Highlights the unique character and behavior of the nation. Frank, irreverent, funny--almost guaranteed to cure Xenophobia.
Alan Turing (1912 - 1954) was a British mathematician who made history: His breaking of the German U-boat Enigma cipher in World War II ensured Allied-American control of the Atlantic. But Turing's vision went far beyond the desperate wartime struggle. Already in the 1930s he had defined the concept of the universal machine, which underpins the computer revolution. In 1945 he was a pioneer of electronic computer design. But Turing's true goal was the scientific understanding of the mind, brought out in the drama and wit of the famous "Turing test" for machine intelligence, and his prophecy for the twenty-first century. Drawn into the cockpit of world events and the forefront of technological innovation, Alan Turing was also an innocent and unpretentious gay man trying to live in a society that criminalized him. In 1952, he revealed his homosexuality and was forced to participate in a humiliating treatment program, and was ever after regarded as a security risk. His suicide in 1954 remains one of the many enigmas in an astonishing life story. "As vivid a picture as one could hope for a most complex and intriguing man," says Douglas Hofstadter, author of Gdel, Escher, Bach. Both a compelling narrative and a work of scholarship, Alan Turing: The Enigma is the definitive biography of one of the greatest minds of the modern world.
An original, entertaining and illuminating guide to a completely different world: England in the Middle Ages.
The book has been produced from material that was originally published on the internet as a blog. It's based around the letters written by Harry Lamin, a Private Soldier in the York & Lancaster Regiment. The letters cover the period from early 1917 until when he returned to his family in the East Midlands of England at the end of the War. Extarcts from his Battalion's War Diary and other contemporary documents with a coomentary are included to enable the reader to set Harry's experiences into a meaningful context. Harry takes part in the astonishing and successful Messines Ridge attack where several hundred tons of explosives were used to destroy the German Defences. He encountered some "interesting" moments during the battle of Passchendaele before being transferred to the Italian front. There, under very different conditions, Harry played his part in the fighting until the war ended. His letters are simple and engaging. Internet readers have commented that the letters give a real insight into this ordinary man thrust into an extraordinary and dreadful situation.
During the early modern period, hundreds of Turks and Moors traded in English and Welsh ports, dazzled English society with exotic cuisine and Arabian horses, and worked small jobs in London, while the "Barbary Corsairs" raided coastal towns and, if captured, lingered in Plymouth jails or stood trial in Southampton courtrooms. In turn, Britons fought in Muslim armies, traded and settled in Moroccan or Tunisian harbor towns, joined the international community of pirates in Mediterranean and Atlantic outposts, served in Algerian households and ships, and endured captivity from Salee to Alexandria and from Fez to Mocha. In Nabil Matar vividly presents new data about Anglo-Islamic social and historical interactions. Rather than looking exclusively at literary works, which tended to present unidimensional stereotypes of Muslims -Shakespeare´s "superstitious Moor" or Goffe´s "raging Turke," to name only two -Matar delves into hitherto unexamined English prison depositions, captives´ memoirs, government documents, and Arabic chronicles and histories. The result is a significant alternative to the prevailing discourse on Islam, which nearly always centers around ethnocentrism and attempts at dominance over the non-Western world, and an astonishing revelation about the realities of exchange and familiarity between England and Muslim society in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. Concurrent with England´s engagement and "discovery" of the Muslims was the "discovery" of the American Indians. In an original analysis, Matar shows how Hakluyt and Purchas taught their readers not only about America but about the Muslim dominions, too; how there were more reasons for Britons to venture eastward than westward; and how, in the period under study, more Englishmen lived in North Africa than in North America. Although Matar notes the sharp political and colonial differences between the English encounter with the Muslims and their encounter with the Indians, he shows how Elizabethan and Stuart writers articulated Muslim in terms of Indian, and Indian in terms of Muslim. By superimposing the sexual constructions of the Indians onto the Muslims, and by applying to them the ideology of holy war which had legitimated the destruction of the Indians, English writers prepared the groundwork for orientalism and for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conquest of Mediterranean Islam. Matar´s detailed research provides a new direction in the study of England´s geographic imagination. It also illuminates the subtleties and interchangeability of stereotype, racism, and demonization that must be taken into account in any responsible depiction of English history.
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