Gerd Gigerenzer's Reckoning with Risk: Learning to Live with Uncertainty illustrates how we can learn to make sense of statistics and turn ignorance into insight. However much we want certainty in our lives, it feels as if we live in an uncertain and dangerous world. But are we guilty of wildly exaggerating the chances of some unwanted event happening to us? Are we misled by our ignorance of the reality of risk? Far too many of us, argues Gerd Gigerenzer, are hampered by our own innumeracy, w...

With shortages, volatile prices and nearly one billion people hungry, the world has a food problem - or thinks it does. Combining frontline investigation with fresh data, this title shows how the way we live now has created a global food crisis - and what we can do to fix it.

Step into the unsettling world of Shirley Jackson with a collection of her finest, creepiest short stories, revealing the queen of American gothic at her mesmerising best. This selection includes 'The Lottery', Jackson's masterpiece and one of the most terrifying and iconic stories of the twentieth century. 'An amazing writer ...

If you haven't read her you have missed out on something marvellous' Neil Gaiman

Half a century after their deaths, the dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler still cast a long and terrible shadow over the modern world. They were the most destructive and lethal regimes in history, murdering millions. They fought the largest and costliest war in all history.

Self-consciously staging itself in the psychotherapy sessions of a disturbed young man, Peter Shaffer's Equus is a shocking exploration of the limits of faith, of the intersecting worlds of the sacred and profane, and of the paltry value of a 'mundane' life, published in Penguin Modern Classics. When a deranged boy, Alan Strang, blinds six horses with a metal spike he is sentenced to psychiatric treatment. Dr Dysart is the man given the task of uncovering what happened the night Strang commit...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is the tale of a catastrophic confrontation between fantasy and reality, embodied in the characters of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Arthur Miller.'I have always depended on the kindness of strangers'Fading southern belle Blanche DuBois is adrift in the modern world. When she arrives to stay with her sister Stella in a crowded, boisterous corner o...

From the author of Wreck this Journal, Keri Smith's How to be an Explorer of the World is an invitation to rediscover the world around you. Artists and scientists analyze the world around them in surprisingly similar ways, by observing, collecting, documenting, analyzing, and comparing. In this captivating guided journal, readers are encouraged to explore their world as both artists and scientists.

The mission Smith proposes? "To document and observe the world around you. As if you've never s...

The classic translation of the cornerstone work of western philosophy Plato's Republic is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy. Presented in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and three different interlocutors, it is an inquiry into the notion of a perfect community and the ideal individual within it. During the conversation other questions are raised: what is goodness; what is reality; what is knowledge; what is the purpose of education? ...

One of the great landmarks of modern history publishing, Simon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution is the most authoritative social, cultural and narrative history of the French Revolution ever produced.

It was Thomas Jefferson who envisioned the United States as a great 'empire of liberty.' In the first new one-volume history in two decades, David Reynolds takes Jefferson's phrase as a key to the saga of America - helping unlock both its grandeur and its paradoxes. He examines how the anti-empire of 1776 became the greatest superpower the world has seen, how the country that offered liberty and opportunity on a scale unmatched in Europe nevertheless founded its prosperity on the labour of bl...