This Modern Guide provides detailed theoretical and empirical insights into key areas of research in food economics. It takes a forward-looking perspective on how different actors in the food system shape the sustainability of food production, distribution, and consumption, as well as on major challenges to efficient and inclusive food systems. Analysing the main characteristics of modern food markets, chapters introduce readers to the economics of food systems, product differentiation, the mediating role of food retailers, and the increasing significance and complexity of international trade in food. Encapsulating new methods in the study of food economics and policy, this Modern Guide explores changes in food value chains and consumption. It further pushes the boundaries of food economics to include economic perspectives on the role of social media and technology such as genomics in shaping food systems. Offering key insights into the state-of-the-art debates in the field, this Modern Guide will be critical reading for graduate students and researchers of food economics. It will also be a timely book for practitioners in the field wishing to take a fresh look at issues shaping food systems.

Space: the biggest geopolitical story of the coming century - new from the multi-million-copy international bestselling author of Prisoners of Geography Spy satellites orbiting the moon. Space metals worth more than most countries' GDP. People on Mars within the next ten years. This isn't science fiction. It's astropolitics. Humans are heading up and out, and we're taking our power struggles with us. Soon, what happens in space will shape human history as much the mountains, rivers and seas have on Earth. It's no coincidence that Russia, China and the USA are leading the way. The next fifty years will change the face of global politics. In this gripping book, bestselling author Tim Marshall lays bare the new geopolitical realities to show how we got here and where we're going, covering the new space race; great-power rivalry; technology; economics; war; and what it means for all of us down here on Earth. Written with all the insight and wit that have made Marshall the UK's most popular writer on geopolitics, this is the essential read on power, politics and the future of humanity. Praise for The Power of Geography: 'Fascinating . . . I can't imagine reading a better book this year.' Daily Mirror 'Another outstanding guide to the modern world. Marshall is a master at explaining what you need to know and why.' Peter Frankopan And Prisoners of Geography: 'Like having a light shone on your understanding... I can't think of another book that explains the world situation so well.' Nicolas Lezard, Evening Standard 'Sharp insights into the way geography shapes the choices of world leaders.' Gideon Rachman, Financial Times

The year is 1973 and changes are afoot in Great Yarmouth and Brokencliff-on-Sea as the New Year comes in with bang! Return to a simpler time when family holidays at the seaside were still fun and electronic devices had never been heard of. The only sound that was heard was the gentle lapping of the waves, the gulls circling above, and the trot of the horse's hooves along the promenade and music from the funfairs.

At independence in 1961, Sierra Leone was a severely underdeveloped country. During the celebrations of their fiftieth anniversary, Sierra Leoneans reflected on the fact that they had failed to make much progress in modernizing and developing their country. The per capita annual income of the country was still below $350. Sierra Leoneans made a new commitment to create an environment that would foster rapid economic growth that is sustained and widely beneficial to their own citizens. In brief, they announced a new determination to improve economic governance and economic management. All of the book's contributors are experts in their respective fields and the majority of them also have a deep knowledge of Sierra Leone, its history, the aspirations of its people and the policymaking challenges that the country faces. Many of the chapters address policy reform issues in specific areas: namely, the financial sector, export promotion, technical and vocational education and training, minerals, agriculture and food security, customary land tenure, the justice system as a whole, and the education of women and improvement in their employment prospects. Sierra Leone has been weak in coherent policy formulation and policy implementation. The message of this unique book on the country is that policymakers can greatly improve the country's economic growth prospects by designing and implementing policies over which they have adequate control. What is basically required is for Sierra Leoneans to understand what kinds of policies need to be implemented and then put in place management and governance arrangements that create the capacity to design and fully implement those policies.

This title discusses the work of two of the most eminent contemporary British architects, Edward Jones and Sir Jeremy Dixon. With distinguished careers spanning four decades, their works separately and, since 1989, in partnership range from the Royal Opera House in London to Mississauga City Hall in Canada and from the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds to the Business School for Oxford University. Although they have built throughout the UK, it is to London above all that Dixon Jones have devoted their energies - and it is on London that they have made the greatest impact. Some of the capital's most important public buildings - the Royal Opera House, the National Portrait Gallery, the courtyard of Somerset House - have been given a new life by their deft interventions, transforming what were previously somewhat austere institutions into vital and valued components of the public realm. In this publication, the buildings and projects of Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones, from their student days to the present, are fully documented with drawings, photographs and essays by critics and clients, as well as comments by the architects. Alan Colquhoun, Robert Maxwell and Kenneth Powell provide an in-depth critical interpretation while Sir Jeremy Isaacs and Charles Saumarez Smith - clients for the Royal Opera House and National Portrait Gallery respectively - offer a unique insight into the process of working with Dixon Jones.

A quest is never what you expect it to be.

Elizabeth Madeline Martin spends her days in a retirement home in Cape Town, watching the pigeons and squirrels on the branch of a tree outside her window. Bedridden, her memory fading, she can recall her early childhood spent in a small wood-and-iron house in Blackridge on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg. Though she remembers the place in detail – dogs, a mango tree, a stream – she has no idea of where exactly it is. ‘My memory is full of blotches,’ she tells her daughter Julia, ‘like ink left about and knocked over.’

Julia resolves to find the Blackridge house: with her mother lonely and confused, would this, perhaps, bring some measure of closure? A journey begins that traverses family history, forgotten documents, old photographs, and the maps that stake out a country’s troubled past – maps whose boundaries nature remains determined to resist. Kind strangers, willing to assist in the search, lead to unexpected discoveries of ancestors and wars and lullabies. Folded into this quest are the tender conversations between a daughter and a mother who does not have long to live.

Taken as one, The Blackridge House is a meditation on belonging, of the stories we tell of home and family, of the precarious footprint of life.