The sheer scale of it makes the measuring of America extraordinary. Beginning in 1785, it became the largest land survey in history stretching from the Ohio river to the Pacific coast and from Lake Erie to the Mexican border. It prepared the ground for the sale of almost two billion acres, and shaped landscapes and cities across the US more drastically than any event since the last ice age.

Before the survey could begin, there had to be agreement about what kind of measurement should be used. What made the 18th-century debate so critical was the revolution taking place in Western thought as objective, scientific reasoning challenged the traditional, subjective view of the world. A battle began between those (like the British) supporting a centuries-old organic form of measurement (ounces and pounds, yards and acres) and the modernizers, like Thomas Jefferson, who backed a system based on scientific observation.

The effects of the measuring of America on the landscape and people (native and immigrant) were huge and long-lasting; the story itself an exotic blend of narrative history and popular science

Barely two centuries ago, most of the world's productive land still belonged either communally to traditional societies or to the higher powers of monarch or church. But that pattern, and the ways of life that went with it, were consigned to history as a result of the most creative - and, at the same time, destructive - cultural force in the modern era: the idea of individual, exclusive ownership of land. This notion laid waste to traditional communal civilisations, displacing entire peoples from their homelands, and brought into being a unique concept of individual freedom and a distinct form of representative government and democratic institutions. Other great civilizations, in Russia, China, and the Islamic world, evolved very different structures of land ownership, and thus very different forms of government and social responsibility. The seventeenth-century English surveyor William Petty was the first man to recognise the connection between private property and free-market capitalism; the American radical Wolf Ladejinsky redistributed land in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea after the Second World War to make possible the emergence of Asian tiger economies. Through the eyes of these remarkable individuals and many more, including Chinese emperors and German peasants, Andro Linklater here presents the evolution of land ownership to offer a radically new view of mankind's place on the planet.

Wild People is the story of one man's experience living among a rare and almost extinct culture. The Iban are a primitive people who live in the hilly jungles of Borneo'whose peaceful existence of hunting, fishing, tending their crops, and worshipping their gods belies a fierce legacy of head-hunting. This, however, is no ordinary work of travel anthropology"if Andro Linklater takes us into the heart of this world he also take us into our own, and the clash of cultures he documents produces not only memorable insight but ample and sharp-witted humor. The author's sympathetic effort to truly understand this utterly alien and exotic culture is where the book's greatest value lies. Far up the Katibas River, where the maps grow vague, he finds a traditional longhouse agreeable to his three-month stay, and a world that makes no distinction between the physical and spiritual, animal and human, waking time and dream time. He learns how to interpret the oracles of birds, signs and omens of every kind, what gods to sacrifice to for a bumper rice harvest. He takes part in a gawai kenyalang, a rare and complex ceremony performed once in a man's lifetime to ensure his prestige in this and the spirit world. He becomes involved"even in matters of the heart. Seduced and beguiled by the culture he has come to respect and admire, the author asks himself a genuine question: Why not? It seems to work for them"they are not only handsome and brave but happy as well. Wild People gives us a palpable sense of what it might be like to live in a primitive culture. In the tradition of such English travel writers as Colin Thubron and Redmond O'Hanlon, it also tells of a personal journey"the story of one civilized and slightly cynical man's brief and poignant romance with a dying culture.

In 1790, America was in enormous debt, having depleted what little money and supplies the country had during its victorious fight for independence. Before the nation's greatest asset, the land west of the Ohio River, could be sold it had to be measured out and mapped. And before that could be done, a uniform set of measurements had to be chosen for the new republic out of the morass of roughly 100,000 different units that were in use in daily life.

Measuring America tells the fascinating story of how we ultimately gained the American Customary System—the last traditional system in the world—and how one man's surveying chain indelibly imprinted its dimensions on the land, on cities, and on our culture from coast to coast.

For fifty years, Pamela Kirrage longed to unlock the secrets of her husband’s encrypted war diary. She was on the verge of giving up when she at last found a mathematician who became as obsessed with learning the secrets of the diary as she was. After months of painstaking investigation, he was finally able to crack the code, and in the process uncover the ending to an extraordinary World War II romance.

Pamela fell in love with RAF pilot Donald Hill in the summer of 1939, just a few months before he was sent to fight in Pacific. Although they planned to marry soon, Donald was captured after siege of Hong Kong and spent the next four years in a Japanese POW camp. Donald ultimately returned to Pamela, but he was never able to tell her about those lost years–and Pamela became convinced that the key to their happiness lay within the mysterious diary he brought back from the war. In The Code of Love Andro Linklater uses the decoded diary as well as extensive research and interviews to paint a vivid portrait of the World War II era, turning this dramatic love story into an inspiring, unconventional epic.