Collected Poems (eBook)
John Fuller
John Fuller is one of the most accomplished, prolific and popular of contemporary poets. His Collected Poems brings together most of his poems, from his first collection, Fairground Music (1961) to Stones and Fires (winner of the 1996 Forward Poetry Prize), and enables us to appreciate the full extent of his remarkable talents. From his strikingly assured early poems - dramatic monologues and playful rewritings of myth and fairytale - to his more complex, discursive later work, Fuller displays his virtuosity with a wide variety of subjects, moods and forms.
Here are fantasies, poems about nature, riddles and nonsense poems; tender love poems and philosophical meditations; sombre, wistful sonnets and the lightest, most charming songs. But there are consistent themes: romantic love, a potent sense of the physical world, and a constant shifting between exuberant irreverence and the yearning for moral and metaphysical truths. Throughout, the poems are steeped in humour and learning, and display Fuller's easy command of the of the whole scope and richness of the English language.
Boxing. The Sport of Kings. And for every king, there are kingmakers and princes, determined heirs and ruthless pretenders to the throne. Boxers may enter the ring alone, but behind them are their families, many of whom have spent a career in the fight game themselves. And all are caught up in this most beautiful but brutal of sports.
Beautiful Brutality is the first book to examine the world of boxing from the perspective of family. With unprecedented access to the likes of the Calzaghes, Mayweathers, Hattons and Khans, Sky Sports boxing expert Adam Smith lays bare the raw emotion at the heart of the sport. How does it feel when your son is taking a pummelling? Can a father make rational judgements from the corner of the ring, in the frenzied atmosphere of a fight? And how much strength does a boxer take from his family, or the family figures that so many trainers and promoters become?
Passionate, hard-hitting and with astonishing revelations about the world of boxing, Beautiful Brutality is written from the heart, by an author with a unique knowledge and experience of the fight game.
Cake Pops (eBook)
Molly Bakes
Cake pops are the hot new thing in baking. A ball of cake, dipped in chocolate, lovingly decorated, and best of all... on a stick you can hold!
Get creative with these gorgeous little treats, which make the perfect gift. There are loads of different flavours, from classic chocolate to adventurous peanut butter. And when it comes to decorating, the sky is literally the limit, with everything from simple coloured balls to love hearts, animals and even fluffy clouds.
They are even cuter than a cupcake. And cake pops are as fun to make as they are a treat to eat. Ms 'Molly Bakes' is the UK's cake pop queen. Here she shares her foolproof recipes for making 50 different cake pops: each unique but all equally irresistibly delicious.
Daniel Defoe's fictional heroine Moll Flanders is famous for her criminal and sexual adventures, racily portrayed n big and small screen romps as bawdy wench, fallen woman and proto-feminist trailblazer. But who was she? And what world did she really inhabit?
To answer these questions Sian Rees takes her readers on a journey of literary and historical detection, across continents, cultures and centuries. Following Moll's tumultuous life, the story moves from Jacobean England to Jamestown, Virginia; from the English Civil War to the struggles of the Powhatan Indians; and from the metropolis of London to the hamlet of Annapolis in the early eighteenth century.
Introducing us to a rogues' gallery of real-life versions of Moll, it is as fast-moving and rich in incident as Defoe's great novel.
The Banker's Daughter (eBook)
Emran Mian
All our parents have secrets.
But Hanna Mehdi's father is unusual. He ran a major bank that collapsed in suspicious circumstances. When it fell, he turned up at her door and told her they had to run away. They fled to a luxury hotel in Beirut which has now become home. They have a yacht. She wears the latest designer clothes.
One day she discovers that her father may have done far worse than make risky bets on the money markets. She finds a photograph that turns her comfortable life upside down. She has to ask: Has my father been lying to me all this time? Are we in danger? Is my father a murderer?
As Hanna follows the trail of blood from Beirut to Lahore to London, her eyes are opened to the real world in which she has been living, a world in which men do whatever they want, women hold their peace and money buys the ability to avoid all responsibility. Suddenly she is forced to grapple with the costs of her freedom. What will she choose: the dull and guilty ease of being the banker's daughter? Or the rough comfort of facing up to the truth?
Emran Mian's brilliantly tense, atmospheric debut takes us deep into the psychology of those whose lives depend on the unscrupulous rich, and makes us think about our own complicity in creating monsters.
Close Your Eyes (eBook)
Ewan Morrison
In 1981 a mother abandoned her child and drove into the night, never to return. Her disappearance was reported in the press as a fatal road accident. Her body was never found.
Thirty years later, Rowan has a child of her own. Afflicted by post-natal depression, she is convinced that she'll hurt her daughter unless she unpicks the mystery of her past, buried deep within a commune in the remote highlands of Scotland. Leaving her young family and life in London, she returns to her childhood home to find a failed utopia shrouded in secrecy. And there, with a looming cult leader, among the rites and rituals, the sacraments and ceremonies, is a single postcard dated a week after her mother's death. As she draws ever closer to the truth about her mother, she fears she might lose even herself.
Close Your Eyes is a powerful novel, exploring the eternal bonds of maternal love. Evoking the spirit of the 60s and 70s in its gentle, lyrical passion, it tells the secret history of a revolutionary social experiment, and, with unflinching honesty, depicts the impacts, both good and bad, that it had on its children.
The Bellamy Herbal (eBook)
David Bellamy
The Benn Diaries (eBook)
Tony Benn
The Benn Diaries, embracing the years 1940-1990, are already established as a uniquely authoritative, fascinating and readable record of political life. The selected highlights that form this single-volume edition include the most notable events, arguments and personal reflections throughout Benn's long and remarkable career as a leading politician.
The narrative starts with Benn as a schoolboy and takes the reader through his youthful wartime experiences as a trainee pilot, his nervous excitement as a new MP during Clement Atlee's premiership and the tribulations of Labour in the 1950s, when the Conservatives were in firm control. It ends with the Tories again in power, but on the eve of Margaret Thatcher's fall, while Tony Benn is on a mission to Baghdad before the impending Gulf War.
Over the span of fifty years, the public and private turmoil in British and world politics is recorded as Benn himself moves from wartime service to become the baby of the House, Cabinet Minister, and finally the Commons' most senior Labour Member.
In a snow-covered village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as her father is abducted in the middle of the night by Russian soldiers. Their life-long friend and neighbour, Akhmed, has also been watching, and when he finds Havaa he knows of only one person who might be able to help.
For tough-minded doctor Sonja Rabina, it's just another day of trying to keep her bombed-out, abandoned hospital going. When Akhmed arrives with Havaa, asking Sonja for shelter, she has no idea who the pair are and even less desire to take on yet more responsibilities and risk.
But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja's world will shift on its axis, revealing the intricate pattern of connections that binds these three unlikely companions together and unexpectedly decides their fate.
'A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is simply spectacular' Ann Patchett
The Future Of Money (eBook)
Bernard Lietaer
THE GLOBAL MONEY SYSTEM NO LONGER WORKS IN OUR BEST INTERESTS; WE NEED A SERIOUS OVERHAUL OF MONEY - AND OF OUR ATTITUDE TOWARDS IT.
Based on the four mega-trends of monetary instability, global greying (an ageing global population), the information revolution, and climate change, Bernard Lietaer looks at different scenarios of what the world might be like in 2020.
The Corporate Millennium: governments are disbanded, central banks become irrelevant and the world is run with Big Brother control by huge companies with their own currencies.
CARING COMMUNITIES: after a monetary crash, people retreat into small, self-sustaining communities, like tribes.
HELL ON EARTH: in which the breakdown of life as we know it is followed by a highly individualistic free-for-all, resulting in an ever more obscene gulf between rich and poor.
SUSTAINABLE ABUNDANCE: envisages a world where we take better care of the environment, re-engage the poor and the unemployed in mainstream society and give back time and fulfilment to the over-worked, while providing the elderly with a high level of personal care.
A society of sustainable abundance is achievable - but only if we are willing to re-think our money system and use money innovations that have already proven effective somewhere in the world today.
What if your best friend's child disappears? And it's all your fault.
This is exactly what happens to Lisa Kallisto - overwhelmed working mother of three - one freezing December in the Lake District. She takes her eye off the ball for just a moment and her whole world descend into nightmare. Her best friend's thirteen-year-old daughter Lucinda has gone missing and now, devastated by this and publicly blamed, Lisa sets out to right the wrong.
But as she begins peeling away the layers surrounding Lucinda's disappearance, Lisa learns that the quiet town she lives in isn't what she thought it was, and her friends might not be who they appear to be, either.
Jeff Bridges is one of the world's most popular actors and his unforgettable performance as The Dude in Coen Brothers film, The Big Lebowski, made him a cult hero. His remarkable career as an actor, performer and songwriter has brought him an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Critics Choice award. Away from the spotlight, Bridges is a dedicated practitioner of Zen Buddhism and for more than a decade has been close friends with Zen leader Bernie Glassman. It is Glassman who has helped guide Bridges' lessons on the path to enlightenment and the two have spent many hours discussing life, love, the movies, creativity, happiness and death.
With wit, charm and profound insight, Bridges and Glassman discover the Zen in iconic scenes and lines from The Big Lebowski. With honesty and humour, Bridges explores how his Zen practice and his life experience inform one another as he discusses his loving relationship with his parents, his marriage, his highly successful career and his warm connection with his fans.
The Art of Being a Woman (eBook)
Patricia Volk's glittering memoir, written with charm, panache and wit, juxtaposes the lives of two women - the iconoclastic fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli and the author's own mother - to tell the story of how young Patricia fashioned herself into a woman.
Patricia Volk's mother Audrey was an upper-middle class New Yorker, a great beauty, a perfectionist, and a polished hostess who believed in women doing things the proper way.
The iconoclastic Italian fashion designer, Elsa Schiaparelli, on the other hand, never found a rule she didn't want to break. One of fashion's most radical provocateurs, she was a cultural revolutionary who embodied the 'daring'.
For Patricia, who read Schiap's 'scandalous' autobiography, Shocking Life, at a tender age, these two women offered fabulously contrasting lessons in everything from fashion, make-up, lingerie, family and entertaining, to love, sex, superstition and gambling - lessons that would stay with her for the rest of her life.
Moving seamlessly between the Volks' 1950s Manhattan home and Schiap's astonishing life in New York, Rome and Paris (among pals like Dali, Duchamp, Picasso), The Art of Being a Woman weaves Audrey's notions of female domesticity with Schiap's groundbreaking creative vision to tell the witty, wise and utterly delightful story of how a young girl learned that there is more than one way to be a woman.
On Strong Beach, an awkward teen with a terrible haircut has a reversal of fortune when he finds artefacts from the future lining a seagulls' nest. By the Hox River in Nebraska, a window fuels both family pride and deadly revenge. In a godforsaken barn in what they suspect is Kentucky, Presidents Eisenhower, John Adams and Rutherford B. Hayes are bemused to find themselves reincarnated as horses. And in the collection's title story, Clyde and Magreb - he a traditional capes-and-coffins vampire, she the more progressive variety - settle in an Italian lemon grove in the hope that its ripe fruit will keep their thirst for blood at bay.
Karen Russell is an audacious talent with a wicked sense of humour, and this hotly anticipated new collection confirms her place as a master of the short story form, and one of the most imaginative young writers at work today.
Spanish Berlitz 2.0 (Other)
Berlitz
The Rough Guide to India (Paperback)
Rough Guides
As China- the oldest continuous civilisation in existence- stands to become the most influential, with its economy expected to exceed that of the United States by 2020, Arthur Cotterell provides a panoramic sweep of an empire that lasted over two millennia through the imperial capitals that were the very foundations of each dynasty. Using original Chinese sources and eyewitness accounts he provides an inside view of the rich array of characters, political and ideological tensions, and technological genius that defined the imperial capitals of China, as each in turn is revealed, explored and celebrated.
From the cosmological foundations of the first capital to the politics of empire and cataclysmic civil wars, this absorbing new book offers a level of insight indispensible for a true understanding of China today.
