Showing results by narrator "John Sackville" in All Categories

How to Walk is part of a charming series of books from Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, exploring the essential foundations of mindful meditation and practice. Focusing on mindful walking, Nhat Hanh explains how this technique can diminish depression, recapture wonder and help us to express sincere gratitude.

Can anyone really own a culture? This magnificent account argues that the story of global civilisations is one of mixing, sharing, and borrowing. It shows how art forms have crisscrossed continents over centuries to produce masterpieces. From Nefertiti's lost city and the Islamic Golden Age to twentieth century Nigerian theatre and Modernist poetry, Martin Puchner explores how contact between different peoples has driven artistic innovation in every era - whilst cultural policing and purism have more often undermined the very societies they tried to protect.

How to See is about our misperceptions, how we can gain insight and how mindfulness practices can help us see our real selves. Thich Nhat Hanh brings his signature clarity, compassion and humour in showing us how to achieve an awakened, more relaxed state of self-awareness so we can understand ourselves and the world around us. This is a perfect guide to life by the most renowned Zen master in the world, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In How to Listen, Thich Nhat Hanh demonstrates how deep listening is a fundamental building block of good communication. With clear and gentle guidance, we learn how truly listening – to ourselves, to each other, to Mother Earth, and to the many ‘bells of mindfulness’ that are available to us in each moment – is the foundation of our practice, an expression of love and a solution to our deepest and most urgent large-scale conflicts.

While plants may not have brains or move around as we do, cutting-edge science is revealing that they have astonishing inner worlds of an alternate kind to ours. They can plan ahead, learn and have rich subjective experiences. They can even be put to sleep. If you can look in the right way, a world full of drama unfurls. In Planta Sapiens, Professor Paco Calvo offers a bold new perspective on plant biology and cognitive science. Using the latest scientific findings, Calvo challenges us to make an imaginative leap into a world that is so close and yet so alien.

Wilkie Collins' follow-up to The Woman in White and No Name is an innovative take on mistaken identity, the nature of evil, and the dark underbelly of Victorian England. The story concerns two distant cousins, both named Allan Armadale, and the impact of a family tragedy, which makes one of them a target of the murderous Lydia Gwilt, a vicious and malevolent charmer determined to get her hands on the Armadale fortune. Will the real Allan Armadale be revealed, and will he survive the plot against his life?

How to Sit is part of a charming series of books from Zen Master, Thich Nhat Hanh, exploring the essential foundations of mindful meditation and practice. How to Sit provides explicit, simple directions on the mechanics of posture and breathing, along with instructions for how best to achieve an awakened, relaxed state of clarity to cultivate concentration and compassion.

We live in a world in which we are invited to change - to become our best selves, through politics, or fitness, or diet, or therapy. We change all the time - growing older and older - and how we think about change changes over time too. We want to think of our lives as progress myths - as narratives of positive personal growth - at the same time as we inevitably age and suffer setbacks. So there are the stories we tell about change, and there are the changes we actually make - and they don't always go, or come, together.

"Steppenwolf" by Hermann Hesse is a captivating and introspective novel that delves into the psyche of its protagonist, Harry Haller. Set in post-World War I Germany, the story unfolds as Haller grapples with the complexities of modern urban life and his own inner turmoil. The term "Steppenwolf" refers to Haller's perception of himself as a lone wolf, an outsider caught between the worlds of bourgeois society and the untamed wilderness.

One winter morning, Lorimer Black - young, good-looking, but with a somewhat troubled expression - goes to keep a perfectly routine business appointment and finds a hanged man. A bad start to the day by anyone's standards and an ominous portent. For Lorimer works in the only-slightly corrupt business of financial adjusting, and he is about to learn that it is much uglier - and even more crooked - than he ever imagined. Suddenly, he's being unfairly blamed for all kinds of irregularities. Next, his life is threatened.

What if everything we thought we knew about history was wrong? From the global best-selling author of Empire, The Ascent of Money and Civilization, this is a whole new way of looking at the world. Most history is hierarchical: it's about popes, presidents, and prime ministers. But what if that's simply because they create the historical archives? What if we are missing equally powerful but less visible networks-leaving them to the conspiracy theorists, with their dreams of all-powerful Illuminati?

In mid-January 2020, scientists Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci learned of how a new virus that had emerged in Wuhan, China, was spreading. Recognising the threat at once, they dropped everything and committed themselves to developing a vaccine against the disease that would soon be known as COVID-19. No one believed it was possible. But by December, the revolutionary BioNTech-Pfizer mRNA inoculation became the first clinically approved COVID-19 vaccine. Soon it was being injected into the arms of millions, turning the tide on the deadliest pandemic in living memory.

Narcoball uncovers the incredible story of Colombian football during the early 1990s - shaped by drug lords, rivalries, and ambition. It uncovers a football empire backed by cartels - where victory was a currency of its own, and defeat, a matter of life and death. This is a different story of Pablo Escobar and his rivals.

From the build-up to the fighting, through to the reverberations still felt in the aftermath, this is a compelling, accessible and immediate history of the war, perhaps the most complex, frightening and destructive event in world history. Discover how deep-seated local fears and hatreds escalated into one vast global conflict that was fought out to the bitter end - from the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party to Pearl Harbour, the D-Day landings and Hiroshima.

Jonathan Harris’s classic text chronologically surveys Byzantine history in the time of the Crusades. The book reveals the attitudes of the Byzantine ruling elites towards the Crusades and their ultimate inability to adapt to the challenges this presented. Using evidence amassed in a wealth of sources, Harris successfully makes the point that Byzantine interactions with Western Europe, the Crusades and the crusader states is best understood in the nature of the Byzantine Empire and the ideology which underpinned it, rather than in any generalised hostility between the peoples.

Alfredo Di Stéfano, Diego Maradona, Gabriel Batistuta, Juan Román Riquelme, Lionel Messi...Argentina has produced some of the greatest footballers of all time. But the rich, volatile history of Argentinian football is made up of both the sublime and the ruthlessly pragmatic. Jonathan Wilson, having lived there on and off during the last decade, is ideally placed to chart the sport's development in a country that, perhaps more than any other, lives and breathes football, its theories and its myths.

Scarred by his experiences in World War 1, German doctor Sebastian Braun lives a quiet life tending to his patients and his beloved garden. Until Sophie Hathaway bursts into his life and challenges his dearly held beliefs. And just at the moment Sebastian discovers love for the first time, war is on the horizon once again, threatening not just his peace of mind. As the Germans approach the Channel Islands, Sebastian has to make choices: be the peace-loving man he has become or stand up and fight for his principles?

Noticing society's creeping descent into infantilisation is one thing, however understanding the roots and causes of the phenomenon is not quite so easy. But in this topical and vitally important new work, cultural theorist and academic, Dr Keith Hayward, exposes the deep social, psychological and political dangers of a world characterised by denuded adult autonomy.

Animal Farm tells the story of Farmer Jones’s animals, led by Napoleon the pig, who rise up in rebellion and take over the farm. Tired of being exploited solely for human gain, the animals—who have human characteristics such as speech—vow to create a new and more just society. However, as time goes on, it becomes clear that the society the animals have constructed is not equal at all when the pigs begin their crusade to consolidate their power and the other animals make the daunting realization that “some animals are more equal than others.”

In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was seized by the Nazis. Along with his teenage son, Fritz, he was sent to Buchenwald in Germany. There began an unimaginable ordeal that saw the pair beaten, starved and forced to build the very concentration camp they were held in. When Gustav was set to be transferred to Auschwitz, a certain death sentence, Fritz refused to leave his side. Throughout the horrors they witnessed and the suffering they endured, there was one constant that kept them alive: the love between father and son.