Andrew Elliott's third collection is a journey through the hinterlands of 20th-century America and Germany. The poems are filled with cars, girls, and movies - but also books, paintings, and spaceships.

Impressive statistics are thrown at us every day - the cost of health care; the size of an earthquake; the distance to the nearest star; the number of giraffes in the world. We know all these numbers are important - some more than others - and it's vaguely unsettling when we don't really have a clear sense of how remarkable or how ordinary they are. How do we work out what these figures actually mean? Are they significant, should we be worried, or excited, or impressed? How big is big, how small is small? With this entertaining and engaging book, help is at hand. Andrew Elliott gives us the tips and tools to make sense of numbers, to get a sense of proportion, to decipher what matters. It is a celebration of a numerate way of understanding the world. It shows how number skills help us to understand the everyday world close at hand, and how the same skills can be stretched to demystify the bigger numbers that we find in the wider contexts of science, politics, and the universe. Entertaining, full of practical examples, and memorable concepts, Is That A Big Number? renews our relationship with figures. If numbers are the musical notes with which the symphony of the universe is written, and you're struggling to hear the tune, then this is the book to get you humming again.

This book explores the return of the 'epic' in 21st century cinema. With the success of Gladiator, both critics and scholars enthusiastically announced the return of a genre which had lain dormant for 30 years. However, this return raises important new questions which remain unanswered. Why did the epic come back, and why did it fall out of fashion? Are these the same kinds of epics as the 1950s and 60s, or are there aesthetic differences? Can we treat Kingdom of Heaven, 300 and Thor indiscriminately as one genre? Are non Western histories like Hero and Mongol epics, too? Finally, what precisely do we mean when we talk about the return of the epic film, and why are they back? The Return of the Epic Film offers a fresh way of thinking about a body of films which has dominated our screens for a decade. With contributions from top scholars in the field, the collection adopts a range of interdisciplinary perspectives to explore the epic film in the 21st century. It is the first collection to address and challenge the return of the epic film in the twenty first century and our tendency to group these films together. The collection offers 12 essays from a range of disciplines as disparate as film, sociology, history and cultural studies, which challenge our core assumptions about the epic film. The Return of the Epic Film includes essays by internationally recognised names in film studies, history and adaptation, which each analyse the return of the epic from a number of angles. The volume brings together a variety of approaches which broaden the arsenal of traditional film studies, and lays the foundations for future research into epic films.

This book explores the return of the 'epic' in 21st-century cinema. With the success of Gladiator, both critics and scholars enthusiastically announced the return of a genre which had lain dormant for 30 years. However, this return raises important new questions which remain unanswered. Why did the epic come back, and why did it fall out of fashion? Are these the same kinds of epics as the 1950s and 60s, or are there aesthetic differences? Can we treat Kingdom of Heaven, 300 and Thor indiscriminately as one genre? Are non-Western histories like Hero and Mongol epics, too? Finally, what precisely do we mean when we talk about the return of the epic film, and why are they back? The Return of the Epic Film offers a fresh way of thinking about a body of films which has dominated our screens for a decade. With contributions from top scholars in the field, the collection adopts a range of interdisciplinary perspectives to explore the epic film in the 21st century.