The eye-witness accounts in this book have been chosen from hundreds of memoirs, letters and travel books, as well as newspapers. The time span reaches from ancient Greece - Thucydides' account of Athens stricken by plague - to February 1986 when James Fenton in the Phillipines, joins the crowd rampaging through President Marcos's palace. There are disasters, executions and battles - often seen from unaccustomed angles - such as, a French knight's account of Agincourt, El Alamein from a German armoured car. But peace has its dramas too, as seen from the accounts of the Pilgrim fathers setting...

Through letter, unpublished works and Golding's intimate journals, the author draws a revelatory and definitive portrait of an extraordinary man. He reveals a many-sided figure: a war hero, a reclussive depressive, a family man, a victim of fears and a writer who trusted the imagination above all things.

Covering hunting spiders and black holes, gorillas and stardust, protons, photons and neutrinos, this anthology plots the development of modern science from Leonardo da Vinci to chaos theory. It consists of accounts by scientists themselves - astronomers, physicists, biologists, chemists, psychologists - who talk about their moments of breakthrough. Ronald Ross describes his discovery of the secret of malaria; the workers in Edison's laboratory put together the first electric-light bulb; and readers share in the construction of the world's first atomic pile.

An anthology of schemes, stories and ideas which people have dreamt of as Utopia. Provides a picture of the hopes and desires of the age in which each Utopia was conceived. The anthology encompasses many noble and selfless schemes but also reveals a trail of folly, tyranny and attempts at social control.