The Soviet Union was founded on a fairytale. It was built on 20th-century magic called 'the planned economy', which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the penny-pinching lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, th[...]

In this extended love letter to children's books and the wonders they perform, Francis Spufford makes a confession: books were his mother, his father, his school. Reading made him who he is. To understand the thrall of fiction, Spufford goes back to his earliest encounters with books, exploring such[...]

Offers an account of how British boffins triumphed across the decades in creating everything from computer games to Martian landers. This book contains chapters on the Beagle II, Elite - the 80s computer game, the Blue Streak missile, Concorde, mobile phone technology and the Human Genome Project, a[...]

But it isn't an argument that Christianity is true - because how could anyone know that? This title is suitable for believers who are fed up with being patronised, and for those who feels there is something indefinably wrong, literalistic, anti-imaginative and intolerant about the way the atheist ca[...]

"Spufford cunningly maps out a literary genre of his own . . . Freewheeling and fabulous." "--The Times "(London) Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an [...]