Backroom Boys

Author : Francis Spufford
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2010-11-25
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9780571266449

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Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford Pdf

A brilliant, beautiful account of how British boffins triumphed across the decades in creating everything from computer games to Martian landers. The 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, among others. Britain is the only country in the world to have cancelled its space programme just as it put its first rocket into orbit. Starting with this forgotten episode, 'Backroom Boys' tells the bittersweet story of how one country lost its industrial tradition and got back something else. Sad, inspiring, funny and ultimately triumphant, it follows the technologists whose work kept Concorde flying, created the computer game, conquered the mobile-phone business, saved the human genome for the human race - and who now are sending the Beagle 2 probe to burrow in the cinnamon sands of Mars. 'Backroom Boys' is a vivid love-letter to quiet men in pullovers, to those whose imaginings take shape not in words but in mild steel and carbon fibre and lines of code. Above all, it is a celebration of big dreams achieved with slender means.

Author : Noam Chomsky
Publisher : Fontana Press
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 1973
Category : History
ISBN : IND:30000055109601

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The Backroom Boys by Noam Chomsky Pdf

Author : Graeme Sligo
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2013-10-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9781922132543

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The Backroom Boys by Graeme Sligo Pdf

The Backroom Boys is the remarkable, but little known, story of how a varied group of talented intellectuals, drafted into the Australian Army in the dark days of 1942, provided high-level policy advice to Australia’s most senior soldier, General Blamey, and through him to the Government for the remainder of the war and beyond. This band of academics, lawyers and New Guinea patrol officers formed a unique military unit, the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, under the command of an eccentric and masterful string-puller, Alf Conlon. The Directorate has been depicted as a haven for underemployed poets or meddlesome soldier-politicians. Based on wide-ranging research, this book reveals a fuller and more fascinating picture. The fierce conflicts in the wartime bureaucracy between public servants and soldiers, in which the Directorate provided critical support to Blamey, went to the heart of military command, accountability and the profession of arms. The Directorate was a pioneer in developing approaches to military government in areas liberated by the combat troops, as demonstrated by the Australian Army in New Guinea, and Borneo in 1945-46. It is an issue of enduring importance. The Directorate established the Australian School of Pacific Administration, and had an important role in founding the Australian National University. Its influence extended into post war Australia. The Backroom Boys emphasises the personality of Colonel Alf Conlon, as well as the talented men and women he recruited. Above all, this book shows how, unexpectedly, the Australian Army fostered a group of men and women who made a lasting contribution to the development of Australia in the decades after the war.

Author : Graeme Sligo
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 380 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Politics and war
ISBN : 192194112X

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The Backroom Boys by Graeme Sligo Pdf

The Backroom Boys is the remarkable, but little known, story of how a varied group of talented intellectuals, drafted into the Australian Army in the dark days of 1942, provided highlevel policy advice to Australia's most senior soldier, General Blamey, and through him to the Government for the remainder of the war and beyond. This band of academics, lawyers and New Guinea patrol officers formed a unique military unit, the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, under the command of an eccentric and masterful string-puller, Alf Conlon. The Directorate has been depicted as a haven for underemployed poets or meddlesome soldier-politicians. Based on wide-ranging research, this book reveals a fuller and more fascinating picture. The fierce conflicts in the wartime bureaucracy between public servants and soldiers, in which the Directorate provided critical support to Blamey, went to the heart of military command, accountability and the profession of arms. The Directorate was a pioneer in developing approaches to military government in areas liberated by the combat troops, as demonstrated by the Australian Army in New Guinea, and Borneo in 1945-46. It is an issue of enduring importance. The Directorate established the Australian School of Pacific Administration, and had an important role in founding the Australian National University. Its influence extended into post war Australia. The Backroom Boys emphasises the personality of Colonel Alf Conlon, as well as the talented men and women he recruited. Above all, this book shows how, unexpectedly, the Australian Army fostered a group of men and women who made a lasting contribution to the development of Australia in the decades after the war.

Author : Edward Smithies
Publisher : Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2015-11-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9781474603393

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Backroom Boys by Edward Smithies Pdf

When we remember the Second World War in the air, we think of fighter pilots and bomber crews. But what was it like for the men and women working as ground crew and in the aircraft factories who also played a crucial role in defeating Hitler? What was it like making history? What sense did these individuals have of what they were doing, either at the time or later? Did they feel they were caught up in the tide of great events? Or were they simply doing their demanding and often dangerous duty?

Author : Philip Jones Griffiths
Publisher : Phaidon Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2006-02-21
Category : Photography
ISBN : 0714846031

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Vietnam Inc. by Philip Jones Griffiths Pdf

Rare and highly sought-after photobook documenting the Vietnam War

Author : Craig Stockings,Peter Dennis
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 417 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2021-11-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9781316514399

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An Army of Influence by Craig Stockings,Peter Dennis Pdf

A thought-provoking analysis of the Australian Army's capacity to change, with a particular focus on the Asia-Pacific region.

Author : Francis Spufford
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2012-09-04
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780571281367

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Unapologetic by Francis Spufford Pdf

'Passionate, challenging, tumultuously articulate . . . Fascinating.' John Carey, Sunday Times 'A wonderful, effortlessly brilliant book.' Evening Standard 'A rare gem, a book that carries conviction by being honest all the way through.' John Gray, Independent If Christianity is anything, it's a refusal to see human behavior as ruled by the balance sheet. We're not supposed to see the things we do as adding up into piles of good and evil we can subtract from each according to some kind of calculus to tell us how, on balance, we're doing. Unapologetic is a book for those curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century. But it isn't an argument that Christianity is true - because how could anyone know that (or indeed its opposite)? It's an argument that Christianity is recognisable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the bits of our lives advertising agencies prefer to ignore.

Author : Noam Chomsky
Publisher : Penguin Books India
Page : 496 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2003-07
Category : United States
ISBN : 014303054X

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For Reasons Of State by Noam Chomsky Pdf

Chomsky S Second Major Collection Of Political Writings, Following His Pathbreaking American Power And The New Mandarins An Essential Record Of Chomsky S Political And Social Thought As It Was Sharpened On The Upheavals In Domestic And International Affairs Of The Early 1970S, For Reasons Of State Is A Major Addition To The Intellectual History Of The Vietnam Era. It Includes Articles On The War In Vietnam And The 'Wider War' In Laos And Cambodia, An Extensive Dissection Of The Pentagon Papers, Reflections On The Role Of Force In International Affairs, Essays On Civil Disobedience And The Role Of The University, And A Now-Classic Introduction To Anarchism. These Contributions Reveal Very Different Facets Of Chomsky S Powers As A Thinker, From His Uncanny Ability To Join Abstract Philosophical Considerations With The Concrete Political Realities Of His Time, To His Singular Capacity To Mount Withering, Fact-Based Critiques Of American Foreign Policy.

Author : Francis Spufford
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Page : 450 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2010-08-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9780571269471

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Red Plenty by Francis Spufford Pdf

'Bizarre and quite brilliant.' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times'Thrilling.' Michael Burleigh, Sunday Telegraph'Francis Spufford has one of the most original minds in contemporary literature.' Nick HornbyThe 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, the magic seemed to be working.Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan, every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche and sputniks would lead the way to the stars. And it's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.

Author : Christina Blizzard
Publisher : Dundurn
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 1995-01-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9781550022544

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Right Turn by Christina Blizzard Pdf

It wasn't so much a big blue machine that chugged its way across Ontario's political landscape in the spring of 1995 — it was more a big purple bulldozer driven by leader Mike harris and a new breed of Tories. Gone were the pinestripes and the cigar-chomping backroom boys of the forty-two years of Tory rule. These Tories were young, hip, and they were riding the wave of their Common Sense Revolution, a platform launched a year earlier. Still, there were only a few who thought the PCs stood a chance of winning the Ontario provincial election. Though Bob Rae's NDP government was foundering, Lyn McLeod and the Liberals were holding what looked like a steady two-to-one lead in the polls. Rlying on a combination of video tapes, clever advertising, and a brilliant campaign plan, the Harris team turned it all around, pulling off one of the most stunning upsets in Canadian political history. Right Turn tells the story.

Author : John Pilger
Publisher : Random House
Page : 642 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2010-09-02
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9781407086378

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Distant Voices by John Pilger Pdf

Throughout his distinguished career as a journalist and film-maker, John Pilger has looked behind the 'official' versions of events to report the real stories of our time. The centrepiece of this new, expanded edition of his bestselling Distant Voices is Pilger's reporting from East Timor, which he entered secretly in 1993 and where a third of the population has died as a result of Indonesia's genocidal policies. This edition also contains more new material as well as all the original essays - from the myth-making of the Gulf War to the surreal pleasures of Disneyland. Breaking through the consensual silence, Pilger pays tribute to those dissenting voices we are seldom permitted to hear.

Author : Edmund Wilson
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 86 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 1941
Category : American fiction
ISBN : UOM:39015004319300

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The Boys in the Back Room by Edmund Wilson Pdf

Author : Nigel Rees
Publisher : Batsford Books
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2014-12-08
Category : History
ISBN : 9781849942898

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Don't You Know There's A War On? by Nigel Rees Pdf

Nigel Rees presents a nostalgic and witty guide to wartime catchphrases, from the now ubiquitous 'Keep Calm and Carry On' to lesser-known gems such as 'lions led by donkeys'. Following his hugely popular survey of domestic sayings, More Tea Vicar?, Rees returns with a witty and fascinating examination of the catchphrases that saw us through wartime Britain and are still relevant in times of crisis today. Including domestic phrases of the time, propaganda, and slang developed by soldiers abroad, the book describes the provenance and development of these intriguing, quirky and sometimes crude phrases that were born out of times of conflict and have in many cases become part of our language.

Author : Dominic Sandbrook
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 688 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2015-10-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780141979311

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The Great British Dream Factory by Dominic Sandbrook Pdf

SPECTATOR BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015 Britain's empire has gone. Our manufacturing base is a shadow of its former self; the Royal Navy has been reduced to a skeleton. In military, diplomatic and economic terms, we no longer matter as we once did. And yet there is still one area in which we can legitimately claim superpower status: our popular culture. It is extraordinary to think that one British writer, J. K. Rowling, has sold more than 400 million books; that Doctor Who is watched in almost every developed country in the world; that James Bond has been the central character in the longest-running film series in history; that The Lord of the Rings is the second best-selling novel ever written (behind only A Tale of Two Cities); that the Beatles are still the best-selling musical group of all time; and that only Shakespeare and the Bible have sold more books than Agatha Christie. To put it simply, no country on earth, relative to its size, has contributed more to the modern imagination. This is a book about the success and the meaning of Britain's modern popular culture, from Bond and the Beatles to heavy metal and Coronation Street, from the Angry Young Men to Harry Potter, from Damien Hirst toThe X Factor.