There are over 2 million domestic gardens (or 359,000 acres) in this country. Just imagine the difference it could make if 2 million gardens became biodiversity friendly! But we wouldn’t just be opening our gardens to nature for altruistic reasons. Gardening for Biodiversity also has advantages for human health and wellbeing. Research has shown that the more urbanised humans have become, the …
People may be visually oriented, but unconsciously we turn to other senses to simplify and de-stress our complicated existence. Fragrance is mysterious, ethereal and elusive. Yet it is rooted solidly in the physical world and can therefore be examined scientifically. The chemistry behind fragrance is complex and fascinating. How do you build fragrance molecules to withstand heat and water and t…
Voices in Psychosis: Interdisciplinary Perspectives deepens and extends the understanding of hearing voices in psychosis in a striking way. For the first time, this collection brings multiple disciplinary, clinical and experiential perspectives to bear on an original and extraordinarily rich body of testimony: transcripts of forty in-depth phenomenological interviews conducted with people who h…
The literature on diversity in higher education has created a substantialfoundation for many of the contributions in this volume, but it also hassome important limitations. First, too often the existing literature framesstudent diversity as a challenge to be overcome for faculty teaching, ratherthan an opportunity to advance student learning. Second, much of theliterature drawn from the North A…
The historian works with documents. Documents are the traces which have been left by the thoughts and actions of men of former times. Of these thoughts and actions, however, very few leave any visible traces, and these traces, when there are any, are seldom durable; an accident is enough to efface them. Now every thought and every action that has left no visible traces, or none but what have si…
In 1850, an epidemic swept America—but instead of leaving victims sick with fever or flu, this epidemic involved a rabid craze for the music of Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. American showman P. T. Barnum (who would later go on to found the circus now known as Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey), a shrewd marketer and self-made millionaire, is credited with spreading “Lindomania” through a s…
In the mid-1950s I had been puzzled that no comprehensive biographical dictionary was available in paperback and I determined to fill the gap. I wrote to Penguin Books in London/ Harmondsworth and received a thoughtful and encouraging letter from A. S. B. Glover, a classical scholar and editor. The two generally available major biographical dictionaries, Chambers’s and Webster’s, both had s…
Sub-Saharan Africa has the most rapidly growing population of any region of the world. The human population is about 5M0 million and it is expected to reach about 1300 million by the year 2025. In 1990 354 million people, 71% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa, lived in rural areas and by the year 2025 this figure will have increased by more than 68% to about 5W0 million. Cities in sub-Sah…
Once upon a time in midwinter, when the snowflakes were falling like feathers from heaven, a queen sat sewing at her window, which had a frame of black ebony wood. As she sewed she looked up at the snow and pricked her finger with her needle. Three drops of blood fell into the snow. The red on the white looked so beautiful that she thought to herself, “If only I had a child as white as snow, …
Once upon a time there was a gentleman who married, for his second wife, the proudest and most haughty woman that ever was seen. She had two daughters of her own, who were, indeed, exactly like her in all things. The gentleman had also a young daughter, of rare goodness and sweetness of temper, which she took from her mother, who was the best creature in the world. The wedding was scarcely over…