Search results for ""author anna""

A beautifully illustrated look at our wonderful watery worldThis Drop of Water begins with a thunderstorm on a hot summer day. Suddenly - splash! A drop of water hits a girl right on the nose. Where did it come from? And where will it go? She wants to know! The book uses this simple premise as a jumping-off point to explore what water is, where it comes from and how essential it is to life here on Earth. It explores topics as important and wide-ranging as how the Earth formed, the water cycle, clouds and the tides. It also highlights just how precious a resource water is. A beautifully illustrated picture book with friendly narrative text by the award-winning author of This Little Pebble, which was shortlisted for prestigious science and art awards, This Drop of Water will make the topic come alive for readers aged 7 and up.List of contents:Thunderstorm!Watery worldIt came from outer spaceFlowing downhillInto the oceansUnderwaterOut of the seaCloudsHere comes the rain!The big freezeWater shapes the worldWater undergroundWater for plantsWater for animalsWater for usTurn on the tap!Down the plugholePrecious waterWeird waterRound and roundWater activitiesGlossary and index

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Smelly Feet investigates disgusting phenomena in the human body, from sweat and snot to foot fungus, diarrhoea and, of course, farting and burping.Disgusting and Dreadful Science features a look at the weird, revolting and shocking aspects of science for children at KS2. From plants and life cycles to the human body and animal adaptations, the books offer fascinating facts, fun examples and true-life stories to provide ways in to understanding solid scientific principles. Perfect for readers aged 9 and up.

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In The Curious Gardener, Anna Pavord brings together in 12 chapters - one from each month of the year - 72 pieces on all aspects of gardening. From what to do in each month and how to get the best from flowers, plants, herbs, fruit and vegetables, through reflections on the weather, soil, the English landscape and favourite old gardening clothes, to office greenery, spring in New York, waterfalls, Derek Jarman and garden design, Anna Pavord always has something interesting to say and says it with great style and candour. The perfect book to guide you through the gardening year and, on days when the weather keeps the most courageous gardener indoors, the perfect book to curl up with beside the fire.

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Animals on the Edge takes a dramatic look at endangered animals around the world, and what is being done to help them. Each book focuses on a different species, taking the reader on a journey to learn about what is being done to help animals in danger, both in the wild and at the zoo. From investigating daily routines, such as how animals hunt and what they eat, to hard-hitting facts about the causes of species extinction in the wild and how conservation efforts and zoo programmes can help, these books are packed with exciting real-life tales and inside information as well as amazing photography throughout. Presented in a magazine style, through accessible chunks o finformation, and packed full of full-colour photos and graphics, this exciting, high-interest series will appeal to reluctant and able readers alike, with key links to the geography curriculum. Includes feature panels with animal stats, facts and real-life rescue stories as well as further information on what readers can do to get involved.

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Theatre in Pieces: politics, poetics and interdisciplinary collaboration is an innovative compilation of seven highly acclaimed productions by key practitioners of non-playwright-driven theatre. Each playtext is reproduced in full and accompanied by extensive notes from members of the original producing theatre. A substantial introduction by Anna Furse provides an overview of the works and contextualises their reading by revealing how a script can emerge from or provoke a collaborative devising process. The works featured include: Hotel Methuselah, Imitating the Dog/Pete Brooks; Don Juan.Who?/Don Juan.Kdo?, Athletes of the Heart; A Girl Skipping, Graeme Miller; Trans-Acts, Julia Bardsley; US, 1966 (with an introduction by Peter Brook); Miss America, Split Britches and 48 Minutes for Palestine, Mojisola Adebayo and Ashtar Theatre.

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So you want to be a pirate? Use this book to find out how to win a pirate battle, what to do if you lose a leg, and how to find treasure, lots of it! White Wolves Non-fiction is a guided reading scheme which takes a high-interest approach to core geography, history and science topics. It has been created to appeal to children and reflect the range of texts in the real world, from guidebooks to cookbooks. Covering a wide range of topics at different reading levels, these books are ideal for classroom and topic libraries, and for teaching non-fiction literacy skills in a curriculum context.

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"Ziegler’s thoughtful, empathetic play brings home with bitter comedy the unlovely male-domination of this world in the 1950s ... glorious." Independent London 1953. Scientists are on the verge of discovering what they call the secret of life: the DNA double helix. Providing the key is driven young physicist Rosalind Franklin. But if the double helix was the breakthrough of the 20th century, then what kept Franklin out of the history books? A play about ambition, isolation, and the race for greatness. Photograph 51 premiered in the UK in London's West End in 2015 in a production which starred Nicole Kidman, where it won the WhatsOnStage Award for Best New Play. Published for the first time in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, this edition features a brand-new introduction by Mandy Greenfield.

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From New York Times bestselling author-illustrator of the Llama Llama books comes a new character ready to dig his way into your heart!Here come the BIG RIGS rolling down the street. Thumpa-thumpabumpa-bumpaBEEP! BEEP! BEEP!There's Loader and Dump Truck, Backhoe and Crane. They're ready to transform a vacant lot into a neighborhood park. And who wants to help most of all?Little Excavator! But are there any jobs for someone so small?Anna Dewdney's signature rhyming text and inviting illustrations make this a perfect read aloud for for fans of things that go!

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Margery Kempe. Aemilia Lanyer. Aphra Behn. Lady Mary. Jane Austen. Warned not to write – and certainly not to bite – these women put pen to paper anyway and wrote themselves into history. ‘Smart, funny and highly readable... a tour de force.’ A.L. Kennedy Ever since Sappho first put stylus to papyrus, women who write have been labelled mad, undisciplined and dangerous. Funny and provocative, Eve Bites Back offers an alternative history of English literature. Placing the female contemporaries of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton centre stage, Anna Beer builds a vibrant new canon through Restoration wits, scandalous sensation novelists and medieval mystics. Delving into the lives and work of eight pioneers – Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, Mary Wortley Montagu, Jane Austen and Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Beer uncovers the struggles and triumphs of these gamechangers, ground-breakers and genre-makers.

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During a tumultuous period when financial speculation began rapidly to outpace industrial production and consumption, Victorian financial journalists commonly explained the instability of finance by criticizing its inherent artifice—drawing persistent attention to what they called “fictitious capital.” In a shift that naturalized this artifice, this critique of fictitious capital virtually disappeared by the 1860s, replaced by notions of fickle investor psychology and mental equilibrium encapsulated in the fascinating metaphor of “psychic economy.” In close rhetorical readings of financial journalism, political economy, and the works of Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, Kornbluh examines the psychological framing of economics, one of the nineteenth century’s most enduring legacies, reminding us that the current dominant paradigm for understanding financial crisis has a history of its own. She shows how novels illuminate this displacement and ironize ideological metaphors linking psychology and economics, thus demonstrating literature’s unique facility for evaluating ideas in process. Inheritors of this novelistic project, Marx and Freud each advance a critique of psychic economy that refuses to naturalize capitalism.

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Whether it is being studied or critiqued, the art canon is usually understood as an authoritative list of important works and artists. This collection breaks with the idea of a singular, transcendent canon. Through provocative case studies, it demonstrates that the content of any canon is both historically and culturally specific and dependent on who is responsible for the canon’s production and maintenance. The contributors explore how, where, why, and by whom canons are formed; how they function under particular circumstances; how they are maintained; and why they may undergo change.Focusing on various moments from the seventeenth century to the present, the contributors cover a broad geographic terrain, encompassing the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Taiwan, and South Africa. Among the essays are examinations of the working and reworking of a canon by an influential nineteenth-century French critic, the limitations placed on what was acceptable as canonical in American textbooks produced during the Cold War, the failed attempt to define a canon of Rembrandt’s works, and the difficulties of constructing an artistic canon in parts of the globe marked by colonialism and the imposition of Eurocentric ideas of artistic value. The essays highlight the diverse factors that affect the production of art canons: market forces, aesthetic and political positions, nationalism and ingrained ideas concerning the cultural superiority of particular groups, perceptions of gender and race, artists’ efforts to negotiate their status within particular professional environments, and the dynamics of art history as an academic discipline and discourse. This volume is a call to historicize canons, acknowledging both their partisanship and its implications for the writing of art history.Contributors. Jenny Anger, Marcia Brennan, Anna Brzyski, James Cutting, Paul Duro, James Elkins, Barbara Jaffee, Robert Jensen, Jane C. Ju, Monica Kjellman-Chapin, Julie L. McGee, Terry Smith, Linda Stone-Ferrier, Despina Stratigakos

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Although we tend to think of television primarily as a household fixture, TV monitors outside the home are widespread: in bars, laundromats, and stores; conveying flight arrival and departure times in airports; uniting crowds at sports events and allaying boredom in waiting rooms; and helping to pass the time in workplaces of all kinds. In Ambient Television Anna McCarthy explores the significance of this pervasive phenomenon, tracing the forms of conflict, commerce, and community that television generates outside the home.Discussing the roles television has played in different institutions from 1945 to the present day, McCarthy draws on a wide array of sources. These include retail merchandising literature, TV industry trade journals, and journalistic discussions of public viewing, as well as the work of cultural geographers, architectural theorists, media scholars, and anthropologists. She also uses photography as a research tool, documenting the uses and meanings of television sets in the built environment, and focuses on such locations as the tavern and the department store to show how television is used to support very different ideas about gender, class, and consumption. Turning to contemporary examples, McCarthy discusses practices such as Turner Private Networks’ efforts to transform waiting room populations into advertising audiences and the use of point-of-sale video that influences brand visibility and consumer behavior. Finally, she inquires into the activist potential of out-of-home television through a discussion of the video practices of two contemporary artists in everyday public settings.Scholars and students of cultural, visual, urban, American, film, and television studies will be interested in this thought-provoking, interdisciplinary book.

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Author Interview on The Brian Lehrer Show America is a weight-obsessed nation. Over the last decade, there's been an explosion of concern in the U.S. about people getting fatter. Plaintiffs are now filing lawsuits arguing that discrimination against fat people should be illegal. Fat Rights asks the first provocative questions that need to be raised about adding weight to lists of currently protected traits like race, gender, and disability. Is body fat an indicator of a character flaw or of incompetence on the job? Does it pose risks or costs to employers they should be allowed to evade? Or is it simply a stigmatized difference that does not bear on the ability to perform most jobs? Could we imagine fatness as part of workplace diversity? Considering fat discrimination prompts us to rethink these basic questions that lawyers, judges, and ordinary citizens ask before a new trait begins to look suitable for antidiscrimination coverage. Fat Rights draws on little-known legal cases brought by fat citizens as well as significant lawsuits over other forms of bodily difference (such as transgenderism), asking why the boundaries of our antidiscrimination laws rest where they do. Fatness, argues Kirkland, is both similar to and provocatively different from other protected traits, raising long–standing dilemmas in antidiscrimination law into stark relief. Though options for defending difference may be scarce, Kirkland evaluates the available strategies and proposes new ways of navigating this new legal question. Fat Rights enters the fray of the obesity debate from a new perspective: our inherited civil rights tradition. The scope is broad, covering much more than just weight discrimination and drawing the reader into the larger context of antidiscrimination protections and how they can be justified for a new group.

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Deliberative democracy – whereby people debate competing ideas before agreeing upon political action – must surely rest on its capacity to include all points of view. But how does this inclusive framework engage with activism that occurs outside of, and in opposition to, deliberative systems themselves? Activism, Inclusion, and the Challenges of Deliberative Democracy challenges the inherent contradiction of a framework that includes activism but doesn’t require sustained exchange with activists, instead measuring the value of their efforts in terms of broader deliberative democratic outcomes. Through the examples of ACT UP, Black Lives Matter, and other contemporary activism, Anna Drake explores the systemic oppression that prevents activists from participating in deliberative systems as equals. This nuanced study concludes that deliberative democrats must address activism on its own terms, external to and separate from deliberative systems that are shaped by injustices. Only then can activism’s distinct democratic contribution be taken seriously.

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Deliberative democracy – whereby people debate competing ideas before agreeing upon political action – must surely rest on its capacity to include all points of view. But how does this inclusive framework engage with activism that occurs outside of, and in opposition to, deliberative systems themselves? Activism, Inclusion, and the Challenges of Deliberative Democracy challenges the inherent contradiction of a framework that includes activism but doesn’t require sustained exchange with activists, instead measuring the value of their efforts in terms of broader deliberative democratic outcomes. Through the examples of ACT UP, Black Lives Matter, and other contemporary activism, Anna Drake explores the systemic oppression that prevents activists from participating in deliberative systems as equals. This nuanced study concludes that deliberative democrats must address activism on its own terms, external to and separate from deliberative systems that are shaped by injustices. Only then can activism’s distinct democratic contribution be taken seriously.

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Discover a world filled with vibrant color and creative possibilities as you explore an array of painting, drawing, printing, and lettering techniques and styles using vivid colors of artist’s ink. In Brilliant Inks, artist, illustrator, and top Skillshare teacher Anna Sokolova shares her own unique methods that get the most out of this versatile medium. With her guidance, create beginner-friendly florals and foliage, animals, still lifes, figures and portraits, and hand lettering. Learn about the various types of inks and the best tools and surfaces to use with them. Then, try basic techniques such as color mixing, creating visual texture, negative painting, and splattering. Work with a variety of brushes, dip pens, and droppers to get different looks, and see how adding common household supplies such as salt and bleach can create the most amazing effects. Use these methods in lessons designed to improve skills and boost confidence. Be inspired to make projects such as a bracelet, paper art dolls, a tote bag, and a decorated book. Full instructions and templates make projects fun and stress free. This incredible material offers so much that’s waiting to be discovered: Vivid monotypes made in minutes using a combination of painting and printmaking methods Custom palettes created with unique blended colors Watercolor-like translucent washes and opaque silhouettes Techniques for creating beautiful motifs using simple brushstrokes and patterns. Begin your colorful journey today with Brilliant Inks and see how far your creativity can go! Perfect for all skill levels, the books in the Art for Modern Makers series take a fun, practical approach to learning about and working with paints and other art mediums to create beautiful DIY projects and crafts.

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Nestled at the heart of the Wiltshire village of Essington St Mary lies a charming park which boasts two magnificent magnolia trees. New arrivals to the neighbourhood, including those being helped by a local charitable trust, are strolling in their shade. Amongst them is Brett, just out of the care system; Carla, escaping an abusive ex-partner; and Matthew, a widower whose house burnt down while he was in hospital.As new beginnings dawn and the coming weeks unfold, Brett, Carla and Matthew will set out on paths to lives they could not have imagined when they first came to Magnolia Gardens.

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Sisters Mattie, Nell and Renie have all managed to escape their oppressive and bullying father, but now separated, the girls must draw upon their strength and courage to build new lives for themselves. Renie, the youngest sister, is living with the newly married Nell, happy in her waitressing job at the King's Head Hotel. But a shadow falls over her the day Mr Judson arrives as assistant manager. Feeling increasingly harassed by him and also eager to escape from Nell's unpleasant husband, Renie is delighted when she is offered a new job in London. Although she at first finds the city a huge and bewildering place, soon she is settling in and making friends. And yet she still worries about her sister Nell, and the way her husband Cliff treats her. When tragedy strikes Nell and her family, Renie is left feeling horrified and helpless. Her only comfort is her growing friendship with the injured Gil, towards whom she has felt an instant trust and affection. But can their relationship progress from friendship to something more? And how will the return of the threatening Judson affect their future?

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Love of the native landscape is part of Scottish culture, but the economic demands of a devolved region (and potentially an independent nation) may put greater strains than ever on already damaged natural resources. Scotland's Landscape reviews the role of the landscapes and cityscapes of Scotland in the context of its contemporary culture. It examines environmental issues from many points of view - from the iconic landscapes that are part of the Scottish sense of identity to actual policies formulated by the newly devolved political establishment. The juxtaposition of cultural attitudes and national policies offers a fascinating contrast between the landscape in imagination and in practical policy. Anna Paterson explores the differences between rhetoric and practice, and considers approaches and attitudes to urban and rural development in contemporary Scottish writing. Attention is then focused upon tourism and stewardship of the land, city planning and rural building, small businesses, local authorities, voluntary organisations - seen as forming a network of individuals trying to match their cultural assumptions to economic practicalities. The author asks tough questions about controversial issues. Are the National Park designations a ticket to ride for commercial tourist developments? Should Scotland's forests be used for recreation or timber production? Are cities suffering more from zoning or from poor design? Is there a contradiction between healthy countryside sports and modern sport management? Finally, she asks what might make sustainable development work in Scotland.

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Introduces Tennyson's famous elegy to first-time readers, students and teachers of the poem. In Memoriam is one of the most famous and influential poems of the 19th century. Composed over nearly three decades and spanning over 100 sections, it is one of the longest elegies in the English language. It is at once a deeply personal description of grief and a wide-ranging discussion of its age. This guide provides: * The full text of the poem; * Information about its cultural, historical and literary contexts; * Four different reading strategies for approaching the text; * Suggested seminar activities, assessments and module outlines for teachers and lecturers

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From acacia to yarrow, this valuable resource is packed with entries for nearly 150 commonly sourced herbs.

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Alethea Hawthorne will not allow Measham Hall to fall into the hands of lesser men... 1665. It is five years since King Charles II returned from exile, the scars of the English Civil Wars are yet to heal and now the Great Plague engulfs the land. Alethea Hawthorne is safe inside the walls of the Calverton household as a lady's companion waiting in anticipation of the day she can return to her ancestral home of Measham Hall. But when Alethea suddenly finds herself cast out on the plague-ridden streets of London, a long road to Derbyshire lies ahead. Militias have closed their boroughs off to outsiders for fear of contamination. Fortune smiles on her when Jack appears, an unlikely travelling companion who helps this determined girl to navigate a perilous new world of religious dissenters, charlatans and a pestilence that afflicts peasants and lords alike. The Master of Measham Hall is the first book in a page-turning historical series. In lyrical prose, Anna Abney portrays the religious divides at the heart of Restoration England in a timeless novel about survival, love, and family loyalty.

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A compact sourcebook of ideas for innovative furnishing, interior environments and small-scale architectural interventions. As the definition of designer' expands and architects today create everything from jewelry to urban masterplans, a new wave of objects is transforming our interior spaces. They include bookshelves that can dynamically divide and reshape a room, chairs that create intimate room-like enclosures, home-office spaces-within-spaces, and self-contained kitchen cubes that can be expanded to reveal every conceivable cooking and eating function. Furnitecture presents some 200 examples of this new design typology. From Danish studio KiBiSi's design for a reconfigurable bookshelf system and Japanese architect Shigeru Ban's moving boxes within rooms, to Dutch designers Makkink & Bey's conversational Ear Chairs and the French atelier 37.2's series of self-standing cubes, there is an interior world of innovation in these pages. And a personal space just for you.

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Hundreds of thousands of British and Irish men, women, and children crossed the Atlantic during the seventeenth century as indentured servants. Many had agreed to serve for four years, but large numbers had been trafficked or “spirited away” or were sent forcibly by government agencies as criminals, political rebels, or destitute vagrants.In Indentured Servitude Anna Suranyi provides new insight into the lives of these people. The British government, Suranyi argues, profited by supplying labour for the colonies, removing unwanted populations, and reducing incarceration costs within Britain. In addition, it was believed that indigents, especially destitute children, benefited morally from being placed in indenture. Capitalist entrepreneurs who were influential at the highest levels of government made their fortunes from Atlantic trade in goods, indentured servants, and slaves, and their participation in the servant trade contributed to the commercialization of criminal justice. Suranyi breaks new ground in showing how indentured servitude was challenged: once in the colonies, indentured servants adapted resourcefully to their circumstances and rebelled against unfair conditions and abuse by suing their masters, by running away, or through outright revolt.Emerging ideas about race and citizenship led to vehement public debate about the conditions of indentured servants and the ethics of indenture itself, prompting legislation that aimed to curb the worst excesses while slavery continued to expand unchecked.

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A surprising and ambitious investigation of language and the varied ways women resist the paradoxes of patriarchy both on and off the page.—New York TimesCombining the soul-baring confessional of Brain on Fire and the addictive storytelling of The Queen’s Gambit, a renowned puzzle creator’s compulsively readable memoir and history of the crossword puzzle as an unexpected site of women’s work and feminist protest.The indisputable “queen of crosswords,” Anna Shechtman published her first New York Times puzzle at age nineteen, and later, helped to spearhead the The New Yorker’s popular crossword section. Working with a medium often criticized as exclusionary, elitist, and out-of-touch, Anna is one of very few women in the field of puzzle making, where she strives to make the everyday diversion more diverse.In this fascinating work—part memo

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New for 2024, the unmissable, official novelisation of the third Paddington movie!In his third big screen outing from Studiocanal, the creators of Wonka and the Harry Potter movies, Paddington and the Browns leave Windsor Gardens to embark on an epic adventure to visit Aunt Lucy at The Home for Retired Bears. There, they find a mystery that sends them on a hilarious and thrilling journey along the Amazon, through the jungle and up to the mountain peaks of Peru.This wonderful retelling of the cinematic film has been penned by Anna Wilson, based on the story by Paul King, Mark Burton and Simon Farnaby, and the screenplay written by Mark Burton, Jon Foster and James Lamont.

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A fantasy epic of freedom and empire, gods and monsters, love, loyalty, honour, and betrayal, from the acclaimed author of GODBLIND. For generations, the forests of Ixachipan have echoed with the clash of weapons, as nation after nation has fallen to the Empire of Songs – and to the unending, magical music that binds its people together. Now, only two free tribes remain. The Empire is not their only enemy. Monstrous, scaled predators lurk in rivers and streams, with a deadly music of their own. As battle looms, fighters on both sides must decide how far they will go for their beliefs and for the ones they love – a veteran general seeks peace through war, a warrior and a shaman set out to understand their enemies, and an ambitious noble tries to bend ancient magic to her will.

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Give your child the support they need in English These new practice test materials for Cambridge English: Flyers (also known as Young Learners English: Flyers) support young learners and include comprehensive guidance for both teachers and parents. By working through the practice tests, children will feel ready for what they need to do on the day of the test, and will also have fun whilst they are learning. The book includes: 3 full practice tests with a colourful and clear design to motivate and encourage young learners, and prepare them for what they will see in the real test Audio is available online with recordings by young native English speakers The Teacher’s Guide and a Parent’s Guide are available online, and are full of information and support for anyone preparing their child for their first Cambridge English test. For Teachers and Parents (available online)• A full guide to each part of the test• Ideas for exam preparation activities• Model answer recordings for the Speaking paper – recorded by young native English speakers so that learners hear examples of correct English again and again• Cambridge English vocabulary list with the key words learners need to know• Audio scripts for the Listening and Speaking sections• Answer key

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Handmade Style is a thoughtful collection of a variety of sewing projects to stretch your skills and keep you enjoying the process of creating throughout the year. Each project builds upon the other and is designed to help any sewist create a complete cohesive handmade simple and sophisticated look. Unlike other sewing titles that include a random combination of projects, Anna has spent years compiling a well-edited collection of projects to ensure that her fans will want to make each and every one. From wearables and accessories to quilts and pillows: these projects are made to live together to create the ultimate handmade style for every modern sewist.

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Practicing Art and Anthropology presents an in-depth exploration of transdisciplinary work in the expanding space between art and anthropology. Having trained and worked as an artist as well as an anthropologist, Anna Laine’s decades-long engagement in art practice, artistic research and anthropology provide her with a unique perspective on connections between the two fields, both in theory and in practice. Intertwining artistic and anthropological ways of working, Laine asks what it means to engage a transdisciplinary stance when academia requires a specific disciplinary belonging. In order to expand the methods of producing academic knowledge by going beyond conventional approaches to research, she draws on examples from her own work with Tamils in India and the UK to present an original take on how we can cross the boundaries between art and anthropology to reach multiple dimensions of understanding. Offering exceptional breadth and detail, Practicing Art and Anthropology provides a unique approach to the discussion. An important read for students and scholars in art and anthropology as well as artists and anyone interacting in the space in-between.

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Abigail Beadle has given two decades of her life to caring for her late father and preserving the family home, Ashgrove House in Wiltshire. When her loathed stepmother, Edwina, dies, Abigail is glad to be released from her bullying. She will also be able to look after the house properly, perhaps have a real Christmas at home, without Edwina's stranglehold on the finances. But her stepmother left behind a will that casts doubt on Abigail's inheritance and raises the possibility that she will have to leave the home she loves so much. It is not until Lucas Chadwick, the man she loved when she was young, returns to the village that Abigail begins to believe her life might be able to start at last ...

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE CHARLES TYRWHITT SPORTS BOOK AWARDS''Top Bins! A personal best, a lap record and a hole in one for when rain has stopped play.'' ALAN DAVIES''The trivia book of the season . . . magnificent.'' SPECTATORDid you know that Henry VIII owned the first pair of football boots? Or that David Attenborough is responsible for yellow tennis balls?A Load of Old Balls is the curious story of us and sport. It''s about our mind-blowingly determined attempts to be the fastest, the strongest, the most skilful. In this endlessly entertaining tale of play and belonging, astonishing violence and jaw-dropping cheating, we learn what led ancient Egyptian athletes to have their spleens removed and discover why Michael Palin was disqualified from a conker tournament. Crossing millennia, continents and cultures, Harkin and Ptaszynski the brainy researchers for BBC''s QI and co-hosts of No Such Thing As A Fish

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Life as Creative Constraint is the first book to focus on the extraordinary life-writing of the French experimental writing group, the Oulipo. The Oulipo's enthusiasm for literary games and formal gymnastics has seen its work caricatured as 'lifeless' - impressively virtuoso but more interested in form than content and ultimately disengaged from the world. This book examines a broad corpus of work by Georges Perec, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques Roubaud and Anne F. Garréta to show that, despite the group's early devotion to the radical impersonality of mathematics, later generations of oulipians have brought the group's fascination with systems, games and constraints to bear on autobiography. Far from being 'lifeless', oulipian constraints and concepts provide the tools that allow writers to engage critically and creatively with lived experience, and mine the potential of the autobiographical genre. The games played by these writers are not simply pastimes or cunning writing techniques, but modes of survival, self-examination, self-invention, and relating to the world and to others. As the title of Georges Perec’s masterpiece suggests, they are a mode d’emploi for life.

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A hilarious romantic comedy from the author of The Bucket List to Mend a Broken Heart'Romantic and refreshing' Mhairi McFarlane'A fun, bouncy, brilliant tale' Heat'Funny, relatable and fabulously written' Daily Express'Perfect for fans of Sophie Kinsella' Take a BreakWhen Lexi's sport-mad boyfriend Will skips her friend's wedding to watch football - after pretending to have food poisoning - it might just be the final whistle for their relationship.But fed up of just getting mad, Lexi decides to even the score. And, when a couple of lost tickets and an 'accidentally' broken television lead to them spending extra time together, she's delighted to realise that revenge might be the best thing that's happened to their relationship.And if her clever acts of sabotage prove to be a popular subject for her blog, what harm can that do? It's not as if he'll ever find out . . .

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