Originally published, New York, Viking Press, 1962.

John Locke was one of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment, whose assertion that reason is the key to knowledge changed the face of philosophy. These writings on thought, ideas, perception, truth and language are some of the most influential in the history of Western thought. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Stupidity is all around us. But in order to vanquish it, we must first understand it. In The Psychology of Stupidity, some of the world's leading psychologists and thinkers--including a Nobel Prize winner and bestselling authors--discuss in articles, essays and interviews

- why smart people sometimes believe in utter nonsense;
- how our lazy brains cause us to make the wrong decisions;
- why trying to debate fools is a trap;
- how media manipulation and Internet overstimulation make us dumber;
- why the stupidest people don't think they're stupid.

From the Roman Emperor Julian, who waxed rhapsodic about Parisian wine and figs, to Henry Miller, who relished its seductive bohemia, Paris has been a perennial source of fascination for 2,000 years. In this definitive and illuminating history, Colin Jones walks us through the city that was a plague-infested charnel house during the Middle Ages, the bloody epicenter of the French Revolution, the muse of nineteenth- century Impressionist painters, and much more. Jones’s masterful narrative is enhanced by numerous photographs and feature boxes—on the Bastille or Josephine Baker, for instance—that complete a colorful and comprehensive portrait of a place that has endured Vikings, Black Death, and the Nazis to emerge as the heart of a resurgent Europe. This is a thrilling companion for history buffs and backpack, or armchair, travelers alike.

A myth-shattering exposé of America’s nuclear weapons

Famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser digs deep to uncover secrets about the management of America’s nuclear arsenal. A groundbreaking account of accidents, near misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs, Command and Control explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: How do you deploy weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them? That question has never been resolved—and Schlosser reveals how the combination of human fallibility and technological complexity still poses a grave risk to mankind. While the harms of global warming increasingly dominate the news, the equally dangerous yet more immediate threat of nuclear weapons has been largely forgotten.

Written with the vibrancy of a first-rate thriller, Command and Control interweaves the minute-by-minute story of an accident at a nuclear missile silo in rural Arkansas with a historical narrative that spans more than fifty years. It depicts the urgent effort by American scientists, policy makers, and military officers to ensure that nuclear weapons can’t be stolen, sabotaged, used without permission, or detonated inadvertently. Schlosser also looks at the Cold War from a new perspective, offering history from the ground up, telling the stories of bomber pilots, missile commanders, maintenance crews, and other ordinary servicemen who risked their lives to avert a nuclear holocaust. At the heart of the book lies the struggle, amid the rolling hills and small farms of Damascus, Arkansas, to prevent the explosion of a ballistic missile carrying the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States.

Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with people who designed and routinely handled nuclear weapons, Command and Control takes readers into a terrifying but fascinating world that, until now, has been largely hidden from view. Through the details of a single accident, Schlosser illustrates how an unlikely event can become unavoidable, how small risks can have terrible consequences, and how the most brilliant minds in the nation can only provide us with an illusion of control. Audacious, gripping, and unforgettable, Command and Control is a tour de force of investigative journalism, an eye-opening look at the dangers of America’s nuclear age.

The rational and irrational emotions associated with death are discussed frankly and openly by the author.

Based on more than a decade's research in South Africa's Karoo Desert, this remarkable journey of discovery and real-life adventure deep into Earth's history is offered by a renowned scientist. Photo insert.

A millionaire English lord dreams of founding a utopian community on a remote Pacific island....

Among the forty-odd men and women selected for the project are a pestologist named Camilla and the narrator. Within hours of the group's arrival on the sunny isle their radio has been destroyed. Within days several members of the group are dead. Dreams turn to nightmare....

The Partnership chronicles the most important periods in Goldman Sachs's history and the individuals who built one of the world?s largest investment banks. Charles D. Ellis, who worked as a strategy consultant to Goldman Sachs for more than thirty years, reveals the secrets behind the firm?s continued success through many life-threatening changes. Disgraced and nearly destroyed in 1929, Goldman Sachs limped along as a break-even operation through the Depression and WWII. But with only one special service and one improbable banker, it began the stage-by-stage rise that took the firm to global leadership, even in the face of the world-wide credit crisis.

France, 1916.

While her adored husband Edouard fights on the front, all Sophie has of him is the beautiful portrait he painted for her.

But when the picture catches the eye of the village Kommandant, he cannot keep away from its subject, and Sophie is forced to make a terrible decision . . .

Almost a century later, Sophie's portrait hangs in the home of Liv Halston, a wedding gift from her young husband before he died.

A chance encounter reveals the painting's true worth.

But will its troubled history turn Liv's life upside down all over again?

As successors to Sherlock Holmes there are no more than a handful of detectives in the great tradition. Mr Reginald Fortune is certainly one of them. Mr Fortune, attached in a loose sort of way to the Home Office and Scotland Yard, is utterly independent, utterly fearless, and with a cold astuteness belied by his cherubic appearance. His speciality is medicine, although he does not practice, but for expert opinions on such matters as recently deceased bodies, the more difficult poisons and the like, the Yard would be hard pressed to do without him. Mr Fortune, Please is the fourth of his casebooks and includes six ingenious, bizarre and murderous crimes which Reggie investigates through minute and forensic, scientific detection.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Henry Christopher Bailey was an English crime novelist and one of the Big Five writers of detective fictions in the ‘Golden Age’ which also included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, R. Austin Freeman and Freeman Wills Crofts. Hugely popular at the time and adored by critics he is today unjustly rather forgotten. This was at least partly due to tortuous issues regarding his literary estate. His best-known creation was the plump and drawling Reginald Fortune. The medically trained ‘Mr Fortune’ was a scientific adviser to Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department and starred in twenty-two novels and short story collections. Much praised for his puzzles and characterisation, the Mr Fortune stories have echoes of Lord Peter Wimsey but are much darker, tackling subjects not touched upon by other major writers, including police corruption and murderous obsession. Bailey’s other series character was Joshua Clunk, a sanctimonious lawyer who exposes corruption and blackmail but also manages to profit from the crimes he investigates. H.C. Bailey died in 1961.

PRAISE FOR H.C. BAILEY’S ‘MR FORTUNE’

‘Fortune is a super sleuth who solves problems that are too much for Scotland Yard’
New York Times

‘The most engaging detective of fiction’
The Observer

‘Clever and entertaining’
Boston Transcript

‘Mr Fortune is not only brilliant but lovable’
New York Times

‘The most engaging detective invented since Sherlock Holmes’
Alexander Woolcott, The New Yorker

‘Brilliant… his plots have an immense and admirable ingenuity’
Times Literary Supplement

‘It is difficult to find in modern detection, puzzles more elaborately conceived and mystifying’
Howard Haycroft

‘Mr Bailey is always readable’
New Statesman

Includes bibliographical references (p. 225-[226]).

A compassionate and hopeful romantic comedy, Passion Project is a reminder that love is waiting for us to let it in

If your twenties are supposed to be the best years of your life, Bennet Taylor is failing miserably . . . with a big emphasis on the miserable. Where’s that zest she keeps hearing about? She’s a temp worker in New York City with no direction, no future, and no social life. And at the painful center of this listlessness is grief over the death of her first love.

When Bennet runs into Henry Adams just hours after standing him up for a first date, she makes an alcohol-fueled confession: She’s not ready to date. In fact, it’s been years since she felt passion for something. Not even pottery, or organized sports—not anything. Rather than leaving her to ruminate, Henry jumps at the opportunity for adventure: Bennet needs to find a passion for life, and Henry will help her find it. Every Saturday, they’ll try something new in New York City. As friends, of course.

As their “passion project” continues, the pair tackle everything from carpentry to tattooing to rappelling off skyscrapers, and Bennet feels her guarded exterior ebbing away. But as secrets surface, Bennet has to decide what she wants, and if she’s truly ready to move on. With emotional resonance and sparkling banter, Passion Project is a fun, flirty, thoughtful story of finding a spark—and igniting happiness.

We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny, and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled Smut Salon, and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus Workshop where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, Electric Literature , and The New York Public Library

Uther, the High King, has died, leaving the infant Mordred as his only heir. His uncle, the loyal and gifted warlord Arthur, now rules as caretaker for a country which has fallen into chaos - threats emerge from within the British kingdoms while vicious Saxon armies stand ready to invade, As he struggles to unite Britain and hold back the enemy at the gates, Arthur is embroiled in a doomed romance with beautiful Guinevere. Will the old-world magic of Merlin be enough to turn the tide of war in his favour?

UK/AUST

Includes bibliographical references (p. [299]-303) and index.

There can be few more mesmerizing historical narratives than the story of how the confident monarchy left by Louis XIV in 1715 became the discredited failure toppled by revolution in 1789. This brilliant new book is the first in forty years to describe the whole period, from the last days of the “Sun King” to the wars of Napoleon. In a groundbreaking work of scholarship, Colin Jones argues that, contrary to popular belief, the house of Bourbon's downfall was hardly a foregone conclusion. Producing an illuminating account of a society torn apart from within, he recounts the saga of how a dynamic French society—the heart of the Enlighten-ment—fell prey to the debt and humiliation of its wars against Britain.

There can be few more mesmerizing historical narratives than the story of how the confident monarchy left by Louis XIV in 1715 became the discredited failure toppled by revolution in 1789. This brilliant new book is the first in forty years to describe the whole period, from the last days of the “Sun King” to the wars of Napoleon. In a groundbreaking work of scholarship, Colin Jones argues that, contrary to popular belief, the house of Bourbon's downfall was hardly a foregone conclusion. Producing an illuminating account of a society torn apart from within, he recounts the saga of how a dynamic French society—the heart of the Enlighten-ment—fell prey to the debt and humiliation of its wars against Britain.