Polly Lee
Author
Language
English
Description
How science is opening up the mysteries of the heart, revealing the poetry in motion within the machine.
Your heart is a miracle in motion, a marvel of construction unsurpassed by any human-made creation. It beats 100,000 times every day—if you were to live to 100, that would be more than 3 billion beats across your lifespan. Despite decades of effort in labs all over the world, we have not yet been able to replicate the heart’s perfect engineering....
Author
Language
English
Description
Why do we love to swear so much? Why do we get so offended when others do it?
In this lively and amusing exploration of the various puzzles that surround swearing, philosopher Rebecca Roache argues that what makes swearing offensive is not really the words at all: the offensiveness lies in what we don't say. The unspoken-and usually unconscious-inferences that speakers and listeners make about each other are key to explaining swearwords' capacity...
Author
Language
English
Description
Jean Serjeant, the heroine of Julian Barnes's wonderfully provocative novel, seems ordinary, but has an extraordinary disdain for wisdom. And as Barnes-winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending-follows her from her childhood in the 1920s to her flight into the sun in the year 2021, he confronts readers with the fruits of her relentless curiosity: pilgrimages to China and the Grand Canyon; a catalogue of 1940s sexual euphemisms; and...