He comes, he sees, he plays with the gadgets… Boris Johnson has been behind the wheel of some of the world’s fastest, most luxurious cars. He’s taken the Jaguar XKR-R for a spin around a posh public school; roared through Islington in the AC Cobra V8; and spent a weekend tearing through the lanes of Sussex in the splendour of the Mercedes S55 AMG. Now he’s going to reveal exactly what it was like. Pondering the fundamental questions – What does it feel like to be overtaken by a female driver when you’re behind the wheel of an Alfa Romeo? Can a car really precipitate a mid-life crisis? – Boris Johnson’s hilarious dispatches from life in the fast lane will appeal to anyone who’s found themselves behind the wheel of one of modern motoring’s finer specimens. But it’s not all glamour and gadgets. Because when he’s not baiting his Holloway neighbours with the Rolls Royce Corniche, we see Boris trying, and failing, to get to grips with the Smart car, and attempting to flee Kosovo in a Fiat Uno. Published together for the first time as a Paperback Original, these hilarious vignettes are vintage Boris: witty, candid and unique.

Marisa Merico, the daughter of one of Italy's most notorious Mafia Godfathers, was dazzled by her father, Emilio DiGiovine. To her he was all powerful, sophisticated and loving; to the rest of the world he was staggeringly ruthless. Marisa knew her father would do anything for her, but she hadn't expected just how much he would ask in return. Born to an English mother, Marisa turned her back on her quiet life in Blackpool to join her charming father, Emilio DiGiovine, who had spent years trying to tempt her back to Italy. Arriving in Milan, Marisa had no idea she was returning to the heart of one of the most notorious drugs, arms and money laundering empires in the world. At first her father shielded her from the family operations and Marisa was overwhelmed by the attention and gifts he lavished on her. But soon the temptation of a new recruit was too great and Marisa was drawn ever deeper into the family's sinister and brutal regime, witnessing things she was too scared to believe. The day she eloped with her father's chief henchman was the day her father decided she was ready to be initiated into the true nature of the family business. Suddenly Marisa saw there was no limit to what he would expect her to do for him. She knew it was wrong, she knew she had to get out, but she had no idea how she could break the sacred Coda Nostra – and survive. Marisa's extraordinarily story is the most powerful portrayal of a Mafia family to emerge in recent years. It's the perfect balance of shocking violence, dangerous betrayals and enduring love.

Collins Gem Card Games provides an introduction to the most played family card games, with clear instructions and guidance on how to master each game. With a stylish new cover design, this best-selling Collins Gem title has been updated to provide even more accessible and helpful advice on learning today’s most popular card games. This new, colour edition will offer help and guidance in a more visually appealing style, making it a joy to learn how to play. Illustrated throughout with colour photographs, this edition includes detailed instructions on how to play over 60 different card games.

The Peak District, with its gentle limestone White Peak and the wilder more dramatic gritstone Dark Peak, is a superb walking area. Explore the district with these 20 walks, all of which are 5 miles or under in length and can easily be completed in less than 3 hours. This guide, produced in co-operation with the Ramblers and featuring Ordnance Survey mapping, is the perfect way to really appreciate the stunning scenery of the Peak District. INCLUDES: ? 20 easy to follow walks which can be completed in 3 hours and under. ? Each walk has a detailed 1:25 000 Ordnance Survey map with the route clearly marked plus a detailed de*ion of the route. ? The walks have been chosen with issues like parking and refreshments in mind to make life easy for families. ? Packed with colour photographs of scenes you will see along the walk. The perfect guide for afternoon walks near to Chesterfield, Sheffield, Matlock, Buxton and Macclesfield.

From one of our greatest science writers, this biography of a beech-and-bluebell wood through diverse moods and changing seasons combines stunning natural history with the ancient history of the countryside to tell the full story of the British landscape. ‘The woods are the great beauty of this country… A fine forest-like beech wood far more beautiful than anything else which we have seen in its vicinity’ is how John Stuart Mill described a small patch of beech-and bluebell woodland, buried deeply in the Chiltern Hills and now owned by Richard Fortey. Drawing upon a lifetime of scientific expertise and abiding love of nature, Fortey uses his small wood to tell a wider story of the ever-changing British landscape, human influence on the countryside over many centuries and the vital interactions between flora, fauna and fungi. The trees provide a majestic stage for woodland animals and plants to reveal their own stories. Fortey presents his wood as an interwoven collection of different habitats rich in species. His attention ranges from the beech and cherry trees that dominate the wood to the flints underfoot; the red kites and woodpeckers that soar overhead; the lichens, mosses and liverworts decorating the branches as well as the myriad species of spiders, moths, beetles and crane-flies. The 300 species of fungi identified in the wood capture his attention as much as familiar deer, shrews and dormice. Fortey is a naturalist who believes that all organisms are as interesting as human beings – and certainly more important than the observer. So this book is a close examination of nature and human history. He proves that poetic writing is compatible with scientific precision. The book is filled with details of living animals and plants, charting the passage of the seasons, visits by fellow enthusiasts; the play of light between branches; the influence of geology; and how woodland influences history, architecture and industry. On every page he shows how an intimate study of one small wood can reveal so much about the natural world and demonstrates his relish for the incomparable pleasures of discovery.

Discover the secret hints, tips and winning ways of the BANANAGRAMS? bunch! This little book contains the insider secrets to help you become Top Banana … Packed with curious words and fascinating facts, the Collins Little Book of Bananagrams? is a treasure in itself. It's the perfect gift for word lovers and BANANAGRAMS? players of all ages the world over, and includes: Dozens of proper nouns that you CAN play – in any word game! Three ways to turn tiles that save VITAL seconds How to use UK & US spellings to IMPROVE your game The one thing you MUST do in your first move 19 games you can play with BANANAGRAMS? tiles The ESSENTIAL tip that buys time whenever you call "PEEL!" A dictionary of WEORDS?: Weird Words That Win Word Games … And DOZENS of other top tips to boost your BANANAGRAMS? playing power! Over 6 million copies of the game sold.

Good games are like good jokes. They get remembered and passed on from person to person. But sometimes they get forgotten. ‘Ting Tang Tommy!’ is about remembering the best games we’ve ever known This book sets out to prove that you can play games anywhere – on the beach, having dinner with friends, at a barbeque, with your family at Christmas. It will equip you with loads of simple, memorable games that you can share at any moment of the day – no equipment required. Beautifully produced and designed, ‘Ting Tang Tommy!’ is both a handbook of games and a personal exploration of them, full of potted histories and interesting facts. Each game featured has been tried and tested – and, most importantly, loved.

Based on The Times Bridge column, an extensive bridge guide aimed at the less experienced or social player who longs to improve their game, with instructive deals and tips, as well as a helpful Index. Andrew Robson, The Times Bridge Correspondent, is both a champion Bridge player and an inspired teacher. He teaches and tutors at his Bridge Club and has acquired great practical knowledge about how people learn to play Bridge. Based on Andrew Robson’s Friday column in The Times, common scenarios are presented with an outline of what actually happened, as well as what should have happened. Along with every deal is the very popular handy tip ‘If you remember just one thing…’, which features throughout the book. The first section of the book, ‘The Game’, is a basic outline providing the key to playing a sensible game of Bridge, subdivided into ‘Bidding’, ‘Declarer Play’ and ‘Defence’. The reader can either read ‘The Game’ first, paying particular attention to the tips, or they can dip in and out of the book, picking a common mistake at random, with the option to cross-reference to the same tip in ‘The Game’ section. Bridge is now reaching a new audience, and is being played by people of all ages. Let Andrew Robson help you to improve your game! Previously published as The Times Bridge: Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Top ten Sunday Times Bestseller ‘Engaging, ambitious and creative’ Guardian Where are we? Are we alone? Who are we? Why are we here? What is our future? Human Universe tackles some of the greatest questions that humans have asked to try and understand the very nature of ourselves and the Universe in which we live. Through the endless leaps of human minds, it explores the extraordinary depth of our knowledge today and where our curiosity may lead us in the future. With groundbreaking insight it reveals how time, physics and chemistry came together to create a creature that can wonder at its own existence, blessed with an unquenchable thirst to discover not just where it came from, but how it can think, where it is going and if it is alone. Accompanies the acclaimed BBC TV series.

This edition does not include illustrations. A fascinating exploration into the history of science and crime. In the tradition of ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’, FINGERPRINTS is the story of the race to discover the secrets trapped in the whorls and arches found on the palm of one’s hand. In 1905 an elderly couple were found murdered in their shop in Deptford, London. The only evidence at the scene of the crime was a sweaty fingerprint on a cashbox. Was it possible that a single fingerprint could be enough to lead to a conviction? Could the pattern of these tracks hold the secrets of the science of identification? Through the story of three brilliant men：William Herschel, a colonial administrator in Indian, Henry Faulds, a missionary in Japan and Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, the extraordinary story of the history of fingerprinting is revealed. It is a story of intellectual skulduggery and scientific brilliance. Packed with an extraordinary cast of individuals whose scientific breakthroughs helped solve one of the most brutal murders in English history and shape our understanding of identity forever.

Welcome to Dr Moreau’s other island. Place of untold horros. Home of the Beast Men… Available for the first time in eBook. He stands very tall, long prosthetic limbs glistening in the harsh sun, withered body swaying, carbine and whip clasped in artificial hands. Man-beasts cower on the sand as he brandishes his gun in the air. He is Dr Moreau, ruler of the fabulous, grotesque island, where humans are as brutes and brutes as humans, where the future of the entire human race is being reprogrammed. The place of untold horrors. The place of the New Man.

Another volume in the widely-read New Naturalist series, this book is an in-depth study of the natural developments and history of Galloway and surrounding areas. Often overlooked due to the reputation of natural habitat in other parts of the country, the author here conveys the diversity and magnificence of nature in the south of Scotland. Galloway and the borders is an extremely varied region, from saltmarshes and shingle beaches to rocky islands and seabird stations. The wide range of hills, displaying a wealth of rich colours, give the area its dominant character. The varied selection of flora and fauna only add to the diversity.

A cutting-edge science book in the style of ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’ and ‘Chaos’ from an exciting and accessible new voice in popular science writing. Bio-inspiration is a form of engineering but not in the conventional sense. Extending beyond our established and preconceived notions, scientists, architects and engineers are looking at imitating nature by manufacturing 'wet' materials such as spider silk or the surface of the gecko's foot. The amazing power of the gecko's foot has long been known – it can climb a vertical glass wall and even walk upside down on the ceiling – but no ideas could be harnessed from it because its mechanism could not be seen with the power of optical microscopes. Recently however the secret was solved by a team of scientists in Oregon who established that the mechanism really is dry, and that it does not involve suction, capillary action or anything else the lay person might imagine. Each foot has half a million bristles and each bristle ramifies into hundreds of finer spatula-shaped projections. The fine scale of the gecko's foot is beyond the capacity of conventional microengineering, but a team of nanotechnologists have already made a good initial approximation. The gecko's foot is just one of many examples of this new 'smart' science. We also discover, amongst other things, how George de Mestral's brush with the spiny fruits of the cocklebur inspired him to invent Velcro; how the shape of leaves opening from a bud has inspired the design of solar-powered satellites; and the parallels between cantilever bridges and the spines of large mammals such as the bison. The new 'smart' science of Bio-inspiration is going to produce a plethora of products over the next decades that will transform our lives, and force us to look at the world in a completely new way. It is science we will be reading about in our papers very soon; it is the science of tomorrow's world.

Master a series of performance-enhancing coding techniques and methods that help them improve the performance of their Unity3D applications About This Book Discover features and techniques to optimize Unity Engine's CPU cycles, memory usage, and the GPU throughput of any application Explore multiple techniques to solve performance issues with your VR projects Learn the best practices for project organization to save time through an improved workflow Who This Book Is For This book is intended for intermediate and advanced Unity developers who have experience with most of Unity's feature-set, and who want to maximize the performance of their game. Familiarity with the C# language will be needed. What You Will Learn Use the Unity Profiler to find bottlenecks anywhere in your application, and discover how to resolve them Implement best practices for C# scripting to avoid common pitfalls Develop a solid understanding of the rendering pipeline, and maximize its performance by reducing draw calls and avoiding fill rate bottlenecks Enhance shaders in a way that is accessible to most developers, optimizing them through subtle yet effective performance tweaks Keep your scenes as dynamic as possible by making the most of the Physics engine Organize, filter, and compress your art assets to maximize performance while maintaining high quality Discover different kinds of performance problems that are critical for VR projects and how to tackle them Use the Mono Framework and C# to implement low-level enhancements that maximize memory usage and avoid garbage collection Get to know the best practices for project organization to save time through an improved workflow In Detail Unity is an awesome game development engine. Through its massive feature-set and ease-of-use, Unity helps put some of the best processing and rendering technology in the hands of hobbyists and professionals alike. This book shows you how to make your games fly with the recent version of Unity 2017, and demonstrates that high performance does not need to be limited to games with the biggest teams and budgets. Since nothing turns gamers away from a game faster than a poor user-experience, the book starts by explaining how to use the Unity Profiler to detect problems. You will learn how to use stopwatches, timers and logging methods to diagnose the problem. You will then explore techniques to improve performance through better programming practices. Moving on, you will then learn about Unity's built-in batching processes; when they can be used to improve performance, and their limitations. Next, you will import your art assets using minimal space, CPU and memory at runtime, and discover some underused features and approaches for managing asset data. You will also improve graphics, particle system and shader performance with a series of tips and tricks to make the most of GPU parallel processing. You will then delve into the fundamental layers of the Unity3D engine to discuss some issues that may be difficult to understand without a strong knowledge of its inner-workings. The book also introduces you to the critical performance problems for VR projects and how to tackle them. By the end of the book, you will have learned to improve the development workflow by properly organizing assets and ways to instantiate assets as quickly and waste-free as possible via object pooling. Style and approach This practical book will help readers understand the essentials of the Unity3D engine and how to build games while improving the performance of their applications.

According to Wikipedia: "Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli (May 23, 1810 – July 19, 1850) was a journalist, critic and women's rights activist associated with the American transcendental movement. She was the first full-time female book reviewer in journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States."

Master the art of creating impressive and reactive UIs for mobile applications on the latest version of Android Oreo. About This Book A comprehensive guide to designing and developing highly interactive user interfaces for your app. Design responsive and agile applications targeting multiple Android devices (up to Android Oreo) using Android Studio 3.0 Write reactive user interfaces with minimal effort by leveraging the latest Android technologies, such as Architecture components and the Lifecycle API Avoid common design problems and pitfalls with the help of shared UI design patterns and best practices. Who This Book Is For This book is for novice Android and Java developers who have a basic knowledge of Android development and want to start developing stunning user interfaces. What You Will Learn Create effective and efficient user interfaces that allow users to carry out tasks smoothly Understand the fundamentals of Android UI design, and take a look at the basic layouts, Inputs, and controls Learn about various UI components provided by Android, which include structured layout objects and UI controls that allow you to build the graphical user interface for your app Explore various styles and themes that allow you to customize the look and feel of your app Leverage the animation and graphics APIs to improve user experience and draw custom 2D graphics In Detail A great user interface (UI) can spell the difference between success and failure for any new application. This book will show you not just how to code great UIs, but how to design them as well. It will take novice Android developers on a journey, showing them how to leverage the Android platform to produce stunning Android applications. Begin with the basics of creating Android applications and then move on to topics such as screen and layout design. Next, learn about techniques that will help improve performance for your application. Also, explore how to create reactive applications that are fast, animated, and guide the user toward their goals with minimal distraction. Understand Android architecture components and learn how to build your application to automatically respond to changes made by the user. Great platforms are not always enough, so this book also focuses on creating custom components, layout managers, and 2D graphics. Also, explore many tips and best practices to ease your UI development process. By the end, you'll be able to design and build not only amazing UIs, but also systems that provide the best possible user experience. Style and approach This book takes an easy tutorial approach to help you learn how to create consistent and efficient user interfaces for your apps. The book first takes you through the basics of user interfaces such as basic layouts, inputs, and controls, and also covers animations and graphics. By the end of the book, you will have learned best practices and will be able to develop inspired interfaces that look good and also work subtly in the background.

Stress Management

The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction

Neuron: A Tutorial Study Guide

Neurotransmitter: A Tutorial Study Guide

Digestive System: A Tutorial Study Guide