Losing a leg in a lawnmower accident would be catastrophic for most people. But swimming star Sophie Pascoe believes it?s the best thing that has happened to her. She reveals how her family helped her turn a negative into a positive and how she developed the drive to become one of the world?s greatest Paralympians. And, of course, she talks about bursting on to the international sporting stage with three gold medals and a silver as a schoolgirl at the Beijing Paralympic Games in 2008, her brush with losing her other leg and the mental strength she had to summon to go on to break a swag of world records and reap three further gold medals at the 2012 London Paralympics.

Losing a leg in a lawnmower accident would be catastrophic for most people. But swimming star Sophie Pascoe believes it’s the best thing that has happened to her. She reveals how her family helped her turn a negative into a positive and how she developed the drive to become one of the world’s greatest Paralympians. And, of course, she talks about bursting on to the international sporting stage with three gold medals and a silver as a schoolgirl at the Beijing Paralympic Games in 2008, her brush with losing her other leg and the mental strength she had to summon to go on to break a swag of world records and reap three further gold medals at the 2012 London Paralympics.

Sophie Pascoe is New Zealand s most successful Paralympian. She has won 16 medals across two Paralympics and two World Championships, including six gold.

Stephen Maturin brings Captain Jack Aubrey secret orders to lead an expedition against the French islands of Mauritius and La Reunion, but the conduct of two of his own officers threatens the success of the mission.

Briscoe's grandmother remembered stories about the first white men coming to the Northern Territory. This extraordinary memoir shows us the history of an Aboriginal family who lived under the race laws, practices and policies of Australia in the twentieth century. It tells the story of a people trapped in ideological folly spawned to solve 'the half-caste problem'. It gives life to those generations of Aboriginal people assumed to have no history and whose past labels them only as shadowy figures. Briscoe's enthralling narrative combines his, and his contemporaries, institutional and family life with a high-level career at the heart of the Aboriginal political movement at its most dynamic time. It also documents the road he travelled as a seventeen year old fireman on the South Australia Railways to becoming the first Aboriginal person to achieve a PhD in history.

What do Bach's compositions, Rubik's Cube, the way we choose our mates, and the physics of subatomic particles have in common? All are governed by the laws of symmetry, which elegantly unify scientific and artistic principles. Yet the mathematical language of symmetry-known as group theory-did not emerge from the study of symmetry at all, but from an equation that couldn't be solved. For thousands of years mathematicians solved progressively more difficult algebraic equations, until they encountered the quintic equation, which resisted solution for three centuries. Working independently, two great prodigies ultimately proved that the quintic cannot be solved by a simple formula. These geniuses, a Norwegian named Niels Henrik Abel and a romantic Frenchman named Évariste Galois, both died tragically young. Their incredible labor, however, produced the origins of group theory. The first extensive, popular account of the mathematics of symmetry and order, The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved is told not through abstract formulas but in a beautifully written and dramatic account of the lives and work of some of the greatest and most intriguing mathematicians in history.

Includes : Catherine of Siena ; Beatrice d'Este ; Anne of Brittany ; Lucrezia Borgia ; Margaret d'Angouleme ; Renee, Duchess of Ferrara.

Varied snippets of information, from babies' names to types of aeroplanes, stories, poems, drawings, lists, riddles and morality tales. Didactic literature of the late 19th century.