The New York Times bestselling author of A History of the World in 100 Objects brings the world of Shakespeare and the Tudor era of Elizabeth I into focus We feel we know Shakespeare’s characters. Think of Hamlet, trapped in indecision, or Macbeth’s merciless and ultimately self-destructive ambition, or the Machiavellian rise and short reign of Richard III. They are so vital, so alive and real that we can see aspects of ourselves in them. But their world was at once familiar and nothing like our own. In this brilliant work of historical reconstruction Neil MacGregor and his team at the British Museum, working together in a landmark collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the BBC, bring us twenty objects that capture the essence of Shakespeare’s universe. A perfect complement to A History of the World in 100 Objects, MacGregor’s landmark New York Times bestseller, Shakespeare’s Restless World highlights a turning point in human history. This magnificent book, illustrated throughout with more than one hundred vibrant color photographs, invites you to travel back in history and to touch, smell, and feel what life was like at that pivotal moment, when humankind leaped into the modern age. This was an exhilarating time when discoveries in science and technology altered the parameters of the known world. Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation map allows us to imagine the age of exploration from the point of view of one of its most ambitious navigators. A bishop’s cup captures the most sacred and divisive act in Christendom. With A History of the World in 100 Objects, MacGregor pioneered a new way of telling history through artifacts. Now he trains his eye closer to home, on a subject that has mesmerized him since childhood, and lets us see Shakespeare and his world in a whole new light.

Why the modern world forgot how to sleep Why is sleep frustrating for so many people? Why do we spend so much time and money managing and medicating it, and training ourselves and our children to do it correctly? In Wild Nights, Benjamin Reiss finds answers in sleep's hidden history -- one that leads to our present, sleep-obsessed society, its tacitly accepted rules, and their troubling consequences. Today we define a good night's sleep very narrowly: eight hours in one shot, sealed off in private bedrooms, children apart from parents. But for most of human history, practically no one slept this way. Tracing sleep's transformation since the dawn of the industrial age, Reiss weaves together insights from literature, social and medical history, and cutting-edge science to show how and why we have tried and failed to tame sleep. In lyrical prose, he leads readers from bedrooms and laboratories to factories and battlefields to Henry David Thoreau's famous cabin at Walden Pond, telling the stories of troubled sleepers, hibernating peasants, sleepwalking preachers, cave-dwelling sleep researchers, slaves who led nighttime uprisings, rebellious workers, spectacularly frazzled parents, and utopian dreamers. We are hardly the first people, Reiss makes clear, to chafe against our modern rules for sleeping. A stirring testament to sleep's diversity, Wild Nights offers a profound reminder that in the vulnerability of slumber we can find our shared humanity. By peeling back the covers of history, Reiss recaptures sleep's mystery and grandeur and offers hope to weary readers: as sleep was transformed once before, so too can it change today.

In a snowstorm, a Lin Clan member named Dong Lang was born. He happened to encounter a random opportunity. Wild beasts massacred the village, and both his parents died. Perhaps it was fated, but by chance, he stepped into an unknown world. Along the way, he had acquired the fetters, the friendship, everything ....

"In the tradition of Wendell Berry, Sanders champions fidelity to place, informed by ecological awareness, arguing that intimacy with one's home region is the grounding for global knowledge. "Reflective, rhapsodic, luminous essays. . . . A wise and beautifully written book."-Publishers Weekly, starred review

The first monogaph on the witty, celebrated Swiss duo.

2018 RUNNER-UP OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE The Restless Earth explores the lives of communities who remain sceptical of China’s big city allure. As the traditions of the New Year bring urban dwellers back to rural Qinghe, Miriam Driessen interrogates the tensions between the proud stoicism of rural family members and the ambitions of their returning relatives. Thoughtful and immersive, it is a portrait of a community whose existence is much more than a hurdle on the way to urbanization.

An essential introduction to the physics of active matter and its application to questions in biology In recent decades, the theory of active matter has emerged as a powerful tool for exploring the differences between living and nonliving states of matter. The Restless Cell provides a self-contained, quantitative description of how the continuum theory of matter has been generalized to account for the complex and sometimes counterintuitive behaviors of living materials. Christina Hueschen and Rob Phillips begin by illustrating how classical field theory has been used by physicists to describe the transport of matter by diffusion, the elastic deformations of solids, and the flow of fluids. Drawing on physical insights from the study of diffusion, they introduce readers to the continuum theory protocol—a step-by-step framework for developing equations that describe matter as a continuum—and show how these methods and concepts can be generalized to the study of living, energy-consuming matter. Hueschen and Phillips then present a range of engaging biological case studies across scales, such as the symmetry breaking that occurs in developing embryos, the perpetual flows that take place in giant algal cells, and the herding of wildebeest on the plains of the Serengeti. An essential resource for students and researchers in biological physics and quantitative biology, The Restless Cell gives complete derivations of all calculations and features illustrations by Nigel Orme that seamlessly bridge conceptual models and continuum descriptions of living matter.