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The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms became an entrenched part of the Canadian Constitution on April 17, 1982. The Charter represented a significant change in Canadian constitutional order and carried the courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, decisively into some of the biggest controversies in Canadian politics. Although the impact of the Charter on Canadian law and society was profound, a new status quo has been established. Even though there will be future Charter surprises and decisions that will claim news headlines, Peter J. McCormick argues that these cases will be occasional rather than frequent, and that the Charter "revolution" is over. Or, as he puts it in his introduction, "I will tell a story about the Charter, about the big ripples that have gradually but steadily died away such that the surface of the pond is now almost smooth." The End of the Charter Revolution explores the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, beginning with a general historical background, followed by a survey of the significant changes brought about as Charter decisions were made. The book addresses a series of specific cases made before the Dickson, Lamer, and McLachlin Courts, and then provides empirical data to support the argument that the Charter revolution has ended. The Supreme Court has without question become "a national institution of the first order," but even though the Charter is a large part of why this has happened, it is not Charter decisions that will showcase the exercise of this power in the future.

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Never has the Victorian novel appeared so perverse as it does in these pages—and never his its perversity seemed so fundamental to its accomplishment. Whether discussing George Eliot’s lesbian readers, Anthony Trollope’s whorish heroines, or Charles Dickens’s masturbating characters, William A. Cohen’s study explodes the decorum of mainstream nineteenth-century fiction. By viewing this fiction alongside the most alarming public scandals of the day, Cohen exposes both the scandalousness of this literature and its sexiness.Scandal, then as now, makes public the secret indiscretions of prominent people, engrossing its audience in salacious details that violate the very code of propriety it aims to enforce. In narratives ranging from Great Expectations to the Boulton and Park sodomy scandal of 1870–71, from Eliot’s and Trollope’s novels about scandalous women to Oscar Wilde’s writing and his trials for homosexuality, Cohen shows how, in each instance, sexuality appears couched in coded terms. He identifies an assortment of cunning narrative techniques used to insinuate sex into Victorian writing, demonstrating that even as such narratives air the scandalous subject, they emphasize its unspeakable nature. Written with an eye toward the sex scandals that still whet the appetites of consumers of news and novels, this work is suggestive about our own modes of imagining sexuality today and how we arrived at them. Sex Scandal will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in Victorian literature, the history of sexuality, gender studies, nineteenth-century Britain, and gay, lesbian, and queer studies.

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In Victorian Skin, Pamela K. Gilbert uses literary, philosophical, medical, and scientific discourses about skin to trace the development of a broader discussion of what it meant to be human in the nineteenth century. Where is subjectivity located? How do we communicate with and understand each other's feelings? How does our surface, which contains us and presents us to others, function and what does it signify? As Gilbert shows, for Victorians, the skin was a text to be read. Nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical perspectives had reconfigured the purpose and meaning of this organ as more than a wrapping and instead a membrane integral to the generation of the self. Victorian writers embraced this complex perspective on skin even as sanitary writings focused on the surface of the body as a dangerous point of contact between self and others. Drawing on novels and stories by Dickens, Collins, Hardy, and Wilde, among others, along with their French contemporaries and precursors among the eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers and German idealists, Gilbert examines the understandings and representations of skin in four categories: as a surface for the sensing and expressive self; as a permeable boundary; as an alienable substance; and as the site of inherent and inscribed properties. At the same time, Gilbert connects the ways in which Victorians "read" skin to the way in which Victorian readers (and subsequent literary critics) read works of literature and historical events (especially the French Revolution.) From blushing and flaying to scarring and tattooing, Victorian Skin tracks the fraught relationship between ourselves and our skin.

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Half of the world’s population today lives in coastal regions lapped by tidal waters. But the tide rises and falls according to rules that are a mystery to almost all of us. In The Tide, celebrated science writer Hugh Aldersey-Williams weaves together centuries of scientific thinking with the literature and folklore the tide has inspired to explain the power and workings of this most remarkable force. Here is the epic story of the long search to understand the tide: from Aristotle, who is said to have drowned himself in his efforts to figure out the Greek tides, to the pioneering investigations into the role of the moon by Galileo and Newton, to the quest to understand and even control the tide in our own time. Throughout, Aldersey-Williams whisks the reader along on his travels in search of the most remarkable tidal phenomena. He visits the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, where the tides are the strongest in the world; arctic Norway, home of the raging tidal whirlpool known as the maelstrom; and Venice, to investigate efforts to defend the city against flooding caused by the famed acqua alta. Along the way, Aldersey-Williams delves into classic literary portrayals of the tide from Shakespeare to Dickens, Melville to Jules Verne. And he reveals the tidal truths behind the Homeric tale of Scylla and Charybdis, the biblical story of Moses parting the Red Sea, the conquests of Julius Caesar, the Boston Tea Party, and the D-Day landings in Normandy.

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'Show me another pleasure like dinner which comes every day and lasts an hour.' – Talleyrand 'He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.' – Jonathan Swift ‘There is no love sincerer than the love of food’ wrote George Bernard Shaw in 1903. Poets, novelists, chefs and gourmands before and after him would seem to agree. Collected in this anthology is a mouth-watering selection of excerpts on the subject of eating, drinking, cooking and serving food, guaranteed to whet every reader’s appetite. Themed sections group together poetry and prose on grapes and bottles, the ideal cuisine, hangover cures and vivid vignettes of dinner-party behaviour, including Mrs Gaskell eating peas with a knife. There are stories about food fit for kings, a duchess’s ‘rumblings abdominal’, fine dining, eating abroad, cooking at home and gastronomic excesses. A section on food and travel features Edmund Hillary’s meal at the summit of Everest, Ernest Shackleton’s dish of penguin in the Antarctic and Joshua Slocum on the unfortunate effects of cheese and plums while sailing solo around the world. Also on the menu are limericks, short-tempered cooks, recipes, fantasy food, special feasts, iron rations, tips on opening oysters and the uses and abuses of coffee. Featuring writers as diverse as Brillat-Savarin, Edward Lear, John Keats, Collette, Charles Dickens, Maria Edgeworth and Marcel Proust and interspersed with a generous helping of cartoons, this is a perfect gift for foodies, chefs, picnickers and epicurean explorers.

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In 1859, the S.S. Great Eastern departed from England on her maiden voyage. She was a remarkable wonder of the nineteenth century: an iron city longer than Trafalgar Square, taller than Big Ben's tower, heavier than Westminster Cathedral. Her paddles were the size of Ferris wheels; her decks could hold four thousand passengers bound for America, or ten thousand troops bound for the Raj. Yet she ended her days as a floating carnival before being unceremoniously dismantled in 1889. Steamships like the Great Eastern occupied a singular place in the Victorian mind. Crossing oceans, ferrying tourists and troops alike, they became emblems of nationalism, modernity, and humankind's triumph over the cruel elements. Throughout the nineteenth century, the spectacle of a ship's launch was one of the most recognizable symbols of British social and technological progress. Yet this celebration of the power of the empire masked overconfidence and an almost religious veneration of technology. Equating steam with civilization had catastrophic consequences for subjugated peoples around the world. Engines of Empire tells the story of the complex relationship between Victorians and their wondrous steamships, following famous travelers like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Jules Verne as well as ordinary spectators, tourists, and imperial administrators as they crossed oceans bound for the colonies. Rich with anecdotes and wry humor, it is a fascinating glimpse into a world where an empire felt powerful and anything seemed possible—if there was an engine behind it.

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The language of flowers is as old as language itself. In the earliest poetry familiar plants were used to represent simple emotions, ideas, or states of mind: love, hope, despair, fidelity, solitude, beauty, mortality. Over time these associations entwined with myth and legend, with religious symbolism, folk and herbal lore. By the early 19th century the 'Language of Flora' had become increasingly refined, especially in England and America, where sentimental flower books listing flower meanings and illustrating them with verse were perennial bestsellers. The Everyman Language of Flowers without sacrificing the charm of its Victorian predecessors aims to provide extended, updated and rather more robust floral anthology for the 21st century, presenting poetry from ancient Greece to contemporary Britain and America, and spanning the world from Cuba to Korea, Russia to Zimbabwe. Here are Rumi and Rilke on the rose; Herrick and Louise Glück on the lily; Chaucer, Emily Dickinson and Jon Silkin on the daisy; Mary Robinson and Ted Hughes on the snowdrop; Lorenzo de Medici, John Clare and Alice Oswald on the violet; Hugo and Roethke on carnations; Ovid and Goethe on poppies; Blake and Eugenio Montale on the sunflower; Christina Rossetti on heartsease and forget-me-nots; Emily Brontë on harebells and heather, Seamus Heaney on lupins, Pasternak on night-scented stock... Eastern cultures, rich in flower associations, are well represented: there are Tang poems celebrating chrysanthemums and peonies, Zen poems about orchids and lotus flowers, poems about jasmine and marigolds from India, roses, tulips and narcissi from Persia, the Ottoman empire and the Arabic world. Flowers are arranged by season, with roses and lilies in a section of their own. In a final section poets comment directly or indirectly on the language of flowers itself. The book concludes with a selected glossary drawn from several celebrated Victorian collections.

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‘Spellbinding. Once you start reading you don’t want to put it down. It is emotional and your heart will go out to these children… I loved it. I couldn’t put it down’ NetGalley review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The USA Today Bestseller Two sisters. One secret. A daring wartime journey… Desperate to escape their stepfather’s house, sisters Amy and Lillian stow away aboard a train full of children being evacuated from London and the threat of Hitler’s bombs. Arriving in the seaside town of Worthing, they are taken in by kindly Norah and her husband Jim. With their future now entrusted to strangers, can the girls finally find a safe harbour in these dark days of war? And will they find the strength to confront what they have been running from, when their past finally catches up with them? An absolutely heartbreaking and uplifting wartime story of courage, sisterhood and the power of love. Perfect for fans of Shirley Dickson, Glynis Peters and Lisa Wingate. Don’t miss the next chapter of the sisters’ story, The Lost Orphan, available to pre-order now! Readers love The Runaway Orphans: ‘Read this book in ONE sitting… Heartbreak, love… A story to lift your heart. Wonderful’ NetGalley review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘Impossible to put down… Heart-breaking and heart-warming all at the same time’ NetGalley review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘A very emotional book and had me in tears… Excellent 5*’ NetGalley review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘So emotional that will touch your heart… A wonderful atmospheric journey and I enjoyed every single chapter ’ NetGalley review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘Gripping and emotional… Once I started it, I didn't want to put it down and read it in two sittings’ NetGalley review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘Oh this book had me on the edge of my seat so many times! I was rooting for those poor girls’ NetGalley review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘Wow… Loved all the characters… I enjoyed it so much I finished it within 24hrs. Would highly recommend’ NetGalley review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘What a beautiful book. I couldn't stop reading until the last page’ NetGalley review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘I loved this… Gripping and emotional. Once I started it, I didn't want to put it down and read it in two sittings’ NetGalley review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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When Margaret Thatcher called in 1979 for a return to Victorian values such as hard work, self-reliance, thrift, and national pride, Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock responded that “Victorian values” also included “cruelty, misery, drudgery, squalor, and ignorance.” The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror is an in-depth look at the ways that the twentieth century reacted to and reimagined its predecessor. It considers how the Victorian inheritance has been represented in literature, politics, film, and visual culture; the ways in which modernists and progressives have sought to differentiate themselves from an image of the Victorian; and how conservatives (and some liberals) have sought to revive elements of nineteenth-century life. Nostalgic and critical impulses combine to fix an understanding of the Victorians in the popular imagination. Simon Joyce examines heritage culture, contemporary politics, and the “neo-Dickensian” novel to offer a more affirmative assessment of the Victorian legacy, one that lets us imagine a model of social interconnection and interdependence that has come under threat in today’s politics and culture. Although more than one hundred years have passed since the death of Queen Victoria, the impact of her time is still fresh. The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror speaks to diverse audiences in literary and cultural studies, in addition to those interested in visual culture and contemporary politics, and situates detailed close readings of literary and cinematic texts in the context of a larger argument about the legacies of an era not as distant as we might like to think.

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The Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 opened magistrates’ courts to abused working-class wives. Newspapers in turn reported on these proceedings, and in this way the Victorian scrutiny of domestic conduct began. But how did popular fiction treat “private” family violence? Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction traces novelists’ engagement with the wife-assault debates in the public press between 1828 and the turn of the century. Lisa Surridge examines the early works of Charles Dickens and reads Dombey and Son and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the context of the intense debates on wife assault and manliness in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Surridge explores George Eliot’s Janet’s Repentance in light of the parliamentary debates on the 1857 Divorce Act. Marital cruelty trials provide the structure for both Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right. Locating the New Woman fiction of Mona Caird and the reassuring detective investigations of Sherlock Holmes in the context of late-Victorian feminism and the great marriage debate in the Daily Telegraph, Surridge illustrates how fin-de-siècle fiction brought male sexual violence and the viability of marriage itself under public scrutiny. Bleak Houses thus demonstrates how Victorian fiction was concerned about the wife-assault debates of the nineteenth century, debates which both constructed and invaded the privacy of the middle-class home.

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In 1966 twelve-year-old Fan Shen, a newly minted Red Guard, plunged happily into China’s Cultural Revolution. Disillusion soon followed, then turned to disgust and fear when Shen discovered that his compatriots had tortured and murdered a doctor whose house he’d helped raid and whose beautiful daughter he secretly adored. A story of coming of age in the midst of monumental historical upheaval, Shen’s Gang of One is more than a memoir of one young man’s harrowing experience during a time of terror. It is also, in spite of circumstances of remarkable grimness and injustice, an unlikely picaresque tale of adventure full of courage, cunning, wit, tenacity, resourcefulness, and sheer luck—the story of how Shen managed to scheme his way through a hugely oppressive system and emerge triumphant. Gang of One recounts how Shen escaped, again and again, from his appointed fate, as when he somehow found himself a doctor at sixteen and even, miraculously, saved a few lives. In such volatile times, however, good luck could quickly turn to misfortune: a transfer to the East Wind Aircraft Factory got him out of the countryside and into another terrible trap, where many people were driven to suicide; his secret self-education took him from the factory to college, where friendship with an American teacher earned him the wrath of the secret police. Following a path strewn with perils and pitfalls, twists and surprises worthy of Dickens, Shen’s story is ultimately an exuberant human comedy unlike any other.Purchase the audio edition.

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Garrett Stewart begins The Deed of Reading with a memory of his first hesitant confrontation, as a teenager, with poetic density. In that early verbal challenge he finds one driving force of literature: to make language young again in its surprise, coming alive in each new event of reading. But what exactly happens in the textual encounter to make literary phrasing resonate so deeply with readers? To take the measure of literary writing, The Deed of Reading convenes diverse philosophic commentary on the linguistics of literature, with stress on the complementary work of Stanley Cavell and Giorgio Agamben. Sympathetic to recent ventures in form-attentive analysis but resisting an emphasis on so-called surface reading, Stewart explores not some new formalism but the internal pressures of language in formation, registering the verbal infrastructure of literary prose as well as verse. In this mode of "contextual" reading, the context is language itself. Literary phrasing, tapping the speech act’s own generative pulse, emerges as a latent philosophy of language in its own right, whereby human subjects, finding no secure place to situate themselves within language, settle for its taking place in, through, and between them. Stewart watches and hears this dynamics of wording played out in dozens of poems and novels over two centuries of English literary production—from Wordsworth and Shelley to Browning and Hopkins, from Poe and Dickens through George Eliot, Conrad, James, and on to Toni Morrison. The Deed of Reading offers a revisionary contribution to the ethic of verbal attention in the grip of "deep reading."

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'Astoundingly good. Brave, wickedly funny and profoundly affecting. Wow!' Miranda Dickinson'An emotional punch-packer of a book. Be prepared for it to swallow you whole' Milly Johnson'A big-hearted, funny, hugely emotional and uplifting novel - I loved it!' Rachael Lucas'Such a beautifully written book with characters that will linger in your head and heart' Sarah J Naughton****You don't need talent to join this group of actors. The ability to remember lines or stay awake throughout a performance is appreciated, but not essential. The only mandatory is a terminal diagnosis. But Adam Campbell is less than enthusiastic about this eccentric form of group therapy. He has under one year to live, and a heck of lot to get done. Like explaining mortality to his six-year-old daughter. And making amends with the woman who should have been his wife.The last thing Adam needs is a part in an amateur production of 'Shakespeare's Greatest Deaths'. But help and hope can be found where we least expect them. And perhaps camaraderie, and a shared purpose, will turn out to be the best medicine after all. As Shakespeare, didn't quite put it: Shuffling off this mortal coil is a drag; but it's no reason to stop living.The Cancer Ladies' Running Club meets The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot, The Last Act of Adam Campbell is a warm, poignant and wise tale about love, friendship, and making the most of every minute of life that we're granted.

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"From a historical point of point, the book is fascinating... From a literary point of view, it’s eloquent ... If you’re a Bordeaux wine collector with deep pockets and a large cellar, it’s invaluable." —Tamlyn Currin, Jancis Robinson "Associations and societies such as the Bordeaux Club are the very acme of civilization. Botticelli and Bach were engaged in the eternal quest for truth and beauty in painting and music, and the Bordeaux Club did the same for viniculture." — Andrew Roberts "For lovers of claret - indeed, all wine - this can only be described as a drool-inducing book." — World of Fine Wine The story of 12 friends who gathered to share and celebrate the extraordinary wines of Bordeaux. Like-minded in their love of wine, they differed wildly (often alarmingly!) in their personal wealth, life and circumstances – their opinions, always voiced, had the power to ignite anger and divide friendships just as easily as they bound them together. Neil McKendrick, member and minute-taker for 57 of the Club’s 70 extraordinary years, weaves the tale of this convivial group with the rigour of a Cambridge academic (he is ex-Master of Gonville and Caius) and the humour of a born raconteur. Alongside the likes of Hugh Johnson, Steven Spurrier and Michael Broadbent, he celebrates the beauty of top-class Bordeaux and the splendour of each setting – from glorious country park to rickety Dickensian boardroom – in which these men were lucky enough to dine, serving up memories of vintages the like of which we will never see again.

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'Original and pacy' CLARE MACKINTOSH'Fresh, wonderful and unexpected' LISA JEWELL'My debut of the year. Kate Helm is an exceptional story teller' C. L. TAYLOR*****IN HER EYES, NO ONE IS INNOCENTGeorgia Sage has a gift: she can see evil in people. As a courtroom artist she uses her skills to help condemn those who commit terrible crimes. After all, her own brutal past means she knows innocence is even rarer than justice. But when she is drawn back into the trial that defined her career - a case of twisted family betrayal - she realises that her own reckless pursuit of justice may have helped the guilty go free.As Georgia gets closer to the truth behind that case, something happens that threatens not only her career, but even her sanity. At first, she fears her guilt around the events of her terrible childhood is finally coming back to haunt her. But the truth turns out to be even more terrifying . . . *****IF YOU LIKE YOUR THRILLERS ORIGINAL, TWISTY, EXCITING AND FRESH, THEN YOU WILL LOVE THE SECRETS YOU HIDE - perfect for fans of Anatomy of a Scandal and Let Me Lie. Every layer, every twist, every revelation makes you question the very characters you thought you could trust, and rethink a plot you thought you were beginning to unravel . . .'I read the whole thing in on huge unstoppable whoosh' JILL MANSELL'Clever concept so brilliantly executed' ARAMINTA HALL'Terrifying and disorienting, shocking and completely original' MIRANDA DICKINSON'Brilliant, original and shocking' CAZ FREAR

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'Mollie Walton captures your attention from the very first page and doesn't let go!' Diney Costeloe'Beautiful ... I can't wait for the next instalment' Judy Summers'A tender tale of love and strength in the midst of war' Val Wood'Stays with you long after you have finished reading' Margaret Dickinson'A highly enjoyable, immersive read!' Sarah Sykes'Vivid, compulsive, and heart-rending. Had me hooked' Louisa Treger'A lively and heart-warming saga' People's Friend ___________North Yorkshire, September 1939.Rosina Calvert-Lazenby, the widowed matriarch of Raven Hall, must be strong for her five daughters as the war approaches. When the RAF come to stay, Rosina is intrigued by their charismatic – albeit young – sergeant. But is there time for love with the war looming?Grace Calvert-Lazenby is twenty-one years old and ready for a new adventure. Joining the Women's Royal Naval Service, she trades the safety of Raven Hall for exhausting drills and conflicting acts of secrecy. It's not easy, but Grace knows that everyone has a part to play in what's to come.With so much on the line, will Rosina and Grace have the courage to lead those around them into the unknown?This heartwarming, dramatic World War II saga is perfect for fans of Vicki Beeby, Kate Thompson and Rosie Clarke. ___________Reader reviews for A Mother’s War:⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'LOVED IT! The layout and the research is stunning'⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'A fabulous read'⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'A definite 5 stars'⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Mollie Walton has done it again!'⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'An excellent book by an outstanding writer'

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'Literary, erudite, poignant and touching' Mail on Sunday'Stafford has a historical X-ray vision which allows her to look through the surface of a given landscape and describe what lies beneath . . . Miraculous' ScotsmanA village waits at the bottom of a reservoir. A monkey puzzle tree bristles in a suburban garden. A skein of wild geese fly over a rusty rail viaduct. The vast inland sea that awed John Clare has become fields.Chapter by fascinating chapter, alive with literary, local, and her own family history, Fiona Stafford reveals the forces, both natural and human, which transform places. Swooping along coastlines, through forests and across fens, following in the footsteps of Burns and Keats, Celia Fiennes and Charles Dickens, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Noel Coward and Compton Mackenzie, join her, time-travelling deep into the stories of our Isles.From red squirrels to brick vistas, from botanical gardens to hot springs, the landscapes of Britain are full of delights and surprises. Chance discoveries of rare species, shipwrecks and unlikely ruins, curious trees and startling towers, weird caves and disused airfields, or even just baffling placenames offer ways into unexpected histories and hidden lives. The clues to the past are all round us - Time and Tide will help you find them.'Shot through with tender delights and unexpected revelations' RICHARD HOLMES'Wonderful . . . A fascinating compendium of people and places and how they endlessly interact to change each other' PHILIP MARSDEN

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'Absolutely hilarious' - Neil Gaiman'One of the funniest musical commentators that you will ever read . . . loud and thoroughly engrossing' - Alan Moore'A man on a righteous mission to persuade people to "lay down your souls to the gods rock and roll".' - The Sunday Times'As funny and preposterous as this mighty music deserve' - John HiggsThe history of heavy metal brings brings us extraordinary stories of larger-than-life characters living to excess, from the household names of Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy, Bruce Dickinson and Metallica (SIT DOWN, LARS!), to the brutal notoriety of the underground Norwegian black metal scene and the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. It is the story of a worldwide network of rabid fans escaping everyday mundanity through music, of cut-throat corporate arseholes ripping off those fans and the bands they worship to line their pockets. The expansive pantheon of heavy metal musicians includes junkies, Satanists and murderers, born-again Christians and teetotallers, stadium-touring billionaires and toilet-circuit journeymen. Award-winning comedian and life-long heavy metal obsessive Andrew O'Neill has performed his History of Heavy Metal comedy show to a huge range of audiences, from the teenage metalheads of Download festival to the broadsheet-reading theatre-goers of the Edinburgh Fringe. Now, in his first book, he takes us on his own very personal and hilarious journey through the history of the music, the subculture, and the characters who shaped this most misunderstood genre of music.

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How did the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) ‘cavalry of the air’ transform into the strategic RAF of the Cold War? The flying lives of these three pilots combine across the years to illustrate how it happened. Trained on Bristol Boxkites in 1912, Major Leonard Dawes helped shape the RFC in its infancy. Posted to France with BE2s, he saw action at the birth of battlefield reconnaissance and air fighting, then activated many new squadrons during the First World War. Joining the RAF in 1923, Group Captain Dickie Barwell became a fighter pilot and respected leader of men. As a Hurricane squadron commander, he routed the first major Luftwaffe air attack of the Second World War and flew with Bader’s Wing in the Battle of Britain. While commanding RAF Biggin Hill, he flew combat operations over France before his death in a friendly-fire incident in 1942. Squadron Leader Brian Fern learned to fly at Ponca City, Oklahoma, in 1942, then trained hundreds of RAF bomber pilots during the Second World War. Post-war tours on Canberra bombers and spy flights in Chipmunks were followed by selection to the elite Valiant bomber force, where he became a leading exponent of in-flight refuelling, which finally gave the RAF its global reach. Combining these three stories into a narrative that explores the rise of the RAF through an era of dazzling technological breakthroughs and ever-changing operational requirements, Alastair Goodrum tells the story of a journey through adversity to the stars.

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It may not be the longest, deepest or widest river in the world but few bodies of water reveal as much about a nation's past and present, or are suggestive of its future, as England's River Thames. Tales of legendary lock-keepers and long-vanished weirs evoke the distant past of a river which evolved into a prime commercial artery linking the heart of England with the ports of Europe. In Victorian times, the Thames hosted regattas galore, its new bridges and tunnels were celebrated as marvels of their time, and London's river was transformed from sewer to centrepiece of the British Empire. Talk of the Thames Gateway and the effectiveness of the Thames Barrier keeps the river in the news today, while the lengthening Thames Path makes the waterway more accessible than ever before. Through quiet meadows, rolling hills, leafy suburbia, industrial sites and a changing London riverside, Mick Sinclair tracks the Thames from source to sea, documenting internationally-known landmarks such as Tower Bridge and Windsor Castle and revealing lesser known features such as Godstow Abbey, Canvey Island, the Sanford Lasher, and George Orwell's tranquil grave. Paintings, Words and Music: Turner, Tissot, Whistler and Monet; Shakespeare at Southwark, Alexander Pope, Charles Dickens, Jerome K. Jerome, William Morris; Handel's Water Music, the first rendition of Rule Britannia, the Rolling Stones and The Who rocking Eel Pie Island. Power, Politics and Intrigue: Runnymede and Magna Carta, the first English parliament, Whitehall Palace, Cliveden and the Profumo affair, the Houses of Parliament and the brooding headquarters of MI5 and MI6. Trade and Commerce: Eel trapping, osier growing; bargemen, watermen and lightermen; the rise and fall of London's docks; urban regeneration, rural protection.

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How a nineteenth-century lawsuit over the estate of a wealthy Tunisian Jew shines new light on the history of belongingIn the winter of 1873, Nissim Shamama, a wealthy Jew from Tunisia, died suddenly in his palazzo in Livorno, Italy. His passing initiated a fierce lawsuit over his large estate. Before Shamama's riches could be disbursed among his aspiring heirs, Italian courts had to decide which law to apply to his estate—a matter that depended on his nationality. Was he an Italian citizen? A subject of the Bey of Tunis? Had he become stateless? Or was his Jewishness also his nationality? Tracing a decade-long legal battle involving Jews, Muslims, and Christians from both sides of the Mediterranean, The Shamama Case offers a riveting history of citizenship across regional, cultural, and political borders.On its face, the crux of the lawsuit seemed simple: To which state did Shamama belong when he died? But the case produced hundreds of pages in legal briefs and thousands of dollars in lawyers’ fees before the man's estate could be distributed among his quarrelsome heirs. Jessica Marglin follows the unfolding of events, from Shamama's rise to power in Tunis and his self-imposed exile in France, to his untimely death in Livorno and the clashing visions of nationality advanced during the lawsuit. Marglin brings to life a Dickensian array of individuals involved in the case: family members who hoped to inherit the estate; Tunisian government officials; an Algerian Jewish fixer; rabbis in Palestine, Tunisia, and Livorno; and some of Italy’s most famous legal minds.Drawing from a wealth of correspondence, legal briefs, rabbinic opinions, and court rulings, The Shamama Case reimagines how we think about Jews, the Mediterranean, and belonging in the nineteenth century.

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The Victorian era was the high point of literary tourism. Writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Sir Walter Scott became celebrities, and readers trekked far and wide for a glimpse of the places where their heroes wrote and thought, walked and talked. Even Shakespeare was roped in, as Victorian entrepreneurs transformed quiet Stratford-upon-Avon into a combination shrine and tourist trap. Stratford continues to lure tourists today, as do many other sites of literary pilgrimage throughout Britain. And our modern age could have no better guide to such places than Simon Goldhill. In "Freud's Couch, Scott's Buttocks, Bronte's Grave", Goldhill makes a pilgrimage to Sir Walter Scott's baronial mansion, Wordsworth's cottage in the Lake District, the Bronte parsonage, Shakespeare's birthplace, and Freud's office in Hampstead. Traveling, as much as possible, by methods available to Victorians - and gamely negotiating distractions ranging from broken bicycles to a flock of giggling Japanese schoolgirls - he tries to discern what our forebears were looking for at these sites, as well as what they have to say to the modern mind. What does it matter that Emily Bronte's hidden passions burned in this specific room? What does it mean that Scott self-consciously built an extravagant castle suitable for Ivanhoe - and star-struck tourists visited it while he was still living there? Or that Freud's meticulous recreation of his Vienna office is now a meticulously preserved museum of itself? Or that Shakespeare's birthplace features student actors declaiming snippets of his plays...in the garden of a house where he almost certainly never wrote a single line? Goldhill brings to these inquiries his trademark wry humor and a lifetime's engagement with literature. The result is a travel book like no other, a reminder that even today, the writing life still has the power to inspire.

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A dramatic and heartwarming Victorian saga, perfect for fans of Maggie Hope and Anne Bennett. 1850s Shropshire. Returning to her mother's birthplace at the age of eighteen, Beatrice encounters a complex family she barely knows. Her great-grandmother Queenie adores her, but the privileged social position of Beatrice's family as masters of the local brickworks begins to make her uncomfortable. And then she meets Owen Malone: handsome, different, refreshing - and from a class beneath her own. They fall for each other fast, but an old family feud and growing industrial unrest threatens to drive them apart. Can they overcome their different backgrounds? And can Beatrice make amends for her family's past? Praise for The Daughters of Ironbridge: 'A Journey. Compelling. Addictive.' Val Wood'Evocative, dramatic and hugely compelling . . . The Daughters of Ironbridge has all the hallmarks of a classic saga. I loved it' Miranda Dickinson 'Feisty female characters, an atmospheric setting and a spell-binding storyline make this a phenomenal read' Cathy Bramley 'The Daughters of Ironbridge has that compulsive, page-turning quality, irresistible characters the reader gets hugely invested in, and Walton has created a brilliantly alive, vivid and breathing world in Ironbridge' Louisa Treger 'Such great characters who will stay with me for a long time' Beth Miller 'The attention to period detail and beautiful writing drew me right in and kept me reading' Lynne Francis 'Vivid, page-turning drama' Pippa Beecheno 'A powerful sense of place and period, compelling characters and a pacy plot had me racing to the end' Gill Paul 'A story that is vivid, twisting and pacy, with characters that absolutely leap off the page' Iona Grey'Beautiful and poignant. I'll definitely be reading The Secrets of Ironbridge' Tania Crosse

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This wide-ranging selection combines popular choices of traditional poems read at funerals with powerful poems by contemporary writers more tuned to our present age of doubt and disbelief. There are poems here for churchgoers and believers, including classic verses of grief and consolation by John Donne, Christina Rossetti, Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson, the anonymous Do not stand at my grave and weep, and the poems read at Princess Diana's funeral. But there are also poems for people of all faiths and religions, for agnostics and atheists, and most importantly for those who aren’t sure what they believe, whose grief over loss is the more intense for not knowing what happens to the soul after death. Grief isn’t denied but experienced and made more bearable by being put into memorable words. Searing poems of lament are followed by moving elegies celebrating the lives of those we will always love. Whether and how the spirit survives is then explored in an extraordinary gathering of poems by writers as different and diverse as the Persian mystic Rumi, Zen Buddhist composers of Japanese haiku, and American poets Mary Oliver and Jane Kenyon. Buttressed against their assertions of faith in an afterlife are modern sceptics, from Auden and Larkin to William Carlos Williams and C.K. Williams, whose wrestling with the meaning of death helps us make sense of no sense, mirroring our own anxieties and difficulties. But however various and contradictory these poems, their message chimes with Larkin’s famous words, proving 'Our almost-instinct almost true:/ What will survive of us is love.' Unlike other poetry anthologies of loss, mourning and remembrance, Do Not Go Gentle offers a selection of poems specifically for reading at funerals and memorial services. It can also be used for reading aloud to friends and family, or for reading while numbed and bewildered – all times when the right poem can help us share and bear the burden of immediate grief.

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In A Town In-Between, Judith Ridner reveals the influential, turbulent past of a modest, quiet American community. Today Carlisle, Pennsylvania, nestled in the Susquehanna Valley, is far from the nation's political and financial centers. In the eighteenth century, however, Carlisle and its residents stood not only at a geographical crossroads but also at the fulcrum of early American controversies. Located between East Coast settlement and the western frontier, Carlisle quickly became a mid-Atlantic hub, serving as a migration gateway to the southern and western interiors, a commercial way station in the colonial fur trade, a military staging and supply ground during the Seven Years' War, American Revolution, and Whiskey Rebellion, and home to one of the first colleges in the United States, Dickinson. A Town In-Between reconsiders the role early American towns and townspeople played in the development of the country's interior. Focusing on the lives of the ambitious group of Scots-Irish colonists who built Carlisle, Judith Ridner reasserts that the early American west was won by traders, merchants, artisans, and laborers—many of them Irish immigrants—and not just farmers. Founded by proprietor Thomas Penn, the rapidly growing town was the site of repeated uprisings, jailbreaks, and one of the most publicized Anti-Federalist riots during constitutional ratification. These conflicts had dramatic consequences for many Scots-Irish Presbyterian residents who found themselves a people in-between, mediating among the competing ethnoreligious, cultural, class, and political interests that separated them from their fellow Quaker and Anglican colonists of the Delaware Valley and their myriad Native American trading partners of the Ohio country. In this thoroughly researched and highly readable study, Ridner argues that interior towns were not so much spearheads of a progressive and westward-moving Euro-American civilization, but volatile places situated in the middle of a culturally diverse, economically dynamic, and politically evolving early America.

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‘A witty, heart-warming tale about woman’s best friend. You’ll love it!’ Nick Spalding ‘A love story that honestly will just make you cheer… I loved it.’ Miranda Dickinson When your dog plays cupid…what could possibly go wrong? Loyal rescue pug Doug wants his adoring owner Julie to find unconditional love and happiness – and he knows she won’t find either in the arms of Luke, her married boss. Doug is terrified that Julie will become a lonely cat-lover if she stays single too long, but he can’t let her fall for any more of Luke’s empty promises. Julie needs to move on – and Doug is convinced that Tom, a newly divorced V-E-T, is perfect for her (despite his questionable occupation). There’s just one problem: Julie and Tom can’t stand each other. Doug doesn’t quite understand the quirks and complexities of human relationships, but he won’t let that get in the way of his mission to bring Tom and Julie together. After all, being a ‘rescue’ works both ways… Readers LOVE Pug Actually! ‘A wonderful novel with delicious humour… I'm in love with Doug the pug!’ Jill Mansell ‘Charming, brilliant and an absolute hoot… This book makes the world feel a happier place to be.’ Milly Johnson ‘Absolutely loved it… A quirky, funny, cute read…I found myself smiling throughout…’ NetGalley reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘A marvellously light read that leaves you giggling… you will not regret this one bit.’ NetGalley reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘Absolutely brilliant…Laugh out loud hilarious’ NetGalley reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘A word of caution: Reading this in public may cause uncontrollable laughter and create a scene.’ Library Journal, starred review ‘[A] hilarious romance…’ The Washington Post ‘…amusing and heartwarming, and Doug is a fantastic star of the show.’ Booklist ‘Laugh-out-loud funny’ Publishers Weekly Praise for Matt Dunn:‘Matt Dunn is officially funny.’ Jojo Moyes ‘Funny, warm, honest…’ Jenny Colgan ‘Matt Dunn’s writing makes you laugh out loud.’ Sophie Kinsella

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The perfect escapist read, for all fans of Cathy Bramley and Jenny Colgan. A Year at the Star and Sixpence is Holly Hepburn's four Star and Sixpence novellas collected together as a novel for the first time. When sisters Nessie and Sam inherit a little pub in a beautiful country village they jump at the chance to escape their messy lives and start afresh. But when they arrive at the Star and Sixpence, it's not quite what they imagined - it's pretty much derelict, ruined by debts, and it's going to be a huge job to get it up and running again. But they are determined to make the best of this new life and they set about making the pub the heart of the village once again. Their first year at the Star and Sixpence won't be easy, though nothing worth doing ever is. But when the sisters' past comes back to haunt them, they start to think that the fresh start they needed is very far away indeed…Curl up with A Year at the Star and Sixpence - the perfect novel to welcome Spring. 'A fresh new voice, brings wit and warmth to this charming tale of two sisters' Rowan Coleman 'You'll fall in love with this fantastic new series from a new star of women's fiction, Holly Hepburn. Filled to the brim with captivating characters and fantastic storylines in a gorgeous setting. Simply wonderful. I want to read more!' Miranda Dickinson 'Warm, witty and laced with intriguing secrets! I want to pull up a bar stool, order a large G&T and soak up all the gossip at the Star and Sixpence!' Cathy Bramley ++ A Year at the Star and Sixpence is the collected Star and Sixpence novellas. If you have already enjoyed the novellas, then you have already enjoyed A Year at the Star and Sixpence. For new novellas from Holly, check out her Picture House by the Sea series and her Castle Court series ++

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The study of Renaissance drawings allows for an intensive exploration of how artists constructed their works and how they thought, often by revealing the artists' ideas through the examination of private images that were deemed inappropriate for more public viewing. Rethinking Renaissance Drawings presents new and original research from art historians and curators from leading universities and museums across North America and Europe. Previous studies on drawings tend to focus on the work of one artist or a small regional group of artists. The essays in this collection address larger issues of the forms and functions of drawing in the Renaissance by exploring a variety of perspectives, including discussions of the process of drawing, the often unorthodox imagery of Renaissance drawings, the collecting and copying of Renaissance drawings, and the works of artists such as Michelangelo, Raphael, Bosch, Parmigianino, Annibale Carracci, Guercino, and Rembrandt. Some of the drawings discussed are exciting new discoveries, published here for the first time, whereas others are familiar works, but shown in a new light. Collectively, these studies offer alternate views of Renaissance art and show more intimate aspects of a period that is often remembered for its paintings and large-scale public monuments. Contributors include David de Witt (Rembrandt House Museum), Stephanie Dickey (Queen's University), Pierre du Prey (Queen's University), David Ekserdjian (University of Leicester), David Franklin (Archive of Modern Conflict), Catherine Monbeig Goguel (Musee du Louvre), Franziska Gottwald (Amsterdam), Sharon Gregory (St Francis Xavier University), Sally Hickson (University of Guelph), Michel Hochmann (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes), Cathleen Hoeniger (Queen's University), Charles Hope (Warburg Institute), Paul Joannides (Cambridge University), Casey Lee (Queen's University), James Mundy (Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center), Aimee Ng (Frick Collection), Sebastian Schutze (University of Vienna), Allison Sherman (Queen's University), Ron Spronk (Queen's University), Steven Stowell (Concordia University), Nicholas Turner (J. Paul Getty Museum), and Catherine Whistler (The Ashmolean).

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In a time where many feel lost, alone, or afraid—and where social media makes us think that everyone has it better, bigger, or brighter—Chasing Normal is a humorous and poignant memoir about learning to embrace yourself, along with the messy life you lived that made you who you are today.As a kid growing up in Indiana surrounded by cornfields and deep poverty, with two emotional terrorists for parents, all Craig Greiwe ever wanted was to be normal. In his youth, he lived under the stairs in Dickensian misery. Once he managed to make it to college, things got about as weird as might be expected for a teenager who grew up reading The 1978 World Book Encyclopedia for kicks. From an emotional breakdown at the top of a mountain at one school to setting off a chain of events that nearly blew apart Columbia Law School a few years after that, his life was anything but normal. Along the way, he found a long-distance foster mom 2,000 miles away; slept his way to success in Hollywood; had his heart broken; discovered secrets about the people who raised him; and was finally adopted by Norman-Rockwell-esque parents at the age of twenty-four. Chasing Normal is the story of a man who grew up trying to be like everyone else, only to realize that being yourself is the only way forward. His stories range from wild to painful and sometimes humorous, but ultimately, they are a journey about compassion, salvation, and eventually, joy. Chasing Normal stands out as a hopeful beacon for anyone who’s ever felt “other”—which is just about everyone. Like a lighthouse on a hill, this book offers direction to an illuminating place where we can learn to embrace ourselves, no matter how messy a life we lived.

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Poems in the Manner Of is an illuminating journey through centuries of writers who continue to influence new work today, including that of respected poet and series editor of The Best American Poetry David Lehman.“Very few writers can actually shape how you see the world. David Lehman is such a writer,” says Robert Olen Butler. Now the Best American Poetry series editor and New School writing professor channels, translates, and imagines a collection of “poems in the manner of” Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats, Rilke, William Carlos Williams, and more. Lehman has been writing “poems in the manner of” for years, in homage to the poems and people that have left an impression, experimenting with styles and voices that have lingered in his mind. Finally, he has gathered these pieces, creating a striking book of poems that channels poets from Walt Whitman to Sylvia Plath and also calls upon jazz standards, Freudian questionnaires, and astrological profiles for inspiration. Intelligent and sparkling, this is a great gift for poetry fans and a useful resource for creative writers. These are poems of wit and humor but also deep emotion and clear intelligence, informed by Lehman’s genuine and knowledgeable love of poetry and literature. From Catullus and Lady Murasaki to Wordsworth, Neruda, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, and Charles Bukowski, Poems in the Manner Of shows how much life there is in poets of the past. And like Edward Hirsch’s How to Read a Poem and Robert Pinsky’s Singing School, this book gives you more than poetry. Whether you’re reading for pure enjoyment or examining how a poet can use references and influences in their own work, Poems in the Manner Of is a treasure trove of literary pleasures and food for thought.

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The origin story of a groundbreaking albumThe 1971 Allman Brothers Band album At Fillmore East was a musical manifesto years in the making. In Play All Night!, Bob Beatty dives deep into the motivations and musical background of band founder Duane Allman to tell the story of what made this album not just a smash hit, but one of the most important live rock albums in history. Featuring insights from bootleg tapes, radio ads, early reviews, never-before-published photos, and the memories of band members, fans, and friends, Beatty chronicles how Allman rejected the traditional route of music business success—hit singles and record sales—and built a band that was at its best jamming live on stage, feeding off the crowd’s energy, and pushing each other to new heights of virtuosic improvisation. Every challenge, from recruiting a group of relatively unknown but established musicians like Jaimoe and Dickey Betts, touring the American South as an interracial band, and the failure of their first two studio albums, sharpened Allman’s determination to pursue the band’s truly unique sound. He made a bold choice—to record their next album live at Bill Graham’s famous concert hall in New York’s Lower East Side, a gamble that launched a new strand of American music to the top of the charts. Four days after the album went gold, Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle accident. He was 24. This book explores how At Fillmore East cemented Allman’s legacy as a strong-willed, self-taught visionary, giving fans of Southern rock and all readers interested in the role of rock music in American popular culture a new appreciation for this pathbreaking album.

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Who is stalking Florence Nightingale and her nurses? Is it the legendary Beast of the Crimean, or someone closer to home? In 1855, Britain and France are fighting to keep the Russians from snatching the Crimean Peninsula from the Ottoman Empire, and Nightingale, a wealthy young society woman, has made it her mission to improve the wretched conditions in the British military hospitals in Turkey-despite fierce objections from the male doctors around her. When young women start turning up dead, their mouths sewn shut with embroidered fabric roses, Inspector Charles Field (the real-life inspiration for Charles Dickens's Inspector Bucket in Bleak House) is sent from England to find the killer among the doctors, military men, journalists, and others swarming Turkey's famous Barrack Hospital. Here Field meets both the famous Nightingale as well as Nurse Jane Rolly, the woman who will become his wife, and as he races to protect them, the prime suspect takes his own life.Case closed. Or is it?Twelve years later, back in London, amid the turmoil surrounding the expansion of voting rights, women again start turning up dead, their mouths covered by that telltale embroidered rose. Did Field suspect the wrong man before, or is he dealing with a deviant copycat? Either way, he must race against time to stop the killer before more bodies are discovered, and before his own family gets pulled into danger. Populated by real figures of the day, from Benjamin Disraeli to novelist Wilkie Collins to, of course, Florence Nightingale herself, and steeped in historical details of 1860s London, The Nightingale Affair plays out against a backdrop of a rapidly changing society. Most of all, it is a pure reading delight, offering shocks, unforgettably vivid scenes, and surprising twists.

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St. Paul, Minnesota. October 1, 1917. High above the city, a renowned local financier named Artemis Dodge lies facedown on the floor of his armored penthouse sanctuary, a single bullet hole in his head. Thirty stories up, in the city’s tallest building, and not a shred of evidence or sign pointing to anyone having broken into the wealthy man’s fortress. It is—to all appearances—an impossible crime. Enter Shadwell Rafferty: Irishman, St. Paul saloonkeeper, sometime detective, and old friend of the celebrated sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Summoned by Louis B. Hill—son of railroad magnate James J. Hill—to investigate, Rafferty descends into a world dominated by greedy tycoons and awash in political intrigue and wartime fearmongering. Suspects lurk in every corner of the city—including Dodge’s beautiful young widow, his slippery assistant, and a shadowy anarchist—and Rafferty pursues them from the streets of Ramsey Hill and the rooms of the Ryan Hotel to the labyrinthine caves under the Schmidt brewery. Matching wits with his foes at the police department and his unsavory rival, the St. Paul detective Mordecai Jones, Rafferty knows that in order to bring a killer to justice he must first unravel the riddle of a single bullet fired in a locked room, three hundred feet above the streets of St. Paul.Set during a bitter streetcar strike and amid the clandestine activities of a ruthless commission charged with enforcing wartime patriotism, Larry Millett has created a classic and perfectly executed locked-room mystery in the great tradition of John Dickson Carr. From locked rooms and civil unrest to murder and wartime paranoia, The Magic Bullet presents Rafferty’s most challenging case, and its gripping conclusion—with a timely assist from Sherlock Holmes—finds both Rafferty and Millett at the top of their games.

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‘Wordy is about the intoxication of writing; my sense of playful versatility; different voices for different matters: the polemical voice for political columns; the sharp-eyed descriptive take for profiles; poetic precision in grappling with the hard task of translating art into words; lyrical recall for memory pieces. And informing everything a rich sense of the human comedy and the ways it plays through historical time. It's also a reflection on writers who have been shamelessly gloried in verbal abundance; the performing tumble of language - those who have especially inspired me - Dickens and Melville; Joyce and Marquez.’ Simon SchamaSir Simon Schama has been at the forefront of the arts, political commentary, social analysis and historical study for over forty years. As a teacher of Art History and an award-winning television presenter of iconic history-based programming, Simon is equally a prolific bestselling writer and award-winning columnist for many of the world’s foremost publishers, broadsheet newspapers, periodicals and magazines. His commissioned subjects over the years have been numerous and wide ranging – from the music of Tom Waits, to the works of Sir Quentin Blake; the history of the colour blue, to discussing what skills an actor needs to create a unique performance of Falstaff. Schama’s tastes are wide-ranging as they are eloquent, incisive, witty and thought provoking and have entertained and educated the readers of some of the world’s most respected publications - the Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar and Rolling Stone magazine. Wordy is a celebration of one of the world’s foremost writers. This collection of fifty essays chosen by the man himself stretches across four decades and is a treasure trove for all those who have a passion for the arts, politics, food and life.

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Bad Girls Go to Hell. Cannibal Holocaust. Eve and the Handyman. Examining film culture’s ongoing fascination with the low, bad, and sleazy faces of cinema, Sleaze Artists brings together film scholars with a shared interest in the questions posed by disreputable movies and suspect cinema. They explore the ineffable quality of “sleaze” in relation to a range of issues, including the production realities of low-budget exploitation pictures and the ever-shifting terrain of reception and taste.Writing about horror, exploitation, and sexploitation films, the contributors delve into topics ranging from the place of the “Aztec horror film” in debates about Mexican national identity to a cycle of 1960s films exploring homosexual desire in the military. One contributor charts the distribution saga of Mario Bava’s 1972 film Lisa and the Devil through the highs and lows of art cinema, fringe television, grindhouse circuits, and connoisseur DVD markets. Another offers a new perspective on the work of Doris Wishman, the New York housewife turned sexploitation director of the 1960s who has become a cult figure in bad-cinema circles over the past decade. Other contributors analyze the relation between image and sound in sexploitation films and Italian horror movies, the advertising strategies adopted by sexploitation producers during the early 1960s, the relationship between art and trash in Todd Haynes’s oeuvre, and the ways that the Friday the 13th series complicates the distinction between “trash” and “legitimate” cinema. The volume closes with an essay on why cinephiles love to hate the movies.Contributors. Harry M. Benshoff, Kay Dickinson, Chris Fujiwara, Colin Gunckel, Joan Hawkins, Kevin Heffernan, Matt Hills, Chuck Kleinhans, Tania Modleski, Eric Schaefer, Jeffrey Sconce, Greg Taylor

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The Alps are Europe's highest mountain range; their broad arc stretches right across the centre of the continent, encompassing a wide range of traditions and cultures. In former times the mountains were feared as the realm of wild and dangerous beasts, and the few travellers who ventured over high passes such as the Simplon or the Great St. Bernard expected to encounter tempests and torments of hellish proportions. But over time the Alps became celebrated by writers for their beauty rather than their savagery. In the nineteenth century, inspired in part by the work of poets such as Byron and Shelley, tourists began flocking to the mountains, and with the development of winter sports a hundred years ago the fate of the Alps as one of the great tourist playgrounds of the world was sealed. Andrew Beattie explores the turbulent past and vibrant present of this landscape, where early pioneers of tourism, mountaineering and scientific research, along with the enduring legacies of historical regimes from the Romans to the Nazis, have all left their mark. Historical Figures: From Julius Caesar and Hannibal to Napoleon and William Tell, the position of the Alps at the heart of Europe has led to centuries of war and conflict. Folklore and Tradition: The wildness of the mountains has inspired a unique popular culture, from legendary tales of dragons flying among the peaks to performances of religious passion plays in valley towns. Writers, Artists and Film-Makers: From the Romantic poets to Charles Dickens and Mark Twain; from Turner and Ruskin to the film-maker Leni Riefenstahl; from James Bond to Heidi and The Sound of Music; the beautiful scenery of the Alps has provided the setting for dozens of books, poems, films and paintings through the centuries.

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SHORT LISTED FOR THE ACKERLEY PRIZE FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY ***'This astonishing book describes a cruel, feral existence and is worthy of standing on the shelf next to George Orwell's Down And Out In Paris And London (1933) as another classic about human exploitation.' - Daily Mail'Chisholm's story is immersive and often thrilling ... He's a fine writer.' - WSJ'Kitchen Confidential for Generation Z' - Fortune'An English waiters riveting account of working in Paris' - Daily Mail'Visceral and unbelievably compelling' - Emerald Fennell'Vividly written and merciless in its detail' - Edward Stourton'An excellent book' - Strong Words magazine'A Dickensian tale of a young man's trial by fire in a French bistro gives rise to biting commentary on Parisian culture in Chisholm's intoxicating debut' - Publisher's Weekly'Ah, Paris... gastronomie magnifique and... insane shit going on behind the scenes. A Waiter in Paris charts Edward Chisholm's jaw-dropping experiences while serving tables in the French capital, a demi-monde of sadistic managers, thieves, fighting for tips and drug dealers. Seems like not much has changedsince George Orwell worked the same beat.' - Evening StandardA waiter's job is to deceive you. They want you to believe in a luxurious calm because on the other side of that door... is hell.Edward Chisholm's spellbinding memoir of his time as a Parisian waiter takes you below the surface of one of the most iconic cities in the world and right into its glorious underbelly. The waiter inhabits a world of inhuman hours, snatched sleep and dive bars; scraping by on coffee, bread and cigarettes, often under sadistic managers, with a wage so low you're fighting your colleagues for tips.It's physically demanding, frequently humiliating and incredibly competitive. And with a cast of thieves, narcissists, ex-Legionnaires, paperless immigrants and drug dealers, it makes for a compelling and eye-opening read.

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Get cosy with Someday at Christmas, the perfect festive read'A GORGEOUS, COSY READ, RICH IN DELICIOUS WINTERY DETAIL' KATE YOUNG'THE PERFECT FESTIVE STORY. SWEET, BLISSFULLY ROMANTIC AND BURSTING WITH HEART . . . OH MY HEART I LOVED IT' MIRANDA DICKINSON'ADORABLE' ELLA RISBRIDGER'THE LITERARY EQUIVALENT OF A MINCE PIE WARM OUT OF THE OVEN, WITH A DOLLOP OF BRANDY CUSTARD ON THE SIDE' SARRA MANNING, RED MAGAZINE'YOU WILL FALL IN LOVE WITH SHELL SMITH' PRIMA_________________________________________________The most delightful Christmas romance. Shell Smith is the most popular make-up artist on the ART counter at Duke & Sons, a beautiful but old-fashioned department store in her hometown. But whilst Shell's love life is looking up, now that she's dating long-time crush Nick, and business is booming in the beauty department, the rest of the store is noticeably quiet . . .The owner's grandson Callum has come up with some creative ways to keep Duke & Sons afloat this Christmas, including allowing a production company to secretly film a romcom after hours. When Callum recruits her to help out, Shell finds there is more to Mr Duke Jr. than sharp suits and a business-like demeanour.With a store to save and her own romance with Nick going off-script, Christmas just got complicated for Shell. But this is the most wonderful time of the year, so there must be a happy ending awaiting . . . Right?_________________________________________________'Warm, funny, sexy, gorgeous setting and characters. I loved it so much. (Also it should totally be a film.)' 5*'I'll struggle to get into another book after this. I absolutely LOVED it.' 5*'Just wonderful! Effortlessly diverse and inclusive' 5*'A wonderful Christmas read that will leave you feeling happier than when you started, reaching out for the cocoa and wanting to put on a Christmas movie. Perfection' 5*

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The first book to trace the critical reception of the great African American woman writer, attending not only to her fiction but to her nonfiction and critical writings. Toni Morrison (1931-2019) is the most important American novelist since Faulkner, the most significant American woman writer since Dickinson, and the most widely read African American public intellectual of the last half century. Her influence as a writer, critic, editor, teacher, and scholar is profound: she changed the face of literature and literary criticism in the US, if not worldwide. Yet despite the ever-expanding field of Morrison scholarship, no book tracing her critical reception has existed, until now. The book is as much a cultural history of America as a reception history of an American writer. Morrison worked brilliantly in many genres - fiction, of course (novels and short stories); drama/staged performance; poetry; non-fiction on historical, social, and political issues; and critical writings on the work of others and on her own work. She generated a literary-critical methodology that recognizes and embraces rather than ignores the African American presence in US literature, and thus transformed American academics' attitude toward American letters. The story of Morrison's achievement in making a home for herself - and for other women and people of color - in the stony bedrock of "white male" American literature is the subject of this book.

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Teachers of literature make judgments about value. They tell their students which works are powerful, beautiful, surprising, strange, or insightful—and thus, which are more worthy of time and attention than others. Yet the field of literary studies has largely disavowed judgments of artistic value on the grounds that they are inevitably rooted in prejudice or entangled in problems of social status. For several decades now, professors have called their work value-neutral, simply a means for students to gain cultural, political, or historical knowledge. ​Michael W. Clune’s provocative book challenges these objections to judgment and offers a positive account of literary studies as an institution of aesthetic education. It is impossible, Clune argues, to separate judgments about literary value from the practices of interpretation and analysis that constitute any viable model of literary expertise. Clune envisions a progressive politics freed from the strictures of dogmatic equality and enlivened by education in aesthetic judgment, transcending consumer culture and market preferences. Drawing on psychological and philosophical theories of knowledge and perception, Clune advocates for the cultivation of what John Keats called “negative capability,” the capacity to place existing criteria in doubt and to discover new concepts and new values in artworks. Moving from theory to practice, Clune takes up works by Keats, Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Samuel Beckett, and Thomas Bernhard, showing how close reading—the profession’s traditional key skill—harnesses judgment to open new modes of perception.

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A new full cast adventure for the Eighth Doctor. The Doctor's past is catching up with him. And so is his future...As a dark chapter dawns for the universe, a friend is at hand. But how can River Song help the Doctor if she can't meet him? 2.1 BEACHHEAD by Nicholas Briggs. In an attempt to recharge his batteries after his confrontation with the Eleven, the Doctor takes Liv and Helen to the sleepy English seaside village of Stegmoor. But they find the village in turmoil and, to make matters worse, their arrival uncovers a mystery from the Doctor's past which threatens the future safety of the planet. Can the Doctor prevent the Voord from invading Earth? And more importantly why have they come in the first place? 2.2 SCENES FROM HER LIFE by John Dorney. Investigating the appearance of the Voord on Earth, the Doctor, Liv and Helen follow a trail which takes them to the other side of the universe. There they discover a mysterious and almost deserted gothic city lost in space and time, in which the grotesque inhabitants are conducting a vile and inhumane experiment.The Doctor and his companions must hurry to save the lives of those in danger before the experiment is a success and the unimaginable consequences become all too real. 2.3 THE GIFT by Marc Platt. The TARDIS deposits its crew on Earth in San Francisco, 1906. There they find an actor-manager desperate to stage his definitive production of King Lear. But a real storm is headed their way when he becomes the possessor of a mysterious psychic 'Gift' which is hungry for power and intent on wreaking havoc and destruction. But exposure to so much psychic activity has the Doctor becoming increasingly erratic. Can he battle his demons and save the world? 2.4 THE SONOMANCER by Matt Fitton. On the other side of the galaxy a mining company is exploiting the already unstable planet of Syra for every precious mineral it contains. River Song is attempting to save the native people. She needs the Doctor's help, but she also knows he mustn't yet discover her true identity. The final confrontation sees the Doctor once again face his enemy the Eleven in an attempt to prevent the destruction of Syra and the genocide of its inhabitants.Fullerlove (Yeva), John Banks (Galactic Heritage) and Mark Bonnar as The Eleven. Doctor Who - Doom Coalition is a follow-up to Big Finish's Dark Eyes series - the first of which received the Best Online Drama at the 2014 BBC Drama Awards.British TV and Hollywood star Paul McGann returns to his hugely popular portrayal of the Doctor (as seen on BBC TV in 2013's Night of the Doctor).Hattie Morahan has now appeared opposite two British fictional greats - the Doctor here, and Sherlock Holmes in 2015's film Mr Holmes with Sir Ian McKellen and Nicola Walker was one of the longest serving actresses in BBC's Spooks series.CAST: Paul McGann (The Doctor), Alex Kingston (River Song), Nicola Walker (Liv Chenka), Hattie Morahan (Helen Sinclair), Rebecca Night (Matilda Gregson), Julia Hills (Phillipa Gregson/Dispatch), Kirsty Besterman (Ishtek), Andrew Dickens (Voord Guard), Emma Cunniffe (Caleera), Vincent Franklin (Lord Stormblood), Jacqueline King (Lady Sepulchra), Hamish Clark (Swordfish), James Jordan (Charles Virgil McLean), Paul Marc Davis (Pepe Gonzalez), Cory English (Sam Sonora), Laura Harding (Ethel Halliday), Enzo Squillino Jnr (Aldo Deluca), Derek Ezenagu (Ruslan), Janet Fullerlove (Yeva), John Banks (Galactic Heritage) and Mark Bonnar as The Eleven.

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The explosive spread of democracy has radically transformed the international political landscape and captured the attention of academics, policy makers, and activists alike. With interest in democratization still growing, Nathan J. Brown and other leading political scientists assess the current state of the field, reflecting on the causes and diffusion of democracy over the past two decades. The volume focuses on three issues very much at the heart of discussions about democracy today: dictatorship, development, and diffusion. The essays first explore the surprising but necessary relationship between democracy and authoritarianism; they next analyze the introduction of democracy in developing countries; last, they examine how international factors affect the democratization process. In exploring these key issues, the contributors ask themselves three questions: What causes a democracy to emerge and succeed? Does democracy make things better? Can democracy be successfully promoted? In contemplating these questions, The Dynamics of Democratization offers a frank and critical assessment of the field for students and scholars of comparative politics and the political economy of development. Contributors: Gregg A. Brazinsky, George Washington University; Nathan J. Brown, George Washington University; Kathleen Bruhn, University of California at Santa Barbara; Valerie J. Bunce, Cornell University; Jose Antonio Cheibub, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Bruce J. Dickson, George Washington University; M. Steven Fish, University of California at Berkeley; John Gerring, Boston University; Henry E. Hale, George Washington University; Susan D. Hyde, Yale University; Craig M. Kauffman, George Washington University; Staffan I. Lindberg, University of Florida; Sara Meerow, University of Amsterdam; James Raymond Vreeland, Georgetown University; Sharon L. Wolchik, George Washington University

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The explosive spread of democracy has radically transformed the international political landscape and captured the attention of academics, policy makers, and activists alike. With interest in democratization still growing, Nathan J. Brown and other leading political scientists assess the current state of the field, reflecting on the causes and diffusion of democracy over the past two decades. The volume focuses on three issues very much at the heart of discussions about democracy today: dictatorship, development, and diffusion. The essays first explore the surprising but necessary relationship between democracy and authoritarianism; they next analyze the introduction of democracy in developing countries; last, they examine how international factors affect the democratization process. In exploring these key issues, the contributors ask themselves three questions: What causes a democracy to emerge and succeed? Does democracy make things better? Can democracy be successfully promoted? In contemplating these questions, The Dynamics of Democratization offers a frank and critical assessment of the field for students and scholars of comparative politics and the political economy of development. Contributors: Gregg A. Brazinsky, George Washington University; Nathan J. Brown, George Washington University; Kathleen Bruhn, University of California at Santa Barbara; Valerie J. Bunce, Cornell University; Jose Antonio Cheibub, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Bruce J. Dickson, George Washington University; M. Steven Fish, University of California at Berkeley; John Gerring, Boston University; Henry E. Hale, George Washington University; Susan D. Hyde, Yale University; Craig M. Kauffman, George Washington University; Staffan I. Lindberg, University of Florida; Sara Meerow, University of Amsterdam; James Raymond Vreeland, Georgetown University; Sharon L. Wolchik, George Washington University

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Understanding the culture of living with hymnbooks offers new insight into the histories of poetry, literacy, and religious devotion.It stands barely three inches high, a small brick of a book. The pages are skewed a bit, and evidence of a small handprint remains on the worn, cheap leather covers that don’t quite close. The book bears the marks of considerable use. But why—and for whom—was it made? Christopher N. Phillips’s The Hymnal is the first study to reconstruct the practices of reading and using hymnals, which were virtually everywhere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Isaac Watts invented a small, words-only hymnal at the dawn of the eighteenth century. For the next two hundred years, such hymnals were their owners’ constant companions at home, school, church, and in between. They were children's first books, slaves’ treasured heirlooms, and sources of devotional reading for much of the English-speaking world. Hymnals helped many people learn to memorize poetry and to read; they provided space to record family memories, pass notes in church, and carry everything from railroad tickets to holy cards to business letters. In communities as diverse as African Methodists, Reform Jews, Presbyterians, Methodists, Roman Catholics, and Unitarians, hymnals were integral to religious and literate life. An extended historical treatment of the hymn as a read text and media form, rather than a source used solely for singing, this book traces the lives people lived with hymnals, from obscure schoolchildren to Emily Dickinson. Readers will discover a wealth of connections between reading, education, poetry, and religion in Phillips’s lively accounts of hymnals and their readers.

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In Twenty Questions, one of America's finest poet-critics leads readers into the mysteries of poetry: how it draws on our lives, and how it leads us back into them. In a series of linked essays progressing from the autobiographical to the critical-and closing with a remarkable translation of Horace's Ars Poetica unavailable elsewhere-J. D. McClatchy's latest book offers an intimate and illuminating look into the poetic mind. McClatchy begins with a portrait of his development as a poet and as a man, and provides vibrant details about some of those who helped shape his sensibility-from Anne Sexton in her final days, to Harold Bloom, his enigmatic teacher at Yale, to James Merrill, a wise and witty mentor. All of these glimpses into McClatchy's personal history enhance our understanding of a coming of age from ingenious reader to accomplished poet-critic. Later sections range through poetry past and present-from Emily Dickinson to Seamus Heaney and W. S. Merwin-with incisive criticism generously interspersed with vivid anecdotes about McClatchy's encounters with other poets' lives and work. A critical unpacking of Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Miss Blount" is interwoven with compassionate psychological portrait of a brilliant poet plagued by both romantic longings and debilitating physical deformities. There are surprising takes on the literary imagination as well: a look at Elizabeth Bishop through her letters, and a tribute to the Broadway lyrics of Stephen Sondheim and the tradition of light verse. The questions McClatchy poses of poems prompt a fresh look and the last word. Free of scholarly pretension, elegantly and movingly written, Twenty Questions is a bright, open window onto a public and private experience of poetry, to be appreciated by poets, readers, and critics alike.

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Set between January 1862 and January 1863, this second installment in the ambitious Civil War series paints an unforgettable portrait of the year that turned a secessionist rebellion into a war of emancipationIncluding eleven never-before-published pieces, here are more than 140 messages, proclamations, newspaper stories, letters, diary entries, memoir excerpts, and poems by more than eighty participants and observers, among them Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, George B. McClellan, Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Clara Barton, Harriet Jacobs, and George Templeton Strong, as well as soldiers Charles B. Haydon and Henry Livermore Abbott; diarists Kate Stone and Judith McGuire; and war correspondents George E. Stephens and George Smalley. The selections include vivid and haunting narratives of battles-Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, the gunboat war on the Western rivers, Shiloh, the Seven Days, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Iuka, Corinth, Perryville, Fredericksburg, Stones River-as well as firsthand accounts of life and death in the military hospitals in Richmond and Georgetown; of the impact of war on Massachusetts towns and Louisiana plantations; of the struggles of runaway slaves and the mounting fears of slaveholders; and of the deliberations of the cabinet in Washington, as Lincoln moved toward what he would call "the central act of my administration and the great event of the nineteenth century": the revolutionary proclamation of emancipation.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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* THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER * 'An enthralling read' GUARDIAN 'A thrilling blend of fantasy and horror, richly imagined and masterfully executed' SFX 'Terrific . . . A book that creeps up on you, wearing brass knuckles' CONN IGGULDEN _______________ The first in a captivating new historical fantasy series, ORDINARY MONSTERS introduces the Talents with a catastrophic vision of the Victorian world, and the gifted, broken children who must save it. There in the shadows was a figure in a cloak, at the bottom of the cobblestone stair, and it turned and stared up at them as still and unmoving as a pillar of darkness, but it had no face, only smoke . . . 1882. North of Edinburgh, on the edge of an isolated loch, lies an institution of crumbling stone, where a strange doctor collects orphans with unusual abilities. In London, two children with such powers are hunted by a figure of darkness – a man made of smoke. Charlie Ovid discovers a gift for healing himself through a brutal upbringing in Mississippi, while Marlowe, a foundling from a railway freight, glows with a strange bluish light. When two grizzled detectives are recruited to escort them north to safety, they are confronted by a sinister, dangerous force that threatens to upend the world as they know it. What follows is a journey from the gaslit streets of London to the lochs of Scotland, where other gifted children – the Talents – have been gathered at Cairndale Institute, and the realms of the dead and the living collide. As secrets within the Institute unfurl, Marlowe, Charlie and the rest of the Talents will discover the truth about their abilities and the nature of the force that is stalking them: that the worst monsters sometimes come bearing the sweetest gifts. _______________ 'A dazzling mountain of wild invention, Dickensian eccentrics, supernatural horrors and gripping suspense' JOE HILL 'Expansive in scope and storytelling, Ordinary Monsters builds an electrifying Victorian world' CARI THOMAS J.M. Miro's book 'Ordinary Monsters' was a #5 Sunday Times bestseller w/e 04-06-2022.

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What did the founders of America think about religion? Until now, there has been no reliable and impartial compendium of the founders' own remarks on religious matters that clearly answers the question. This book fills that gap. A lively collection of quotations on everything from the relationship between church and state to the status of women, it is the most comprehensive and trustworthy resource available on this timely topic. The book calls to the witness stand all the usual suspects--George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams--as well as many lesser known but highly influential luminaries, among them Continental Congress President Elias Boudinot, Declaration of Independence signer Charles Carroll, and John Dickinson, "the Pennsylvania Farmer." It also gives voice to two founding "mothers," Abigail Adams and Martha Washington. The founders quoted here ranged from the piously evangelical to the steadfastly unorthodox. Some were such avid students of theology that they were treated as equals by the leading ministers of their day. Others vacillated in their conviction. James Madison's religious beliefs appeared to weaken as he grew older. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, seemed to warm to religion late in life. This compilation lays out the founders' positions on more than seventy topics, including the afterlife, the death of loved ones, divorce, the raising of children, the reliability of biblical texts, and the nature of Islam and Judaism. Partisans of various stripes have long invoked quotations from the founding fathers to lend credence to their own views on religion and politics. This book, by contrast, is the first of its genre to be grounded in the careful examination of original documents by a professional historian. Conveniently arranged alphabetically by topic, it provides multiple viewpoints and accurate quotations. Readers of all religious persuasions--or of none--will find this book engrossing.

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