny pieces of rice paper tucked into canisters and tied to the legs of the birds. Authentic voices from rural France, the Netherlands and Belgium – they were sometimes comic, often tragic and occasionally invaluable with details of German troop movements and fortifications, new Nazi weapons, radar system or the deployment of the feared V-1 and V-2 rockets that terrorized London. Who were the people who provided this rich seam of intelligence? Many were not trained agents nor, with a few exceptions, people with any experience of spying. At the centre of this book is the ‘Leopold Vindictive’ network – a small group of Belgian villagers prepared to take huge risks. They were led by an extraordinary priest, Joseph Raskin – a man connected to royalty and whose intelligence was so valuable it was shown to Churchill, leading MI6 to parachute agents in to assist him. A powerful and tragic tale of wartime espionage, the book brings together the British and Belgian sides of the Leopold Vindictive’s story and reveals for the first time the wider history of a quirky, quarrelsome band of spy masters and their special wartime operations, as well as how bitter rivalries in London placed the lives of secret agents at risk. It is a book not so much about pigeons as the remarkable people living in occupied Europe who were faced with the choice of how to respond to a call for help, and took the decision to resist.

Bestselling author Simon Winchester writes a magnificent history of the pioneering engineers who developed precision machinery to allow us to see as far as the moon and as close as the Higgs boson. Precision is the key to everything. It is an integral, unchallenged and essential component of our modern social, mercantile, scientific, mechanical and intellectual landscapes. The items we value in our daily lives - a camera, phone, computer, bicycle, car, a dishwasher perhaps - all sport components that fit together with precision and operate with near perfection. We also assume that the more precise a device the better it is. And yet whilst we live lives peppered and larded with precision, we are not, when we come to think about it, entirely sure what precision is, or what it means. How and when did it begin to build the modern world? Simon Winchester seeks to answer these questions through stories of precision's pioneers. Exactly takes us back to the origins of the Industrial Age, to Britain where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John `Iron-Mad' Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. Thomas Jefferson exported their discoveries to the United States as manufacturing developed in the early twentieth century, with Britain's Henry Royce developing the Rolls Royce and Henry Ford mass producing cars, Hattori's Seiko and Leica lenses, to today's cutting-edge developments from Europe, Asia and North America. As he introduces the minds and methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? Who has invented and perfected it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value, such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we would wish it to be? And can the precise and the natural co-exist in society?

Vietnam became the Western world's most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the United States in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. He portrays the set pieces of Dienbienphu, the Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and less familiar battles such as the bloodbath at Daido, where a US Marine battalion was almost wiped out, together with extraordinary recollections of Ho Chi Minh's warriors. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed 2 million people. Many writers treat the war as a US tragedy, yet Hastings sees it as overwhelmingly that of the Vietnamese people, of whom forty died for every American. US blunders and atrocities were matched by those committed by their enemies. While all the world has seen the image of a screaming, naked girl seared by napalm, it forgets countless eviscerations, beheadings and murders carried out by the communists. The people of both former Vietnams paid a bitter price for the Northerners' victory in privation and oppression. Here is testimony from Vietcong guerrillas, Southern paratroopers, Saigon bargirls and Hanoi students alongside that of infantrymen from South Dakota, Marines from North Carolina, Huey pilots from Arkansas. No past volume has blended a political and military narrative of the entire conflict with heart-stopping personal experiences, in the fashion that Max Hastings' readers know so well. The author suggests that neither side deserved to win this struggle with so many lessons for the 21st century about the misuse of military might to confront intractable political and cultural challenges. He marshals testimony from warlords and peasants, statesmen and soldiers, to create an extraordinary record.

In The Killer Across the Table, legendary FBI criminal profiler and number one bestselling author John Douglas delves deep into the lives and crimes of four of the most disturbing and complex predatory killers he's encountered, offering never-before-revealed details about his profiling process and divulging the strategies used to crack some of his most challenging cases. Former Special Agent John Douglas has sat across the table from many of the world's most notorious killers - including Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, `Coed Killer' Edmund Kemper, `Son of Sam Killer' David Berkowitz and `BTK Strangler' Dennis Rader, and has also been instrumental in the exoneration of Amanda Knox and the West Memphis Three. He has gone on to become a legend in the world of criminal investigative analysis, and his work has inspired TV shows and films such as Mindhunter, Criminal Minds and The Silence of the Lambs. In this riveting work of true crime, Douglas spotlights four very different criminals he's confronted over the course of his career, and explains how they helped him to put together the puzzle of how psychopaths and predators think. Taking us inside the interrogation room and demonstrating the unique techniques he uses to understand the workings of the most terrifying and incomprehensible minds, The Killer Across the Table is an unputdownable journey into the darkest reaches of criminal profiling and behavioural science from a man who knows serial killers better than anyone else. As Douglas says: `If you want to understand the artist, look at his art.' If you want to understand what makes a murderer, start here.

A new, fully updated edition of David Attenborough's groundbreaking Life on Earth. David Attenborough's unforgettable meeting with gorillas became an iconic moment for millions of television viewers. Life on Earth, the series and accompanying book, fundamentally changed the way we view and interact with the natural world setting a new benchmark of quality, influencing a generation of nature lovers. Told through an examination of animal and plant life, this is an astonishing celebration of the evolution of life on earth, with a cast of characters drawn from the whole range of organisms that have ever lived on this planet. Attenborough's perceptive, dynamic approach to the evolution of millions of species of living organisms takes the reader on an unforgettable journey of discovery from the very first spark of life to the blue and green wonder we know today. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the book's first publication, David Attenborough revisited Life on Earth, completely updating and adding to the original text, taking account of modern scientific discoveries from around the globe. This paperback edition also includes more than 60 full colour photographs, chosen by the author to help illustrate the book in a much greater way than was possible forty years ago. This updated edition provides a fitting tribute to an enduring wildlife classic, destined to enthral the generation who saw it when first published and bring it alive for a whole new generation.