Bryan Appleyard – författare

A brand-new book from the award-winning SUNDAY TIMES journalist Brian Appleyard.Simplicity has become a brand and a cult. People want simple lives and simple solutions. And now our technology wants us to be simpler, to be ''machine readable''. From telephone call trees that simplify us into a series of ''options'' to social networks that reduce us to our purchases and preferences, we are deluged with propaganda urging us to abandon our irreducibly complex selves. At the same time, scientists tell us we are ''simply'' the products of evolution, nothing more than our genes. Brain scanners have inspired neuroscientists to claim they are close to cracking the problem of the human mind. ''Human equivalent'' computers are being designed that, we are told, will do our thinking for us. Humans are being simplified out of existence. It is time, says Bryan Appleyard, to resist, and to reclaim the full depth of human experience. We are, he argues, naturally complex creatures, we are only ever at home in complexity. Through art and literature we see ourselves in ways that machines never can. He makes an impassioned plea for the voices of art to be heard before those of the technocrats. Part memoir, part reportage, part cultural analysis, THE BRAIN IS WIDER THAN THE SKY is a dire warning about what we may become and a lyrical evocation of what humans can be. For the brain is indeed wider than the sky.

An evocative historical thriller based in one of London''s original suburbs.Set in 1912, Bedford Park is not just a London suburb: it is a crucible for enlightenment and modernity inhabited by people who wish to better themselves - and those who should know better. It is a singular place, architecturally sidestepping the modern whilst encouraging those with new ideas to take up residence.Into this mix sails Cal Kidd from America. In a coffee-house he makes the acquaintance of Binks, a man whose occupation in the City is vague but he seems to know everybody. And so Cal meets real-life characters like Maud Gonne and Frank Harris, while Ford Madox Ford, W.B. Yeats and Joseph Conrad appear also. Then Binks is gruesomely murdered, and after never really having to deal with anything in his life, Cal the observer now has to act.The spirit of the age is what makes BEDFORD PARK so evocative, a time when everyone tries to invoke the future but often looks to the past to achieve it. Among the host of vivid characters, the greatest is London itself, a city in a constant state of flux whose centre is journalism. All the detail makes the place exotic and exciting - the marathon at the Olympics in 1908, a ride on the Flip Flap in White City, news being chalked up on dock walls for those who couldn''t afford papers, a woman peeling potatoes in the Biosphere cinema in Bishopsgate. London has to comment instantly upon itself or be commented upon, always new and important.

More than any other technology, cars have transformed our culture. Cars have created vast wealth as well as novel dreams of freedom and mobility. They have transformed our sense of distance and made the world infinitely more available to our eyes and our imaginations. They have inspired cinema, music and literature; they have, by their need for roads, bridges, filling stations, huge factories and global supply chains, re-engineered the world. Almost everything we now need, want, imagine or aspire to assumes the existence of cars in all their limitless power and their complex systems of meanings.This book celebrates the immense drama and beauty of the car, of the genius embodied in the Ford Model T, of the glory of the brilliant-red Mercedes Benz S-Class made by workers for Nelson Mandela on his release from prison, of Kanye West''s ''chopped'' Maybach, of the salvation of the Volkswagen Beetle by Major Ivan Hirst, of Elvis Presley''s 100 Cadillacs, of the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost and the BMC Mini and even of that harbinger of the end - the Tesla Model S and its creator Elon Musk.As the age of the car as we know it comes to an end, Bryan Appleyard''s brilliantly insightful book tells the story of the rise and fall of the incredible machine that made the modern world what it is today.