What is luck? The chances are you don't really know, but you probably believe in it, and I bet that you invoke the word every day of your life ...'Bad luck!' 'That was lucky!' 'You should be so lucky!' 'What a lucky escape!' - said with varying degrees of intensity, sincerity, sarcasm, amusement, incredulity or disgust. But what is luck? This book tries to determine what luck is, how it operates in our lives, and how far the individual is at its mercy - favoured by good luck or cursed by bad? Is there any justice or fair play in life, or are these merely human concepts that don't exist in the laws governing the universe? Whatever you think you believe, by the time you have read this book, the odds are that you will have changed your mind. James M Kileen's analysis ranges from Astrology to Zoroastrianism and everything in between: the big bang and the butterfly effect, destiny and determinism, fortune-telling and feng shui, gambling and game theory, miracles and Murphy's Law, oracles and ordeals, philosophy and religion, precognition and the placebo effect, serendipity and synchronicity. A Matter of Luck is a highly readable yet thought-provoking work, interspersed with illuminating and amusing examples to illlustrate each facet of this fascinating subject: for example, the true stories of the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo, King Umberto and the chef, James Dean's car, and the woman who simultaneously chose the winning numbers for both the Massachusetts and Rhode Island lotteries (although the numbers she chose for the Rhode Island lottery were the winning numbers for the Massachusetts lottery, and vice versa). Lucky or unlucky - you decide, if you can.

Journalist Allum Bokhari has spent four years investigating the tech giants that dominate the Internet: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. He has discovered a dark plot to seize control of the flow of information, and utilize that power to its full extent-to censor, manipulate, and ultimately sway the outcome of democratic elections. His network of whistleblowers inside Google, Facebook and other companies explain how the tech giants now see themselves as "good censors," benevolent commissars controlling the information we receive to "protect" us from "dangerous" speech. They reveal secret methods to covertly manipulate online information without us ever being aware of it, explaining how tech companies can use big data to target undecided voters. They lift the lid on a plot four years in the making-a plot to use the power of technology to stop Donald Trump's re-election.

Using examples from different historical contexts, this book examines the relationship between class, nationalism, modernity and the agrarian myth. Essentializing rural identity, traditional culture and quotidian resistance, both aristocratic/plebeian and pastoral/Darwinian forms of agrarian myth discourse inform struggles waged 'from above' and 'from below', surfacing in peasant movements, film and travel writing. Film depictions of royalty, landowner and colonizer as disempowered, 'ordinary' or well-disposed towards 'those below', whose interests they share, underwrite populism and nationalism. Although these ideologies replaced the cosmopolitanism of the Grand Tour, twentieth century travel literature continued to reflect a fear of vanishing rural 'otherness' abroad, combined with the arrival there of the mass tourist, the plebeian from home.