Aldo by John Burningham is the tale of a lonely little girl who finds that her imaginary friend Aldo has the power to comfort & reassure. With its haunting illustrations & lyrical text, Aldo is full of feeling & the perfect story to share if your child is worried & unhappy about friendships. ...

The catalog of the Aldo Manutiu exhibition, 500 years after his death, is a tribute to the most famous printer in the history of publishing. It tells how the book changed the world & how & why this change happened in Venice, cosmopolitan city & gateway between East & West. But it is mainly a journey through the world of culture & the arts in Venice between the end of the fifteenth century & the start of the sixteenth, in a crucial period featuring major figures like the painters Bellini, Carpaccio, & the young Giorgione (with the debut of his pupil Titian), illustrious visiting foreign artists like Albrecht Durer, & intellectuals of European fame such as Erasmus of Rotterdam. ...

The son of biologist T. H. Huxley, Aldous Huxley had a privileged background & was educated at Eton & Oxford despite an eye infection that left him nearly blind. Having learned braille his eyesight then enhanced enough for him to start writing, & by the 1920s he had become a fashionable figure, producing witty & daring novels like CROME YELLOW (1921), ANTIC HAY (1923) & POINT COUNTER POINT (1928). But it is as the author of his celebrated portrayal of a nightmare future society, BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932), that Huxley is remembered today. A truly visionary book, it was a watershed in Huxley's world-view as his later work became more & more optimistic
- coinciding with his move to California & experimentation with mysticism & psychedelic drugs later in life. Nicholas Murray's brilliant new book has the greatest virtue of literary biographies: it makes you want to go out & read its subject's work all over again. A fascinating reassessment of one of the most interesting writers of the twentieth century.
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Alec Cobbe (b.1945) established his reputation as a conservator of Old Master paintings before specializing in the redecoration & rearrangement of historic interiors as homes for masterpieces. His list of clients

Includes:: H.R.H. The Prince of Wales & the Ritz Hotel.

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This is a biography about the British motor industry's most influential & controversial engineer, Sir Alec Issignois. Wood exposes a behind-the-scenes impression of the personal & corporate struggles within the declining British car industry, a complex process in which Issigonis played a famous role. THE COLLAPSE in 2005 of MG Rover marked the end of Britain's indigenous motor industry as a volume car manufacturer. Yet back in the 1960s its Longbridge-based British Motor Corporation predecessor dominated the market with the iconic Mini & stylish 1100. Both were the work, together with the legendary Morris Minor, of Sir Alec Issigonis, CBE, FRS, the British motor industry's most influential & controversial engineer. In this full-length biography, published to commemorate the centenary of its subject's birth, which falls in 2006, award-winning motoring historian Jonathan Wood chronicles the rise & fall of Issigonis, born in Turkey of Greek/ Bavarian parentage, who arrived in Britain as a near-penniless refugee & became the most powerful automobile engineer in the l&. His ingenious & effective designs had a deep, lasting influence on the evolution of the motor car & on the wider history of industrial design, & he deserves to be ranked with the other giants of the field like Ferdinand Porsche in Germany & Dante Giacosa in Italy. Wood's candid & meticulously researched account, which exposes Sir Alec's public & private faces, & is the product of some 30 years of research, is complemented by interviews conducted with many of Issigonis' former colleagues & friends, including: Ronald Barker, John Cooper, Jack Daniels, Christopher Dowson, Paddy Hopkirk, Spen King, Dr Alex Moulton, Dr Bernd Pischetsrieder, Lord Snowdon & Stuart Turner. The finished volume is a balanced view of a remarkable, immensely talented man, with a behind-the-scenes impression of the personal & corporate struggles within the declining British car industry, a complex process in which Issigonis played a famous role. ...

Aled Jones, a choirboy with a remarkable voice, achieved more as a teenager than many adult singers do in a lifetime. His prodigious talent propelled him to international stardom; before he was 16, he had already sold more than 6 million records & had become a fixture on television & radio. He has worked alongside such musical greats as Leonard Bernstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Neville Marriner, Howard Blake & Mike Oldfield. Some of the high points of his early career included performances at the Hollywood Bowl & the wedding of Bob Geldof & Paula Yates, as well as singing privately for the Prince & the late Princess of Wales. Best known as a boy soprano for his hit ' Walking in the Air', Aled tells the full story of the effect it had on his life. Always refreshingly honest & self-effacing, Aled reveals how he faced up to life after his voice had broken & how he carved out a new career for himself on stage, record, television & radio. His story begins with his idyllic childhood on the Welsh island of Anglesey & his years as a chorister at Bangor Cathedral, during which his family provided wonderful support & encouragement as he rose to fame. He tells of his studies at the Royal Academy of Music & the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. As an adult performer, Aled has released a series of best-selling albums. Today, he is most known for sitting alongside Lorraine Kelly as one half of the presenting partnership of ITV's breakfast programme Daybreak. He is a regular host of Songs of Praise & presents weekly radio programmes for Classic FM & BBC Radio Wales. Aled: My Story reveals the man behind the music in a frank, heart-warming & funny account of his life. ...

Aled Jones was a choirboy with a remarkable voice, whose prodigious talent propelled him to international stardom. Before he was sixteen, he had already sold more than six million records & had become a fixture on television & radio. He has worked alongside such greats as Leonard Bernstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sir Neville Marriner, Howard Blake, & Mike Oldfield. Some of the high points of his early career include performances at the Hollywood Bowl & the wedding of Bob Geldof & Paula Yates, as well as singing privately for the Prince & Princess of Wales. Best known as a boy soprano for his hit " Walking in the Air, Aled tells the full story of this phenomenal record & the effect it had on his life. Always refreshingly honest & self-effacing, Aled reveals how he faced up to life after his voice had broken & how he carved out a new career for himself on stage, record, television, & radio. His story begins with his idyllic childhood on the Welsh island of Anglesey & his years as a chorister at Bangor Cathedral, during which his family provided wonderful support & encouragement as he rose to fame. He tells of his studies at the Royal Academy of Music & the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School & delves behind the scene of some of Britain's best-know institutions, such as Songs of Praise, BBC Wales & Classic FM. Aled reveals the truth about the man behind the music in this frank, heartwarming & funny account of his life. ...

The perfect gift for Christmas, this book

Includes:: all your favourite carols brought vividly to life

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The perfect gift for Christmas, this book

Includes:: all your favourite carols brought vividly to life with

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This book provides a history of the alehouse between the years 1550 & 1700, the period during which it first assumed its long celebrated role as the key site for public recreation in the villages & market towns of Engl&. In the face of considerable animosity from Church & State, the patrons of alehouses, who were drawn from a wide cross section of village society, fought for & won a central place in their communities for an institution that they cherished as a vital facilitator of what they termed good fellowship. For them, sharing a drink in the alehouse was fundamental to the formation of social bonds, to the expression of their identity, & to the definition of communities, allegiances & friendships. Bringing together social & cultural history approaches, this book draws on a wide range of source material
- from legal records & diary evidence to printed drinking songs
- to investigate battles over alehouse licensing & the regulation of drinking; the political views & allegiances that ordinary men & women expressed from the alebench; the meanings & values that drinking rituals & practices held for contemporaries; & the social networks & collective identities expressed through the choice of drinking companions. Focusing on an institution & a social practice at the heart of everyday life in early modern Engl&, this book allows us to see some of the ways in which ordinary men & women responded to historical processes such as religious change & state formation, & just as importantly reveals how they shaped their own communities & collective identities. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the social, cultural & political worlds of the ordinary men & women of seventeenth-century Engl&.BR> MARK HAILWOOD is Associate Research Fellow in History at the University of Exeter.

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