Steve Roud was Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the joint author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song, and the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. His publications include London Lore (2008) and The Lore of the Playground (2010). He also compiles the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally acclaimed computer databases of traditional folk and popular song. He lives in Sussex.

Steve Roud

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Cade Metz

'This colourful page-turner puts artificial intelligence into a human perspective . . . Metz explains this transformative technology and makes the quest thrilling.' Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs 
____________________________________________________ 
 
This is the inside story of a small group of mavericks, eccentrics and geniuses who turned Artificial Intelligence from a fringe enthusiasm into a transformative technology. It's the story of how that technology became big business, creating vast fortunes and sparking intense rivalries. And it's the story of breakneck advances that will shape our lives for many decades to come - both for good and for ill. 
________________________________________________ 
 
'One day soon, when computers are safely driving our roads and speaking to us in complete sentences, we'll look back at Cade Metz's elegant, sweeping Genius Makers as their birth story - the Genesis for an age of sentient machines.' Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store and The Upstarts 
 
'A ringside seat at what may turn out to be the pivotal episode in human history . . . easy and fun to read . . . undeniably charming.' Forbes

Genius Makers

The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and the World

Stephanie Shirley

Richard Askwith

In 1962, Stephanie "Steve" Shirley founded an IT software company when the concept of software barely existed. The company created huge opportunities for women in tech, allowing them to work on projects like the programming of the black box flight recorder from the comfort of their own home. The business thrived and Shirley gradually transferred ownership of the company to those who worked for it, creating 70 millionaires in the process. 
 
Let it Go explores Shirley's trail blazing career as an entrepreneur but it also charts her incredible personal story - her dramatic arrival in England as an unaccompanied Kindertransport refugee from Germany and the tragic death of her son, Giles, who suffered severely from Autism. Today, Dame Stephanie Shirley is one of Britain's leading philanthropists, devoting most of her time, energy and money to supporting and creating charities in the areas of Autism and STEM. This is an engrossing story of an extraordinary life, filled with lessons in what it means to be human.

Let It Go

My Extraordinary Story - From Refugee to Entrepreneur to Philanthropist

Pedro Domingos

'Pedro Domingos demystifies machine learning and shows how wondrous and exciting the future will be' Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs 
 
Society is changing, one learning algorithm at a time, from search engines to online dating, personalized medicine to predicting the stock market. But learning algorithms are not just about Big Data - these algorithms take raw data and make it useful by creating more algorithms. This is something new under the sun: a technology that builds itself. In The Master Algorithm, Pedro Domingos reveals how machine learning is remaking business, politics, science and war. And he takes us on an awe-inspiring quest to find 'The Master Algorithm' - a universal learner capable of deriving all knowledge from data.

The Master Algorithm

How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

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

Peter Scott-Morgan

Peter, a brilliant scientist, is told that he will lose everything he loves. 
 
His husband. His family. His friends. His ability to travel the world. All will be gone. 
 
But Peter will not give up. He vows that this will not be the end and instead seeks a completely new beginning . . . 
 
Peter has Motor Neurone Disease, a condition universally considered by doctors to be terminal. It will destroy his nerve cells and he is told that within an average of two years, it will take his life too. 
 
But, face-to-face with death, he decides there is another way. Using his background in science and technology, he navigates a new path, one that will enable him not just to survive, but to thrive. 
 
This is the astonishing true story behind the primetime Channel 4 documentary, about Dr. Peter Scott-Morgan who will become the first person to combine his very humanity with artificial intelligence and robotics to become a full Cyborg. His discovery means that his terminal diagnosis is negotiable, something that will rewrite the future. And change the world. 
 
By embracing love, life and hope rather than fear, tragedy and despair he will become Peter 2.0.

Peter 2.0

The Human Cyborg

Amy Lea

Tara Chen has had her heart broken ten times, by ten different men. Nevertheless, she is still determined to find her perfect match. The only problem? Tara is a romance novel obsessive, and her standards are sky high. 
 
Modern dating apps have killed the meet-cute, so Tara decides to revisit her exes - all ten of them - in the hope of finding her very own trope-worthy second-chance romance. And every heroine needs a sidekick, so she enlists her new flatmate, firefighter Trevor. 
 
Trevor Metcalfe is the first to rush into a burning building but the last to rush into a relationship. Love just isn't his thing. But, the more time they spend together, the more Trevor appreciates Tara's authentic, dramatic self. 
 
Can they break the habits of a lifetime and give their spark a chance?

Exes and O's

Bob Burg

John David Mann

The Go-Giver tells the story of an ambitious young man named Joe who yearns for success. Joe is a true go-getter, though sometimes he feels as if the harder and faster he works, the further away his goals seem to be. 
 
One day, desparate to land a key sale at the end of a bad quarter, he seeks advice from the enigmatic Pindar, a legendary consultant referred to by many devotees sinply as the Chairman. Over the next week, Pindar introduces Joe to a series of successful 'go-givers' who teach him how to open himself up to the power of giving.

The Go-Giver

A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea

Lilly Singh

From actress, comedian and YouTube sensation Lilly Singh (a.k.a Superwoman) comes the definitive guide to being a BAWSE - a person who exudes confidence, reaches goals, gets hurt efficiently, and smiles genuinely because they've fought through it all and made it out the other side. 
Told in her hilarious, bold voice that's inspired over 9 million fans, and using stories from her own life to illustrate her message, Lilly proves that there are no short-cuts to success. 
 
WARNING: This book does not include hopeful thoughts, lucky charms, and cute quotes. That's because success, happiness and everything else you want in life needs to be fought for - not wished for. In Lilly's world, there are no escalators. Only stairs.

How to Be a Bawse

A Guide to Conquering Life

George Dyson

'Full of historical anecdotes . . . but this is much more than a history book. [George Dyson] weaves his threads together for a purpose. Using voices of the past and present, he describes a fresh and sometimes startling viewpoint of the emerging relationship between nature and machines. From vignettes about Olaf Stapledon, George Boole, John von Neumann, and Samuel Butler, a larger story develops in which the twin processes of intelligence and evolution are inseparably intertwined' Danny Hillis, Wired

Darwin Among the Machines

Scott Shapiro

Fancy Bear was hungry. Looking for embarrassing information about Hillary Clinton, the elite hacking unit within Russian military intelligence broke into the Democratic National Committee network, grabbed what it could, and may have contributed to the election of Donald Trump. 
 
Robert Morris was curious. Experimenting one night, the graduate student from Cornell University released "the Great Worm" and became the first person to crash the internet. 
 
Dark Avenger was in love. To impress his crush, the Bulgarian hacker invented the first mutating computer virus-engine and nearly destroyed the anti-virus industry. 
 
Why is the internet so insecure? How do hackers exploit its vulnerabilities? Fancy Bear Goes Phishing tells the stories of five great hacks, their origins, motivations and consequences. As well as Fancy Bear, Robert Morris and Dark Avenger, we meet Cameron Lacroix, a sixteen-year-old from South Boston, who hacked Paris Hilton's cell phone because he wanted to be famous and Paras Jha, a Rutgers undergraduate, who built a giant botnet designed to get him out of his calculus exam and disrupt the online game Minecraft, but which almost destroyed the internet in the process. Scott Shapiro's five stories demonstrate that computer hacking is not just a tale of technology, but of human beings. 
 
Yet as Shapiro shows, hackers do not just abuse computer code - they exploit the philosophical principles of computation: the very features that make computers possible also make hacking possible. He explains how our information society works, the ways our data is stored and manipulated, and why it is so subject to exploitation. Both intellectual romp and dramatic true-crime narrative, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing exposes the secrets of the digital age.

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing

The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks

Naomi Klein

What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired a double? Someone almost like you, and yet not you at all? 
 
When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn't. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger. Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity - all we have to meet the world - so unstable? 
 
To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world: one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting 'the children'). In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into polished virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something far more sinister. 
 
This is a book for our age and for all of us; a deadly serious dark comedy which invites us to view our reflections in the looking glass. It's for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters.

Doppelganger

A Trip Into the Mirror World

Stephen Sexton

Memories of going 'through the looking-glass' into the land of video games are some of the most evocative of all childhood. In these poems we are rushed back to years spent playing Super Mario World, a place where people are small and flowers are large, a place of treacherous labyrinths and heart-stopping leaps of faith, where the materiality, wonder and peril of that world bleeds into our own as the young player bravely travels with his mother on the journey of her life-ending illness. 
 
 Drawing on traditions of elegy and pastoral, this is a daring, moving and lyrically beautiful exploration of memory, grief and the unreal.

If All the World and Love Were Young

Webb Keane

We have always lived with ethically significant others, whether they are the pets we keep, the gods we believe in or the machines we are endowing with life. How should we treat them as our world changes? 
 
In Animals, Robots, Gods, acclaimed anthropologist Webb Keane provides a new vision of ethics, defined less by our minds, religion or society, and more by our interactions with those around us. Drawing on ground-breaking research by fieldworkers around the world, he explores the underpinnings of our moral universe. Along the way we investigate the ethical dilemmas of South Asian animal rights activists, Balinese cockfighters, Japanese robot fanciers - even macho cowboys. We meet a hunter in the Yukon who explains his prey generously gives itself up to him; a cancer sufferer in Thailand who sees his tumour as a reincarnated ox; a computer that gets you to confess your anxieties as if you were on the psychiatrist's couch. 
 
With charm, wit and insight, Keane offers us a better understanding of our doubts and certainties, showing how centuries of conversations between us and non-humans inform our conceptions of morality, and will continue to guide us in the age of AI and beyond.

Animals, Robots, Gods

Adventures in the Moral Imagination

Marc Cameron

When brilliant and eccentric scientist Liu Wangshu disappears from his apartment in China, the Ministry of State Security is furious, and certain they know what's happened: a defection to the Americans. 
 
 President Jack Ryan knows how valuable an asset Liu would be - the inventor is responsible for much of China's recent technological progress, with his latest project rumoured to be the biggest yet. The problem is that none of Ryan's team have any idea where Liu is. 
 
 And what's worse, Ryan discovers that China is already watching them closely: a mole, code-named SURVEYOR, has managed to infiltrate US intelligence, with a terrifying level of access. 
 
 The new Cold War is about to get very hot indeed . . .

Tom Clancy's Shadow of the Dragon

Jenny Blake

Borrowing from the Silicon Valley mindset of building lean, agile companies that thrive under conditions of risk and uncertainty, Jenny Blake shows you how to apply the same attitude to your career. 
 
In Pivot, Blake removes the feelings of confusion and panic that often come with trying something new. Instead, she shows you how to build upon existing assets - your strengths, interests and networks - to launch a new career filled with meaning, adventure, learning and growth.

Pivot

The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

Andrew Blum

The Internet. Home to the most important and intimate aspects of our lives. Our careers, our relationships, our selves, all of them are out there - online. So ... where is that exactly? And who's in charge again? And what if it breaks? 
 
In Tubes Andrew Blum takes us on a gripping backstage tour of the real but hidden world of the Internet, introducing us to the remarkable clan of insiders and eccentrics who own, design and run it everyday. He uncovers the secret data warehouses where our online selves are stored, peels back the wires that transport us across the globe, reveals its mammoth hubs and surprising alley-ways, explaining what the Internet actually is, where it is, how it got there - and, yes, what happens when it breaks.

Tubes

Behind the Scenes at the Internet

Elizabeth Emens

This book will give you many hours of your life back. 
 
Scheduling doctor's appointments. Planning a party. Buying a present. Filling out paperwork. These are the kind of secretarial and managerial tasks necessary to run a life and a household. Elizabeth Emens was a working mother with two young children, swamped like so many of us, when she realised that 'life admin' was consuming her. Desperate to survive and to help others along the way, she gathered favourite tips and tricks, admin confessions, and the secrets of admin-happy households. 
 
Drawing on her research and writing in a wholly original manner, she shows how admin affects our lives; how we might reduce, redistribute and even prevent it; what 'admin personalities' we might have; and how to deal with it in relationships. The Art of Life Admin teaches us all how to do less of it, and to do it better.

The Art of Life Admin

How To Do Less, Do It Better, and Live More

John Gribbin

The revolution is here. In breakthrough after breakthrough, pioneering physicists are unlocking a new quantum universe which provides a better representation of reality than our everyday experiences and common sense ever could. The birth of quantum computers - which, like Schrödinger's famous dead-and-alive cat, rely on entities like electrons existing in a mixture of states - is starting to turn the computing world on its head. 
 
In his fascinating study of this cutting-edge technology, John Gribbin updates his previous views on the nature of quantum reality, arguing for a universe of many parallel worlds where 'everything is real'. Looking back to Alan Turing's work on the Enigma machine and the first electronic computer, Gribbin explains how quantum theory developed to make quantum computers work in practice as well as in principle. He takes us beyond the arena of theoretical physics to explore their practical applications - from machines which learn through 'intuition' and trial and error to unhackable laptops and smartphones. And he investigates the potential for this extraordinary science to allow communication faster than light and even teleportation, as we step into a world of infinite possibility.

Quantum Computing from Colossus to Qubits

The History, Theory, and Application of a Revolutionary Science

Morten Storm

Paul Cruickshank

Tim Lister

He was the Western convert who would plunge deep inside al-Qaeda. He named his first son Osama after 9/11 and became a Jihadist. But then - after a sudden loss of faith - Morten Storm made a life-changing decision. He became a double agent and joined the CIA, MI6 and MI5. 
 
Filled with hair-raising close calls and deception, Storm's story builds to the climactic finale when he must betray his friend and mentor al-Awlaki - al-Qaeda's biggest threat to the West. Storm is trusted to find al-Awlaki a wife from Europe. She becomes the bait for a possible American drone strike.

Agent Storm

A Spy Inside al-Qaeda

My Life Inside al-Qaeda

Richard Browning

**As seen on Top Gear** 
 
'Richard Browning is a real-life Tony Stark.' - Wired 
 
--------------- 
 
For fans of Adrian Newey, Guy Martin and Chris Hadfield, in Taking on Gravity inventor Richard Browning tells the inspiring story behind his iconic jet suit, and shares his creative principles for generating true innovation. 
 
From Icarus to Iron Man, the dream of human flight has always inspired and challenged us. Now, with his pioneering jet suit, Richard Browning has redefined what is possible. 
 
Richard Browning's story is one of groundbreaking innovation. Building an aviation business from his garage, he has invented a whole new form of personal flight - a fantasy previously reserved for the pages of science fiction. His iconic jet suit has captured the imaginations of millions around the world, triggered ongoing developments in technology and engineering, and inspired a new generation of creative minds to pursue their dreams. 
 
In Taking on Gravity, Browning reveals the creative principles of his multimillion-pound company, Gravity Industries, and shows us how grass-roots innovation can disrupt established industries in exciting and unexpected ways. On this journey into the sky we'll experience what it's like to take flight, to test the limits of the human body, and to convert moonshot ideas into tangible results. 
 
The Gravity story is an inspiring example of human creativity and our ceaseless desire to push the boundaries of what is possible. Where we go next is up to you. 
 
READERS LOVE THE 'TAKING ON GRAVITY' STORY 
 
***** 'Tony Stark Lite' 
***** 'Must read for anyone looking for inspiration to continue pursuing their dream' 
***** 'Taking on Gravity by Richard Browning is equal parts inspiring, inquisitive, soulful and ultimately a fantastic read that I will return to again.'

Taking on Gravity

A Guide to Inventing the Impossible from the Man Who Learned to Fly

Andrew Chen

'A true Silicon Valley insider' Wired 
 
Why do some products take off? And what can we learn from them? 
 
The hardest part of launching a product is getting started. When you have just an idea and a handful of customers, growth can feel impossible. This is the cold start problem. 
 
Now, one of Silicon Valley's most esteemed investors uncovers how any product can surmount the cold start problem - by harnessing the hidden power of network effects. Drawing on interviews with the founders of Uber, LinkedIn, Airbnb and Zoom, Andrew Chen reveals how any start-up can launch, scale and thrive.

The Cold Start Problem

How to Start and Scale Network Effects

Using Network Effects to Scale Your Product

Rie Qudan

Welcome to the Japan of tomorrow. Here, the practice of a radical sympathy toward criminals has become the norm – and a grand skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo is planned to house wrongdoers in compassionate comfort. Acclaimed architect Sara Machina has been tasked with designing the city's new centrepiece, but is riven by doubt. As she casts her mind to the terrible crime she experienced as a young girl, she wonders if she might think against the grain of her time: could it be that criminals deserve the punishment and disdain of the past? In search of solace, in need of creative inspiration, Sara turns to the knowing words of an AI chatbot… 
 
Awarded Japan's highest literary prize, Sympathy Tower Tokyo is an extraordinary novel from one of the most exciting new voices in world literature. Partly inspired by conversations with an artificial intelligence, it offers an extraordinary defence of the power of language written by humans, a touching exploration of the imaginative impulse, and an often hilarious send up of our modern world's unrelenting conformity.

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