Covers four texts from the 1890s that helped to crystallize the idea of the 'New Woman' during a period where the role of women was increasingly debated and challenged, not least due to the growth of the suffrage movement.

Running is not just a sport. It reconnects us to our bodies and the places in which we live, breaking down our increasingly structured and demanding lives. It allows us to feel the world beneath our feet, lifts the spirit, allows our minds out to play and helps us to slip away from the demands of the modern world. When Vybarr Cregan-Reid set out to discover why running meant so much to so many, he began a journey which would take him out to tread London's cobbled streets, climbing to sites that have seen a millennium of hangings, and down the crumbling alleyways of Ruskin's Venice. Footnotes transports you to the cliff tops of Hardy's Dorset, the deserted shorelines of Seattle, the giant redwood forests of California, and to the world's most advanced running laboratories and research centres, using debates in literature, philosophy and biology to explore that simple human desire to run. Liberating and inspiring, this book reminds us why feeling the earth beneath our feet is a necessary and healing part of our lives.

This is the road from climate change to primate change.

PRIMATE CHANGE is a wide-ranging, polemical look at how and why the human body has changed since humankind first got up on two feet. Spanning the entirety of human history – from primate to transhuman – Vybarr Cregan-Reid’s book investigates where we came from, who we are today and how modern technology will change us beyond recognition.

In the last two hundred years, humans have made such a tremendous impact on the world that our geological epoch is about to be declared the ‘Anthropocene’, or the Age of Man. But while we have been busy changing the shape of the world we inhabit, the ways of living that we have been building have, as if under the cover of darkness, been transforming our bodies and altering the expression of our DNA, too.

Primate Change beautifully unscrambles the complex architecture of our modern human bodies, built over millions of years and only starting to give up on us now.