‘The story of “invasive species” is really the story of human history, and Eatherley tells it with great verve … Fascinating’ Daily TelegraphA unique history of plant and animal invaders of the British isles spanning thousands of years of arrivals and escapes, as well as defences mounted and a look to the future. As Brits we pride ourselves as stoic defenders, boasting a record of resistance dating back to 1066. Yet, even a cursory examination of the natural world reveals that while interlopers of the human variety may have been kept at bay, our islands have been invaded, conquered and settled by an endless succession of animals, plants, fungi and other alien lifeforms that apparently belong elsewhere. Indeed it’s often hard to work out what actually is native, and what is foreign. From early settlement of our islands, through the Roman and mediaeval period, to the age of exploration and globalisation, today’s complement of alien species tells a story about our past.

Invasive Aliens

A large number of managers - especially in these difficult times - feel completely overwhelmed. Their inboxes are overflowing, they constantly struggle to finish their to-do lists and they stay at work longer than they would like to, leaving little time for the things that really matter. Luckily there is a way for managers to enjoy work and build a successful and fulfilling career without stress or long hours. In his bestselling book The 80/20 Principle, Richard Koch showed readers how to put the 80/20 Principle - the idea that 80 per cent of results come from just 20 per cent of effort - into practice in their personal lives. Now he demonstrates the few things you need to do in the workplace to multiply the results you achieve. By applying the strategies outlined in The 80/20 Manager, you will: - Put in fewer hours than your colleagues yet never be short of time - Learn to focus only on the issues that really matter, and ignore those that don't - Achieve exceptional results by working less hard - Feel successful every day

The 80/20 Manager

For the past forty years, Richard Koch has worked to uncover simple and elegant principles which govern business success. To qualify, a principle must be so overwhelmingly powerful that anyone can reliably apply it to generate extraordinary results. Working with venture capitalist Greg Lockwood and supported by specially commissioned research from OC&C Strategy Consultants, Koch has now found one elemental principle that unites extraordinarily valuable companies: simplifying. Some firms simplify on price - consider budget flights stripped of all extras that still take you from A to B - creating new, huge mass markets for their wares. Others, such as Apple, simplify their proposition, bringing a beautifully easy-to-se product or service to a large premium market. How can your business become a simplifier? With case studies of some of the most famous firms of the last hundred years, from finance to fast food, this enlightening book shows how to analyse any company's potential to simplify, and enrich the world.

Simplify

SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2019 Wordsworth and Coleridge as you’ve never seen them before in this new book by Adam Nicolson, brimming with poetry, art and nature writing. Proof that poetry can change the world. It is the most famous year in English poetry. Out of it came The Ancient Mariner and ‘Kubla Khan’, as well as Coleridge’s unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood, Wordsworth’s revolutionary verses in Lyrical Ballads and the greatness of ‘Tintern Abbey’, his paean to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding. Bestselling and award-winning writer Adam Nicolson tells the story, almost day by day, of the year in the late 1790s that Coleridge, Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and an ever-shifting cast of friends, dependants and acolytes spent together in the Quantock Hills in Somerset. To a degree never shown before, The Making of Poetry explores the idea that these poems came from this place, and that only by experiencing the physical circumstances of the year, in all weathers and all seasons, at night and at dawn, in sunlit reverie and moonlit walks, can the genesis of the poetry start to be understood. What emerges is a portrait of these great figures as young people, troubled, ambitious, dreaming of a vision of wholeness, knowing they had greatness in them but still in urgent search of the paths towards it. The poetry they made was not from settled conclusions but from the adventure on which they were all embarked, seeing what they wrote as a way of stripping away all the dead matter, exfoliating consciousness, penetrating its depths. Poetry for them was not an ornament for civilisation but a challenge to it, a means of remaking the world.

The Making of Poetry

Eddie Chapman was a womaniser, blackmailer and safecracker. He was also a great hero - the most remarkable double agent of the Second World War. Chapman became the only British national ever to be awarded an Iron Cross for his work for the Reich. He was also the only German spy ever to be parachuted into Britain twice. But it was all an illusion: Eddie fooled the Germans in the same way he conned his victims in civilian life. He was working for the British all along. Until now, the full story of Eddie Chapman's extraordinary exploits has never been told, thwarted by the Official Secrets Act. Now at last all the evidence has been released, including Eddie's M15 files, and a complete account of what he achieved is told in this enthralling book.

Zigzag

The RSPB’s Book of the SeasonThe distinctive white-tailed sea eagle was driven to extinction in Britain more than 200 years ago, but this immense predator is making a return to our skies, thanks to Roy Dennis, an ornithologist, conservationist and arguably the driving force behind the UK’s reintroduction agenda. Roy was instrumental in returning the Osprey, red kite and golden eagle to the British Isles, but the road to reintroduction isn’t an easy one. In what will surely be the seminal book on British reintroductions, Roy details the painstaking process of returning the Goldeneye to Scotland, one duckling at a time, the die-hard determination needed to make a dazzling success of the red kite reintroduction and the leap of faith we will all need to make to accept sharing our forests and skies with large carnivores again. He also illustrates all that we have to gain by restoring our ecosystems to balance. Filled with a lifetime’s worth of stories from the front lines of conservation, Reintroduction offers an eye-opening insight into the complexities of reintroducing extinct animals to Britain. It’s also an intimate portrait of these apex predators and a reminder of why we need them.

Restoring the Wild

Based on the series produced for the BBC World Service A Financial Times and Bloomberg Business Week Book of the Year Who thought up paper money? How did the contraceptive pill change the face of the legal profession? Why was the horse collar as important for human progress as the steam engine? How did the humble spreadsheet turn the world of finance upside-down? The world economy defies comprehension. A continuously-changing system of immense complexity, it offers over ten billion distinct products and services, doubles in size every fifteen years, and links almost every one of the planet's seven billion people. It delivers astonishing luxury to hundreds of millions. It also leaves hundreds of millions behind, puts tremendous strains on the ecosystem, and has an alarming habit of stalling. Nobody is in charge of it. Indeed, no individual understands more than a fraction of what's going on. How can we make sense of this bewildering system on which our lives depend? From the tally-stick to Bitcoin, the canal lock to the jumbo jet, each invention in Tim Harford's fascinating new book has its own curious, surprising and memorable story, a vignette against a grand backdrop. Step by step, readers will start to understand where we are, how we got here, and where we might be going next. Hidden connections will be laid bare: how the barcode undermined family corner shops; why the gramophone widened inequality; how barbed wire shaped America. We'll meet the characters who developed some of these inventions, profited from them, or were ruined by them. We'll trace the economic principles that help to explain their transformative effects. And we'll ask what lessons we can learn to make wise use of future inventions, in a world where the pace of innovation will only accelerate.

Fifty Things that Made the Modern Economy

June 1940. Britain is Europe's final bastion of freedom - and Hitler's next target. But not everyone fears a Nazi invasion. In factories, offices and suburban homes are men and women determined to do all they can to hasten it. Throughout the Second World War, Britain's defence against the enemy within was Eric Roberts, a former bank clerk from Epsom. Equipped with an extraordinary ability to make people trust him, he was recruited into the shadowy world of espionage by the great spymaster Maxwell Knight. Roberts penetrated first the Communist Party and then the British Union of Fascists, before playing his greatest role for MI5 - as Hitler's man in London. Codenamed Jack King, he single-handedly built a network of hundreds of British Nazi sympathisers, with many passing secrets to him in the mistaken belief that he was a Gestapo officer. Operation Fifth Column, run by a brilliant woman scientist and a Jewish aristocrat with a sideline in bomb disposal, was kept so secret it was omitted from the reports MI5 sent to Winston Churchill. In a narrative that grips like a thriller, Robert Hutton tells the fascinating story of an operation whose existence has only recently come to light. Drawing on newly declassified documents and private family archives, Agent Jack shatters the comfortable notion that Britain could never have succumbed to fascism, and celebrates - at last - the courage of individuals who protected the country they loved at great personal risk. Read by Roger Davis (P) Orion Publishing Group 2018

Agent Jack: The True Story of MI5's Secret Nazi Hunter

The urge to tidiness seems to be rooted deep in the human psyche. Many of us feel threatened by anything that is vague, unplanned, scattered around or hard to describe. We find comfort in having a script to rely on, a system to follow, in being able to categorise and file away. We all benefit from tidy organisation - up to a point. A large library needs a reference system. Global trade needs the shipping container. Scientific collaboration needs measurement units. But the forces of tidiness have marched too far. Corporate middle managers and government bureaucrats have long tended to insist that everything must have a label, a number and a logical place in a logical system. Now that they are armed with computers and serial numbers, there is little to hold this tidy-mindedness in check. It's even spilling into our personal lives, as we corral our children into sanitised play areas or entrust our quest for love to the soulless algorithms of dating websites. Order is imposed when chaos would be more productive. Or if not chaos, then . . . messiness. The trouble with tidiness is that, in excess, it becomes rigid, fragile and sterile. In Messy, Tim Harford reveals how qualities we value more than ever - responsiveness, resilience and creativity - simply cannot be disentangled from the messy soil that produces them. This, then, is a book about the benefits of being messy: messy in our private lives; messy in the office, with piles of paper on the desk and unread spreadsheets; messy in the recording studio, the laboratory or in preparing for an important presentation; and messy in our approach to business, politics and economics, leaving things vague, diverse and uncomfortably made-up-on-the-spot. It's time to rediscover the benefits of a little mess.

Messy

A special audio drama featuring over thirty characters, written to celebrate the 45th anniversary of Dark Shadows. "It's as if Lucifer plucked out one of his own eyes..." The year is 1690. Isaac Collins is sailing to America to establish a new life for his family. Suddenly, during a strange and unnatural blizzard, he discovers a single blood-red pearl. A pearl that seems to sing to him... The pearl will be going on a journey. Passed down through generations bringing luck both good and bad. But what does it want? Why is its journey so linked to the Collins family? And who will ultimately take ownership of the crimson pearl?

Dark Shadows Dramatic Readings

Dark Shadows, 21: The Crimson Pearl (Unabridged)

The year is 1893, and struggling artist Charles Delaware Tate works alone in a garret in New York City. Frustrated by his lack of artistic genius, he seems doomed to a life of misery and failure. And then he meets Eloise Verinder... and his whole world changes. The year is 1920. Charles Delaware Tate now lives alone in a sanatorium. But he's still painting, creating extraordinary works of art. Even though he is completely blind. A new nurse arrives, eager to hear the story of Charles' rise and fall... and of his first encounter with Count Petofi...

Dark Shadows, 15: The Blind Painter (Unabridged)

relevance|desc

publishdate|desc

publishdate|asc

rating|desc

title|asc

author_lastname|asc

BookBeat gives you access to thousands of audiobooks right on your mobile. Find your next favourite by browsing through our top lists and categories.

Do you like to read books? Discover thousands of e-books at BookBeat. Pick and choose from different genres, such as best-sellers, crime, romance, non-fiction and much more!

Get access to thousands of e-books on your phone. Browse and find your next favorite read today!

On our Bookshelf - Audiobooks

BookBeat lets you enjoy over 1 million audiobooks and e-books on your mobile or tablet. Try for free!

BookBeat - Audiobooks and e-books directly in the mobile. Try for free!

Unless you're out on an adventure, it's better to sign up at the website of {country}.

You can browse and find the most popular authors and books in the BookBeat app here. We’ve got a great selection of various authors and genres, this list will definitely inspire you to a great reading experience in the app!

{AuthorName} books - BookBeat

{NarratorName} as narrator - BookBeat

Are you on the hunt for your new favourite narrator, or do you have a favourite that you want to listen to even more? We've got you covered! We've gathered all of the most popular narrators and the books they’ve narrated here.

Search - BookBeat

Title

Person doing dishes and listening to BookBeat

Narrator

Roger Davis

Get started with BookBeat today

About us

Follow us

Help and contact

Information

BookBeat

Download BookBeat