Anthony Flew

I am very much aware that it is an act of extreme rashness to attempt to write an elementary book about structures. Indeed it is only when the subject is stripped of its mathematics that one begins to realize how difficult it is to pin down and describe those structural concepts which are often called' elementary'; by which I suppose we mean 'basic' or 'fundamental'. Some of the omis sions and oversimplifications are intentional but no doubt some of them are due to my own brute ignorance and lack of under­ standing of the subject. Although this volume is more or less a sequel to The New Science of Strong Materials it can be read as an entirely separate book in its own right. For this reason a certain amount of repetition has been unavoidable in the earlier chapters.

During the latter half of the '80s a new breed of guitar-orientated bands began to emerge in the UK - armed with an overt pop song craft sensibility, and enamoured with a conflicting post-punk spirit and adoration of the '60s, many of these unlikely acts - all anoraks, Dr Martens and charity shop chic - would go on to become Top 40 regulars and set the tone for music beyond these shores, culminating in 'The Stone Roses', an album that defined a generation. 'Cut Me Deep' - named for a Jasmine Minks track which captured that spirit - presents a snapshot of that time and place, via essential independent labels such as Creation, Sarah Records and 4AD, and their major backed counterparts in Blanco Y Negro et al, alongside distribution via Rough Trade and other like-minded outlets. With an electric guitar in hand (no Stratocasters here please), and resplendent in clothes as immaculately and cheaply curated as their record collections, a new generation of British musicians kickstarted what would become the only credible challenge to the increasingly dominant synthesiser pop scene of the late 1980's.

This selection of over 150 photographs provides a visual guide to the desperate air war fought over the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1945.

In 1910 Roald Amundsen set off from Oslo toward the North Pole but soon received word that two Americans—Frederick Cook and Robert Peary—each claimed to have reached the Pole ahead of him. Devastated, Amundsen famously went south. For years Cook and Peary tried to convince the world of their claims.

Leos Janácek (1854-1928) is considered to rank with Antonin Dvorak and Bedrich Smetana as one of the most important Czech composers. Janácek was inspired by Moravian and Slavic folk music, which he incorporated in a modern, highly original synthesis. His work attained its mature form first in the 1904 opera Jenufa (often called the 'Moravian national opera'), and later with the symphonic poem Sinfonietta, and other chamber works and operas. A century later, Chech pianist Emil Viklicky, like Janácek, has taken the music of his native Moravia and melded it into a larger mainstream, in this case American-style jazz. In fact, Emil has written jazz arrangements of several Janácek compositions, three of which are heard in this collection: the two previously mentioned and a third, 'In the Mists.' The other tracks are a combination of traditional Moravian folksong (re-worked into a jazz context) and Emil's own compositions.