If you want to go in one direction, the best route may involve going in another. This is the concept of 'obliquity': paradoxical as it sounds, many goals are more likely to be achieved when pursued indirectly. The richest men and women are not the most materialistic; the happiest people are not necessarily those who focus on happiness, and the most profitable companies are not always the most profit-oriented as the recent financial crisis showed us. Whether overcoming geographical obstacles, winning decisive battles or meeting sales targets, history shows that oblique approaches are the most successful, especially in difficult terrain. John Kay applies his provocative, universal theory to everything from international business to town planning and from football to managing forest fire.

In The Logic of Life, bestselling author Tim Harford quite simply makes sense of this world. Life often seems to defy logic. The receptionist is clearly smarter than the boss who earns fifty times her salary. Arbitrary lines starkly divide the desirable districts of the city from the dangerous ones. Voters flock to the polling booths to elect candidates who’ll rip them off to favour special interests. None of it makes logical sense — or does it? Economist and acclaimed author Tim Harford thinks it does. By weaving stories from locations as diverse as a Vegas casino to a barroom speed date, Harford aims to persuade you that people are, in fact, surprisingly logical. When a street prostitute agrees to unprotected sex, or a teenage criminal embarks on a burglary — perhaps especially when a racist employer disregards a black job applicant — we would seem to be a million miles from rational behaviour. Harford shows that, discomfitingly, we are not. It turns out that the unlikeliest of people are complying with the logic of economics and responding to future costs and benefits, often without realizing it; and socially tragic outcomes can have their roots in individually rational decisions. Brilliantly reasoned, always entertaining and often provocative, The Logic of Life is a book to help you understand yourself and the world around you.

This book describes how changes in the Earth's orientation are observed and computed in terms of tidal forcing and models of the Earth's interior.

Shadows on the Grass, Winter's Tales, Last Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny, and Ehrengard, Brantly explores the clues, details, and subplots in texts that critics often describe as puzzles and labyrinths. Brantly reveals the thought and care that Dinesen devoted to the construction of her stories, her expansive knowledge of world literature, and the great pleasure awaiting readers as they unravel the mysteries embedded in her texts."--BOOK JACKET.

Censorship profoundly affected early modern writing. Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England offers a detailed picture of early modern censorship and investigates the pressures that censorship exerted on seventeenth-century authors, printers, and publishers. In the 1600s, Britain witnessed a civil war, the judicial execution of a king, the restoration of his son, and an unremitting struggle among crown, parliament, and people for sovereignty and the right to define “liberty and property.” This battle, sometimes subtle, sometimes bloody, entailed a struggle for the control of language and representation. Robertson offers a richly detailed study of this “censorship contest” and of the craft that writers employed to outflank the licensers. He argues that for most parties, victory, not diplomacy or consensus, was the ultimate goal. This book differs from most recent works in analyzing both the mechanics of early modern censorship and the poetics that the licensing system produced—the forms and pressures of self-censorship. Among the issues that Robertson addresses in this book are the workings of the licensing machinery, the designs of art and obliquity under a regime of censorship, and the involutions of authorship attendant on anonymity.

The finance sector of Western economies is too large and attracts too many of the smartest college graduates. Financialization over the past three decades has created a structure that lacks resilience and supports absurd volumes of trading. The finance sector devotes too little attention to the search for new investment opportunities and the stewardship of existing ones, and far too much to secondary-market dealing in existing assets. Regulation has contributed more to the problems than the solutions. Why? What is finance for? John Kay, with wide practical and academic experience in the world of finance, understands the operation of the financial sector better than most. He believes in good banks and effective asset managers, but good banks and effective asset managers are not what he sees. In a dazzling and revelatory tour of the financial world as it has emerged from the wreckage of the 2008 crisis, Kay does not flinch in his criticism: we do need some of the things that Citigroup and Goldman Sachs do, but we do not need Citigroup and Goldman to do them. And many of the things done by Citigroup and Goldman do not need to be done at all. The finance sector needs to be reminded of its primary purpose: to manage other people's money for the benefit of businesses and households. It is an aberration when the some of the finest mathematical and scientific minds are tasked with devising algorithms for the sole purpose of exploiting the weakness of other algorithms for computerized trading in securities. To travel further down that road leads to ruin. A Financial Times Book of the Year, 2015 An Economist Best Book of the Year, 2015 A Bloomberg Best Book of the Year, 2015