Walk the mysterious nighttime streets of Prague with Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek, eavesdrop on intimate conversations in restaurants and lively beer halls with Karel Capek and Bohumil Hrabal, listen to jazz in stylish nightclubs with Josef Skvorecky. The stories in this volume — many of which appear in English for the first time — will take you on a personal odyssey through the city's stormy past to its dynamic present. For the traveler who wishes to experience something of its essence, Prague illuminates the heart and soul of a great city. Contributors include Michal Ajvaz, Karel Capek, Ivan Divis, Jaroslav Hasek, Daniela Hodrova, Bohumil Hrabal, Alois Jirasek, Franz Kafka, Jiri Karasek ze Lvovic, Egon Erwin Kisch, Ivan Klima, Jiri Kovtun, Frantisek Langer, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, Karel Pecka, Ota Pavel, Josef Skvorecky, Jindriska Smetanova, Jachym Topol, and Jiri Weil.

    The author argues for the preservation of the time and space in which to walk in an ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.

    Whether it means the accumulation of wealth or a more vaguely understood notion of self-fulfillment or self-actualization, happiness has been an inevitable, though elusive, goal.But it is hard to separate "real" happiness from the banal self-help version that embraces mindless positive thinking. And though we have two booming "happiness industries" religion, with its promise of salvation, and psychopharmacology, with its promise of better living through chemistry each comes with its own problems and complications.In "Seven Pleasures," Willard Spiegelman takes a look at the possibilities for achieving ordinary secular happiness without recourse to either religion or drugs. In this erudite and frequently hilarious book of essays, he discusses seven activities that lead naturally and easily to a sense of well-being. One of these dancing requires a partner, and therefore provides a lesson in civility, or good citizenship, as one of its benefits. The other six reading, walking, looking, listening, swimming, and writing are things one performs alone. "Seven Pleasures "is a marvelously engaging guide to the pursuit of happiness, and all its accompanying delights."

     Dozens of Top 10 lists provide vital information on each destination, as well as insider tips, from uncovering a city's most memorable sights to finding the best restaurants and hotels in each neighborhood. And to save you time and money, there's even a Top 10 list of Things to Avoid. Each "Top 10" contains a pull-out map and guide that includes fold-out maps of city metro systems, useful phone numbers, and 60 great ideas on how to spend your day.

    Cruise through Norway's majestic fjords, float in Iceland's Blue Lagoon or sample Copenhagen's finest new-Nordic cuisine; all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of Scandinavia and begin your journey now! Inside Lonely Planet's Scandinavia Travel Guide: Colour maps and images throughout Highlights and itineraries help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots Essential info at your fingertips - hours of operation, phone numbers, websites, transit tips, prices Honest reviews for all budgets - eating, sleeping, sight-seeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss Cultural insights give you a richer, more rewarding travel experience - history, art, literature, cinema, music, architecture, landscapes, wildlife and cuisine. Over 45 maps Covers Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, Tallinn and more eBook Features: (Best viewed on tablet devices and smartphones) Downloadable PDF and offline maps prevent roaming and data charges Effortlessly navigate and jump between maps and reviews Add notes to personalise your guidebook experience Seamlessly flip between pages Bookmarks and speedy search capabilities get you to key pages in a flash Embedded links to recommendations' websites Zoom-in maps and images Inbuilt dictionary for quick referencing The Perfect Choice: Lonely Planet Scandinavia, our most comprehensive guide to Scandinavia, is perfect for both exploring top sights and taking roads less travelled. Looking for just a few of the destinations included in this guide? Check out the relevant Lonely Planet Travel Guides, our most comprehensive guides that both cover the top sights and take the roads less travelled. Authors: Written and researched by Lonely Planet, Andy Symington, Anna Kaminski, Anthony Ham, Carolyn Bain, Cristian Bonetto, Peter Dragicevich. About Lonely Planet: Since 1973, Lonely Planet has become the world's leading travel media company with guidebooks to every destination, an award-winning website, mobile and digital travel products, and a dedicated traveller community. Lonely Planet covers must-see spots but also enables curious travellers to get off beaten paths to understand more of the culture of the places in which they find themselves.

    Is there a knack to being happy? From paddle-boarding down the Thames in a Santa hat, to wild swimming in a glacial river and cooking sausages on a campfire, Bill revels in the exhilaration of the outdoors, as well as the quieter pleasures of letter-writing, or of simple reflection.In this beautiful and uplifting book, Bill Bailey explores all this and more while delving into the nature of happiness, all in his own, remarkable, way.Packed with wisdom and humour, and with delightful illustrations by the comedian himself, Bill Bailey aims for the heart of pure joy and contentment - and how we can all achieve it.

    Part meditation on nature and walking, part memoir and part social history, his arresting debut is first and foremost a personal inquiry into the spirit of a place: a 14-mile broken ridge of land on the fringes of Northern London known as Scarp. Conspicuous but largely forgotten, a vast yet largely invisible presence hovering just beyond the metropolis, Scarp is a vast storehouse of regional memory. We join the author as he explores and reimagines this brooding, pregnant landscape, meticulously observing his surroundings, finding surprising connections and revealing lost slices of the past. SCARP captures the satisfying experience of a long, reflective walk. Whether talking about the beauty of a bird or a telegraph pole, deaths at a roundabout or his own troubled past, Papadimitriou celebrates the poetry in the everyday. His captivating prose reveals that the world around us is alive and intrinsically valuable in ways that the trappings of day-to-day life lead us to forget, and allows us to re-connect with something more authentic, more immediate, more profound.

    Yet how many of us still really walk in our everyday lives?Driven by a combination of a car-centric culture and an insatiable thirst for productivity and efficiency, we're spending more time sedentary and alone than we ever have before. If bipedal walking is truly what makes our species human, as paleoanthropologists claim, what does it mean that we are designing walking right out of our lives? Antonia Malchik asks essential questions at the center of humanity's evolution and social structures: Who gets to walk, and where? How did we lose the right to walk, and what implications does that have for the strength of our communities, the future of democracy, and the pervasive loneliness of individual lives?The loss of walking as an individual and a community act has the potential to destroy our deepest spiritual connections, our democratic society, our neighborhoods, and our freedom. But we can change the course of our mobility. And we need to. Delving into a wealth of science, history, and anecdote -- from our deepest origins as hominins to our first steps as babies, to universal design and social infrastructure, A Walking Life shows exactly how walking is essential, how deeply reliant our brains and bodies are on this simple pedestrian act -- and how we can reclaim it.

    I don’t mean that it’s going to bore you to death with a blow by blow account of what it’s like to sit on the Statutory Instrument Debate on Naval regulations 1968-2020 – but to demystify the places and practice of politics.’ From agonising decisions on foreign air strikes to making headlines about orgasms, from sitting in on history-making moments at the UN to eating McCain potato smiles at a black-tie banquet in China, the life of a politician is never dull. And it’s also never been more important. But politics is far bigger than Westminster, and in this book Jess Phillips makes the compelling case for why now, more than ever, we all need to be a part of it. With trademark humour and honesty, Jess Phillips lifts the lid on what a career in politics is really like and why it matters – to all of us. This is the inside story of what’s really going on.

    In eye-catching watercolors and detailed sketches, artist Diana Gessler captures the allure that makes Washington DC one of the most visited destinations in the country. In addition to the national landmarks, stirring memorials, and vibrant neighborhoods, there's the Cherry Blossom Festival, the Twilight Tattoo (a military pageant featuring the Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps and the U.S. Army Drill Team), colorful row houses, famous hotels and restaurants, and more museums than you'll be able to visit in just one trip. Gessler covers the city's most popular attractions but also heads off the beaten path to share hidden gems, like the quirky Albert Einstein Memorial and Eastern Market, where you can dine on bluebucks and browse for flea market finds. Also included are an index of sites and a useful appendix of addresses, Web sites, Metro stops, and phone numbers. Very Washington DC is a picture-perfect guidebook—a one-of-a-kind memento for tourists and a cherished reminder of the city's riches for those who have always lived in America's hometown.

    Yet with our modern fixation on speed, this healthy pedestrian activity has been largely left behind.At a personal and professional crossroads, writer, editor, and obsessive walker Dan Rubinstein travelled throughout the U.S., U.K., and Canada to walk with people who saw the act not only as a form of transportation and recreation, but also as a path to a better world. There are no magic-bullet solutions to modern epidemics like obesity, anxiety, alienation, and climate change. But what if there is a simple way to take a step in the right direction? Combining fascinating reportage, eye-opening research, and Rubinstein’s own discoveries, Born to Walk explores how far this ancient habit can take us, how much repair is within range, and guarantees that you’ll never again take walking for granted.

    But for a series of choices, accidents and coincidences - any of which could have gone otherwise - your life would have been very different. The same goes for reality. We live in just one of many possible worlds - but we can imagine parallel universes in which dinosaurs still rule the Earth, the Russians got to the moon first, everyone's a vegetarian or time itself flows backwards. And that's just for starters. What if the laws of physics were different? What if robots become smarter than us? Or, if every human on the planet simply vanished tomorrow? The answers to these questions aren't just fun to consider, but reveal deep truths about our own universe.Join New Scientist on a thrilling journey through dozens of incredible but perfectly possible alternative realities, thought experiments and counterfactual histories - each shining a surprising and unexpected spotlight on life as we know it.

    Fish-in-a-bag. Cajun spiced eggs. French apple tarts. If you think this doesn't sound like diet food, then think again. Featuring ALL the recipes from his BBC2 TV series, Tom Kerridge shows how you can enjoy all your FAVOURITE FOODS and still LOSE WEIGHT with his LOWER-CALORIE DIET WITH A DIFFERENCE.Michelin-starred chef Tom Kerridge has been developing top recipes for nearly three decades and knows how to make things taste good. He also understands how much willpower it takes to shift unhealthy excess weight, because he has lost over 11 stone in the last four years by following a low-carb diet. Now Tom is turning his attention to helping food-lovers who have chosen a lower-calorie diet as their own route to weight-loss.This is a lower-calorie diet with a difference – it's based on hunger-satisfying portions of delicious, lower-calorie dishes that taste amazing. The focus is on the food that we can and should be eating to lose weight, which is easy to make and won't make you feel as though you are missing out. Recipes include Southern-style chicken; One-layer lasagne; Chicken tikka masala; Lamb doner kebab; Beef stroganoff; Sweet potato and black bean burritos; Sticky pork chops; and Baked doughnuts with sweet five-spice dust.As Tom says: 'It's impossible to stick to a diet if the food you're expected to eat is boring and doesn't fill you up. So I've developed lots of tasty and satisfying recipes that people will love to cook and eat, but that will also help them lose weight. I truly believe that this attitude works. I've been there myself and now I want to help others get there too.' By adopting a new, healthy approach to eating you really CAN lose weight for good.

    It’s not quite a nature book, not quite a humour book, not quite a family memoir, not quite folklore, not quite social history, not quite a collection of essays, but a bit of all six.It contains owls, badgers, ponies, beavers, otters, bats, bees, scarecrows, dogs, ghosts, Tom’s loud and excitable dad and, yes, even a few cats. It’s full of Devon’s local folklore – the ancient kind, and the everyday kind – and provincial places and small things. But what emerges from this focus on the small are themes that are broader and bigger and more definitive.The book’s language is colloquial and easy and its eleven chapters are discursive and wide-ranging, rambling even. The feel of the book has a lot in common with the country walks Tom Cox was on when he composed much of it: it’s bewitched by fresh air, intrepid in minor ways, haunted by weather and old stories and the spooky edges of the outdoors, restless, sometimes foolish, and prone to a few detours... but it always reaches its intended destination.The book is illustrated with Tom’s own landscape photographs and linocuts by his mother.

    Andrew Doughty unlocks the secrets of an island so big and divers that many visitors never realize all that it has to offer.