The making of the Oxford English Dictionary was a monumental 50 year task requiring thousands of volunteers. One of the keenest volunteers was a W C Minor who astonished everyone by refusing to come to Oxford to receive his congratulations. In the end, James Murray, the OED's editor, went to Crowthorne in Berkshire to meet him.

Galileo is seen as one of the greatest scientists ever. Little is known of his illegitimate daughter, Virginia. As a nun, she wrote 120 letters to her father from 1623 to her death from exposure and malnutrition ten years later. This text investigates the father-daughter relationship.

In 1508, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. For the next four years, he and a team of assistants laboured over the vast ceiling. This book tells the story of those four years and paints a picture of day-to-day life on the Sistine scaffolding - in the upheaval of early sixteenth-century Rome.

Alan Cutler tells the extraordinary story of the 17th century Danish geologist Steno, who was the first man to claim that the earth must be older than the Bible claimed, forever changing Western civilisation's ideas of time and undermining biblical authority, yet ended his life a Catholic bishop.

An account of a revolution in our understanding of life's history, this book tells how three obscure British scientists completely changed our view of evolution by discovering a unique group of 530 million year-old creatures in the Burgess Shale fossil deposit in the Rockies.

The paperback of the Sunday Times bestseller that reveals how the earth became the shape it is today. This book will change the way you see the world -- permanently.