Reference

How much do you know about Bible stories? With more than 5,000 questions and facts, this book will challenge you whatever your level of scripture knowledge. ‘In which town was Jesus born?’ is easy enough; but who was Solomon’s mother and how many wings does a seraph have? The 15-question quizzes are organized under headings including War and Peace, Family Ties and Apocalypse Now.

How did the Germanic dialect of a small island become a lingua franca spoken by two billion people across the globe? This compelling guide charts the history of the English language from the earliest texts to the age of Twitter. Attractively illustrated with colour photographs and maps, the book focuses on 100 places that played a key role in the development of the language, from Canterbury – where the Latin alphabet was adopted – to Kolkata, and from Salford to San Francisco.

For this short dictionary, Tuleja has selected foreign tems that are neither completely Anglicized nor merely pedantic. From Abendland (German: 'the West') to zolotaya seredina (Russian: 'the golden middle'), he a gives a translation, pronunciation and information on meaning and history; and there is much more - among the 'Special Categories' are classical phobias, a Sanskrit sampler, Italian musical terms and fearless leaders (caliph, czar, kaiser etc). Finally, there are indexes of words and phrases and subjects.

This collection of unusual puzzles challenges the reader not only to find solutions but, in the spirit of computing pioneer Alan Turing’s methodology, to tease out the rules of the puzzles themselves. The puzzles, which mainly involve words and letters, increase in difficulty as the book progresses, but cryptic titles and numerous optional hints (listed in a separate section) lead codebreakers step by step to solutions catalogued at the back.

Produced in association with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, Mapping the Oceans records millennia of human efforts to navigate and chart the seas, first for trade and more recently for research. Illustrated with historic maps, paintings and prints, it explores the development of navigational instruments, the principles of latitude and longitude, marine biology, and the new technologies that have allowed scientists to probe the oceans’ depths.