In this account of the third of Michael Palin's travel adventures for BBC Television, he journeys for almost a year, covering 50, 000 miles & all of the 18 countries that border the Pacific Ocean, encompassing a wide diversity of landscape, culture & people. The Pacific Rim is one of the world's most volatile areas, with economies that are expanding faster than anywhere else on earth
- & here the earth itself is in a constant state of flux. Not for nothing is the Pacific coastline known as the Ring of Fire
- volcanoes mark Palin's journey like stepping stones, & he climbs one which has recently erupted & is still smoking. He negotiates mountains & plunging gorges, crosses glaciers, dodges icebergs, follows great rivers such as the Yangtse & the Amazon, & confronts the notorious Cape Horn & the wild & windswept beaches of western Alaska. The people Palin meets include one of the few remaining survivors of a Siberian Gulag camp, head-hunters in Borneo, & Japanese monks. He eats maggots in Mexico, rustles camels in the Australian desert, lands a plane in Seattle, & sings with the Pacific Fleet choir in Vladivostock.

...

Dame Ellen Mac Arthur’s latest book is not just about sailing, nor is it even predominantly about her well known & admired solo exploits at sea. Full Circle looks at Dame Ellen’s broader, more human life & story, particularly focussing on her reasons behind the decision to turn her back on competitive sailing & her subsequent actions & life choices. Now dedicating herself to the cause of sustainability, the book tackles the question of how & why one the world’s most lauded sportswomen turned her back on the world that adored her to focus her drive & ambition towards a seemingly impossible to solve global issue. Full Circle is about hope & determination, about family & the ties that bond & drive us, & about how one person can make a difference, no matter how small. ...

Michael Palin travels Full Circle through 18 countries encircling the Pacific
- the world’s largest ocean
- in a journey he

...

The third of Michael Palin's travel adventures for BBC Television covered 50, 000 miles & all of the 18 countries that border the Pacific Ocean. Basil Rao's photographs bear witness to the wide diversity of landscape, culture & people encountered on the journey. The Pacific Rim is one of the world's most volatile areas, with economies that are expanding faster than anywhere else on earth
- & here the earth itself is in a constant state of flux. Not for nothing is the Pacific coastline known as the Ring of Fire
- volcanoes mark Palin's journey like stepping stones, & he climbs one which has recently erupted & is still smoking. He negotiates mountains & plunging gorges, crosses glaciers, dodges icebergs, follows great rivers such as the Yangtse & the Amazon, & confronts the notorious Cape Horn & the wild & windswept beaches of western Alaska. The people Palin meets include one of the few remaining survivors of a Siberian Gulag camp, head-hunters in Borneo, & Japanese monks. He eats maggots in Mexico, rustles camels in the Australian desert, lands a plane in Seattle, & sings with the Pacific Fleet choir in Vladivostock.

...

So much about the society that is now emerging in the twenty-first century bears an astonishing resemblance to the most prominent features of what we call the classical world
- its institutions, its priorities, its entertainment, its physics, its sexual morality, its food, its politics, even its religion. The ways in which we live our rich & varied lives correspond
- almost eerily so
- to the ways in which the Greeks & Romans lived theirs. Whether we are eating & drinking, bathing or exercising or making love, pondering, admiring or enquiring, our habits of thought & action, our diversions & concentrations recreate theirs. It is as though the 1500 years after the fall of Rome had been time out from traditional ways of being human. This eye-opening book makes us look afresh at who we are & how we got here. Full Circle is not only wonderfully witty & brilliantly astute, but also profound & often disquieting. Ferdinand Mount effortlessly peels back 2000 years of history to show how much we are like the ancients, how in ways both trivial & crucial we are them & they are us.


...

'I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger...' writes Wilfred Leland James in the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up '1922', the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerising tales from Stephen King, linked by the theme of retribution. For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife Arlette proposes selling off the family homestead & moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder & madness. In ' Big Driver', a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters the stranger is along a back road in Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated & left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face to face with another stranger: the one inside herself. ' Fair Extension', the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest & certainly the funniest. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment. When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable & she discovers the stranger inside her husb&. It's a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, & it definitively ends 'A Good Marriage'. Like DIFFERENT SEASONS & FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT, which generated such enduring hit films as The Shawshank Redemption & Stand by Me, FULL DARK, NO STARS proves Stephen King a master of the long story form. ...

From West Country cider brewers to Yorkshire tripe dressers, Tom meets the punters & producers at the heart of our food traditions. He samples the very best of real English food: Bury black pudding, home-cured Wiltshire bacon & the planet`s finest cheddar. But ” Full English” is no paean to an imagined land where yokels sip ale together while chomping on pork pies. Tom`s quest delves beneath the surface to unearth the real story behind our eating habits, & what the food of today says about us: organic heaven or mass-produced hell? Peppered with mouth-watering recipes & recommendations, Tom`s pilgrimage maps out England`s defining dishes: Fish & Chips in the North, Balti in the midlands, & Snail Porridge at the Fat Duck. But it is the colourful characters we meet along the way who truly bring ” Full English” to life. ...

Riding as fast as you could for as long as you could was the main tactic in the early days of road racing when Grand Tours could be won by hours. Now a minute`s delay thanks to a puncture could ruin a rider`s chances over a three-week race & the sport is described as nothing less than chess on wheels. The intricacies & complexities of cycling are what makes it so appealing: an eye for opportunity & a quick mind are just as crucial to success as a `big engine` or good form. So how do you win a bike race? How do you cope with crosswinds, cobbles, elbows-out sprints, weaving your way through a teeming peloton? Why are steady nerves one of the best weapons in a rider`s arsenal & breakaway artists to be revered? Where do you see the finest showcase of tactical brilliance? Peter Cossins takes us on to the team buses to hear pro cyclists & directeurs sportifs explain their tactics: when it went right, when they got it wrong
- from sprinting to summits, from breakaways to bluffing. Hectic, thrilling, but sometimes impenetrable
- watching a bike race can baffle as much as entertain. Full Gas is the essential guide to make sense of all things peloton.

...

Brigid Keenan was never destined to lead a normal life. From her early beginnings
- a colourful childhood in India brought to an
...

Brigid Keenan was never destined to lead a normal life. From her early beginnings
- a colourful childhood in India brought to an
...