Search results for ""Author Neil Coley""

'As smooth as oil, sweet as milk, clear as amber and strong as brandy.' Boniface, in George Farquhar’s play The Beaux Stratagem, describing Lichfield ale. Farquhar was one of the visitors to Lichfield in the eighteenth century when the city was notorious for its many pubs and brothels. Today, thankfully, only its pubs are famous and continue to add colour to this fine Georgian city. The great medieval cathedral forms a magnificent backdrop to the many pubs of the city, some of which were visited by Lichfield’s most famous son, Samuel Johnson, whose brooding statue can be found in the city’s market square. Many of Lichfield’s ancient pubs, some of them old coaching inns from the days of stagecoaches and highwaymen, are still in existence; others, sadly, have gone. This book tells the story of those lost pubs – where they were and why they disappeared – as well as examining those that still grace the city, tracking their history through the centuries and telling their many uplifting, sad, and sometimes strange stories. Find out about haunted pubs, the pub where an army regiment was founded and the two rival inns where political parties encouraged mob violence in the street that separated them. Lichfield Pubs is a book that residents and visitors alike will not want to miss.

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“Life, as someone once said, will always disappoint you in the final analysis.” In 1973, Stella, a university student, took her own life by jumping from a high-rise building. Or so the police reports claim. Meanwhile, in the present, crime fiction writer Robert Cross is attempting to organise a fifty-year reunion of his university friends. But as long forgotten memories begin to emerge, Robert is left to piece together the reality of Stella’s death, haunted by his own disreputable past.

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After successfully tracking down the perpetrator of the Jack the Ripper murders (as told in An Alien Autumn, the first book of the series) the undercover aliens from the planet Jara, First Commander Ashto and Apprentice Commander Atia, continue with their secret mission to discover as much information as possible about the Earth. However, their research is again interrupted by the murderous activities of another ruthless serial killer who has taken to leaving the headless and bloodless bodies of young male prostitutes around the East End of London. As the two aliens search to find the identity of this elusive blood obsessed murderer, they also meet with some of the prominent literary figures of the age including the writer and wit Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker the creator of the most famous horror novel of the 19th century, Dracula. When Ashto and Atia leave London for the first time their travels take them to the picturesque Yorkshire coastal town of Whitby whe

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