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

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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.

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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.


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The Full Cupboard of Life by Alexander Mc Call Smith follows Precious Ramotswe, whose engagement to Mr J. L. B. Matekoni is of some long standing, but still remains open ended. However her fiancé has things on his mind other than setting a wedding date, notably a frightening demand from Mma Potokwani, pushy matron of the Orphan Farm. Mma Ramotswe herself has serious issues to consider
- a wealthy lady has asked her to check up on several suitors. Are these men interested only in her money? This may be difficult to ascertain, but Mma Ramotswe is, of course, an exceptionally intuitive lady.
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'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. ...

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.

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Brigid Keenan was never destined to lead a normal life. From her early beginnings
- a colourful childhood in India brought to an
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Brigid Keenan was never destined to lead a normal life. From her early beginnings
- a colourful childhood in India brought to an
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Praise for the man & book from Leo Houlding...” Johnny Dawes is the enigmatic front man of an eclectic band of British climbers who in the mid 1980`s redefined the standards of difficulty & danger in traditional climbing. Introducing the world to the impossible grades of E8 & E9, & laying the foundations of the modern scene, Johnny`s unique style & character have become legend. This long awaited book gives his take on a highly influential period of climbing history & a look inside the mind of a tormented genius. Written with devoted passion & brutal honesty, ” Full of Myself” lays bare Johnny`s bipolar mix of privilege & pain, wizardry & dysfunction. Master of friction & maestro of momentum on rock & road, orchestrator of contemporary climbing techniques such as the dead-point & dyno, the living embodiment of poetry in motion turns his hand to the pen with great effect.” Ed Douglas adds...” Johnny Dawes is a legend in British climbing. In 1986, he was responsible for the most inspired new route in a generation, when he climbed Indian Face on Clogwyn d`ur Arddu in Snowdonia. Difficult & tenuous, a fall from its hardest move would most likely be fatal. But Dawes is much more than a risk-taker. His rich imagination has left a legacy of outstanding new routes all over the country, not least on the gritstone edges of Derbyshire where his bold & fluid style reached its fullest expression. He`s an artist really, a choreographer with a warrior spirit.” & from Simon Beaufoy (Academy Award winning screenwriter of ” The Full Monty” & ” Slumdog Millionaire”)...” Each generation produces a handful of visionaries, people who can see beyond the possible. Whether he likes it or not, Johnny is climbing`s visionary. There are accounts of terrifying first-ascents on crumbling sea cliffs & even more terrifying accounts of van-driving around Wales. At the heart of the book is a man traversing on crystals towards some kind of understanding of who he is, a man less earth-bound than us climbing mortals, but who cannot, quite, fly. Much like his climbing, his imagination leaps
- this is a beautiful book about an extraordinary person. William Blake with sticky boots.”
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This complete set of signal flags is sewn on a dress line to allow the set to be run from stem-head to masthead to taffrail. The flags come in the following order: E-Q-3-G-8-Z-4-W-6-P-1-I-ANSWER-T-Y-B-X-1st SUB-H-3rd SUB-D-F-2nd SUB-U-A-O-M-R-2-J-0-N-9-K-7-V-5-L-C-S. A storage bag is provided. Flags are manufactured from MOD standard woven & knitted polyester & are either sewn or dye printed depending on the complexity of the design. Every flag is hemmed on all sides & provided roped & toggled with a strong polyester heading tape. This set is made to order. Please contact us at maritime@stanfords.co.uk for urgent orders or"es for different sizes. ...