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Scott Belsky

Silicon Valley is full of start-up success stories; every day stories emerge of a new company with the potential for a billion-dollar valuation and plans for global domination. 
 
But what can we really learn from these stories? How many of these start-ups are genuinely successful in the long term? When nine out of ten start-ups end in spectacular burnout, how can we ensure our own success story? 
 
While most books and press focus on the more sensational moments of creation and conclusion, The Messy Middle argues that the real key to success is how you navigate the ups-and-downs after initial investment is secured. It will give you all the insights you need to build and optimize your team, improve your product and develop your own capacity to lead. Building on seven years' of meticulous research with entrepreneurs, small agencies, start-ups and billion-dollar companies, Scott Belsky offers indispensable lessons on how to endure and thrive in the long term.

The Messy Middle

Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture

Tom Templeton

We ask so much of our doctors. 
 To heal. To trust. To care. To listen. 
 To tell a man he'll die tomorrow. To help a man who doesn't want to live. 
 To look into a parent's panicked eyes as their daughter fights for breath. 
 To watch a 103-year-old woman slip away. 
 
 Doctors know our deepest secrets, our private worries and our most vulnerable moments. In this breathtaking memoir of patients he has helped, lost, and those who have changed him forever, Dr Tom Templeton weaves a profound and moving portrait of humanity, asking us to treat all with compassion.

34 Patients

The profound and uplifting memoir about the patients who changed one doctor’s life

Evelyn Prentis

'It must be stressed from the start that I was not a born nurse. Not every girl is. Not every nurse is either, however wholeheartedly she may throw herself into the project once she gets going. Born nurses can be easily recognised. They have a little something the others haven't got which never seems to desert them however desperate the circumstances may become' 
 
Desperate circumstances were something Evelyn Prentis had to get very used to when she began her life as a nurse. It was in 1934 that Evelyn left home for the first time to enrol as a trainee at a busy Nottingham hospital in the hope of £25 a year. 
 
A Nurse in Time is her affectionate and funny account of those days of dedication and hardship, when never-ending nightshifts, strict Sisters and permanent hunger ruled life, and joy was to be found in a late-night pass and a packet of Woodbines.

A Nurse in Time

Katalin Karikó

Katalin Karikó began life as a butcher’s daughter in communist Hungary. Raised in a one-room home of clay and straw with no running water, she saw potential everywhere: in the promise of a seed, in the alchemy of soap, in the scarlet of a carcass. 
 
Breaking Through is the extraordinary story of her courageous determination – first to become a scientist, and then to unlock an elusive molecule she believed could revolutionise medicine. Others disagreed, and for decades she endured demotions, discrimination and even threats of deportation. Yet Karikó persevered, ultimately making a world-shifting discovery: the mRNA vaccine technology that saved millions of lives and will transform healthcare forever.

Breaking Through

A Memoir

My Life In Science

Howard Dully

Charles Fleming

Howard Dully was 12 years old when he was given a lobotomy. He was 56 years old when he found out why. The four decades in between tell a story of profound love and compassion. 
 
In 1960 Howard's father and stepmother delivered him into the hands of the man who had invented the 'ice pick' lobotomy. Expelled from the mainstream medical community, his once-popular procedure now a grisly medical relic, Dr Walter Freeman was eager to turn this temperamental 12-year-old into a submissive boy - especially after hearing the terrible lies his stepmother told about him. Howard, told he was going into the hospital for tests, was instead given electro-shock treatments and a transorbital lobotomy. It took him 40 years to recover. 
 
Howard Dully's escape from that dark place is a voyage of enormous hope and universal appeal.

Messing with My Head

The shocking true story of my lobotomy

Sebastian Mallaby

Even in a tech world crowded with visionary leaders, Demis Hassabis is recognized as a special case. Born to working class, immigrant parents in North London, a chess prodigy by five and wizard coder in his teens, he turned down a seven-figure job offer from a video-game studio to study science at Cambridge. Long before the current obsession with AI, he founded the path-breaking company DeepMind in order to pursue a single, audacious goal: the dream of artificial superintelligence, which would solve humanity’s hardest problems, change life and work as we know it, and perhaps even unlock the deepest mysteries of the Universe. For his scientific achievements, he won a Nobel Prize in 2024, and his company, now Google DeepMind, is considered the tech giant’s engine room. 
 
For the past three years, Sebastian Mallaby has had unprecedented access to Hassabis and DeepMind, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews with him and his inner circle as well as detractors and rivals at other companies. The result is a revelation-packed portrait of a singular mind and a historic reckoning with the AI revolution, a shift potentially more significant than any since the dawn of complex thought 70,000 years ago. 
 
As Mallaby chronicles, DeepMind is locked in an arms race with Silicon Valley competitors to build artificial general intelligence, and thereby become the keeper of humanity’s future. Yet this is not a Silicon Valley story. Hassabis has remained in Britain, and unlike his rivals, his aims are not wealth and power but scientific enlightenment. Like them, however, he is haunted by the memory of Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the atom bomb. He aims to control the technology, but the technology may ultimately control him – and humanity writ large.

The Infinity Machine

Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence

Roderick Bailey

A remarkable true story about saving life in wartime, not taking it 
 
 'A story destined to be told. A fascinating history of blood for the front line. Humbling, awe inspiring and life affirming.' Sue Black, author of All That Remains 
 
The Lifesavers were a little-known band of men and women at the forefront of groundbreaking battlefield care in the Second World War. 
 
As part of a new and pioneering service, unconventional and iconoclastic, they pushed and pulled blood from hundreds of thousands of donors into the veins of battle casualties all over the world. Deploying expert teams – officially the smallest units in the British Army – who risked their own lives to reach the wounded and sick, they transformed survival rates with an impact comparable to that of penicillin. 
 
Among them were pre-war GPs, conscientious objectors and a communist doctor who had transfused his first casualty in the Spanish Civil War. Prominent was Gladwin Buttle, a larger-than-life dynamo, who, in North Africa, defied shortages by sending blood into the desert in cleaned-out whisky bottles and sterilizing kit with a broken-down steamroller. Directing was Lionel Whitby – ‘the greatest vampire the world has known’ he was called in 1945 – whose own life was saved in 1918 by blood transfused on the Somme. 
 
Their skills and innovations saw action in some of the most important battles in recent history, forging lifelines that allies sought to replicate but enemies – to their cost – did not. Some continue to inspire life-saving methods of emergency care today. 
 
Bestselling historian Roderick Bailey follows their trailblazing work from the start of the conflict to its end, from Dunkirk and El Alamein to Normandy and the Burmese jungle. Unearthed from rigorous research among diaries, letters and other first-hand accounts, The Lifesavers – a gripping narrative of the Second World War presented from an entirely new angle – tells the full tale for the first time.

The Lifesavers

The Trailblazers of the Second World War Who Took Blood into Battle

Tim Higgins

Inside the outrageous, come-from-behind story of Elon Musk and Tesla's bid to build the world's greatest car and the race to drive the future. 
 
 Elon Musk is among the most controversial titans of Silicon Valley. To some he's a genius and a visionary and to others he's a mercurial huckster. Billions of dollars have been gained and lost on his tweets and his personal exploits are the stuff of tabloids. But for all his outrageous talk of mind-uploading and space travel, his most audacious vision is the one closest to the ground: the electric car. 
 
 When Tesla was founded in the 2000s, electric cars were novelties, trotted out and thrown on the scrap heap by carmakers for more than a century. But where most onlookers saw only failure, a small band of Silicon Valley engineers and entrepreneurs saw potential and they pitted themselves against the biggest, fiercest business rivals in the world, setting out to make a car that was quicker, sexier, smoother, cleaner than the competition. 
 
 Tesla would undergo a truly hellish fifteen years, beset by rivals, pressured by investors, hobbled by whistleblowers, buoyed by its loyal supporters. Musk himself would often prove Tesla's worst enemy--his antics repeatedly taking the company he had funded himself to the brink of collapse. Was he an underdog, an antihero, a conman, or some combination of the three? 
 
 Wall Street Journal tech and auto reporter Tim Higgins had a front-row seat for the drama: the pileups, wrestling for control, meltdowns, and the unlikeliest outcome of all, success. A story of power, recklessness, struggle, and triumph, Power Play is an exhilarating look at how a team of eccentrics and innovators beat the odds... and changed the future.

Power Play

Elon Musk, Tesla, and the Bet of the Century

George Dyson

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 
 
How did we end up in a world where humans coexist with technologies we can no longer fully control or understand? 
 
George Dyson plots an unexpected course through the past 300 years to reveal the hidden connections that underpin our digital age, ending with a premonition of what lies ahead. 
 
From an eighteenth-century Russian voyage across the North Pacific, to the mirror signals that heralded the age of digital telecommunications and the invention of the vacuum tube, Analogia interweaves historical adventure with scientific insight in a deeply personal story that frames the pursuit - and cost - of the digital revolution in a captivating new light.

Analogia

The Entangled Destinies of Nature, Human Beings and Machines

David Attenborough

David Attenborough is one of the most influential and admired figures in English television. When 26, he applied for a job in the BBC – which then meant radio – and was promptly turned down. But someone saw his rejected application and asked, would he like to try television? He would, and sixty years later, he is still at it. Elegantly told, often very funny, here is his story. 
 
At home there is his rise to controlling BBC2, introducing colour television to Britain, encounters with Montgomery, Anthony Eden, singers, athletes, explorers, the Queen, Benjamin Britten. Abroad there are people just as remarkable, journeys up tropical rivers, to the interior of New Guinea or the Australian outback, dragons, birds of paradise, flying snakes and walls of cockroaches. 
 
Now updated to cover his work since 2009, Life on Air is a remarkable account of David Attenborough’s passion for the natural world and his lifelong quest to understand it. .

Life on Air

Clare English

Clare English meets the entrepreneurs, mavericks, trend-setters and seminal thinkers who have forged a path to the top 
 
Broadcaster and current affairs specialist Clare English talks to 12 extraordinary trailblazers. Here are the inspiring stories of politicians and inventors, scientists and surgeons, models, parents, creatives and founders. All, in their own field and in their own way, have broken new ground and changed the world. 
 
David Blunkett tells how he rose to high political office despite being blind from birth; Kim Cotton discusses the highs and lows of becoming the UK's first surrogate mother; and Ian Ritchie talks about pioneering the first web browser - and reveals the missed opportunity that could have made him millions. From EastEnders actor Michael Cashman, who made history with UK TV's first gay kiss to Professor Sir Alan Cuschieri on spearheading keyhole surgery and David Gow on coming up with the idea of the world's first bionic hand, each has a compelling tale to share. 
 
Also included are three episodes from another BBC Radio Scotland series, Women on Top, in which Clare English chats to successful women about the sacrifices they had to make to reach the top, and whether they really have it all. We hear from Nicola Sturgeon about her life in Scottish politics; Marie Claire editor Marie O'Riordan on the glamour of the fashion industry; and Krissi Murison on becoming NME magazine's first female editor, and whether her gender makes any difference on the job. 
 
Presented by Clare English 
 
Pioneers 
Produced by Philip Sime 
With: David Blunkett, Sir Alec Jeffreys, Kim Cotton, Ian Ritchie, Michael Cashman, James Goodfellow, Michael Apted, Shannon Murray, Professor Sir Alfred Cuschieri, Roy Day and Mike Tunstall of The Samaritans, David Gow 
 
First broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland: 23 December 2010-3 February 2011 (Series 1), 25 August-29 September 2011 (Series 2) 
 
Women on Top 
With Nicola Sturgeon, Marie O'Riordan and Krissi Murison 
First broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland: 29 January 2009, 15 January 2009 and 17 June 2010 
 
©2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P)2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd.

Pioneers

Lessons from 12 world-leading innovators

Roger Osborne

Detective story, social history, human drama, The Deprat Affair recreates the hothouse atmosphere of colonial Indochina in the early twentieth century. Among its cliques, its bitter rivalries, its nepotism and favours, how are we to disentangle the scientific, the moral and the legal 'truths' of the affair?   Most of all, the story centres on one compelling individual - Jacques Deprat. En route to a golden future as one of France's greatest geologists, he is suddenly accused of fraud and plunged into a desperate fight to save his reputation. Convicted of placing European fossils among samples collected in Indochina, he is dismissed from his job, and expelled from the Société Géologique de France. Thrown out of the science to which he has given everything, he re-invents himself, changes his name, and begins not one, but two fascinating new lives - each as extraordinary and colourful as the one he left behind. And even in the manner of his premature death, Deprat proved his ability to shake the world.   Eighty years on from his conviction, the truth of the Deprat affair is still in doubt - and is still passionately debated among French scientists. But innocent or guilty, Jacques Deprat is an astonishing figure, whose capacity to overcome the world's disgrace and the dissolution of his dreams makes an amazing and captivating story.

The Deprat Affair

Peter Raby

In 1858, aged thirty-five, weak with malaria, isolated in the remote Spice Islands, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to Charles Darwin: he had, he said excitedly, worked out a theory of natural selection. Darwin was aghast - his work of decades was about to be scooped. Within a fortnight, his outline and Wallace's paper were presented jointly in London. A year later, with Wallace still at the opposite side of the world, On the Origin of Species was published. Wallace had none of Darwin's advantages or connections. Born in Usk, Gwent, in 1823, he left school at fourteen and in his mid-twenties spent four years in the Amazon collecting for museums and wealthy patrons, only to lose all his finds in a shipboard fire in mid-Atlantic. He vowed never to travel again. Yet two years later he was off to the East Indies, beginning an eight-year trek over thousands of miles; here he discovered countless unknown species and identified for the first time the point of divide between Asian and Australian fauna, 'Wallace's Line'. With vigour and sensitivity, Peter Raby reveals Wallace as a courageous and unconventional explorer. After his return, he plunged into a variety of controversies, staying vital and alert until his death at the age of 90, in 1913. Gentle, self-effacing, and remarkably free from the racism that blighted so many of his contemporaries, Wallace is one of the neglected giants of the history of science and ideas. This stirring biography - the first for many years - puts him at centre stage, where he belongs.

Alfred Russel Wallace

Fredrik Sjöberg

Stories just begin. We rarely know where and almost never why. It doesn't matter. Nothing is certain any longer. I just want to shut my eyes, point at random and say, as a sort of experiment, that once, when I was sixteen years old, I spent a whole night singing romantic songs in the top of a pine tree. That's where it may have started. 
 
In this follow-up to The Fly Trap, Sjöberg continues to explore the pleasures and trials of those who spend their time tracing the smallest details of the natural world. In these two tales, he calls on his childhood memories and experience as a hoverfly collector, and follows the trail of long forgotten entomologists before him who left their native Sweden for the United States. From Stockholm to the Grand Canyon, Sjöberg contemplates the richness of life and the strange paths it leads us on.

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