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Each volume in this series forms an illustrated introduction to one branch of knowledge, with an outline of the most important concepts and principles as well as information on key figures and historical developments. The three titles included in this set are: The Universe (Read more...) Astronomy (Read more...) Physics (Read more...)

Aiming to help children become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, each workbook in the engaging Brain Boosters series comprises interactive puzzles and brainteasers to teach numeracy and logic skills and practice questions to test the learning. Age 6+ The two titles included in this set are: Times Tables and Multiplication Activity Book (Read more...) Adding and Subtracting Activity Book (Read more...)

The story of the newly rich and enigmatic Jay Gatsby, living in luxury in his Long Island mansion, captures the flamboyance, carelessness and cruelty of the wealthy during America's Jazz Age.

Emily Brontë’s incomparable story of Cathy, Heathcliff and their passionate, but doomed love, played out on the windswept Yorkshire moors, first appeared in 1847 and has lost none of its romance and power.

Tracing the conflicts of family and friends through ten years, Virginia Woolf’s novel begins with the Ramsay family’s first holiday on Skye in 1910, when their youngest son asks to visit the lighthouse they can see from the house, and ends after the war, when they can revisit the island.

HG Wells’s story about a machine that allows travel back and forward in time remains one of the great science fiction adventures, but when it was published in 1895, it was also a dark warning of dangers to come.

This profoundly influential literary-philosophical experiment – a book of aphorisms put into the mouth of the Persian sage Zarathustra – contains the kernel of Nietzsche's thought: his famous proclamation that 'God is dead', and the much-misinterpreted theory of the rise of the Übermensch that has attained a higher, enhanced humanity. First published in four parts in 1883–85.

‘Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains’, so begins one of the most profoundly influential works of Western political philosophy. Written in 1762, The Social Contract puts forward Rousseau’s theory of the general will and the sovereignty of the whole citizen body – ideas that were taken up by the French revolutionaries and political thinkers as far-flung as Jefferson in America and Tolstoy in Russia.

Translated, with an introduction by the Oxford classicist Benjamin Jowett (1817–1893), Plato’s Republic is widely regarded as the finest of the Socratic dialogues, bringing together political thought and philosophy. Among the issues debated in the dialogue are the meaning of justice and the just man, immortality of the soul, the theory of Forms, and the ideal state ruled by its philosopher king.

This long poem by the Lebanese poet and philosopher, Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) tells of a wise Prophet leaving for home after a long sojourn in a foreign city. Before he leaves, the citizens besiege him with questions about how to live their lives and serve their god.

Mr and Mrs Bennet have five daughters, no sons and a property entailed to a male cousin: at least one good marriage is necessary, but between Elizabeth Bennet’s hasty judgements, Mr Darcy’s prideful demeanour and misunderstandings all round, the prospects are limited.

Some years before the story begins, Anne Elliot had been engaged to Frederick Wentworth, a naval officer, but was persuaded by an aunt to break it off. They meet again, Anne still in love with Wentworth, but unable to declare her feelings or deny them by accepting another man’s proposal.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, the ‘diary’ of an embittered former civil servant, is widely regarded as one of the first existentialist novels. It is joined here by the story of Golyadkin, a man who meets his double, then finds his life being taken over by the doppelgänger.

This collection of writings by René Descartes (1596–1650) begins with the short, yet tremendously important Discourse on the Method, with the famous assertion cogito ergo sum within the discussion of knowledge, the existence of God and the distinction between mind and body. The Meditations then expand on Descartes’ metaphysical arguments, and selections from The Principles of Philosophy complete the volume.

Published under the pseudonym Currer Bell in 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s novel tells the story of Jane, a young governess, and her employer Mr Rochester, and how their love for each other is thwarted by the mysterious presence of a woman in the attic of Thornfield Hall.

Published in 1878, two years after Nietzsche broke with German Romanticism and his former friend, Richard Wagner, this is his first philosophical book written in aphoristic style. Here he describes the ‘free spirits’ that will transcend traditional Christianity, challenges the Christian notions of good and evil, and introduces the concept of the will to power.

Joseph Conrad's dark and profoundly influential novel is narrated by Marlow, a mariner who recalls his journey up-river into the densely forested depths of Africa on a mission to find the enigmatic trading company agent, Kurtz. In this edition, it is accompanied by the Tales of Unrest (1898), including Conrad’s ‘best story’, An Outpost of Progress.

In Swift's great satire on early 18th-century politics and society, Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon, narrates his astonishing travels among the tiny Lilliputians, the Brobdingnag giants and the ludicrous intellectuals of Laputa, and in the lands of the noble Houyhnhnms and brutish Yahoo.

From Pip's first encounter with the escaped convict in the village churchyard, Dickens's penultimate novel holds us in thrall to the orphan's changing fortunes and the shifting sands on which he bases his own great expectations.

Clever, self-satisfied and interfering, Emma Woodhouse is determined to arrange marriages for her friends, while avoiding one for herself; but the matchmaking finds both Emma and her protégé, poor Harriet, caught in a web of misunderstandings.

To reveal the realities of poverty, Orwell’s memoir draws on his experiences in the late 1920s when, as a young writer struggling to get work published, he worked as a dish-washer in Paris and lived on the road with tramps around London.

Ground-breaking in its realism and psychological depth, Dostoevsky’s novel tells the story of Raskolnikov, the impoverished student who justified to himself the murder of a miserly pawnbroker and the theft of her money, yet suffers moral anguish in the aftermath of his brutal crime.

The tale of the 'squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner' Ebenezer Scrooge, the ghosts that visit him, and the fate of poor Tiny Tim has been a bestseller since it was hurriedly published in time for Christmas in 1843.

Written around the time that Aristotle (384–322 BCE) established his own school in Athens, this is a guide to what was a critical skill in ancient Greece: the art of arguing persuasively in debate and public speaking. A seminal text that has shaped theory and practice down to modern times, the book sets out the contexts and types of rhetoric, the strategies of persuasion, and the style of delivery.

On Mr Jones’s farm, the animals revolt against their human masters. The pigs become the leaders, but corrupted by power, they turn into the new tyrants. A satire on revolutionary and Stalinist Russia, Orwell’s novel has remained as vivid and as relevant as when it first appeared in 1945.

Set the 1840s in St Petersburg, a fictional town modelled on Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain grew up, these are the famous escapades of the young, energetic and inventive dare-devil Tom and his companion Huckleberry Finn.

Written in 1948 and warning of things to come, Orwell’s dystopian novel is set in a totalitarian future, where history is rewritten and independent thought is outlawed, so that when Winston Smith dares to write a diary and fall in love, he falls foul of the Thought Police.

Since 1609, when they were first published, Shakespeare’s sonnets have fascinated readers, both with the depth of the poet’s insight into the variety of love and the passage of time and with the mysteries of the beautiful Young Man, the Rival Poet and the Dark Lady. This volume presents all 154 sonnets, with a brief introduction.

Claude Monet (1840–1926) was one of the original Impressionist group whose subjects were modern life and the play of light on people and landscape. This richly illustrated introduction to his life and work traces Monet’s style and preoccupations from early success at the official Salon (with Camille in 1866) to his final paintings of the waterlilies in his garden at Giverny.

From preparing canvas to framing and storing finished artwork, this source book is a practical, up-to-date guide to materials for artists, amateur and professional. Starting with oils, the book covers acrylic, encaustic and tempera painting, watercolours, gouache and drawing materials; there are chapters on pigments, colour mixing, brushes and other applicators and, finally, guidance on working safely with artists’ materials.

From ancient Greek concepts of the soul to the insights of modern neurology and psychoanalysis, Rooney explains how we have tried to answer questions about the mind’s workings, individuals’ sense of identity and the best ways to treat mental illness.

Susie Hodge traces the life of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) from his childhood in the Netherlands, through the places that were so important to his art – Paris, Arles and Saint-Rémy – to his illness and death in Auvers. Among the topics discussed are van Gogh’s letters, his depiction of the poor in The Potato Eaters (1885) and the self-portraits.

Both a religious order and a private army, the Templars were answerable only to the Pope and dominated the politics of the Middle East during the tumultuous age of the Crusades. This book traces the history and changing fortunes of the order, from its foundation in 1119 to its suppression amid accusations of heresy less than two centuries later.

For devotees of recreational mathematics, Tim Sole presents 28 numbers, starting with .301 (concerning Newcomb’s formula for the proportion of naturally occurring numbers beginning with the digit N) and ending ‘Beyond Infinity’ with Cantor’s amazing discovery that there are an infinite number of numbers bigger than infinity. Among chapters on topics such as the fundamental constant of music (1.059) and Euler’s identity, there are 38 conundrums (with answers) for the mathematically inclined.

Thomas Stevens introduces Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), one of the original group of French Impressionist painters, with reproductions and commentary on his enduringly popular paintings such as La Loge (1874), which was Renoir’s principal exhibit at the first Impressionist show, Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876) and The Umbrellas.

Along with an introduction to the life and work of the great Renaissance ‘artist-engineer’, this volume brings together extracts from his writings, facsimile pages of his notebooks, plans and drawings, and reproductions of paintings including The Last Supper and Mona Lisa, illustrating the tremendous scope of Leonardo’s genius. The book is bound in gilt-embossed scarlet linen and slip-cased.

The rings of Saturn or Jupiter’s Great Red Spot are familiar images, although they are invisible to the naked eye: this book explains how we know what they look like. After a chapter describing the mapping of planetary orbits, it discusses each planet and its moons, from Earth’s near neighbours to the distant ice giants Neptune and Uranus, showing how their surfaces have been mapped and depicted, and examining the range of scientific information that different types of imaging provide.

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.

Historically, dual interpretations of physical phenomena as waves or particles became unified in quantum theory, which revolutionized views of the universe. However, topics such as Schrödinger’s (imaginary) cat and the double-slit experiment are notorious for being misinterpreted or badly explained. This illustrated guide by a NASA scientist aims to dispel confusion, while introducing key players such as Planck, Bohr and Feynman.

After explaining how astrophysicists use ‘tools’ such as the electromagnetic spectrum, telescopes and photography to discover how astronomical systems are formed and evolve through time, Dr Odenwald covers some of the key themes in modern astrophysics: the structure and evolution of the Sun, planetary systems, stars and galaxies, and the cosmic structure, the Big Bang and the physics of the origin of the universe.

Reflecting how science is ‘as complex and multifaceted as the problems it seeks to unpick’, this very accessible, illustrated history approaches the subject both chronologically, from around 3000 BCE to the 21st century, and in the context of 16 different disciplines. Starting with mathematics, medicine and philosophy in antiquity, it follows the discoveries that heralded new branches of science, with a final chapter looking ahead to the possibilities of environmental science, medicine, AI and space exploration.

Through chapters discussing the Big Bang, the creation of matter, the lifecycle of stars and how planets and moons are formed, Anne Rooney narrates the story of our universe and how generations of scientists and philosophers have sought to understand it.

Identifying the fundamental chemical building blocks of nature, the periodic table of elements was first proposed by Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869. This introduction explores the history of scientific discovery that led to this codification and explains how it works and has been refined since.

This book examines the evolution of the world’s six major faiths and their practice in the modern world. Topics include the lives of the Buddha and Guru Nanak, each of the religions’ geographical spread and conflicts such as the Crusades.

Acknowledging the roots of science in natural philosophy, this book follows the endeavours of physicists since the Renaissance in developing a rational understanding of the world and looks at topics including optics, energy, atoms and space-time.

In the Apology Plato quotes Socrates as saying, at his trial for impiety, ‘an unexamined life is not worth living’. For those new to philosophy, this very accessible, illustrated survey of the development and various strands of Western thought offers a guide to starting that philosophical examination of life, tackling the big questions, including Is there a God? What can we know? and How should we live?

This overview of medical history charts humanity’s journey of discovery across thousands of years during which changing models of disease, new surgical techniques and breakthrough research have improved the ability to diagnose and treat illness and injury.

Providing an accessible explanation of the key mathematical discoveries that have shaped human progress and understanding, this volume ranges from the geometry of the Ancient Greeks to calculus, set theory and fuzzy logic.

Emerging from the experiments of alchemists, the discoveries of chemists have driven civilization forward through the manipulation of raw materials to create metals, explosives, medicines and more recently plastics.