Showing results by narrator "Graham Mack" in All Categories

From Gabriel Turville-Petre comes a comprehensive study of Scandinavian civilization as a part of European civilization, rather than an isolated phenomenon.

In Fast Jets on the Front Line, Alan Munro reflects on his time in the RAF and the Cold War jets which he flew. Having started his career after basic training on the Gloster Javelin with No. 228 OCU, Alan went on to become a flying instructor at No. 1 Flying Training School, Linton-on-Ouse. But with the United Kingdom's withdrawal from East of Suez, he found himself with a ground posting and questioning whether he would see front-line flying again.

During a demonstration in Hyde Park, Communist bus driver Jim Drover acts on instinct to protect his wife by stabbing to death the policeman set to strike her down. Sentenced to hang—whether as a martyr, tool, or murderer—Drover accepts his lot, unaware that the ramifications for the crime, and the battle for his reprieve, are inflaming political unrest in an increasingly divided city. But Drover's single, impulsive act is also upending the lives of the people he loves and trusts.

Elderly military veteran Volper had no idea what to expect when he entered the virtual world of Alpha Rome. But he now realizes that it’s not a game, after all. The number of times you can respawn by replicating in special capsules is limited and might one day run out. Volper has also had to take on a group of teenagers and has managed to turn them into a lethal combat squad. However, their success has not gone unnoticed, and the team has caught the attention of some powerful corporations.

Surveillance permeates every aspect of our lives today. Every click on the keyboard, every call, text or email, every purchase, every contact with a doctor or the police or a government department, each time you walk under a video camera or pass through a security check, and in many other ways, you are recorded, identified, traced, and tracked. This Very Short Introduction investigates how surveillance makes people visible, how it grew to its present size and prevalence, how it came to rely on technologies of data-handling, and how it developed its own cultural features.

There are approximately 25,000 "city killer" asteroids in near-Earth orbit—and most are yet to be found. Small enough to evade detection, they are capable of large-scale destruction, and represent our greatest cosmic threat. But in September 2022, against all odds, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission deliberately crashed a spacecraft into a carefully selected city killer, altering the asteroid's orbit. In How to Kill an Asteroid, award-winning science journalist Robin George Andrews reveals the development of the technology that made it possible

A particular form of AI is now embedded in our tech, our infrastructure, and our lives. How did it get there? Where and why should we be concerned? And what should we do now? The Shortcut: Why Intelligent Machines Do Not Think Like Us provides an accessible yet probing exposure of AI in its prevalent form today, proposing a new narrative to connect and make sense of events that have happened in the recent tumultuous past, and enabling us to think soberly about the road ahead.

Flying Officer Angus Mackennelly is flying over Northern France when his tank is holed and he's forced to crash-land. Luckily, he is picked up by the French Resistance before the enemy can get to him and, after a tense few days moving between safe houses, he escapes back to Blighty. Reunited with his squadron, Angus expects to return to flying duties. However, Squadron Leader Bentley informs him that he's not going to be flying sorties. He is singled out to lead a top-secret mission.

What would you think if, in your old age, the doctors tell you that you only have a couple years left to live, and even ultra-modern medical technology is powerless to help? Some may spend their remaining years at the bottom of a bottle, others may choose to spend it quietly, with family...But there are also those who are ready to leave everything behind. Volper is one of those who has decided to have one last hurrah and immerse himself in a virtual reality.

Nobody chooses to be bald. Nobody wants to look into the mirror and be confronted with an absence. Nobody gains any comfort from having a slightly better idea of what their skull looks like. Stuart Heritage has been bald for two years. But before he accepted the inevitable, he spent a number of years ineptly trying to conceal this fact with an array of expensive treatments and terrible haircuts. Can a man go bald with dignity? Maybe. But can a man go bald with more dignity than Stuart Heritage? Oh good god yes, and this book is his attempt to make that happen for you.

The Uninvited examines the reaction of governments and of the scientific community to claims from the public that they have been involved with alien interaction, looking at the world's most famous alien contact cases and highlighting the common threads that bind them together.

Flying Officer Angus Mackennelly and the rest of "Maverick" Squadron 696 are engaged in tactics to lure the Luftwaffe into battle. But Angus has grave misgivings about the orders he has been given, which are justified when he loses a brand-new pilot on their first incursion.

What does it mean to be cosmopolitan? Typically, cosmopolitanism is understood as a broad moral orientation, involving some kind of commitment to global moral equality. On this understanding, to be cosmopolitan is simply to evidence that moral orientation oneself. By contrast, Being Cosmopolitan takes up a thoroughly political approach. The focus is on what it might mean, and what it is like, to be political in a distinctly cosmopolitan form.

In the 1880s, control over northeastern Africa was a political minefield into which Prime Minister Gladstone did not want to step—until his emissary Charles Gordon was besieged in Khartoum, and the city became the focal point for war. It was the height of European colonialism. Injustices were administered, bloody battles fought, and civilians caught in the crossfire. Among the British officers were figures who would later adopt starring roles in the First World War, such as Egyptian Army sapper Captain Herbert Kitchener.

1940, England. After a series of run-ins with his superiors, Flying Officer Angus Mackennelly is posted to Squadron 696—the Maverick unit full of misfits and outsiders. Angus has just returned from gunning down enemy aircraft when he is given a shocking top-secret mission. A spy is in their midst, feeding information to the Germans, and Angus is tasked with exposing him. MI6 pin their suspicions on one of the squadron's foreign pilots, but Angus is not convinced. He needs to get closer to the men in his unit to try and unravel their secrets.

The first full reappraisal of one of Britain's great fighter aces, this book examines the truth behind Tuck's 1956 biography, Fly for Your Life. It looks at the evidence behind the myths, checks out some of the exaggerated stories and reveals the real Stanford Tuck. In January 1942 Bob Tuck was the top-scoring British fighter ace with an official score of twenty-nine enemy aircraft destroyed. During the Battle of Britain his legendary prowess grew and he was posted to command a leaderless and demoralized squadron, this time flying Hurricanes.

What began as a normal game for a retired veteran who, after a long and eventful life, decided to spend his few remaining days inside of a virtual world, has abruptly started acquiring features of reality. A terrible, dysfunctional, and sometimes murderous reality. For a while, Volper only manages to survive thanks solely to his combat experience. And then he meets others he simply cannot pass by, because of one of his two weaknesses.

Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure? What about crabs, shrimps, insects, or spiders? How do we tell whether a person unresponsive after severe brain injury might be suffering? When does a fetus in the womb start to have conscious experiences? Could there even be rudimentary feelings in miniature models of the human brain, grown from human stem cells? And what about AI? These are questions about the edge of sentience, and they are subject to enormous, disorienting uncertainty. We desperately want certainty, but it is out of reach.

Gestapo Hunter explores the charmed life and exceptional career of Ted Sismore, widely considered one of the RAF's very best wartime navigators and leaders. A quiet, unassuming man who was nicknamed "Daisy" on account of his youthful complexion, Ted was one of only a handful of aircrew to complete a tour of operations in Blenheims in the summer of 1941.

No country in history has been more deeply penetrated by spies than divided Germany after the Second World War. Fighting for the eastern corner were the 'first class comrades' of the Stasi—the East German Ministry for State Security. Rising from the ruins of a defeated country, and guided by its KGB masters, the early Cold War saw the Stasi establish itself as one of the world's most notorious spy and secret police agencies.