Why does philosophy give some people a headache, others a real buzz, and yet others a feeling that it is subversive and dangerous? Why do a lot of people think philosophy is totally irrelevant? What is philosophy anyway?

The ABCs of philosophy - easy to understand but never simplistic.

Beginning with basic questions posed by the ancient Greeks - What is the world made of? What is a man? What is knowledge? What is good and evil? - "Philosophy For Beginners" traces the development of these questions as the key to understanding how Western philosophy developed over the last 2,500 years.

A superlative, fascinating graphic account of Albert Einstein's strange world and how his legacy has been built upon since. It is now more than a century since Einstein's theories of Special and General Relativity began to revolutionise our view of the universe. Beginning near the speed of light and proceeding to explorations of space-time and curved spaces, Introducing Relativity plots a visually accessible course through the thought experiments that have given shape to contemporary physics. Scientists from Isaac Newton to Stephen Hawking add their unique contributions to this story, as we encounter Einstein's astounding vision of gravity as the curvature of space-time and arrive at the breathtakingly beautiful field equations. Einstein's legacy is reviewed in the most advanced frontiers of physics today - black holes, gravitational waves, the accelerating universe and string theory.

Fractals are the geometry of the natural world. They're about the broken, wrinkled, wiggly world- the uneven shapes of nature, unlike the idealised forms of Euclidean geometry. We see fractals everywhere; indeed, we are fractals ourselves. Fractal geometry is an extension of classical geometry which can make precise models of physical structures, from ferns to galaxies. It can describe the shape of a cloud as precisely as an architect can describe a house. Introducing Fractals traces the historical development of this mathematical discipline, explores its descriptive powers in the natural world, and then looks at the applications and the implications of the discoveries it has made. As John Archibald Wheeler, protege of Niels Bohr, friend of Albert Einstein and mentor of Richard Feynman has said, 'No one will be considered scientifically literate tomorrow, who is not familiar with fractals.'

What is time? The 5th-century philosopher St Augustine famously said that he knew what time was, so long as no one asked him. Is time a fourth dimension similar to space or does it flow in some sense? And if it flows, does it make sense to say how fast? Does the future exist? Is time travel possible? Why does time seem to pass in only one direction? These questions and others are among the deepest and most subtle that one can ask, but Introducing Time presents them - many for the first time - in an easily accessible, lucid and engaging manner, wittily illustrated by Ralph Edney.