A four step plan to break your technology addictions and regain balance in your life. If you are bogged under by Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Gmail, Blackberry, iPad, laptop or X-box, if your heart flutters when you see a flashing red light, your phone beep and your e-mail ping, perhaps technology is increasingly taking over your life. With so much available to us, it is easy to surrender control to it. Our digital lifestyles are more of a weight on our shoulders than we know and many of us can no longer focus on a single task or face-to-face conversation without wanting to reach out or retreat to the virtual world every few minutes. It's time for a digital detox. This 28 day four step plan will get you started - rethink, reboot, reconnect and revitalise, learning to live with technology. 254pp in paperback.

Love him or loath him, the journalist Piers Morgan shouts loud a rallying cry for a united future to consider what really matters in life. It's time to get back some common sense, time to cancel the cancel culture. If you think NHS heroes and Captain Sir Tom Moore are the real stars of our society, not the self-obsessed, tone-deaf celebrities and royal renegades, then this is the book for you. Piers Morgan is sickened by the cancel-culture bullies, destroying people's careers and lives and from feminism to masculinity, racism to gender, body image to veganism, mental health to competitiveness at school, the right to free speech and expressing an honestly held opinion he believes are being crushed at the altar of 'woke' political correctness. COVID-19 shed shocking light on the problems that plague our country. Stockpilers and lockdown cheats revealed our grotesque levels of self-interest. Millennials flocked to parks for picnics, proving the rank hypocrisy of the supposedly 'socially conscious'. The virtue-signalling woke brigade continued their furious assault on free speech, shutting down debate on important issues like gender, racism and feminism. The global pandemic has exposed in the UK deep divisions within society and laid bare a toxic culture war and here Morgan also holds the government to often ferocious account over its handling of the crisis. Yet he also on balance sees that Coronavirus has showcased our strengths, selfless bravery in the heroic efforts of our healthcare staff, a greater appreciation of migrant workers, the return of local community spirit and inspiring, noble acts from members of the public. From Wuhan to PPE, Harry and Meghan and Black Lives Matter and attacks on statues, Boris and Donald, here is a book of January to July. Morgan has strong opinions and is utterly truthful in where he points his aim.

Learning is an adventure, but education is a process of selection and the results can be destructive. The criteria used to separate pupils of differing aptitudes are riddled with cultural assumptions, as the author discovered when he flunked a unit in his engineering degree in India. Nowadays he is head of Open Learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the journey that got him to one of the world's most prestigious universities also showed him the fallacies in modern educational programmes. Selectivity, starting with IQ tests which became popular in the 1930s, represents a massive squandering of resources, because IQ tests are contingent on surroundings and circumstances, and fluctuating scores within families of lower socioeconomic status indicate the disproportionate effect environment has in those groups. Over 100 years ago E L Thorndike regarded learning as a mass-replicable response to stimuli, while at the other end of the educational theory spectrum was Dewey, who approached the cognitive science of learning as a multi-layered process. Thorndike saw forgetting as a negative aspect of learning, but in the 1970s Robert and Elizabeth Bjork of UCLA posited that forgetting was an essential tool in the mind's armoury of storage and retrieval. Examining in detail the neurological processes involved in learning, the author charts the different schools of learning theory including Montessori, Piaget and Loewenstein. He follows memory phenomenon Claire Wang to Elon Musk's elite training campus Ad Astra, where the ultimate goal is to teach knowledge that will affect world outcomes. The experience reinforces his misgivings about elite education, and access rather than exclusivity continues to be Sarma's mantra. 321pp, paperback.

Udo Kischka was an otherwise healthy 62-year old who ran harder than usual to catch a train home, went to bed feeling normal and was discovered unconscious by his wife the next morning, paralysed and blind on the left side and unable to call for help. But Udo was no ordinary stroke patient: he was a specialist in stroke medicine, while his wife Helena Kennerley is a clinical psychologist. Their joint account of how Udo managed his condition is fascinating for the psychological insight Helena brings, the understanding of the science contributed by Udo, and the inspiration deriving from their struggle together as a couple and as a family. When Udo was transferred to the Oxford Centre of Enablement he was there for nine months, longer than the average, and family events like Christmas were very upsetting. Their teenage children found it difficult to cope with their dad's twisted face and slow speech, and there was a feeling that the children should not be given any burden of care unless they requested it. But on day 68 Udo moved his fingers, and as a specialist he knew what a step forward this was. Fatigue was a real foe, and clarity alternated with distraction in his speech, together with a tendency to repetition. To Helena's puzzlement Udo prioritised mobility over cognitive abilities, because standing and walking gave him more of a sense of who he was. As a couple Helena and Udo were advised to make a completely new game plan, and in conclusion Helena describes their experiences with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. 180pp, paperback, resources, bibliography, black and white photos.

Sigmund Freud's controversial ideas have penetrated Western culture more deeply than those of any other psychologist. The 'Freudian slip', the 'Oedipus complex', 'childhood sexuality', 'libido', 'narcissism' 'penis envy', the 'castration complex', the 'id', the 'ego' and the 'superego', 'denial', 'repression', 'identification', 'projection', 'acting out', the 'pleasure principle', the 'reality principle', 'defence-mechanism' - are all taken for granted in our everyday vocabulary. Psychoanalysis was never just a method of treatment, rather a vision of the human condition which has continued to fascinate and provoke long after the death of its originator. Its central hypothesis, that we live in conflict with ourselves and seek to resolve matters by turning away from reality, did not emerge from experimental science but from self-examination and the unique opportunities for observation presented by the psychoanalytic technique - in particular, from the confessions produced by 'free-association' in Freud's consulting room. Written during the turmoil of the First World War, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis was distilled from a series of lectures given at Vienna University, but had to wait for the war to end before being made available to the English speaking world. Paperback, 393pp.

"Stories are what connect us, and remind us that hope is always possible" - the words of Heather Morris, bestselling author and extraordinary storyteller of tales about survival, resilience and hope. Working in a public hospital in Melbourne in 2003, she was introduced to Lale Sokolov, an elderly gentleman whose life would be the basis for her novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz which has sold six million copies. This is a companion to that beloved book, a series of accounts from remarkable people she has met, whether that is the section about listening to the wisdom of our elders, to that of Lale, to our children, or to ourselves. Transport yourself with Morris to her gramps' memories, travelling across South Africa with Field Marshal Kitchener as a 16-year-old boy. She shares heartening stories such as one encounter when, at the hospital where she worked, she learned that a teenage boy with a terminal illness had completed every level on his games, so she rang the company who sent a young man - a game designer - to deliver them which ended with the two becoming profound friends. Learn more about Cilka Klein, a figure in Lale Sokolov's history, who Morris then wrote about in her second book: Cilka's Journey, and how Morris sought all the details she could (including her birth record) in the town hall of Sabnov in Slovakia. Glimpse the mind of Ian (Morris' brother) who left the Navy, listening to his gut instinct, and spurned the idea of becoming a local friendly police officer in favour of carving out his own life which included living in several countries, a successful business career and a family. The end of each chapter also includes tips on how readers can be active listeners for different people, whether that is using a physical stimulus, simple questions or the ritual of a cup of tea to encourage elders to open up, or learning that the secret to listening to a child is time, giving them the time to speak so they know how important they are. For the eager reader of Morris' other work, there is also insight into how she constructed Lale's story through the sharing of a table she used when writing Lale's anecdotes up, with columns dedicated to what she did, how she felt, what Lale said and how Lale felt. This is an intimate and touching behind the scenes look at how stories are forged, celebrated and made immortal through sharing them. Signed by the author, black and white illustrations, 314pp.

Despite her name, this intrepid explorer had a deep fear of fish, so to overcome her phobia she plots to travel to Thailand, learn to dive and swim with the biggest fish in the world, the mighty whale shark. Revealing, poignant, hilarious and horrific, it is a serious piece about conquering fears, personal courage, bereavement, family, the science of underwater exploration, decompression chambers and divers, and considerable knowledge about, well, fish. Studded with PADI open water manual quotations like 'No one but you can say what calls you to scuba diving', and References. 330pp.

Machine learning dominates every aspect of our modern lives as algorithms decide the news we consume, whether we get a mortgage, and which friends wish us happy birthday. But as these systems make ever more decisions on our behalf, how do we ensure that they do what we want and act both safely and fairly? This conundrum is the subject of this urgent and vital book on a subject that is often talked about but little understood. Brian Christian masterly surveys the 'AI fairness' community, introducing us to some of its historical roots in science, philosophy and activism, and crucially many of its quandaries and limitations. From the AI programmes and robots that exploit dangerous loopholes in their own instructions, to facial recognition algorithms that ignore black people, Christian explains how, as machine learning develops, we rapidly approach a collision between artificial intelligence and our most sacred human values. He unpicks the latest studies and features numerous interviews with top researchers. A revealing and helpful guide to an urgent problem in tech on how we can improve our lives rather than complicate or even destroy them. 476pp in large softback.

'A thoughtful and stirring look into the art and science of lifelong learning. Currently, I'm learning Gaelic, dressmaking and how to lay floors. Last year, I was knitting and coding. I'm fifty, and not supposed to be a beginner anymore - according to society's conventions - but Tom Vanderbilt turns that flawed assumption on its head...' - Rose George. Discover why learning is good for us and how to develop a Beginner's Mindset, no longer exclusive to the young, in a book that bridges the small, tricky gulf between enthusiasm and action. Fascinating and challenging, learn new skills along with Tom as he tackles skills under the tutelage of professionals in singing, juggling, chess, surfing and drawing. Be prepared to fail over and over and enjoy along the way the anecdotal records of Tom's experiences, many interesting and fun, and many with his young daughter, and among the nuggets in the book are insights from scientists and experts. We revere expertise but look down on the beginner, but why are children the only ones allowed to experience the inherent fun of facing new daily challenges? What could this do for your brain? 300 pages.

The topic is how collaboration and curiosity has shaped mankind. As we recover from the pandemic of 2020, the world needs more open minds, open hearts, open communications, open markets, and Norberg's superb book demonstrates how openness has been key to the success of our species over 10,000 years. From Stone Age hunter-gatherers to contemporary Chinese-American relations, Open explores how across time and cultures we have struggled with a constant tension between our yearning for cooperation and our profound need for belonging. Providing a bold new framework for understanding human history, Norberg examines why we are often uncomfortable with openness, but also why it is essential for progress. As the world is ravaged by Coronavirus, climate change and financial uncertainty, our future feels in doubt. However, when we look at the world objectively, humanity is doing better than ever. The freedom to explore and exchange whether goods, ideas or people, has led to stunning achievements in science, health, technology and living standards. So why are we so intent on ruining it? Norberg makes a compelling case for why an open world with an open economy is worth fighting for more than ever. The World Bank has calculated that the greatest economic damage from epidemics like swine flu, SARS or the new coronavirus do not come from mortality, morbidity, treatment and associated loss of production, but from increased fear of associating with others which shuts down places of production, transportation, harbours and airports. 440 intriguing pages, large softback.