ENGLAND IS BORN. BBC2`s major TV series THE LAST KINGDOM is based on Bernard Cornwell`s bestselling novels on the making of England & the fate of his great hero, Uhtred of Bebbanburg. The Lords of the North is the third book in the series. Season 2 of the epic TV series premiers this March. The year is 878. Uhtred of Bebbanburg, fresh from fighting for Alfred the Great, must journey north with a band of men to avenge his father, who has been cut down by the Danish lord Kjartan, Uhtred`s oldest enemy. But the north is a realm of chaos, rebellion & bloody retribution. As he plans his revenge attack, Uhtred is betrayed & ends up on a slave voyage to Icel&. Friends & alliances must unite to free him, & fight once more in the battle for Engl&. ...

Scotland`s rich past & varied landscape have inspired an extraordinary array of legends & beliefs, & in ” The Lore of Scotland” Jennifer Westwood & Sophia Kingshill bring together many of the finest & most intriguing: stories of heroes & bloody feuds, tales of giants, fairies, & witches, & accounts of local customs & traditions. Their range extends right across the country, from the Borders with their haunting ballads, via Glasgow, site of St. Mungo`s miracles, to the fateful battlefield of Culloden, & finally to the Shetlands, home of the seal-people. More than simply retelling these stories, ” The Lore of Scotland” explores their origins, showing how & when they arose & investigating what basis
- if any
- they have in historical fact. In the process, it uncovers the events that inspired Shakespeare`s ” Macbeth, ” probes the claim that Mary King`s Close is the most haunted street in Edinburgh, & examines the surprising truth behind the fame of the Mac Crimmons, Skye`s unsurpassed bagpipers. Moreover, it reveals how generations of Picts, Vikings, Celtic saints & Presbyterian reformers shaped the myriad tales that still circulate, &, from across the country, it gathers together legends of such renowned figures as Sir William Wallace, St Columba, & the great warrior Fingal. The result is a thrilling journey through Scotland`s legendary past & an endlessly fascinating account of the traditions & beliefs that play such an important role in its heritage.

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From conkers to marbles, from British Bulldog to tag, not forgetting `one potato, two potato` & `eeny, meeny, miny, mo`, The Lore of the Playground looks at the games children have enjoyed, the rhymes they have chanted & the rituals & traditions they have observed over the past hundred years & more. Each generation, it emerges, has had its own favourites
- hoops & tops in the 1930s, clapping games more recently. Some pastimes, such as skipping, have proved remarkably resilient, their complicated rules carefully handed down from one class to the next. Many are now the stuff of distant memory. & some traditions have proved to be strongly regional, loved by children in one part of the country, unknown to those elsewhere. All are brilliantly & meticulously recorded by Steve Roud, who has drawn on interviews with hundreds of people aged from 8 to 80 to create a fascinating picture of all our childhoods.
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At the centre of this extraordinary historical narrative are two linked themes: the grinding down of the aborigines during the long rivalries of the quest for El Dorado, the mythical kingdom of gold; &, two hundred years later, the man-made horror of the new slave colony. Naipaul shows how the alchemic delusion of El Dorado drew the small island of Trinidad into the vortex of world events, making it the object of Spanish & English colonial designs & a Mecca for treasure-seekers, slave-traders, & revolutionaries. & through an accumulation of casual, awful detail, he takes us as close as we can get to day-to-day life in the Caribbean slave plantations -- at the time thought to be more brutal than their American equivalents. In this brilliantly researched book, living characters large & small are rescued from the records & set in a larger, guiding narrative -- about the New World, empire, African slavery, revolution -- which is never less than gripping. ` History as literature, meticulously researched & masterfully written` New York Times Book Review `A formidable achievement... No historian has attempted to weave together in so subtle a manner the threads of the most complex & turbulent period of Caribbean history` Times Literary Supplement ` Brilliant... Startling` New Statesman `A remarkable book... Intelligent, humane, brilliantly written` Book World ...

The gripping first-hand narrative of the whaling ship disaster that inspired Melville`s ” Moby-Dick ”and informed Nathaniel Philbrick`s monumental history, ” In the Heart of the Sea.” In 1820, the Nantucket whaleship ” Essex” was rammed by an angry sperm whale thousands of miles from home in the South Pacific. The ” Essex ”sank, leaving twenty crew members drifting in three small open boats for ninety days. Through drastic measures, eight men survived to reveal this astonishing tale. ” The Narrative of the Wreck of the Whaleship Essex, ” by Owen Chase, has long been the essential account of the ” Essex”`s doomed voyage. But in 1980, a new account of the disaster was discovered, penned late in life by Thomas Nickerson, who had been the fifteen-year-old cabin boy of the ship. This discovery has vastly expanded & clarified the history of an event as grandiose in its time as the ” Titanic.” This edition presents Nickerson`s never-before-published chronicle alongside Chase`s version. Also included are the most important other contemporary accounts of the incident, Melville`s notes in his copy of the Chase narrative, & journal entries by Emerson & Thoreau. ...

When an explosion reverberates through the Swan Hotel in Shanghai, it is not just shards of glass & rubble that come crashing down. Li Jing & Zhou Meiling find their once-happy marriage rocked to its foundations. For Li Jing, his head pierced by a shard of falling glass, awakens from brain surgery only able to utter the faltering phrases of the English he learnt as a child
- a language that Meiling & their young song Pang Pang cannot speak. When an American neurologist arrives, tasked with teaching Li Jing to speak fluently again, she is as disorientated as her patient in this bewitching, bewildering city. As doctor & patient grow closer, feelings neither of them anticipated begin to take hold. Feelings that Meiling, who must fight to keep both her husband`s business & her family afloat, does not need a translator to underst&.
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Long before GPS, Google Earth, & global transit, humans traveled vast distances using only environmental clues & simple instruments. John Huth asks what is lost when modern technology substitutes for our innate capacity to find our way. Encyclopedic in breadth, weaving together astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, & ethnography, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way puts us in the shoes, ships, & sleds of early navigators for whom paying close attention to the environment around them was, quite literally, a matter of life & death. Haunted by the fate of two young kayakers lost in a fogbank off Nantucket, Huth shows us how to navigate using natural phenomena--the way the Vikings used the sunstone to detect polarization of sunlight, & Arab traders learned to sail into the wind, & Pacific Islanders used underwater lightning & ”read” waves to guide their explorations. Huth reminds us that we are all navigators capable of learning techniques ranging from the simplest to the most sophisticated skills of direction-finding. Even today, careful observation of the sun & moon, tides & ocean currents, weather & atmospheric effects can be all we need to find our way. Lavishly illustrated with nearly 200 specially prepared drawings, Huth`s compelling account of the cultures of navigation will engross readers in a narrative that is part scientific treatise, part personal travelogue, & part vivid re-creation of navigational history. Seeing through the eyes of past voyagers, we bring our own world into sharper view. ...

Caryl Phillips`s The Lost Child is a sweeping story of orphans & outcasts, haunted by the past & fighting to liberate themselves from it. At its centre is Monica Johnson, cut off from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner, & her bitter struggle to raise her sons in the shadow of the wild moors of the north of Engl&. Intertwined with her modern narrative is the ragged childhood of Emily Bronte`s Heathcliff, the anti-hero of Wuthering Heights & one of literature`s most enigmatic lost boys. Written in the tradition of Jean Rhys`s Wide Sargasso Sea & J.M. Coetzee`s Foe, The Lost Child is a multifaceted, deeply original response to Emily Bronte`s masterpiece. A critically acclaimed & sublimely talented storyteller, Phillips recovers the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, getting at the heart of alienation, exile, & family by transforming a classic into a profound story that is singularly its own. ...

Sixty years after his father left to be a mapmaker in the war in Europe, Emerson Johansson received a package that had been lost in the mail for decades. The package contained a most extraordinary gift: an exquisite book Johansson s father lovingly handmade detailing an extraordinary adventure they shared together just months before his departure. This book tells the tale of how father & son set out into the mountains on Christmas Eve to cut a tree, but get caught in a dangerous blizzard. Lost in the snow, they are helped by a mysterious figure, a silvery man who does not speak but leaves them a series of gifts that help them survive & who ultimately leads them home in an almost magical way. The enigmatic man`s image is not captured in the photographs the boy took with his new camera, pictures he believed, until now, were long lost. Little did he know that his father had taken the photographs, & drawing on vellum overlays from his own memory of that night`s events, meticulously reconstructed, mapped, & narrated their adventure, revealing that the curious man in the woods was, in fact, no stranger, but somebody well known to us all. This book, destined to become a Christmas classic, is a faithful facsimile of the magnificent handcrafted present Johnasson s father sent him, & a poignant reminder that the best gifts, of memory, family, & the kindness of strangers, transcend time but never our understanding. ...

`” Is it really possible, do you suppose, ” said Sherlock Holmes to me one morning, as we took breakfast together, ”that a healthy & robust man may be so stricken with terror that he drops down dead?”` So begins ` The Adventure of the Brown Box`. Even better than his first collection, twelve new stories from the much praised Denis O. Smith, including ` The Adventure of the Velvet Mask`, ` The Adventure of the Tomb on the Hill`, & ` The Secret of Shoreswood Hall`. Smith`s stories are of the sort most eagerly devoured by avid fans of Holmes & Dr Watson. A would-be client tells Holmes a strange tale, & he is drawn in to a seemingly impenetrable mystery. Whether in the shrouding fog of London, or far from the city, deep in the countryside, these fast-paced stories, set in the late nineteenth century, before Holmes`s disappearance at the Reichenbach Falls, recreate with wonderful fidelity the world of Conan Doyle`s best Holmes stories. This captivating anthology brings to a new audience the very best of Denis O. Smith`s work in a satisfyingly hefty compendium. ...