Set in the Dublin of the mid 1980s - gripped by a heroin epidemic and light years from the post EU economic boom of today - All Names Have Been Changed tells the story of a small group of mature students on a writing course at Trinity, who become dangerously obsessed with their tutor, a notorious writer. Brilliantly exploring the shifting group dynamic, as events spiral ever further out of control, this is a novel of considerable verve and ambition. Following earlier forays into the worlds of art restoration and classical music, it is further evidence of a writer with a natural gift for narrative and atmosphere.

The stories you are about to read are true, and all the names were changed to protect the innocent. These are true stories from a police dispatcher, stories about handcuffs and headboards, and some of the dumbest criminals, and how one police dispatcher made a transition from the old school way of doing things to the new, and after twenty-six years of experience, I share some of the most memorable stories. Joseph L. Swick

Among shifting politics, tastes, and technology in television history, one genre has been remarkably persistent: the cop show. Claudia Calhoun returns to Dragnet, the pioneering police procedural and an early transmedia franchise, appearing on radio in 1949, on TV and in film in the 1950s, and in later revivals. More than a popular entertainment, Dragnet was a signifier of America’s postwar confidence in government institutions—and a publicity vehicle for the Los Angeles Police Department. Only the Names Have Been Changed shows how Dragnet’s “realistic” storytelling resonated across postwar culture. Calhoun traces Dragnet’s “semi-documentary” predecessors, and shows how Jack Webb, Dragnet’s creator, worked directly with the LAPD as he produced a series that would likewise inspire public trust by presenting day-to-day procedural justice, rather than shootouts and wild capers. Yet this realism also set aside the seething racial tensions of Los Angeles as it was. Dragnet emerges as a foundational text, one that taught audiences to see police as everyday heroes not only on TV but also in daily life, a lesson that has come under scrutiny as Americans increasingly seek to redefine the relationship between policing and public safety.

This book looks at the radio and television series Dragnet (1949 - 1959) as a document of postwar culture, analyzing the ways in which the series informed listeners and viewers about the workings of the justice system and instructed Americans in their responsibilities as citizens.

The bestselling author of The Architecture of Happiness and The Art of Travel spends a week at an airport in a wittily intriguing meditation on the "non-place" that he believes is the centre of our civilization. In the summer of 2009, Alain de Botton was invited by the owners of Heathrow airport to become their first ever writer-in-residence. Given unprecedented, unrestricted access to wander around one of the world's busiest airports, he met travellers from all over the globe, and spoke with everyone from baggage handlers to pilots, and senior executives to the airport chaplain. Based on these conversations he has produced this extraordinary meditation on the nature of travel, work, relationships, and our daily lives. Working with the renowned documentary photographer Richard Baker, he explores the magical and the mundane, and the interactions of travellers and workers all over this familiar but mysterious "non-place," which by definition we are eager to leave. Taking the reader through departures, "air-side," and the arrivals hall, de Botton shows with his usual combination of wit and wisdom that spending time in an airport can be more revealing than we might think.