Despite 21st-century fears of an 'epidemic' of loneliness, its history has been sorely neglected. A Biography of Loneliness offers a radically new interpretation of loneliness as an emotional language and experience. Using letters and diaries, philosophical tracts, political discussions, and medical literature from the eighteenth century to the present, historian of the emotions Fay Bound Alberti argues that loneliness is not an ahistorical, universal phenomenon. It is, in fact, a modern emotion: before 1800, its language did not exist. And where loneliness is identified, it is not always bad, but a complex emotional state that differs according to class, gender, ethnicity and experience.
Looking at informative case studies such as Sylvia Plath, Queen Victoria, and Virginia Woolf, A Biography of Loneliness charts the emergence of loneliness as a modern and embodied emotional state.

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An intriguing look at how past market wisdom can help you survive and thrive during uncertain times
In Wealth, War & Wisdom, legendary Wall Street investor Barton Biggs reveals how the turning points of World War II intersected with market performance, and shows how these lessons can help the twenty-first-century investor comprehend our own perilous times as well as choose the best strategies for the modern market economy.
Through these pages, Biggs skillfully discusses the performance of equities in both victorious and defeated countries, examines how individuals preserved their wealth despite the ongoing battles, and explores whether or not public equities were able to increase in value and serve as a wealth preserver. Biggs also looks at how other assets, including real estate and gold, fared during this dynamic and devastating period, and offers valuable insights on preserving one's wealth for future generations. With clear, concise prose, Biggs
Reveals how the investment insights of truly trying times can be profitably applied to modern day investment endeavors Follows the performance of global markets against the backdrop of World War II Offers many relevant lessons-about life, politics, financial markets, wealth, and survival-that can help you thrive in the face of adversity
Wealth, War & Wisdom contains essential insights that will help you navigate modern financial markets during the uncertain times that will increasingly define this new century.

For almost a hundred years from the 1860s, the City of London's overseas banks financed the global trade that lay at the core of the British Empire. Foremost among them from the beginning were two start-up ventures: the Standard Bank of South Africa, which soon developed a powerful domestic franchise at the Cape, and the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China. This book traces their stories in the nineteenth century, their glory days before 1914 - and their remarkable survival in the face of global wars and the collapse of world trade in the first half of the twentieth century.
The unravelling of the Empire after 1945 eventually forced Britain's overseas banks to confront a different future. The Standard and the Chartered, alarmed at the expansion of American banking, determined in 1969 on a merger as a way of sustaining the best of the City's overseas traditions. But from the start, Standard Chartered had to grapple with the fading fortunes of its own inherited franchise - badly dented in both Asia and Africa - and with radical changes in the nature of banking. Its British managers, steeped in the past, proved ill-suited to the challenge. By the late 1980s, efforts to expand in Europe and the USA had brought the merged Group to the brink of collapse.
Yet it survived - and then pulled off a dramatic recovery. Standard Chartered realigned itself, just in time, with the phenomenal growth of Asia's 'emerging markets', many of them in countries where the Chartered had flourished a century earlier. In the process, the Group was transformed. Trebling its workforce, it brushed aside the global financial crisis of 2008 and by 2012 could look back on a decade of astonishing growth. Recent times have added an eventful postscript to a long and absorbing history.
Crossing Continents recounts Standard Chartered's story with a wealth of detail from one of the richest archives available to any commercial bank. The book also affords a rare and compelling perspective on the evolution of international trade and finance, showing how Britain's commercial influence has actually worked in practice around the world over one hundred and fifty years.

“One of the most significant books in my life.” —Obie Fernandez, Author, The Rails Way
“Twenty years ago, the first edition of The Pragmatic Programmer completely changed the trajectory of my career. This new edition could do the same for yours.” —Mike Cohn, Author of Succeeding with Agile, Agile Estimating and Planning, and User Stories Applied
“. . . filled with practical advice, both technical and professional, that will serve you and your projects well for years to come.” —Andrea Goulet, CEO, Corgibytes, Founder, LegacyCode.Rocks
“. . . lightning does strike twice, and this book is proof.” —VM (Vicky) Brasseur, Director of Open Source Strategy, Juniper Networks
The Pragmatic Programmer is one of those rare tech books you’ll read, re-read, and read again over the years. Whether you’re new to the field or an experienced practitioner, you’ll come away with fresh insights each and every time.
Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt wrote the first edition of this influential book in 1999 to help their clients create better software and rediscover the joy of coding. These lessons have helped a generation of programmers examine the very essence of software development, independent of any particular language, framework, or methodology, and the Pragmatic philosophy has spawned hundreds of books, screencasts, and audio books, as well as thousands of careers and success stories.
Now, twenty years later, this new edition re-examines what it means to be a modern programmer. Topics range from personal responsibility and career development to architectural techniques for keeping your code flexible and easy to adapt and reuse. Read this book, and you’ll learn how to:
Fight software rot
Learn continuously
Avoid the trap of duplicating knowledge
Write flexible, dynamic, and adaptable code
Harness the power of basic tools
Avoid programming by coincidence
Learn real requirements
Solve the underlying problems of concurrent code
Guard against security vulnerabilities
Build teams of Pragmatic Programmers
Take responsibility for your work and career
Test ruthlessly and effectively, including property-based testing
Implement the Pragmatic Starter Kit
Delight your users
Written as a series of self-contained sections and filled with classic and fresh anecdotes, thoughtful examples, and interesting analogies, The Pragmatic Programmer illustrates the best approaches and major pitfalls of many different aspects of software development. Whether you’re a new coder, an experienced programmer, or a manager responsible for software projects, use these lessons daily, and you’ll quickly see improvements in personal productivity, accuracy, and job satisfaction. You’ll learn skills and develop habits and attitudes that form the foundation for long-term success in your career.
You’ll become a Pragmatic Programmer.
Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

The Templars, the Hospitallers, the Tuetonic Knights and the Knights of the Spanish and Portuguese orders were 'noblemen vowed to poverty, chastity and obedience, living a monastic life in convents which were at the same time barracks, waging war on the enemies of the Cross'. These military religious orders emerged during the Crusades as Christendom's storm troopers in the savage conflict with Islam. Some of them still exist today, now devoted to charitable works. "The Monks of War" is the first general history of these orders to have appeared since the eighteenth century. Writing in "The Times Literary Supplement", Professor David Knowles described it as, 'Undeniably the work of someone who knows and accepts the standards of critical history, but ...who sees the past also as an epic or a colourful spectacle'.

In this book, members of Brooks' write on different aspects of the London Club. Contributors include Lord Blake, Noel Annan, Roy Jenkins and James Lees Milne. Philip Ziegler's books include a biography of the Duke of Windsor and Desmond Seward is the author of "Prince of the Renaissance".

Reviewers' comments on the first edition: 'Zygmunt Bauman presents a cogently argued and compelling thesis...an important book from a distinguished scholar, that adds a new dimension to the poverty debate' - "British Journal of Sociology". 'It will be of great interest and value to students, teachers and researchers in sociology and social policy! [Bauman] provides a very forceful and sophisticated statement of the case; and a very well written one too. As a wide ranging analysis of our present discontents it is an admirable example of the sort of challenge which sociology at its best can offer to us and our fellow citizens to re-assess and re-think our current social arrangements' - "Work, Employment and Society". 'This is a stylish and persuasive analysis of the transition between the age of the 'society of producers' to that of the 'society of consumers" - Political Studies.It is one thing to be poor in a society of producers and universal employment; it is quite a different thing to be poor in a society of consumers, in which life projects are built around consumer choices rather than on work, professional skills or jobs. Where 'being poor' was once linked to being unemployed, today it draws its meaning primarily from the plight of a flawed consumer. This has a significant effect on the way living in poverty is experienced and on the prospects for redeeming its misery. "Work, Consumerism and the New Poor" traces this change over the duration of modern history. It makes an inventory of its social consequences, and considers how effective different ways of fighting poverty and relieving its hardships are.The new edition of this seminal work features: updated coverage of key thinkers in the field; discussion of recent work on redundancy, disposability and exclusion; and, current thinking on the effects of capital flows on different countries and the changes on the shop floor through, for example, business process re-engineering; and, new material on security and vulnerability. It is a key reading for students and lecturers in sociology, politics and social policy, and those with an interest in contemporary social issues.

Investors have too often extrapolated from recent experience. In the 1950s, who but the most rampant optimist would have dreamt that over the next fifty years the real return on equities would be 9 per cent per year? Yet this is what happened in the U.S. stock market. The optimists triumphed. However, as Don Marquis observed, an optimist is someone who never had much experience. The authors of this book extend our experience across regions and across time. They present a comprehensive and consistent analysis of investment returns for equities, bonds, bills, currencies and inflation, spanning sixteen countries, from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. This is achieved in a clear and simple way, with over 130 color diagrams that make comparison easy. Crucially, the authors analyze total returns, including reinvested income. They show that some historical indexes overstate long-term performance because they are contaminated by survivorship bias and that long-term stock returns are in most countries seriously overestimated, due to a focus on periods that with hindsight are known to have been successful. The book also provides the first comprehensive evidence on the long-term equity risk premium - the reward for bearing the risk of common stocks. The authors reveal whether the United States and United Kingdom have had unusually high stock market returns compared to other countries. The book covers the U.S., the U.K., Japan, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, Denmark, and South Africa. Triumph of the Optimists is required reading for investment professionals, financial economists, and investors. It will be the definitive reference in the field and consulted for years to come.

Did Alan Turing play a major role in the advent of the all-purpose computer? Did Turing Award winners, like Edsger W. Dijkstra, depend on his famous accomplishments?
In his well-researched book The Dawn of Software Engineering: from Turing to Dijkstra, Edgar G. Daylight deromanticizes Turing's & logic's role in the history of computing.
Dijkstra's pioneering work in compilers lies at the heart of modern-day computers. The book vividly describes how & why Dijkstra's ideas stood out among those of his contemporaries.
This book includes interviews with Turing Award winners Tony Hoare, Niklaus Wirth, Peter Naur, and Barbara Liskov.

南部非洲一度被认为是由英国殖民地、布尔共和国和非洲酋长领地组成的一锅一文不值的大杂烩，一个对外部世界来说无足轻重的麻烦地区。然而，勘探者偶然发现了世界上最丰富的钻石和黄金矿藏，这引发了英国人和布尔人之间争夺土地控制权的激烈斗争。其结果是英国进行了近一个世纪以来的最昂贵、最血腥、最屈辱的战争，以及布尔共和国的毁灭。《纽约客》把这些年的故事称为“一段精于算计的历史”。梅雷迪斯技巧娴熟地描绘了对钻石（以及黄金）的迫切需求如何为种族隔离奠定了基础。

The ten works collected in this volume demonstrate how a diverse group of writers challenged the conscience of a nation and laid the foundations of the African American literary tradition by expressing their in anger, pain, sorrow, and courage.
Included in the volume: Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw ; Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano ; The Confessions of Nat Turner ; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass ; Narrative of William W. Brown ; Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb ; Narrative of Sojouner Truth ; Ellen and William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom ; Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Narrative of the Life of J. D.Green .

A dazzling cornucopia exploring the impact of discovery upon such great Romantic writers as Mary Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron and John Keats.

David Abulafia begins with the earliest of seafaring societies - the Polynesians of the Pacific, the possessors of intuitive navigational skills, long before the invention of the compass, who by the first century were trading between their far-flung islands. By the seventh century, trading routes stretched from the coasts of Arabia and Africa to southern China and Japan, bringing together the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific, linking together half the world through the international spice trade. In the Atlantic, centuries before the little kingdom of Portugal carved out its powerful, seaborne colonial empire, many peoples sought new lands across the sea - the Bretons, the Frisians and, most notably, the Vikings, now known to be the first Europeans to reach North America. As Portuguese supremacy dwindled in the late sixteenth century, the Spanish, the Dutch and then the British each successively ruled the waves.
Following merchants, explorers, pirates, cartographers and travellers in their quests for spices, gold, ivory, slaves, lands for settlement and knowledge of what lay beyond, David Abulafia has created an extraordinary narrative of humanity and the oceans. Besides its grand narratives, The Boundless Sea explores the lesser known maritime enterprises of Denmark, Sweden, Oman, Sri Vijaya and many others. And today, as plastic refuse covers thousands of square miles of the waters, and once exotic trading cities and outposts are replaced by vast, mechanized container ports, he asks - what next for our oceans and our world?

Captive American Indian Manteo was returned to his homeland as Governor, a gamble that resulted in the first English settlement in the New World. Using first-hand accounts, this book tells the full story and its extraordinary twist.