Search results for ""Dynasty Press Ltd""

Who should rule Russia? In an era of oligarchs and growing Russian wealth, the issue is not irrelevant. Equally, in the late nineteenth century, funding in university colleges was as essential as it is now. The novel is set in St George's College, Oxford, where mismanagement and factional rivalry have led to the urgent need to raise funds. A Russian Grand Duke, Eugene Saltanovich, has promised an endowment. Long resident in England, the Anglophile Prince Rostov, a former student at the college, is invited along with his wife, Princess Alisa, to a memorial dinner where he is to interpret the Grand Duke's speech. The occasion turns out to be a fiasco when the Grand Duke claims his dancing doll will save Russia. What follows is apparently murder and an attempted coverup that rouses the prince's suspicions. The Grand Duke's dancing doll proves to be a fact, but the alleged presence of nuns in the college leads the prince to realize that they offer a vital clue to the Grand Duke's, er, great idea. Rostov is witness to a further death, provokes a duel, finally uncovers the ambitious plan at the heart of the cover-up and the even more startling likelihood that, had the Grand Duke's, er, great idea worked, the history of the twentieth century might have been completely different. Ingenious, witty and original, The Grand Duke's, er, Great Idea is a quality crime novel based on historical fact, but strictly of relevance to the present day.

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In 'Pom-Poms Up!, From Puberty to the Pythons and beyond, the British born, American raised and RADA trained actress reveals her life, loves and laughs as the 'Glamorous PYTHON GIRL' who famously kept her cool and a straight face in the heat of the humour generated by Cleese, Palin, Jones, Gilliam and the late Chapman, The 'MONTY' Pythons.

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'Bags of fish for cats - 50 pence'. So it was written, on a chalkboard sign outside a fresh fishmonger's, under the arches of the raised promenade along the beachfront of England's newly super trendy and booming seaside City of Brighton and Hove. In Brighton Babylon, PK Heights is a Grade II listed maisonette flat in one of the City's up and coming Regency Squares that provides the elegant base for a series of interlocking true stories about the city's people and their lives. Newly relocated from London, Brighton resident Peter Jarrette combines and intertwines his stories, using a colourful palette that is one part Brokeback Beach and three parts seawater. He vividly portrays a selection of suspect characters and shocking episodes; much like the curious bits and pieces that might be on offer in one of those bags of fish for cats. To the author's consternation, the residents and visitors are a thoroughly peculiar and motley crew. This former string of south coast fishing villages with a royal and decadent past may now be a thoroughly cosmopolitan City and even aspire to being an international hub, but it has not yet lost its renowned and celebrated dark side, far from it. Brighton Babylon is populated by a cast of unsavoury hobos and bother boys; Yardie obsessed golden shower webmasters from nearby Crawley; mistakenly racist London hairdressers; strangely scripted market researchers; extemporised short-haul cabin crew; pushy airline First Officers; politically incorrect new food emporia; a vengeful, crumbling resort Pier and a locally obsessed, cat-mad press pack.

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Meghan and Harry The Real Story: Persecutors or Victims provides the reader with genuine insight into the consequences of the couple's choices through her recognition of what it has taken them to get there, including infuriating the late Queen and jettisoning close family as well as friends and colleagues.

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This book tells the story of human civilisation as a series of historical periods, from Prehistory to the present day, describing the way each evolved into the next. In so doing, it explains the reasons behind what happened in each period, in terms of their contribution to the whole. It describes the way the ideas process evolves along with society, and explains the myths, religions and philosophical ideas which developed in the Ancient world, and the way its great empires appeared. Then, according to new technology and principles, how the events of the Middle Ages led to the rediscovery of the Americas and took us into the Modern periods, where the industrial revolution gave rise to the Middle Classes, and a new type of politics featured more representative forms of government. However, after two world wars which redefined the era, Postmodernity emerged as a term for the structure of Cold War society, which gave rise to the success of digital technology, but also led to the new problem of terrorism. Hence, many questions have arisen over the direction of human society, how it has evolved out of history, and how we address its issues. What type of problems can we solve at each stage? Perhaps with computers we are now able to analyse data in a way which was not possible before and this will lead to the next era.

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This intimate and personal memoir of the present incumbent of Firle Place, the home in the South Downs of the Gage family for 500 years, is described as follows by Charles Moore: In this book, Nicky Gage describes his father's memoirs as 'masterly but short'. The same could be said of his own. Both when being funny - which, again and again, he is - and when being serious, he has a gift for economy of style. Take this chapter opening: 'Sadly, the sexual revolution of the 1960s passed me by, as I was either sitting on my tractor looking after sheep or occasionally visiting my parents - whose butler disapproved of my agricultural attire.' Without being tediously confessional, Nicky is direct about his own failings. One of these, he thinks, is that he took much too long to grow up. Is that such a failing? No doubt it caused some difficulties along the way, but his childlike quality is central to the charm to which all his friends testify. It has allowed him to stay open to the world. He became a father in his seventies and continues to paint and hunt in his mid-eighties, an age when most men would long have put aside such things. He possesses an invincible innocence, which lights up his blue eyes, and makes this book a delight. Sir John Gage made the family fortune in the first half of the 16th century. Nicky, his descendant, writes admiringly of Sir John's good intentions towards Firle expressed in his will. We should all admire Nicky's fulfilment of those intentions in the 21st.

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With her royal insider's knowledge and historical insight, Lady Colin Campbell turns her attention to People of Colour and the Royals. She herself is strongly vested in the subject of colour, being the proud product of one of the most prominent families in the multi-racial world of Jamaica.When she was born there in 1949 that country had, although inadequate, more progressive and inclusive race relations than anywhere else. In her first eighteen years she lived through the transitional period from colonial heyday to independence in 1962, to the subsequent political and demographic changes. Jamaicans hold very dear the concept of their national motto 'Out of Many One People', and she understands the nuances whereby all Jamaicans, irrespective of colour, are regarded as members of the Black Community. Her lack of prejudice allows her to examine the sometimes difficult past with welcome objectivity and refreshing candour, and Jamaica has continued to spearhead many of the positive changes taking place in larger countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. Her book is full of welcome surprises. It takes her unique heritage, courage, insight and experience to write a book as illuminating and hopeful as People of Colour and the Royals. It is a work which she hopes will go some way to healing the divisions of the past and consolidating the unity of the present into an even more cohesive future.

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At its heart is the sinister warning Mary Shelley issued in the Introduction to her own Frankenstein: 'Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.' Who was Joe Richter? Anglo-Russian, intelligent, recently sacked as a translator and lobbyist, assaulted and branded because he had translated an unusually sensitive historical document. For adherents of a violent neo-Soviet cult he was a cheat and so much bourgeois filth. For a wealthy American businessman it could mean big money. For a Russian oligarch it could mean enormous political power. For his mother it could mean happiness. For his girlfriend it could mean serious danger. For Joe himself it meant that he had to be a new Frankenstein. Has he really been gifted with the power to be a Frankenstein, to create new life? Does his DNA or bloodline relate him to a recently deceased relative who was supposed to have such powers? Aided by the CIA, he flies to California to perform an act of revitalization, only to find that what this could mean for world politics also has a deeply troubling personal meaning for Joe himself.

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Prince Dmitry Rostov, Anglophile lover of English poetry, especially Shakespeare, has a bicycling accident. It occurs beside Wordsworth's "sylvan Wye". More sinister and worrying are a ghostly white figure, a strange black boat, a blood-red rose cast on the water, a train whistle and a gunshot, all of which make him witness to a "gap in nature" that will ultimately involve him in a unique quest for the truth. Finding himself less seriously injured than he thought, he receives medical care and a night's rest at the home of the beautiful daughter of Lord Irmingham, a devotee of the late-Victorian cult of Tolstoyanism. Discovering that the prince had once met Anna Karenina, Lord Irmingham insists on having him as an honoured guest at his large country house, Stadleigh Court, among other guests assembled for a soiree devoted to celebrating Tolstoy's ideas. But there is an important sub-text to the occasion, as the prince soon discovers. He is invited to confront the veiled, reclusive lady in the tower. Is she Anna Karenina? Is she now apparently alive and well and living at Stadleigh Court on the banks of the river Wye? Entrusted with the task of identifying her, the prince finds himself drawn ever more deeply into a sympathetic understanding of her situation, her concern for her son, newly arrived from Russia but suddenly struck down, her joys and fears, above all her talk of threats and, finally, her claim to have "enemies". The soiree when it occurs proves to be fatally tragic. Her death overnight forces the prince to investigate. By dint of clever detective work and a certain amount of good luck he gradually uncovers the specifically Russian reasons for her killing. An Epilogue to what is an ingenious and entertaining crime novel reveals how much more the prince has to tell his wife when she returns from visiting her mother in Russia.

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This is a story about two boys who meet at school in England. The first, Nicko, is the direct descendant of a White Russian emigre from the Revolution while the other, Viktor, is the grandson of Stalin's satrap, the director of the Dalstroi Trust, a part of the Gulag system that mined gold in Kolyma. The satrap, Nikishov, is an actual histor

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During the Cold War, if you’re a young British diplomat photographed naked next to a naked Russian girl wearing a white fur hat, you’re likely to have been caught in a Soviet honey trap. Your career as a diplomat is probably wrecked. Ironically it may have an opposite effect by leading to friendship with a girl from the U.S. embassy and a joint involvement in creating a fictitious network of informants. But why does it have an immediate connection with a maverick Soviet rocket being retrieved from the North Sea and a threat, thirty years later, to assassinate the recently elected U.S. president? In Soviet Russia the answer was to be found in a so-called `forbidden zone.’ Against all good judgement the British diplomat visits such a zone, meets a family member renowned as a rocket scientist and subsequently helps him to defect to the USA. Thereby the fictitious network is justified and the scientist is granted his lifelong wish. However, thirty years later Washington becomes deeply concerned when it is reported that someone, possibly the scientist, intends to assassinate the president during a one-night visit to London. A certain amount of available Cold War expertise is called into play to thwart the likelihood, but the real secret is revealed by the girl in the white fur hat who was there at the beginning and at the end. A novel about sexual relations and betrayal, genius and the genie of mockery, the dagger of God and the cross of forgiveness, it exactly reverses the likelihood of assassination and replaces it with everlasting love.

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Jim Nordon (31 and divorced) has problems. Disliking suburbia, he aims to recuperate as much as possible from the 21st century by renting an apartment on the top floor of Victoria Mansions, an Edwardian building in Southampton Row due for demolition in the coming year. A supposedly successful career in local government means he has denied himself his ambition to become a portrait painter. These problems, if not insuperable, are worsened by the fact that he has to write a report, if possible anonymously, on reducing costs in his own work place. Finally there is the problem of sex. He gains periodic sexual satisfaction from a convenient relationship, but he hires a young girl as PA to help with his report and falls in love with her. This relationship becomes the centre of his life. Although it is a happy love affair, it breaks down when the earlier relationship intervenes. On a Sunday morning after returning to his Manchester home he climbs a hill called The Steep. There he discovers his past. The episode determines him in his decision to change his life. A novel of perceptive characterisation and rich descriptions, written sensitively and poetically with touches of humour, explicit in its treatment of sex, it focuses on love and death and the universal need to confront the steeps that occur in life when choosing between creativity and expediency.

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In this new book royal historian Lady Colin Campbell covers The Queen's Marriage in intimate detail. Using her connections and impeccable sources she recounts details of the inside story of the monarch's relationship with the Duke of Edinburgh and her close family.

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Winton Dean (1916-2013), the renowned musical scholar and critic, gives a sparkling account of his early life. He writes of his controversial father, Basil Dean, the theatrical and film producer and founder of ENSA, his great uncle Rufus Isaacs and Daisy, Countess of Warwick, the mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales.

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A humorous account of the demise of British royalty, the dynasty of massive repute. 'There was nothing very funny to write about his death except to say it was much appreciated.' From the tragic to the humorous, the unexpected to the almost unbelievable, And Then the King Died recalls the fascinating history of royal demises in Great Britain, from Alfred the Great to George VI. Murder, madness, unfortunate accidents and toilet problems all feature in this absorbing and at times hilarious account of the deaths of our nation's monarchs. The book takes each royal character in turn and deals with their end. A chapter by chapter, summary of the causes of death in the royal lineage, and full of human interest. The characters in this book are all well known to the potential readers. They have entered our mythology and the fabric of our society and moulded the British identity. They are known for their exploits and for the achievements of the citizens who contributed during their lifetimes. This book describes another side to their existence, their frailty and vulnerability, their final conflict. The book is a light-hearted and sometimes irreverent study of the human side of well-known leaders. Some may see the content as an allegory for the present state of the monarchy. Others may worry that the topic could be given more consideration in the forthcoming months.

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