New knowledge and new thinking in human health, science, religion, and current affairs use questions and answers to many complex issues that are affecting peoples lives all over the world.
It wouldn't be for years after that fateful day when Alexander Fleming sneezed on a petri dish and stumbled upon Penicillin, that the almost miraculous power of this mould would transform the lives of every person on the planet.
*Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and the Marsh Biography Award*The definitive biography of chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, the only British woman to win a Nobel prize in the sciences to date.
It is almost a century since Thomas Alva Edison, the world's greatest inventor, gave the world electric light - and exactly one hundred years since he built the first successful phonograph (forerunner of the gramophone).
A Jew who left Germany when Hitler came to power, Sir Ernst Chain was a winner, with Sir Alexander Fleming and Lord Florey, of the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1945.
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY BILL GATESIn this warm, insightful portrait of the Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, we see the wisdom, humour and curiosity of Richard Feynman through a series of conversations with his friend Ralph Leighton.
In the tradition of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief and James Gleick's Genius, The Emperor of Scent tells the story of Luca Turin, an utterly unusual, stubborn scientist, his otherworldly gift for perfume, his brilliant, quixotic theory of how we smell, and his struggle to set before the world the secret of the most enigmatic of our senses.
The official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley Alan Turing was the mathematician whose cipher-cracking transformed the Second World War.
One of the most enduring images of the Ethiopian famine that shocked the world in 1984 was that of the young International Red Cross nurse who, surrounded by thousands of starving people and with limited supplies, had the terrible task of choosing which children to feed, knowing that those she turned away might not last the night.
If you drink apple juice with cinnamon, look after your gums, read, dance and take an aspirin a day - you are well on your way to preventing Alzheimer's disease.
Given the extent of his influence on 17th-century life, and his lasting impact on the British landscape it is remarkable that no book has been written before about John Evelyn.
Marie Curie is a women who changed the face of science for all time, not just because of her discovery of the radioactive element Radium and her work with it, but because of her incredible strides forward in a such a male dominated world as laboratory science at the turn of the 19th century.
'Our childhood came to an end when our parents parted and from then on Jennifer was placed in the impossible position of having to be a parent to me, her sister.
The Skeleton Cupboard is Professor Tanya Byron's account of her years of training as a clinical psychologist, when trainees find themselves in the toughest placements of their careers.
Ronald White-Cooper may have worked as a doctor in London's slums and tended to badly wounded men on the Western Front, but when he arrived in Dartmouth in 1920 to set up as a GP he found himself facing some unique challenges.
For fans of David Sedaris, Tina Fey and Caitlin Moran comes Furiously Happy from Jenny Lawson, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Let's Pretend This Never Happened.
Which of these stories is true and which is semi-true I have, of course, not the slightest intention of telling you, but I hope this will not detract from your enjoyment .
Winner of the Alan Paton Award and the South African Booksellers Choice AwardJonathan Kaplan has been a hospital surgeon, a flying doctor, a ship's medical officer and a battlefield surgeon.
In 1858, aged thirty-five, weak with malaria, isolated in the remote Spice Islands, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to Charles Darwin: he had, he said excitedly, worked out a theory of natural selection.
Eight women who changed the worldCaroline Norton * Elizabeth Blackwell * Florence Nightingale * Emily Davies * Josephine Butler * Elizabeth Cady Stanton * Margaret Sanger * Emma GoldmanSignificant Sisters traces the lives of eight women, each of whom pioneered vital changes in the spheres of law, education, the professions, morals or politics: the first woman doctor, the pioneer of birth control, a radical journalist, and suffragists.
Set in Glasgow in the 1930s, Young James Herriot is the fascinating story of Herriot s formative years at veterinary college, recounting the tales behind his calling to work with animals and his early friendships.