This introduction to the early horn provides a historical account of the instrument's development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as a practical guide to playing techniques and principles of interpretation. The book aims to help performers to play in a historically appropriate style and provides a series of case studies including major works from the horn repertoire by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. It includes chapters on the historical background of the instrument, its design and development, and choice of instrument today.

‘The bombshell book everyone is talking about’ DAILY MAIL ‘A radio genius … the maestro of the show’ EVENING STANDARD As presenter of Radio 4’s Today, the nation’s most popular news programme, John Humphrys was famed for his tough interviewing. He has been at the heart of journalism for decades. Now, he offers his life story from the poverty of his post-war childhood in Cardiff, leaving school at fifteen, to the summits of broadcasting. Along the way, he recalls the experiences that have marked him most: being the first reporter at the terrible disaster in Aberfan, reporting from South Africa in the dying days of apartheid, from Ireland during the Troubles, and from the White House on Richard Nixon’s historic resignation. With his trademark tenacity and no punches pulled, John also weighs in on the controversies of his career, the role and limitations of the BBC, and the broader health of political debate today. He hopes you’ll tune in.

'The bombshell book everyone is talking about' DAILY MAIL 'A radio genius ... the maestro of the show' EVENING STANDARD As presenter of Radio 4's Today, the nation's most popular news programme, John Humphrys was famed for his tough interviewing. He has been at the heart of journalism for decades. Now, he offers his life story from the poverty of his post-war childhood in Cardiff, leaving school at fifteen, to the summits of broadcasting. Along the way, he recalls the experiences that have marked him most: being the first reporter at the terrible disaster in Aberfan, reporting from South Africa in the dying days of apartheid, from Ireland during the Troubles, and from the White House on Richard Nixon's historic resignation. With his trademark tenacity and no punches pulled, John also weighs in on the controversies of his career, the role and limitations of the BBC, and the broader health of political debate today. He hopes you'll tune in.

'Wonderfully spirited' DAILY MAIL The follow-up to the Sunday Times Top 10 bestseller Lost for Words, from Today presenter and national treasure John Humphrys. From the huge response to Lost for Words, it's clear that many of us share John's strong feelings about the use and misuse of the English language. Not because we want to split hairs (or infinitives) but because how we use words reveals so much about the way we see the world. Here John takes a sharp look at phrases and expressions in current use to expose the often hidden attitudes that lie behind them - from the schoolroom to the boardroom, from Westminster to the weather forecast. Questioning our assumptions, puncturing our illusions and illuminating the way we live now, Beyond Words is a small book that speaks volumes.

This introduction to the early horn provides a historical account of the instrument's development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as a practical guide to playing techniques and principles of interpretation. The book aims to help performers to play in a historically appropriate style and provides a series of case studies including major works from the horn repertoire by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. It includes chapters on the historical background of the instrument, its design and development, and choice of instrument today.

'Greatly enjoyable' GUARDIAN 'It is always exhilarating to read a book which says what so many of us think' SPECTATOR 'Timely and lively' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Let us be very clear about this from the start: John Humphrys is a Good Thing' EVENING STANDARD * * * * * * From Today programme presenter and national treasure John Humphrys, the bestselling cry in book form for better English and an expose of the political uses and abuses of language. From empty cliche to meaningless jargon, dangling participle to sentences without verbs, the English language is reeling. It is under attack from all sides. Politicians dupe us with deliberately evasive language. Bosses worry about impacting the bottom line while they think out of the box. Academics talk obscure mumbo jumbo. Journalists and broadcasters, who should know better, lazily collaborate. In his bestselling Lost for Words, Today presenter and national treasure John Humphrys wittily and powerfully exposes the depths to which our beautiful language has sunk and offers many examples of the most common atrocities. He also dispenses some sensible guidance on how to use simple, clear and honest language. Above all, he shows us how to be on the alert for the widespread abuse - especially by politicians - and the power of the English language.

The source of the Nile had long eluded and tormented explorers, and John Hanning Speke's discovery of Lake Victoria in 1858 elevated him to the pantheon of heroes of African exploration, alongside Livingstone and Stanley. But the part played by the Welsh mining engineer John Petherick in the discovery was ignored after he was branded a slave trader by Speke, and the controversy that followed ended with Petherick ruined and Speke dead. This first biography of Petherick places him at the centre of one of the great discoveries in African exploration - and as the focus of a dispute that rocked the geographical establishment. Was Petherick a rogue, as portrayed by some, or the victim of a conspiracy that destroyed his reputation and denied him a share of the credit for his part in one of the greatest feats in African exploration?

What became of Harold Prettyman, a German agent captured by the British during World War Two? Eighty years later, an investigation by reporter Jack Flynt seems to end at a new dormer bungalow with white pebble-dash walls, not the grey stone terraced house in the Welsh valleys from which, according to a recently declassified MI5 file, Prettyman operated a radio transmitter from the attic alerting German U-Boats to Allied shipping movements. Dead ducks are news stories destined for the News Editor's spike and Flynt suspects he has found one until a letter arrives at the bungalow with the same coded message --Many Happy Returns Harold Prettyman--used by Prettyman and his accomplice in 1940. But there are no Allied food convoys in the North Atlantic and, believing the letter a hoax Flynt's newspaper moves him to another assignment-the disappearance of a Foreign Office diplomat suspected of fleeing to Moscow like his predecessors Burgess and Maclean. But Scotland Yard seems more interested in the Coal Miner, a missing Van Gogh masterpiece looted by the Red Army Trophy Brigade as war reparations, but now the focus of an exhibition at Tate Britain after being returned to its owner by the Commission for the Recovery of Looted Art in Europe. The painting discovered hanging on the kitchen wall of the apartment of a dead Trophy Brigade officer had been taken in lieu of pension. Private homes, art galleries and museums across the Russian Federation continue to hold large quantities of booty from the Second World War, worthless since President Putin banned the repatriation of cultural artifacts, but priceless in the West. So, is the Coal Miner exhibited at the Tate the missing Van Gogh or a forgery made by a copyist at the Hermitage in St Petersburg? A zig-zag trail leads Flynt's search for Harold Prettyman into the world of Diplomatic Bags, fakes, and money laundering.

Death is a subject modern society shies away from. Even doctors avoid the word. But if we regard death as a failure in our desire to prolong life, can we ever arrive at a humane approach to those whose lives have lost meaning? Are we keeping people alive simply because we can? Here, John Humphrys and his co-author Dr Sarah Jarvis take a wider look at how our attitudes to death have changed as doctors have learned how to prolong life beyond anything that could have been imagined only a few generations ago, and confront one of the great challenges facing the western world today. There are no easy answers but the first step must surely be to accept that death can be as welcome as it is inevitable.

'All the erudition and pithy wit you would expect from Humphrys, but there is also a charming, genuine enquiry that shines through' MAIL ON SUNDAY * * * * * * Bestselling author, radio presenter and national treasure John Humphrys tackles the big question of God through his own personal journey and argues that doubt is the only credible belief. Throughout the ages believers have been persecuted - usually for believing in the "wrong" God. So have non-believers who have denied the existence of God as superstitious rubbish. Today it is the agnostics who are given a hard time. They are scorned by believers for their failure to find faith and by atheists for being hopelessly wishy-washy and weak-minded. But John Humphrys is proud to count himself among their ranks. In this book he takes us along the spiritual road he himself has travelled. He was brought up a Christian and prayed every day of his life until his growing doubts finally began to overwhelm his faith. As one of the nation's most popular and respected broadcasters, he had the rare opportunity in 2006 of challenging leaders of our three main religions to prove to him that God does exist. The Radio Four interviews - Humphrys In Search of God - provoked the biggest response to anything he has done in half a century of journalism. The interviews and the massive reaction from listeners had a profound effect on him - but not in the way he expected. Doubt is not the easy option. But for the millions who can find no easy answers to the most profound questions it is the only possible one.

John Humphrys started as a cub reporter on a tiny weekly newspaper and , forty years later, has become one of the most respected and controve rsial broadcasters of his generation. In Devil's Advocate he uses his experience to set in context the changes that have overtaken Britain during those forty years. He deba tes the issues that he believes should concern us all. He challenges our changing social and moral values and questions the direction socie ty is taking. We are much better off than we have ever been, but Humphrys sense s a deep unease. Instead of a world in which there were many differen t influences telling us what life was all about, and what living a goo d life might involve, we now have a single voice that threatens to dro wn out all the others. That voice is consumer populism. Its strength derives from the increasing commercialisation of our lives and a medi a, which is itself under greater and greater commercial pressures. Some of the effects include a coarsening of the fabric of daily l ife and a growing thoughtlessness and even hysteria in public debate. Our children are losing their innocence at an ever-earlier age and, t hough we worry about it, we seem impotent in the face of it. Humphrys asks whether, if we had been able to choose our destinat

John Humphrys is passionate about the state of British food, farming, fishing and agriculture. Here, he looks back to the days of organic farming in England when people shared and swapped food and considered the wildlife as well as the farmed animals, crops and fruits. He examines today's travesties: factory farming, pouring chemicals into the land, the scandal of the supermarket wars and cheap imported goods. He then turns to the future and asks: Can we save this ravaged earth and rebuild our community values? Most of all, can we reverse the damage to ourselves and our long-term health that may result from what we eat? John Humphrys' book requires the full attention of anyone who cares about themselves or the future.

'A very funny tome' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Hilarious' DAILY MAIL 'A profoundly instructive course in the idiosyncrasies of Greek law, custom and culture ... entertainingly chronicled' SAGA * * * * * * From Radio 4 presenter, bestselling author and national treasure John Humphrys, a funny and engaging memoir of building a home in Greece written together with his son Christopher. It was a moment of mad impulse when John Humphrys decided to buy a semi-derelict cottage and a building site on a plot of land overlooking the Aegean. A few minutes gazing out over the most glorious bay he had ever seen was all it took to persuade him. After all, his son Christopher was already raising his family there so he would help build the beautiful villa that would soon rise there. What could possibly go wrong? Everything. John was to spend the next three years regretting his moment of madness. Some of it had its comic side. He learned to cope with a drunken peacock falling out of his favourite tree and even a colony of rats invading his bedroom. Some of the humans proved trickier: the old man demanding payment for olive trees in the middle of John's own land; the neighbour who dragged his lovely old fishing boat onto the beach and set fire to it after a row with his wife. And, of course, the builders. Was the plumber who electrocuted him in the shower vengeful or merely incompetent? John learned a lot about Greece in a short time. He grew to love it and loathe it in almost equal measures, but was never for a moment bored by it. And Christopher learned a bit more about John. Their shared experience revived keen memories for him of growing up with a father for whom patience was never the strongest virtue... Here father and son capture the idyll and the odyssey as paradise is found, lost and regained.

After Dunkirk the British Army was broken, the country isolated and invasion imminent. German Military Intelligence was sat the task of recruiting collaborators from among Welsh nationalists to sabotage military and civilian installations ahead of the landing. Strategic deception was one of the few weapons left. To fool the Germans into believing Britain was ready and able to repel invaders when in fact it had only the weapons salvaged from Dunkirk, MI5 invented an imaginary cell of Welsh saboteurs led by a retired police inspector.