TIME Magazine (EDITION: EUROPE)
August 27, 2007 Vol. 170, No. 8 

• COVER: How Diana Transformed Britain (10 Years On) - From shy bride to passionate campaigner, Diana, Princess of Wales didn't just transform herself — she changed her country
• Waiting to be King  (10 Years On) - Waiting to be King is hard, but Charles is making his mark
• William and Harry : Like Mother, Like Sons  (10 Years On) - Following Diana's lead, William and Harry are redefining what it means to be royal
• ASTRONOMY: Galileo's Moon View - Newly uncovered sketches by Galileo offer a unique glimpse of a scientific giant in the throes of discovery
• ARTS: Bird Flight: Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero (Books) - The thrill and peril of Michael Ondaatje's new novel is that you never know where he's taking you next

Robert Ludlum is the acknowledged master of suspense and international intrigue. For the past twenty-five years he has had an unbroken string of bestselling novels, selling hundreds of millions of copies worldwide and setting a standard that has yet to be surpassed. With The Prometheus Deception, Ludlum's first new novel in three years, he is at the very pinnacle of his craft.

Nicholas Bryson was a deep-cover operative for a secret American intelligence group called the Directorate. After a mission went wrong he was retired to a new identity as a college professor in Pennsylvania.

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Scientific American Special Edition : A MATTER OF TIME 2006
More than 200 years ago Benjamin Franklin coined the now famous dictum that equated passing minutes and hours with shillings and pounds. The new millennium--and the decades leading up to it--has given his words their real meaning. Time has become to the 21st century what fossil fuels and precious metals were to previous epochs. Constantly measured and priced, this vital raw material continues to spur the growth of economies built on a foundation of terabytes and gigabits per second.

This reduction of time to money may extend Franklin's observation to an absurd extreme. But the commodification of time is genuine-and results from a radical alteration in how we view the passage of events. Our fundamental human drives have not changed from the Paleolithic era, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Much of what we are about centers on the same impulses to eat, procreate, fight or flee that motivated Fred Flintstone. Despite the constancy of these primal urges, human culture has experienced upheaval after upheaval in the period since our hunter-gatherer forebears roamed the savannas. Perhaps the most profound change in the long transition from Stone Age to information age revolves around our subjective experience of time.

Just For Fun: The Story of An Accidental Revolutionary
The autobiography of a career computer programmer, even an unorthodox one, may sound less than enthralling, but this breezy account of the life of Linux inventor Torvalds not only lives up to its insouciant title, it provides an incisive look into the still-raging debate over open source code. In his own words (interspersed with co-writer Diamond's tongue-in-cheek accounts of his interviews with the absentminded Torvalds), the programmer relates how it all started in 1981 with his grandfather back in Finland, who let him play around on a Vic 20 computer. At 11 years old, Torvalds was hooked on computersespecially on figuring out how they ran and on improving their operating systems. For years, Torvalds did little but program, upgrading his hardware every couple of years, attending school in a desultory fashion and generally letting the outside world float by unnoticed, until he eventually wrote his own operating system, Linux. In a radical move, he began sharing the code with fellow OS enthusiasts over the burgeoning Internet in the early 1990s, allowing others to contribute to and improve it, while he oversaw the process. Even though Torvalds is now a bigger star in the computer world than Bill Gates, and companies like IBM are running Linux on their servers, he has retained his innocence: the book is full of statements like "Open source makes sense" and "Greed is never good" that seem sincere. Leavened with an appealing, self-deprecating sense of humor and a generous perspective that few hardcore coders have, this is a refreshing read for geeks and the techno-obsessed.

St Hilda
The 7th century saint, Hilda, or Hild as she would have been known then, wielded great religious and political influence in a volatile era. The monasteries she led in the north of England were known for their literacy and learning and produced great future leaders, including 5 bishops. The remains of a later abbey still stand in Whitby on the site of the powerful monastery she headed there.

We gain most of our knowledge of Hilda's life from The Venerable Bede who wrote that she was 66 years in the world, living 33 years in the secular life and 33 dedicated to God. She was baptised alongside the king of Northumbria and with her royal connections, she was a formidable character. Bede writes: “Her prudence was so great that not only indifferent persons but even kings and princes asked and received her advice”. Hild and her Abbey at Whitby hosted the Synod which decided when Easter would be celebrated, following a dispute between different traditions. Her achievements are all the more impressive when we consider that Christianity was still in its infancy in Northumbria.

So what contribution did she make to establishing Christianity in the north of England? How unusual was it for a woman to be such an important figure in the Church at the time? How did her double monastery of both men and women operate on a day-to-day basis? And how did she manage to convert a farmhand into England's first vernacular poet?