First published in 1930 to an unprecedented storm of protest, Catherine Carswell's The Life of Robert Burns remains the standard work on its subject. Carswell deliberately shakes the image of Burns as a romantic hero - exposing the sexual misdemeanours, drinking bouts and waywardness that other, more reverential, biographies choose to overlook. Catherine Carswell's real achievement is to bring alive the personality of a great man: passionate, hard-living, generous, melancholic, morbid and triumphant . . . the very archetype of the supreme creative artist.

Chris Guthrie, torn between her love of the land and her desire to escape the narrow horizons of a peasant culture, is the thread that links these three works. In them, Gibbon interweaves the personal joys and sorrows of Chris' life with the greater historical and political events of the time. Sunset Song, the first and most celebrated book of the trilogy, covers the early years of the twentieth century, including the First World War. Chris survives, with her son Ewan, but the tragedy has struck and her wild spirit is subdued. In Cloud Howe, as the minister's wife, Chris learns to love again, and we witness the cruel gossip and high comedy of small village life until, once again, Chris suffers a terrible loss. Grey Granite focuses on her son Ewan and his passionate involvement with justice for the common man. For Chris, with her intuitive strength, nothing lasts - only the land endures.

Goli Otok is a naked island off the coast of Croatia that served as a penal colony for political prisoners of Yugoslavia after World War II. Thousands were Partisan fighters against the German occupation caught on the Soviet side of the ideological split between Moscow and Belgrade in 1948. Many leaders of the pro-Soviet faction were slain trying to flee eastward. Other leaders and thousands of followers were imprisoned on Goli Otok. Many died there. Years later, Sergei Korneichuk, a Red Army intelligence agent is assigned to Belgrade under cover as a correspondent of Radio Moscow. His activities reveal how the seeds were sown for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

We live a miracle everyday, a world of coloured reflections in a river, scents of flowers, birdsong, a warm breeze. Buried below our living experience, science has discovered a world of atoms and vibrations, a world of blind elementary forces. These forces operate everywhere in the known universe, including the chemistry of our bodies. Most poignantly they operate in our brains. How does the miracle of our conscious life emerge from this dry world of atomic forces? Should we expect science to give a satisfactory answer to this question? Practical developments such as genetic engineering and brain imaging have brought a contemporary vitality to these questions. The book explores the linked hierarchy of science, from physics to brain structure. Within this journey, progressively deeper questions are asked about the nature and limits of scientific explanation. Diagrams and photographs are used to assist the text. Many of the diagrams are novel and illustrate ideas in a compact way.

Introduced in 1998, the Smart car has revolutionised our cities. Over one million Smarts have left the factory and the car itself has been a global success. Introduced in the UK in 2000, there are now over 50,000 Smarts in the UK. This book looks at the impact of the Smart car in the UK, and of its history and genesis beforehand.