David Starkey - Elizabeth
Elizabeth I holds a unique place in the English imagination as
one of the nation's most powerful, charismatic and successful monarchs. She is usually imagined as the icy, untouchable figure memorably
recreated on screen by Bette Davis and Judi Dench, but that vision of
Elizabeth ignores the turbulent years of her early life, from her birth
as the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in 1533, until her
accession to the throne in 1558 following the death of her sister Mary.
It is these early years which are the subject of David Starkey's
fascinating
Elizabeth I, written to accompany his television series about the life of Elizabeth.
Anna is the first of Arnold Bennett's 'Five Towns' novels. It was started in 1896, two years before the debut of his first published novel A Man from the North in 1898, but did not finally appear until September 1902 after six years of re-writing and polishing and several changes of title. It is therefore an extremely important work, the more so because it began a long series of stories set in his thinly-disguised birthplace - the Potteries - over a period of nearly twenty years. As is frequently the case with an aspiring author, A Man from the North was basically autobiographical in a personal way, but there was little personal, though much of upbringing and living social history, in Anna.
Ours is about 100,000 light years across, is shaped like a fried egg and we travel inside it at approximately 220 kilometres per second. The nearest one to us is much smaller and is nicknamed the Sagittarius Dwarf. But the one down the road, called Andromeda, is just as large as ours and, in 10 billion years, we'll probably crash into it.
Galaxies - the vast islands in space of staggering beauty and even more staggering dimension. But galaxies are not simply there to adorn the universe, they house much of its visible matter and maintain the stars in a constant cycle of creation and destruction.
The Next Fifty Years, Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century
Эту книгу можно было бы назвать футурологической, если бы она не была написана глубокими профессионалами своего дела.
Scientists love to speculate about the direction research and technology will take us, and editor John Brockman has given a stellar panel free rein to imagine the future in The Next Fifty Years. From brain-swapping and the hunt for extraterrestrials to the genetic elimination of unhappiness and a new scientific morality, the ideas in this book are wild and thought-provoking. The list of scientists and thinkers who participate is impressive: Lee Smolin and Martin Rees on cosmology; Ian Stewart on mathematics; and Richard Dawkins and Paul Davies on the life sciences, just to name a few. Many of the authors remind readers that science has changed a lot since the blind optimism of the early 20th century, and they are unanimously aware of the potential consequences of the developments they describe. Fifty years is a long time in the information age, and these essays do a credible and entertaining job of guessing where we're going.
The Teaching Company In both his life and his music, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was a man of contrasts.
He composed serious Teutonic music and joyful dance music.
He was miserly with himself and exceedingly generous with family and associates.
He was kind to working people and known for his biting, malicious wit in artistic and aristocratic circles.
No one's idea of an easy man to know, Brahms destroyed a good deal of his own work and almost all of his lifetime's correspondence, in later years even collecting his letters from friends so that he could consign them to the flames.
This course links the complexities of Brahms the man with the electrifying music of Brahms the composer through biographical information and musical commentary. Brahms had vowed early in life to be lonely but free. He never married, owned a home, held a job for more than a few years, or took on a commissioned piece.
In art, he showed a similar independence of spirit. He believed in traditional musical genres and forms as challenges, not as hindrances to expressive freedom but as healthy sources of stimulation for his awesome artistic powers.
Unlike, for example, Beethoven, Brahms did not reinvent his art repeatedly in response to personal emotional crises, but rather found his essential compositional voice while in his mid-20s, and developed it in more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary fashion.
The Next Fifty Years, Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century 
Johannes Brahms
