The London Brick Company of Stewartby and Peterborough has served the building industry by rail and by road. This second, fully revised edition from Nostalgia Road celebrates the company's history. The guide shares the company's growth, its acquisitions and its delivery service as well as details on the brick-making process. The book explores how the firm emerged from a series of acquisitions of different brick-making firms from the 1880s until a new company emerged as the London Brick Company Ltd. in 1936. It shares how the company grew to become the major producer of bricks in the country and the biggest brick company in the world. Learn how the organisation was well ahead in social thinking by offering better conditions and higher pay levels for their staff in accord with their philanthropic ideals which were similar to the Quakers and the Cadbury family. Discover how, in 1974, the firm bought Whittlesey as the clay reserves in the Peterborough area could be better managed under the control of one company rather than multiple. The book also offers insight into how elite the firm was, highlighting that one of the biggest benefits of the semi-dry brick industry, as typified by the London Brick Company, was the fact that huge quantities of bricks could be produced cheaply by use of the continuous kiln. There are also fantastic images to bring the company's history to life, including a landscape shot of the horse and rail transport at the company's No.2 yard near Peterborough in the late 1800s and a photograph of a London Brick Company vehicle called the Foden DG6 which was a 6-wheeler similar to the brick vehicles requisitioned by the Ministry of Supply in the Second World War. Paperback, 8" x 8.3", colour and black and white images, 52pp.

Thomas explored why so many of the greatest thinkers were Nonconformists and the rise of the rejection of orthodox religion and the rise in literacy and role of women in spreading reading are the subjects of her book. She explores the evolution of dissenting thought and how Nonconformity shaped the transformation of England from a rural to an urban, industrialised society. The foundations for the Industrial Revolution were in place from the late Middle Ages when the early development of manufacturing processes and changes in the structure of rural communities began to provide opportunities for economic and social advancement. Successive waves of Huguenot migrants and the influence of Northern European religious ideology also played an important role in this process. The Civil Wars provided a catalyst for the dissemination of new ideas and helped shape the emergence of a new English Protestantism and divergent dissident sects. The persecution which followed strengthened the Nonconformist cause, and for the early Quakers it intensified their unity and resilience, qualities which would prove to be invaluable for business. In the years following the Restoration, Nonconformist ideas fuelled enlightened thought creating an environment for enterprise but also a desire for more radical change. Reformers seized on the plight of a working poor alienated by innovation and frustrated by false promises, the vision which was at first the spark for innovation would ignite revolution. B/w illus. 280 pages.

If you use a mobile phone, connect to a WiFi network, withdraw cash from an ATM, or watch a film on Netflix, you are using cryptography. Cryptography secures 7 billion bank cards, 55 billion daily WhatsApp messages and three quarters of the connections made on the world wide web. This go-to book on the subject explains the technology and its implications in a way that the averagely intelligent person can understand. Cryptography is essentially an application of mathematics and has indirectly given rise to popular movies such as Enigma and Skyfall. You can get by without being aware of it, but in a series of imaginary day to day scenarios the author explains that knowing a bit about how it works can help make you more secure. Around 30% of fraud in the business world concerns cybercrime, and the cybersecurity firm Norton estimates that in 2017 there were 978 million global victims. The downside of cryptography is that on the one hand it protects the ordinary user in cyberspace, but it can also be used to protect organised crime, terror cells and child pornographers. In 2017 in the UK forty hospitals found their computer systems had been disabled by attackers who wanted a ransom to return the systems to normal, raising moral questions about the way we handle crime. Cryptography is political and there are no simple answers between freedom and control. The author explains keys and algorithms, bits and bytes. An encryption algorithm takes two core ingredients - plain text and key - and mixed them up to produce a cyphertext. If the text does not fit the bytes, padding is used. Then the bytes, columns and rows are all scrambled more than once. But who exactly is threatening us out there? The author considers an imaginary child, twelve year old Chloe, who uses social media, and the potential dangers. The book concludes by looking at possible future scenarios. 308pp.

In order to succeed in lobbying, you must first and foremost be politically aware and have knowledge of the political landscape. What is your political profile? Are you aware of who and what politicians are about? Do you know which politicians you have to persuade and who else is in the political arena, friends and allies? How do you deal with political risk and what do you do about politicians making decisions that will inevitably fall on your business? The lobbying game is not the preserve for the privileged few with deep pockets, personal contacts and an encyclopaedic knowledge of politics. All that is needed is the confidence and the wherewithal to go out and make a compelling case, at the right time, to the right people. To become an influential player in the corridors of power you must know what decisions are going to be made, who will be taking them, and how to shape the debate and the decisions. This book shows you how to get on the inside track, make your presence felt, and make politics work for you. It also can be applied to your business or personal success. The author draws on 30 years? successful lobbying in European and international arenas to life the veil on this elusive art, revealing strategies he has used and strings he has pulled, from the practicalities of planning campaigns and being the most persuasive person in the room to how to deal with political risk and crises. 278pp, paperback.

An international bestseller described as 'Outstanding' by The Sunday Times. To understand error in judgement, we must understand both bias and noise. Sometimes as we will see through the book, noise is the more important problem. But in public conversations about human error and in organisations all over the world, noise is rarely recognised. Bias is the star of the show with noise usually off stage. A few examples of the alarming amount of noise in situations in which accuracy matters are how different doctors make different judgements about patients' conditions, such as in the reading of x-rays; case managers in child protection agencies accessing children at risk of abuse; professional forecasters offering highly variable predictions about sales, and likelihoods of trouble; asylum decisions and the lottery of whether an asylum seeker is admitted into a country; personnel decisions and interviews, bail decisions; forensic science or decisions to grant patents. This variability is obviously troublesome from the standpoint of equity. The book investigates the difference between noise and bias, the nature of human judgement, accuracy and error, predictive judgement and even AI, human psychology and interpersonal differences; and efforts to tackle noise in medicine, business, education, government and elsewhere. We all make bad judgements more than we think and this is a book that shows what we can do to make better ones. 452pp, paperback.

Take a minute to answer these questions - what's the average number of sexual partners? What proportion of your country are immigrants? What does it cost to raise a child? Do you think teenage girls are getting pregnant at an alarming rate or that a large percentage of the prison population are immigrants? This brilliant investigation by the Head of Ipsos Mori Social Research Institute analyses the role of social media and fact-checking in this post-truth age. In the final chapter he gives a list of ten useful things we can do to manage ourselves. Brexit and Donald Trump, Facebook, Google, climate change, educational levels, political misdirection and disengagement, wishful and wrongful thinking, filtering our worlds, he looks at worldwide worry and how we should manage our misperceptions. With useful statistics and questions and answers, graphs and pie charts, in these days when we probably no longer trust the clergy, then journalists and least of all politicians, can we trust our own education and perception? Much food for thought. 304pp in paperback.

Trade is the lifeblood of nations. It has provided vital goods and wealth to countries and merchants from the ancient Egyptians who went in search of gold and ivory to their 21st century equivalents trading high-tech electronic equipment from the Far East. In this beautiful book, more than 70 maps give a visual representation of the history of World Commerce, accompanied by text which tells the extraordinary story of the merchants, adventurers, middle-men and monarchs who bought, sold, explored and fought in search of profit and power. The maps are all works of art, and include Çatalhöyük and Neolithic trade Plan, c. 6200BC, Petra and the Frankincense route, Babylonian Map of the World, c. 600BC, the Amber road, Charlamagne and Carolingian trade, the trans Saharan gold trade, the Silk Road, Marco Polo, the rise of the maritime republics, Venetian trading empire, Bruges and the cloth trade, plagues and pandemics, and the voyages of Zheng He, Stone Map of China, 1136, Hereford Mappa Mundi, c. 1300, Buondelmonti Map of Constantinople, c. 1420, the Portuguese trading empire in Africa, circumnavigating the globe, Ottoman trade in the 16th century, Aztec trade, pirates and privateers, Newfoundland and the cod trade, the Dutch and Manhattan, the Hudson's Bay Company and the fur trade, trade in the birth of the United States, South America and the Spanish, the Dutch East India Company, Portugal's China trade, Sweden, Russia and the north European trade in the 16th century, the British in India, the slave trade, the sugar, cotton and coffee trade, the China tea trade and the Clippers, the age of steam, world cities, imperialism, the Suez and Panama canals, the Trans-Siberian railway, the Cape to Cairo railway, the wool, coal, coffee and oil trades, electronics and the internet, banking and finance to trade blocs, tourism, and threats to world trade. Plus The Waldseemüller Map, 1507, James Rennell Map of Hindoostan, 1782, Air Age Map, 1945 and Johns Hopkins Covid-19 Dashboard, 2020. Endlessly fascinating browsing. Colour full page maps, 21 x 27.5cm, 224 pages.

Covering a 3000-year period from 3100 BCE to 332, this book on a complex subject is written in a readable chronological style and looks at ancient diplomacy, travel, trade, warfare, domination and immigration. It covers military campaigns including the battle of Qadesh under Rameses II and Hatshepsut's trading mission to the mysterious land of Punt. The rich story behind Egypt's Foreign Relations includes the Nubian Kingdom of Kerma, Nile fortresses, the Sea Peoples and Persian satraps. An Egyptian priest named Manetho estimated that 30 dynasties had ruled Egypt during this time, and modern scholars have adopted Manetho's dynastic divisions largely unchanged, grouping them into longer periods such as the "Early" or "Middle" Kingdom. The book explores Egypt's foreign relations from the Predynastic period to the arrival of Alexander the Great. Egyptians saw their land as representing order, balance and justice, while the regions beyond represented disorder, and there was a further barrier between humans and gods. Peoples were roughly grouped as Egyptians, Nubians, Libyans and Asiatics. Egyptian iconography shows its rulers smiting and destroying their enemies, and a pharaoh's sandals had images of his enemies on the sole so that he was permanently represented as trampling them into the dust. The reality, though, was that Egyptian rulers also exchanged elaborate courtesies with neighbouring potentates, and in daily life foreigners in roles such as soldiers or diplomats were treated as equals. Egypt was a land of slaves, many of whom had been seized around the Mediterranean coast to work as household servants or navvies on building projects. In the political unrest at the end of the Old Kingdom, the royal court moved from Memphis to Herakleopolis, possibly driven by climate change and drought. Archaeological evidence shows that Nubians of different ethnicities continued to live in the unified territories, and that was still the case when Tuthmosis II and his wife Hatshepsut consolidated their control. His New Kingdom successor, Tuthmosis II, forged north into the Levant, marching through Gaza to confront a hostile coalition of city states at Megiddo. We know that the later Pharaoh Akhenaten received tributes from foreigners because they are pictured at Amarna, while a wrecked sea vessel of the same period provides evidence for trade with Mycenae. Amarna was also the site of diplomatic correspondence, strongly suggesting that the empire looked to Greece during its period of decline. 213 pages, many maps, photos.

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) is perhaps the foremost economic thinker of the 20th century. On economic theory, he ranks with Adam Smith and Karl Marx; and his impact on how economics was practiced, from the Great Depression to the 1970s, was unmatched. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was first published in 1936. But its ideas had been forming for decades ? as a student at Cambridge, Keynes had written to a friend of his love for 'Free Trade and free thought'. Keynes's limpid style, concise prose, and vivid descriptions have helped to keep his ideas alive - as have the novelty and clarity, at times even the ambiguity, of his macroeconomic vision. He was troubled, above all, by high unemployment rates and large disparities in wealth and income. Only by curbing both, he thought, could individualism, ?the most powerful instrument to better the future', be safeguarded. The 21st century may yet prove him right. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Keynes elegantly and acutely exposes the folly of imposing austerity on a defeated and struggling nation. 538 page paperback.

As the threats of AI loom large, we must all earn how to think alongside our silicon counterparts. Discover the unexpected advantage of the AI age. There is so much talk about the threat posed by intelligent machines that it might be tempting to surrender to our robot overlords right away, but Mubeen isn't ready to throw in the towel just yet. As far as he is concerned, we have an edge over machines. Our own superpower is a remarkable system of thought developed over the centuries. Familiar to us all, but often badly taught and misrepresented in popular discourse, this system has a name - mathematics. Mathematicians have always seized upon the latest technologies to enhance their own thinking skills. Computers may reign supreme when it comes to totting up sums and spotting patterns, but Mubeen identifies seven areas of mathematical intelligence where humans can retain a crucial advantage. In exploring these areas, he opens up a fascinating world in which we can develop our uniquely human abilities. Topics covered are estimation where tribes only count to four, where babies outsmart computers and why we underestimate pandemics. He looks at the dogness of dogs, how mathematicians paint ideas, and the blind spots of computers; when stories fool us, why machines can't be trusted, and how to tell eternal truths; why spoilsports deserve more credit, how mathematics gets reinvented, and the truths computers will never discover; and why speed is overrated and the wisdom of 'sleeping on it'. Finally he looks at an unlikely mathematical duo, how ants get their intelligence, and the quest for a super-mathematician. 339pp, graphs and illus.