Through revealing photographs and accompanying text, this book offers an enchanting and beautiful glimpse into the inner life of the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES). The IHES in France is an institute of advanced research in mathematics and theoretical physics with an interest in epistemology and the history of science. It provides exceptionally gifted scientists with a place where they can devote themselves entirely to their research, free of teaching and administrative constraints, and offers them the opportunity to invite visitors with whom they wish to work.

Written with great wit and panache, this biography also has a serious purpose: to make us face up to the moral bankruptcy of Napoleon's dictatorship. Johnson tells the whole story: his astonishing gift for figures and calculation, his mastery of cannon; his audacious, hyperactive and aggressive generalship and his simple battle tactics; his complete control of propaganda and the success of the cultural presentation of the Empire; the Code Napoleon; his failure as an international statesman, as Europe grew to hate him; his marshals and ministers; his wives, mistresses, personal style and working methods; the British blockade and the Continental System; the mistakes in Spain and Russia. The escape from Elba, the events leading up to Waterloo and the battle itself, which gets a full treatment, is particularly riveting.

'I now present for the reader two hundred or more sketches of people I have come across during over sixty years as a writer, editor, historian, broadcaster and lecturer, all over the world. Some are mere glimpses, others attempts to pluck out the mystery. I have been obliged to exclude a number of interesting people who are still living, and I present my findings more for diversion and amusement than for edification. I simply raise the curtain on the human comedy I have witnessed, and present what I have seen, and heard, often in whispers and asides'. In the course of a long and distinguished career, Paul Johnson has known popes, presidents, prime ministers, painters, poets, playwrights, even the foul-mouthed publican Muriel Belcher who ran the legendary Colony Club. Harking back to the scandalously anecdotal seventeenth-century book by John Aubrey on the celebrities of his times, Johnson's "Brief Lives" gives us a unique insight into recent history. But where Aubrey relied on hearsay (however meticulously ascribed), Paul Johnson draws more on personal experience. He has advised Margaret Thatcher, counselled Princess Diana, had dinner with Lee Kuan Yew, and had a drawing done of him by Ernest Hemingway. He has been an insider and an outsider but, above all, is a shrewdly humorous analyst of a range of characters who have changed history, formed public taste or simply lightened our lives by their presence.

In 1868, Jack Renton, a teenage Scots sailor, was shanghaied in San Francisco. In 1876, he was rescued from captivity on the Pacific island of Malaita, home to a fearsome tribe of headhunters. After the rescue, in a sensational best-selling memoir, Renton recounted his eight-year adventure: how he jumped ship and drifted two thousand miles in an open whaleboat to the Solomon Islands, came ashore at Malaita, was stripped of his clothes, possessions and his very identity, but lived to serve the island's tribal chief Kabou eventually as his most trusted adviser. For all the authenticity and riveting detail, however, it turns out that Renton's chronicle glossed over key events that made him the man that Kabou said he loved, "as my first-born son. " Mining the oral history passed down in detail from generations of Malaitans, documentary filmmaker Nigel Randell spent seven years piecing together a more complete and grislier account of Renton's experienceas a man forced to assimilate in order to survive. While The White Headhunter is the story of a man transformed by an island, it is also the story of a man who transformed the island as he prepared it for the onslaught of Western civilization.

“Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”
--Warren Buffett

In March of 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with million-dollar stakes, but those numbers meant nothing to them. They were accustomed to risking billions.

At the card table that night was Peter Muller, an eccentric, whip-smart whiz kid who’d studied theoretical mathematics at Princeton and now managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT…when he wasn’t playing his keyboard for morning commuters on the New York subway. With him was Ken Griffin, who as an undergraduate trading convertible bonds out of his Harvard dorm room had outsmarted the Wall Street pros and made money in one of the worst bear markets of all time. Now he was the tough-as-nails head of Citadel Investment Group, one of the most powerful money machines on earth. There too were Cliff Asness, the sharp-tongued, mercurial founder of the hedge fund AQR, a man as famous for his computer-smashing rages as for his brilliance, and Boaz Weinstein, chess life-master and king of the credit default swap, who while juggling $30 billion worth of positions for Deutsche Bank found time for frequent visits to Las Vegas with the famed MIT card-counting team.

On that night in 2006, these four men and their cohorts were the new kings of Wall Street. Muller, Griffin, Asness, and Weinstein were among the best and brightest of a new breed, the quants . Over the prior twenty years, this species of math whiz --technocrats who make billions not with gut calls or fundamental analysis but with formulas and high-speed computers-- had usurped the testosterone-fueled, kill-or-be-killed risk-takers who’d long been the alpha males the world’s largest casino. The quants believed that a dizzying, indecipherable-to-mere-mortals cocktail of differential calculus, quantum physics, and advanced geometry held the key to reaping riches from the financial markets. And they helped create a digitized money-trading machine that could shift billions around the globe with the click of a mouse.

Few realized that night, though, that in creating this unprecedented machine, men like Muller, Griffin, Asness and Weinstein had sowed the seeds for history’s greatest financial disaster.

Drawing on unprecedented access to these four number-crunching titans, The Quants tells the inside story of what they thought and felt in the days and weeks when they helplessly watched much of their net worth vaporize – and wondered just how their mind-bending formulas and genius-level IQ’s had led them so wrong, so fast. Had their years of success been dumb luck, fool’s gold, a good run that could come to an end on any given day? What if The Truth they sought -- the secret of the markets -- wasn’t knowable? Worse, what if there wasn’t any Truth?

In The Quants , Scott Patterson tells the story not just of these men, but of Jim Simons, the reclusive founder of the most successful hedge fund in history; Aaron Brown, the quant who used his math skills to humiliate Wall Street’s old guard at their trademark game of Liar’s Poker, and years later found himself with a front-row seat to the rapid emergence of mortgage-backed securities; and gadflies and dissenters such as Paul Wilmott, Nassim Taleb, and Benoit Mandelbrot.

With the immediacy of today’s NASDAQ close and the timeless power of a Greek tragedy, The Quants is at once a masterpiece of explanatory journalism, a gripping tale of ambition and hubris…and an ominous warning about Wall Street’s future.

《超越东西方》一书为吴经熊用英文撰写，于1951年在夏威夷完稿，在纽约初版，此后先后被译为法文、葡萄牙文、荷兰文、德文、韩文出版。这是他的自传体著作，书中以一种灵性自白的笔触描述了其人生经历、及其宗教皈依的心路历程。其思绪浪漫任运，题材涉猎广泛，文笔优美典雅，多有惊人之见和神来之笔，堪称中国现代基督宗教灵修文学之杰作。吴经熊以一种信仰的虔诚叙述了其对基督宗教的体验、见证，同时亦以一种比较的视域论及其对儒、佛、道三教和中国传统文化、以及中国精神之真谛精髓的体会、见解。在他看来，“中国人是按照儒家学说为人处世的，同时得到了道家去世思想的平衡，但在他们内在的生活里他们追随的却是佛教思想。”在此，儒家思想的本质乃论及伦理关系，道家思想关涉不可言喻、神秘莫测的终极实在，而佛教则以其“在片刻活出永恒”的禅悟来让人达到从此岸到彼岸、从缘起界到绝对界、从时间到永恒、从现象到实在的“过渡”。他认为，中国精神的最基本特征，“是抽象与具体、普遍与个别、最世俗与最脱俗、超越的理想主义与讲实际的实用主义的结合。”其实，吴经熊在这里已体悟到中华民族追求和谐的文化精神。可以说，儒家之道德哲学是以伦理学之途来追求众生的和谐，着眼于社会人生；道家之自然哲学是以生理学之途来追求自然的和谐，着眼于自然万物；而佛教之精神哲学则是以心理学之途来追求宇宙的和谐，着眼于内心反思。这些追求在中国文化中殊途同归，共构其追求和谐的文化精神。而吴经熊则引入了基督宗教信仰体系和西方文化精神传统的参照，旨在达到对东方、西方的超越。其以娴熟的西文来流畅阐述中国思想，本身更是体现出一种中西合璧、天衣无缝的和谐境界。

Fitztroy Maclean was one of the real-life inspirations for super-spy James Bond. After adventures in Soviet Russia before the war, Maclean fought with the SAS in North Africa in 1942. There he specialised in hair-raising commando raids behind enemy lines, including the daring and outrageous kidnapping of the German Consul in Axis-controlled Iraq. Maclean's extraordinary adventures in the Western Desert and later fighting alongside Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia are blistering reading and show what it took to be a British hero who broke the mould...

He was one of the most gifted scholars of his generation—a brilliant writer, high-society star, and cultural force who moved easily between aristocratic houses and the humble haunts of literary bohemia. He developed a lucid prose style that he used to scathing effect, earning notoriety for his sharp attacks on other historians. Now this superb biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, universally acclaimed overseas, makes its anticipated American debut.
With incisive knowledge of the man and access to never-before-published letters, Adam Sisman paints a fascinating portrait of this charismatic, contentious, contradictory character. Sisman examines Trevor-Roper’s middle-class upbringing in a house so empty of affection that it caused, as he put it, his “almost physical difficulty in expressing emotion.” He traces Trevor-Roper’s career from his early academic triumphs to his later failure to produce the big book expected of him.
Sisman also provides riveting new details of the high drama of Trevor-Roper’s World War II intelligence work—in which he boldly blew the whistle on bureaucratic infighting that imperiled British code-breaking—and the exclusive investigation of Hitler’s death that inspired his bestselling postwar triumph, The Last Days of Hitler. As never before, Trevor-Roper’s personal life is explored, including his passionate affair with an older, married woman. Finally, An Honourable Englishman reveals the truth behind his public substantiation of the false Hitler diaries in 1983, a misstep (encouraged by his impatient employer Rupert Murdoch) that forever tainted his reputation.
Profoundly bright and brutally acerbic, Hugh Trevor-Roper was a literary lion like no other, and in An Honourable Englishman he receives the absorbing biography he deserves.

Bankers, philanthropists, scholars, socialites, artists, and politicians, the Warburgs stood at the pinnacle of German (and, later, of German-American) Jewry. They forged economic dynasties, built mansions and estates, assembled libraries, endowed charities, and advised a German kaiser and two American presidents. But their very success made the Warburgs lightning rods for anti-Semitism, and their sense of patriotism became increasingly dangerous in a Germany that had declared Jews the enemy. Ron Chernow's hugely fascinating history is a group portrait of a clan whose members were renowned for their brilliance, culture, and personal energy yet tragically vulnerable to the dark and irrational currents of the twentieth century. "Splendid.... Chernow does a wonderful job fleshing out the lives of the major characters in this family drama." -- Wall Street Journal "[Ron Chernow] has surpassed himself in this absorbing chronicle." -- The New Yorker "This is grand-scale scholarship .... It is all here, along with so much of the painful, tumultuous history of our time, all in one splendid book." -- David McCullough, author of Truman

Kim Philby was the greatest spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain’s counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War—while he was secretly working for the enemy. And nobody thought he knew Philby like Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s best friend and fellow officer in MI6. The two men had gone to the same schools, belonged to the same exclusive clubs, grown close through the crucible of wartime intelligence work and long nights of drink and revelry. It was madness for one to think the other might be a communist spy, bent on subverting Western values and the power of the free world.
But Philby was secretly betraying his friend. Every word Elliott breathed to Philby was transmitted back to Moscow—and not just Elliott’s words, for in America, Philby had made another powerful friend: James Jesus Angleton, the crafty, paranoid head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton's and Elliott’s unwitting disclosures helped Philby sink almost every important Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years, leading countless operatives to their doom. Even as the web of suspicion closed around him, and Philby was driven to greater lies to protect his cover, his two friends never abandoned him—until it was too late. The stunning truth of his betrayal would have devastating consequences on the two men who thought they knew him best, and on the intelligence services he left crippled in his wake.
Told with heart-pounding suspense and keen psychological insight, and based on personal papers and never-before-seen British intelligence files, A Spy Among Friends is Ben Macintyre’s best book yet, a high-water mark in Cold War history telling.

An award-winning biographer's penetrating portrait of the most glamorous branch of the international family, the one that came to prominence under Napoleon, and has ever since been locked in a turbulent relationship with that country. Of the many books written about the Rothschilds, this is the first to focus so closely on the French branch--perhaps the most fascinating side of this astonishing family. 8-page black-and-white inserts.