Search results for ""author john taylor""

The mummified forms, along with beautifully painted masks and coffins, of animals, scribes, viziers, noblemen and women, priests, pharaohs and queens from the Pharaonic period, all feature in this miniature but magnificent introduction to the world of the Ancient Egyptian mummy.

Read more less

Soccer is the most popular sport in the world. It is also an endless scientific panorama. Every movement by the players and each interaction with the ball involves physics, fluid mechanics, biology, and physiology, to name just a few of the scientific disciplines. In a book that targets middle and high school players, Taylor begins with a history of soccer and its physical and mathematical aspects. He then addresses important questions such as how and why a ball bounces, how the ball spins, and what these dynamics mean for the game. He introduces readers to the science of kicking, heading, and trapping and looks at the sources of the energy required to run, jump, and kick for an entire game. Taylor then puts it all together by following a sequence of plays and describing the science behind tactical manoeuvres. Sidebars and appendices allow those with a more mathematical bent to follow the physics and perform experiments to see the effects of phenomena like drag, bounce, and spin. In addition, key terminology is highlighted, explained in the text, and summarized in the glossary.

Read more less

With Duran Duran, John Taylor has created some of the greatest songs of our time. From the disco dazzle of debut single 'Planet Earth' right up to their latest number one album All You Need is Now, Duran Duran has always had the power to sweep the world onto its feet. It's been a ride - and for John in particular, the ride has been wild, thrilling...and dangerous. Now, for the first time, he tells his incredible story - a tale of dreams fulfilled, lessons learned and demons conquered. A shy only child, Nigel John Taylor wasn't an obvious candidate for pop stardom and frenzied girl panic. But when he ditched his first name and picked up a bass guitar, everything changed. John formed Duran Duran with his friend Nick Rhodes in the spring of 1978, and they were soon joined by Roger Taylor, then Andy Taylor and finally Simon Le Bon. Together they were an immediate, massive global success story, their pictures on millions of walls, every single a worldwide hit. In his frank, compelling autobiography, John recounts the highs - hanging out with icons like Bowie, Warhol and even James Bond; dating Vogue models and driving fast cars - all the while playing hard with the band he loved. But he faced tough battles ahead - troubles that brought him to the brink of self-destruction - before turning his life around. Told with humour, honesty and hard-won wisdom, and packed with exclusive pictures, In the Pleasure Groove is a fascinating, irresistible portrait of a man who danced into the fire...and came through the other side.

Read more less

Throw off the shackles of formal schooling and embark upon a rich journey of self-directed, life-long learning After over 100 years of mandatory schooling in the U.S., literacy rates have dropped, families are fragmented, learning "disabilities" are skyrocketing, and children and youth are increasingly disaffected. Thirty years of teaching in the public school system led John Taylor Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory governmental schooling is to blame, accomplishing little but to teach young people to follow orders like cogs in an industrial machine. He became a fierce advocate of families and young people taking back education and learning, arguing that "genius is as common as dirt," but that conventional schooling is driving out the natural curiosity and problem-solving skills we're born with, replacing it with rule-following, fragmented time, and disillusionment. Gatto's radical treatise on public education, a bestseller for 25 years, continues to bang the drum for an unshackling of children and learning from formal schooling. Now, in an ever-more-rapidly changing world with an explosion of alternative routes to learning, it's poised to continue to shake the world of institutional education for many more years. Featuring a new foreword from Zachary Slayback, an Ivy League dropout and cofounder of tech start-up career foundry Praxis, this 25th anniversary edition will inspire new generations of parents and students to take control of learning and kickstart an empowered society of self-directed lifetime-learners.

Read more less

Should you find yourself strolling along the coastal heights of Douarnenez, a Brittany town near the westernmost point of continental France, you would do well to look out for a signpost marked, “Georges Perros (1923–1978) ‘Dazzled by the sea.’” Perros, who famously made that remark and settled there in 1959, was initially an actor but is now best known for his literary output, which was marked by stylistic freshness and frank criticism. Perros lived anonymously in the fishing port of Douarnenez, scraping by as a freelance author and manuscript reader who taught and published a few books, but mostly corresponded with fellow writers or rode his motorcycle along the country roads. Indeed, Perros is known for his fame-shunning habits and for choosing to take up residence far from the sophistication of the capital city. But behind the folksy, sometimes sighing, sometimes bitter, sometimes sardonic, sometimes even resigned voice lurks an intensely sensitive, highly cultivated ruminator on the human condition. He is best remembered for the autobiographical poems collected in Blue Poems and An Ordinary Life, as well as for Paper Collage, his compendium of maxims, vignettes, short prose narratives, occasional diary-like notations, critical remarks, and personal essays. Making this essential work available for the first time in English, this book presents a selection of these touching and thought-provoking short texts alongside numerous maxims, a genre in which Perros excelled. With typical modesty, the author called himself a journalier des pensées, a day labourer who tills thoughts. As readers, we can do no better than to read the tilled thoughts of Georges Perros.

Read more less

Fables, memories, things he's read, things he's seen, transposed or made up, the stories gathered in Portrait Tales take the reader around the world, hopping through art history, with imaginative flair for the caustic or extravagant, yet always telling detail: from an impossible portrait of Jesus in 50 AD, which somehow brings J.L. Godard into the picture, to the 14th c. Ottoman Empire, to China's Qing Dynasty, the Italian Renaissance, French Rococo, and Louise Bourgeois's mirrors, these historiettes expound the paradoxes, the necessity, and the dangers of seeking truthfulness in art. With gentle but unmistakable irony, they highlight the intricate connexion between art and power.

Read more less

Benedict Cumberbatch reads these four new Sherlock Holmes stories by John Taylor'An Inscrutable Masquerade'/ 'The Conundrum of Coach 13'/ 'The Trinity Vicarage Larceny'/ 'The 10.59 Assassin'Inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s original Sherlock Holmes stories, John Taylor has written four more mysteries featuring the world’s greatest detective. Read by acclaimed actor Benedict Cumberbatch, these new adventures share all the suspense of the original tales.In a drawer in his bureau, Dr Watson keeps a locked cedarwood chest – a ‘box of secrets’. It contains an archive of notes referring to some of Holmes’ cases that, for one reason or another, never saw the light of day. Now, for the first time, Watson has decided to reveal the truth to the world... In these four thrilling stories, Holmes experiments with the science of ballistics, locates some missing gold bullion, investigates the theft of a large amount of money and solves the baffling mystery of the Stovey murder.

Read more less

For most Bible readers Ezekiel is almost a closed book,' writes John Taylor. 'Their knowledge of him extends little further than his mysterious vision of God's chariot-throne, with its wheels within wheels, and the vision of the valley of the dry bones ... In its structure, however, if not in its thought and language, the book of Ezekiel has a basic simplicity, and its orderly framework makes it easy to analyse.' Taylor's commentary offers a portrait of the prophet, places his prophecies within their historical settings, and provides an overview of the book's contents and themes.

Read more less

A meditation on the work of Italian artist Giorgio Morandi and its power to evoke a complexity of emotions and astonishment. In The Pilgrim’s Bowl, Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet examines Giorgio Morandi’s ascetic still lifes, contrasting his artistic approach to the life philosophies of two authors whom he cherished, Pascal and Leopardi, and reflecting on the few known autobiographical details we know about Morandi. In this small and erudite tome, Jaccottet draws us into the very heart of the artist’s calm and strangely haunting oeuvre. In his literary criticism, Jaccottet is known for deeply engaging with the work of his fellow poets and tenaciously seeking the essence of their poetics. In this, his only book-length essay devoted to an artist, his critical prose likewise blends empathy, subtle discernment, and a determination to pinpoint, or at least glimpse, the elusive underlying qualities of Morandi's deceptively simple, dull-toned yet mysteriously luminous paintings. The Pilgrim’s Bowl is a remarkably elucidating study based on a profound admiration for and a dialogue with Morandi’s oeuvre.

Read more less

Swiss novelist Catherine Colomb is known as one of the most unusual and inventive francophone novelists of the twentieth century. Fascinated by the processes of memory and consciousness, she has been compared to that of Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. The Spirits of the Earth is the first English translation of Colomb's work and its arrival will introduce new readers to an iconic novel.The Spirits of the Earth is at heart a family drama, set at the Fraidaigue ch teau, along the shores of Lake Geneva, and in the Maison d'en Haut country mansion, located in the hills above the lake. In these luxe locales, readers encounter upper-class characters with faltering incomes, parvenues, and even ghosts. Throughout, Colomb builds a psychologically penetrating and bold story in which the living and the dead intermingle and in which time itself is a mystery.

Read more less

One of the central figures from a remarkable generation of French-language poets, Pierre Chappuis has thus far only been represented in English translation in fragments: a few poems here and there in magazines, online reviews, and anthologies. Like Bits of Wind rights that wrong, offering a generous selection of Chappuis’s poetry and prose from the past forty years, drawn from several of his books. In these pages, Chappuis delves into long-standing questions of the essence of life, our relationship to landscape, the role of the perceiving self, and much more. His skeletal, haiku-like verse starkly contrasts with his more overtly poetic prose, which revels in sinuous lines and interpolated parentheticals. Together, the different forms are invigorating and exciting, the perfect introduction for English-language readers.

Read more less

A deeply contemplative work devoted to thinking from one of the foremost literary figures of contemporary France. Dying of Thinking is the ninth volume of Pascal Quignard’s Last Kingdom series. It explores three themes: how thought and death coincide, how thought is close to melancholy, and how thought takes shelter near traumatism. One who thinks, Quignard shows us, “compensates” for a very ancient abandonment. Even as a dream is a meaning whose disorderly, condensed, paradoxical images intuit something which has preceded sleep and which returns in them, thought is a meaning which uses words that are written, re-transcribed, dissected, etymologized and neologized. Throughout the Last Kingdom series, Quignard has sought to experience another way of thinking, one that has nothing to do with philosophy, a way of attaching himself “literally” to texts and of progressing by decomposing the imagery of dreams. Dying of Thinking is the heart of this quest.

Read more less

The last works of the last great classic European poet now available in English. In his 96th and final year, and with the help of the poet José-Flore Tappy, celebrated Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet finished two manuscripts-in-progress, one in prose and one in poetry, both of which are presented in this volume in John Taylor’s sensitive translation. The first work, “La Clarté Notre-Dame,” takes off from the “pure, weightless, fragile, yet crystal-clear tinkling” of a monastery bell heard during a walk with friends. With this thought-provoking sound as a leitmotiv, Jaccottet looks back on a life of writing, reading, and scrutinizing humankind’s existential and spiritual aspirations. He sets these concerns against his equally lifelong preoccupation with “the rise of evil in today’s world,” notably in Syria. Composed in a baroque style, the verse poems collected in “The Last Book of Madrigals” explore love. Jaccottet returns in spirit to Italy, the country which for him symbolizes happiness and sensuality. As he evokes amorous attraction, he conjures up Monteverdi’s madrigals, one of Dante’s little-known rhymes, and Giuseppe Ungaretti’s last poem. Reinventing and commenting on these works, Jaccottet meditates on old age, approaching death, despair, and the persistence of love. Together, both works grapple with devastating darkness, but as Tappy observes in her afterword, however, Jaccottet’s “greatest force” was “his perpetually renewed desire, during the most terrifying night, to head for the light.”

Read more less

Philippe Jaccottet’s newest work follows in some ways the approach of Seedtime, his recent two-volume collection of notebooks. Similarly comprising on-the-spot jottings, philosophical reflections, literary commentary, dream narratives and sundry “notes,” this book nonetheless differs from the preceding volumes in that the Swiss poet includes more personal material than ever before. Drawing on unpublished notebooks from the years 1952–2005, Jacottet offers here passages about his family, the death of his father-in-law and of his mother, his encounters with other major poets—such as René Char, Francis Ponge, Jean Tardieu, and his friends Yves Bonnefoy and André du Bouchet—and his trips abroad, as well as, characteristically, his walks in the countryside around the village of Grignan, in the south of France, where he has lived since 1953. For a poet who has been notoriously discreet about his life, this book offers unexpected glimpses of the private man. Above all, the entries in this notebook show how one of the greatest European poets grapples with the discouraging elements of existence, counterbalancing them by recording fleeting perceptions in which “something else,” almost like a threshold, seems present.

Read more less

In these times of heartbreaking violence, clashing religions, and a seemingly never-ending narrative of dichotomy between East and West, wonder at the religion and culture of the Middle East can be in short supply. However, the lyrical and philosophical travel writing in Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet’s Calm Fire rekindles it, lifting us out of our ordinary locales and stories of violent conflict in the Middle East. Jaccottet’s poetic descriptions explore the rich cultural worlds of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Israel, giving us uncommon glimpses into countries so often associated with turmoil, death and destruction. Expressing a poet’s admiration for the ecstasies of faith and a philosopher’s skepticism of these seemingly transformative feelings, Jaccottet dives deep into the religious cultures of the places he visits. ​ Ultimately, whether in his native Swiss Alps or among the cedars of Lebanon, the same question pervades Philippe Jaccottet’s work: How should we live? More than a simple palliative to a depressing news cycle, Calm Fire captures a true sense of place by celebrating and pondering ways of life through the immersive experience of travel.

Read more less

Should you find yourself strolling along the coastal heights of Douarnenez, a Brittany town near the westernmost point of continental France, you would do well to look out for a signpost marked, "Georges Perros (1923-1978) 'Dazzled by the sea.'" Perros, who famously made that remark and settled there in 1959, was initially an actor but is now best known for his literary output, which was marked by stylistic freshness and frank criticism. Perros lived anonymously in the fishing port of Douarnenez, scraping by as a freelance author and manuscript reader who taught and published a few books, but mostly corresponded with fellow writers or rode his motorcycle along the country roads. Indeed, Perros is known for his fame-shunning habits and for choosing to take up residence far from the sophistication of the capital city. But behind the folksy, sometimes sighing, sometimes bitter, sometimes sardonic, sometimes even resigned voice lurks an intensely sensitive, highly cultivated ruminator on the human condition. He is best remembered for the autobiographical poems collected in Blue Poems and An Ordinary Life, as well as for Paper Collage, his compendium of maxims, vignettes, short prose narratives, occasional diary-like notations, critical remarks, and personal essays. Making this essential work available for the first time in English, this book presents a selection of these touching and thought-provoking short texts alongside numerous maxims, a genre in which Perros excelled. With typical modesty, the author called himself a journalier des pensees, a day labourer who tills thoughts. As readers, we can do no better than to read the tilled thoughts of Georges Perros.

Read more less

Frédéric Zaavy's brilliant career as a master jeweller shone like a meteor but flamed out far too soon. Zaavy considered himself heir to the legacy of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, gem dealer to Louis XIV, and was chosen as the exclusive jeweller for the 21st century revival of Fabergé. Zaavy's artistic genius lay in painting with precious stones and in engineering remarkable settings to hold those stones almost invisibly. His works achieved a preëminence in the thousand-year evolution of French jewellery. The influences on his life and work were myriad. Nature, quantum physics, art, music, spirituality, poetry, literature, and even science fiction all shaped his extraordinary world view and taste. He was a philosopher jeweller. Stardust encapsulates the last year of his life, from the moment he learned he would soon die, right through to the end, with his life still at full throttle. With a text by acclaimed French philosophical writer Gilles Hertzog and a stunning visual narrative by celebrated photographers John Bigelow Taylor and Dianne Dubler, Zaavy's work and life are presented in a portrait of what was and of what might have been. Text in English and Simplified Chinese.

Read more less

Exam Board: SQA Level: National 5 Subject: Physics Two books in one! Combining a revision guide and a full set of practice test papers, this fantastic resource is all you need to revise for the exam. The revision guide• Covers all of the topics in the CfE National 5 Physics curriculum, broken down into manageable chunks for easy revision• Clearly explains key concepts, research evidence and real-life applications• Contains Quick Tests to let students check their knowledge and understanding as they go along The practice test papers• Are in the format and the style of the SQA exam, giving students an opportunity to practice taking the National 5 Physics exam• Marking instructions and sample answers are provided online, so students can check their progress

Read more less

The Pocket Oxford Classical Greek Dictionary is an elementary level dictionary ideal for learners of Classical Greek at school and university level. It covers over 20,000 Greek words and phrases in clear, user-friendly translations, and over 4,000 English words in common usage. The dictionary also offers help with Greek to English sentence construction and prose composition, and provides tables of irregular verbs. Additional information includes detailed lists of numerals and proper names, a guide to pronunciation, and a map of Greece.

Read more less