Книга A view of the elementary principles of education, founded on the study of the nature of man

Published to coincide with his major biography of Iris Murdoch, Peter Conradi’s acclaimed critical appreciation of her work is reissued in a fully revised and updated edition, with a foreword by John Bayley.‘Peter Conradi is uniquely qualified to accompany the reader in a discovery of one of the 20th-century’s most remarkable novelists and thinkers.’ John BayleyIris Murdoch, who died in 1999, was the author of twenty-six novels, including ‘The Bell’, ‘A Fairly Honourable Defeat’, ‘The Black Prince’ and the Booker Prize-winning ‘The Sea, The Sea’.In ‘The Saint and the Artist’, the only full critical examination of Murdoch’s work by a British critic, Peter Conradi, who knew her well, traces the way in which the zest and buoyant high spirits of her early novels gave way to a more deeply and darkly comic achievement in the novels of the 1970s, and in some from the last period. He suggests how her own life, wonderfully transmuted into high art, provided the raw material for her novels, and argues that they should be read as serious entertainments and as important fictions in the Anglo-Russian tradition, and not as disguised philosophy.

From one of our greatest science writers, this biography of a beech-and-bluebell wood through diverse moods and changing seasons combines stunning natural history with the ancient history of the countryside to tell the full story of the British landscape.‘The woods are the great beauty of this country… A fine forest-like beech wood far more beautiful than anything else which we have seen in its vicinity’ is how John Stuart Mill described a small patch of beech-and bluebell woodland, buried deeply in the Chiltern Hills and now owned by Richard Fortey. Drawing upon a lifetime of scientific expertise and abiding love of nature, Fortey uses his small wood to tell a wider story of the ever-changing British landscape, human influence on the countryside over many centuries and the vital interactions between flora, fauna and fungi.The trees provide a majestic stage for woodland animals and plants to reveal their own stories. Fortey presents his wood as an interwoven collection of different habitats rich in species. His attention ranges from the beech and cherry trees that dominate the wood to the flints underfoot; the red kites and woodpeckers that soar overhead; the lichens, mosses and liverworts decorating the branches as well as the myriad species of spiders, moths, beetles and crane-flies. The 300 species of fungi identified in the wood capture his attention as much as familiar deer, shrews and dormice.Fortey is a naturalist who believes that all organisms are as interesting as human beings – and certainly more important than the observer. So this book is a close examination of nature and human history. He proves that poetic writing is compatible with scientific precision. The book is filled with details of living animals and plants, charting the passage of the seasons, visits by fellow enthusiasts; the play of light between branches; the influence of geology; and how woodland influences history, architecture and industry. On every page he shows how an intimate study of one small wood can reveal so much about the natural world and demonstrates his relish for the incomparable pleasures of discovery.

NIGHT OF LOVE:To save her struggling dance company, Meg must accept an unthinkable offer from the man she thought betrayed her long ago. But will it cost her more to trust Steven or to deny the irresistible passion reigniting between them?SECRET AGENT MAN:Corporate security chief Lang Patton could hand anything… except commitment. But to protect his ex-fianc?e, Kirry Campbell, from a vicious stalker, Lange would rediscover a love worth dying for…

NOW A MAJOR TV DRAMA ON SKY ATLANTIC. The first crime novel in Robert Wilson’s Seville series, featuring the tortured detective Javier Falcon.The man is bound, gagged and dead in front of his television.The terrible self-inflicted wounds tell of his violent struggle to avoid some unseen horror. On the screen? In his head? What could make a man do that to himself?It's Easter week in Seville, a time of passion and processions. But detective Javier Falc?n is not celebrating. Appalled by the victim's staring eyes he is inexorably drawn into this disturbing, mystifying case. And when the investigation into the dead man's life sends Javier trawling though his own past and into the shocking journals of his late father, a famous artist, his unreliable memory begins to churn. Then there are more killings and Falc?n finds himself pushed to the edge of a terrifying truth…

When the young naturalist Darwin set sail on a round the world expedition at the end of 1831, it was only with a vague notion that the relationships between all life forms, both present and extinct, were more complex than the Christian version of the world s creation purported them to be. During his five-year voyage of discovery on board HMS Beagle and more than two decades subsequently devoted to research, he painstakingly collected a mass of evidence from across the planet from Paraguay and the Galapagos Islands to Stafford shire and Scotland building a compelling case for the theory of natural selection, which would change the way we look at the world for ever. The founding text of evolutionary biology which prompted a revolution in the fields of science and religion similar in magnitude to the discoveries of Copernicus and Newton Darwin s On the Origin of Species was an instant best-seller when it was published in 1859 and has become a cultural milestone that has influenced a wide range of disciplines of human knowledge.