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An exquisitely illustrated collection of historical guides to creating pigments from flowers and plantsFlowering currant, ivy, Portuguese laurel, and woad might all have grown in a medieval garden, but it would have taken special expertise to extract and create rich blue and purple pigments from them. Humans have been extracting dyes and inks from natural materials for millennia, and the practice was firmly established during the medieval era, recorded in manuscripts that survive today. Gold from Newton’s Apple Tree brings together recipes for making natural colors according to season, method, and ingredients.This unique book takes its title from an ink recipe derived from a descendant of Sir Isaac Newton’s apple tree, in which ingredients extracted from the bark are transformed, seemingly by magic, from brown to a yellow gold. But gold pigments can also be extracted from cornflower, crocus, greater celandine, myrrh, and turmeric. Nabil Ali shares his own accessible adaptations for preparing these and other recipes rooted in medieval craft traditions. Along the way, he provides an engaging and informative natural history of the plants used, alongside the broad spectrum of marvelous colors they produce.Presenting original translations of medieval recipes taken from painters' and illuminators' technical manuscripts from the third century BCE through to the twenty-first century, alongside stunning botanical illustrations, Gold from Newton’s Apple Tree is a captivating celebration of colors derived from nature. Autorid: Nabil Ali

A major new biography that reveals how politics profoundly shaped Joyce’s life, thought and writingsThe young James Joyce (1882–1941) was forged in the smithy of Irish political controversies, and he took into his European exile a depth of political insight unrivalled among his fellow modernists. In this biography of Joyce in his youth and early exile, acclaimed Irish historian and biographer Frank Callanan reveals a Joyce who is markedly more politically conscious, informed and complex than the Joyce of Richard Ellmann’s classic account. Written in a sparkling style and rich with historical insights, Callanan’s deeply researched biography is the first sustained account of how Joyce’s Irish and European political and cultural context shaped his life, thought, and writings.Joyce was eight years old in 1890 when the O’Shea divorce scandal tore Irish nationalism apart, leading to the split in the Irish Parliamentary Party, the death of nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell, and a long, bitter period dominated by the anti-Parnellites. This was the Ireland that Joyce grew up in and rebelled against, and which determined his literary direction. Callanan uncovers a Joyce who was a highly original and dissenting Irish nationalist, who refused to avow or vaunt his nationalism and whose understanding was refined by the experience of living in multicultural Trieste with its fraught ethnic politics and differing models of statehood. Callanan’s Joyce is as heroic as Ellmann’s defiantly modernistic artist but in a more interesting way—a writer who didn’t lack political conviction but whose views didn’t yield to the expectations of his time.Energizing, witty, profound, and elegant, James Joyce: A Political Life is a magisterial biography that will transform how readers look at Joyce and his politics. Autorid: Frank Callanan, Robert Spoo

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A groundbreaking account of how firearms changed Europe and the worldIn Renaissance Italy, the gun was not only a tool of war but also a desirable object, a luxury item carried at court. Guns were in use on the battlefield by 1440; later in that century Leonardo da Vinci sketched a design for a faster-firing, more portable handgun that could be hidden beneath a cloak. As the gun proliferated in society, it became both a means of self-defence and a threat to civic order. In The Firearm Revolution, historian Catherine Fletcher explores the emergence of firearms in Renaissance Italy and beyond, describing the social transformations that accompanied the evolution of the handgun from innovative military technology to widely used personal accessory.Fletcher shows that as guns became smaller and the new wheellock mechanism made concealed carry possible, Italian states increasingly tried to control their use—even as they viewed firearms as necessary for their militias. In the end, Fletcher reports, the importance of civic defence trumped the concern for social order. As guns became ever more acceptable, stories of how firearms aided Europeans’ overseas conquests created a new and more positive image for a weapon once considered the devil’s work. Debates over the regulation of firearms five centuries ago—which included arguments over the restriction of gun ownership, the use of guns for self-defence and the regulation of an armed militia—in many ways anticipate discussions about gun control today. Fletcher’s groundbreaking account sheds new light on how governments weighed the competing priorities of defence and social order as they set out to build empires. Autorid: Catherine Fletcher

A comprehensive look at inequalities and why they matterThere is a widespread sense throughout the developed world that progress toward a better society has stalled. Many countries, including the UK, have experienced persistent economic stagnation accompanied by declining trust in institutions. Governments are struggling to respond not only to traditional economic problems but also to newer challenges posed by climate change, migration and technological change. Challenging Inequalities connects these conditions to inequality—inequality not just of income and wealth but of health, political participation and opportunity. It not only offers a detailed analysis of the different forms of inequalities but also an in-depth consideration of why inequalities matter, how they have changed and what can, or should, be done about them.The book explains the enduring effects of early life experiences and education and examines the trends in employment and earnings over recent decades. It argues that economic stagnation since the financial crises of 2008–2009 has exposed inequalities originating in the 1980s. Not only have incomes stagnated, but so has progress towards reducing health inequalities and dealing with inequalities across gender, ethnicity, geography, age and educational level. The combination of earnings inequality and economic stagnation has led to the growing importance of wealth, the increasing concentration of economic power in an older generation and a decline in social mobility. Economic inequalities have also resulted directly in dangerous differences between regions and in political power across groups.The need to address inequality has never been more urgent. Changing Inequalities offers a road map for how we have arrived at such a perilous spot—and how we can change course to achieve better outcomes for all. Autorid: Paul Johnson

How the computer revolution shaped our conception of rationality—and why human problems require solutions rooted in human intuition, morality, and judgmentIn the 1940s, mathematicians set out to design computers that could act as ideal rational agents in the face of uncertainty. The Irrational Decision tells the story of how they settled on a peculiar mathematical definition of rationality in which every decision is a statistical question of risk. Benjamin Recht traces how this quantitative standard came to define our understanding of rationality, looking at the history of optimization, game theory, statistical testing, and machine learning. He explains why, now more than ever, we need to resist efforts by powerful tech interests to drive public policy and essentially rule our lives. While mathematical rationality has proven valuable in accelerating computers, regulating pharmaceuticals, and deploying electronic commerce, it fails to solve messy human problems and has given rise to a view of a rational world that is not only overquantified but surprisingly limited. Recht shows how these mathematical methods emerged from wartime research and influenced fields ranging from economics to health care, drawing on illuminating examples ranging from diet planning to chess to self-driving cars. Highlighting both the power and limitations of mathematical rationality, The Irrational Decision reveals why only humans can resolve fundamentally political or value-based questions and proposes a more expansive approach to decision making that is appropriately supported by computational tools yet firmly rooted in human intuition, morality, and judgment.