Lauren, Jack, Ruby & Billy live by the seaside with their mum & dad. But their parents are always arguing, & then their dad moves out. Lauren & Jack decide they have to get them together again. & so begins Operation Eiffel Tower.. .in which the four children try to raise money to give their mum & dad a treat in an attempt to make them happier. First they want to send their parents to Paris, but quickly realise they can never afford that, so instead they set up a dinner for two under the Eiffel Tower in the local crazy golf attraction. But will it get their parents talking again? A funny & very moving story that tackles important issues with a light touch. ...

On the evening of 9th June 1956 in an apartment in Buenos Aires, a dozen men were arrested on suspicion of plotting against the Argentine government. A few hours later, the local police chief received the order to execute them. Almost all were innocent. Operation Massacre recreates the events of that night & its aftermath in dramatic detail, from the horrifying, botched execution to the author`s successful efforts to track down the survivors & bring the perpetrators to justice. Pre-dating Capote`s In Cold Blood by over a decade, Operation Massacre is the original work of modern true crime. Walsh combines a passion for the truth with a novelist`s flair for storytelling. This -- his most celebrated work -- is a masterpiece of reportage, admired by writers as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges & Gabriel Garcia Márquez. ...

A RICHARD & JUDY BOOK CLUB SELECTION One April morning in 1943, a sardine fisherman spotted the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain & set in train a course of events that would change the course of the Second World War. Operation Mincemeat was the most successful wartime deception ever attempted, & certainly the strangest. It hoodwinked the Nazi espionage chiefs, sent German troops hurtling in the wrong direction, & saved thousands of lives by deploying a secret agent who was different, in one crucial respect, from any spy before or since: he was dead. His mission: to convince the Germans that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allied armies planned to invade Greece. The brainchild of an eccentric RAF officer & a brilliant Jewish barrister, the great hoax involved an extraordinary cast of characters including a famous forensic pathologist, a gold-prospector, an inventor, a beautiful secret service secretary, a submarine captain, three novelists, a transvestite English spymaster, an irascible admiral who loved fly-fishing, & a dead Welsh tramp. Using fraud, imagination & seduction, Churchill`s team of spies spun a web of deceit so elaborate & so convincing that they began to believe it themselves. The deception started in a windowless basement beneath Whitehall. It travelled from London to Scotland to Spain to Germany. & it ended up on Hitler`s desk. Ben Macintyre, bestselling author of Agent Zigzag, weaves together private documents, photographs, memories, letters & diaries, as well as newly released material from the intelligence files of MI5 & Naval Intelligence, to tell for the first time the full story of Operation Mincemeat. ...

It's 1945: a German bomber flies over Iceland in a blizzard; the crew have lost their way & eventually crash on the Vatnajokull glacier, the largest in Europe. Puzzlingly, there are both German & American officers on board. One of the senior German officers claims that their best chance of survival is to try to walk to the nearest farm & sets off, a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. He soon disappears into the white vastness. 1999, mid-winter, & the US Army is secretively trying to remove an aeroplane from the Vatnajokull glacier. By coincidence two young Icelanders become involved but will pay with their lives. Before they are captured, one of the two contacts his sister, Kristin, who will not rest until she discovers the truth of her brother's fate. Her pursuit puts her in great danger, leading her on a long & hazardous journey in search of the key to the riddle about Operation Napoleon. ...

In the summer of 1940, the Nazi war machine was at its zenith. France, Denmark, Norway & the Low Countries were all under occupation after a series of lightning military campaigns. Only Britain stood in the way of the complete triumph of Nazi tyranny. But for the first time in the war, Hitler did not prevail. The traditional narrative of 1940 holds that Britain was only saved from German conquest by the pluck of RAF Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain. The image of Dad`s Army recruits training with broomsticks is a classic symbol of the nation`s supposed desperation in the face of the threat from Operation Sealion, as the German plan for invasion was code-named. Yet as Leo Mc Kinstry details, the British were far more ruthless & proficient than is usually recognised. The brilliance of the RAF was not an exception but part of a pattern of magnificent organisation. In almost every sphere of action, such as the destruction of the French naval fleet or the capture of German spies, Britain`s approach reflected an uncompromising spirit of purpose & resolution. Using a wealth of primary materials from both British & German archives, Leo Mc Kinstry provides a ground-breaking new assessment of the six fateful months in mid-1940, beginning with Winston Churchill`s accession to power in May & culminating in Germany`s abandonment of Operation Sealion. ...

Topographical survey of Belgium at 1:20, 000 from Nationaal Geografisch Instituut / Institut Géographique National, the country’s national survey organization. Each 20K map covers one quarter of the corresponding 1:50, 000 map (with adjustments in the border & coastal areas). The maps provide all the information expected of topographic mapping at this scale & in addition have an unusually large amount of vegetation and/or land use information (different types of woodlands, gardens, orchards, heath, etc). The maps have a 1-km UTM grid, with margin ticks for latitude & longitude at intervals of 1`. Map legend & a glossary of terms used on the maps include English. Stanfords keeps as regular stock 20K maps for the World War I battlefields around the Ypres, Messines & Passchendaele, & for the area of the Battle of Waterloo. The 1:20, 000 survey covers the whole of Belgium & maps for other regions can be supplied as special orders. To see the list of titles in this series please click on the series link.PLEASE NOTE: the Long-Distance Footpaths Map of Belgium at 1:300, 000 which shows the division of Belgium into the 50K survey sheets can also be used to see in more detail coverage by the 20K maps. ...

Eleven-year-old Ophelia might not be brave, but she certainly is curious. Her family are still reeling from her mother`s death, & in a bid to cheer everyone up, her father has taken a job at a fantastically enormous & gothic museum in a city where it never stops snowing. Ophelia can`t wait to explore
- & she quickly discovers an impossibility. In a forgotten room, down a very dark corridor, she finds a boy, who says he`s been imprisoned for three-hundred-&-three-years by an evil Snow Queen who has a clock that is ticking down towards the end of the world. A sensible girl like Ophelia doesn`t quite believe him, of course, but there`s no denying he needs her help. There are many other, darker, impossibilities in this museum too. Ghosts, wolves, Misery Birds, magical swords
- & even fabled Snow Queens
- will all do their very best to stop Ophelia & hurt her family. She will have to garner all her courage, strength & cleverness if she is to rescue this most Marvellous Boy
- & maybe even save the world in the process.



...

Eleven-year-old Ophelia might not be brave, but she certainly is curious. Her family are still reeling from her mother`s death, & in a bid to cheer everyone up, her father has taken a job at a fantastically enormous & gothic museum in a city where it never stops snowing. Ophelia can`t wait to explore
- & she quickly discovers an impossibility. In a forgotten room, down a very dark corridor, she finds a boy, who says he`s been imprisoned for three-hundred-&-three-years by an evil Snow Queen who has a clock that is ticking down towards the end of the world. A sensible girl like Ophelia doesn`t quite believe him, of course, but there`s no denying he needs her help. There are many other, darker, impossibilities in this museum too. Ghosts, wolves, Misery Birds, magical swords
- & even fabled Snow Queens
- will all do their very best to stop Ophelia & hurt her family. She will have to garner all her courage, strength & cleverness if she is to rescue this most Marvellous Boy
- & maybe even save the world in the process.



...

An ingenious interactive art book that uses simple shapes to create stunning creative designs. Ophelia Pang is a Hong Kong-based ...

In 1832 William Jardine & James Matheson established what would become the greatest British trading company in East Asia in the nineteenth century. After the termination of the East India Company`s monopoly in the tea trade, Jardine, Matheson & Company`s aggressive marketing strategies concentrated on the export of teas & the import of opium, sold offshore to Chinese smugglers. Jardine & Matheson, recognized as giants on the scene at Macao, Canton, & Hong Kong, have often been depicted as one-dimensional villains whose opium commerce was ruthless & whose imperial drive was insatiable. In Opium & Empire, Richard Grace explores the depths of each man, their complicated & sometimes inconsistent internal workings, & their achievements & failures. He details their decades-long journeys between Britain & China, their business strategies & standards of conduct, & their inventiveness as ”gentlemanly capitalists.” The commodities they marketed also included cotton, rice, textile goods, & silks & they functioned as agents for clients in India, Britain, Singapore, & Australia. During the First Opium War Jardine was in London giving advice to Lord Palmerston, while Matheson was detained under house arrest at Canton in the spring of 1839, an incident which helped prompt the armed British response. Moving beyond the caricatures of earlier accounts, Opium & Empire tells the story of two Scotsmen whose lives reveal a great deal about the type of tough-minded men who expanded the global markets of Victorian Britain & played major roles in changing the course of modern history in East Asia. ...