During World War II, Bill Sinclair wrote over 2,300 pages of letters to his beloved wife, Lisbeth. Discovered in his wartime valise, Bill's photographs and private papers are now brought to life, marking 75 years since the end of the Second World War. They provide a unique perspective and alternative narrative to some of the most important events of the time. On 30th July 1941, Bill Sinclair's daughter was born, but it was on that same day that he embarked on a ship that would take him to war. It would be almost four years before Bill saw his daughter for the first time due to his posting to General Headquarters in Cairo, supporting key offensives including Alamein in the Western Desert Campaign of North Africa and Cassino in Italy. He was mentioned in despatches and awarded the MBE for his part in the Italian Campaign. Against the backdrop of war, when circumstances permitted, football provided a brief distraction and a glimpse of normality. Bill organised and participated in matches along with famous names of the time, often in front of crowds of thousands. It was an opportunity to forget, if only for a few hours.
A real knock-out' DAILY TELEGRAPH Random occurences that shaped the history of football - an alternative history of the game from loveable broadcaster Colin Murray. Nowadays a top Premiership football club can spend £50 million on a Portuguese pin-up or a legendary Italian goalkeeper, but you cannot take into account the effects of a dodgy takeaway meal, a dropped bottle of aftershave on a goalkeeper's toe, or the fact that your most creative player has to leave town because of a chance drunken encounter with another player's wife. It is these random moments that have shaped football as much as the headline-grabbing Cantona kung fu kick and that Russian linesman in 1966. In this witty alternative history of football you will learn: * Different sizes of football were used in each half of the inaugural World Cup Final of 1930. * Sheffield United almost signed Diego Maradona. * Saddam Hussein changed the result of an Iraq versus Chelsea match. * Bury FC's Robbie the Bobby tops the league of worst-behaved mascots. From the height of international football to the scandal of the Conference league Christmas party that cost far more than a bar-bill, Colin Murray tries his best to make you believe, once more, in football's unpredictability.
I walk back into the living room. I have never seen this room before. Some might be confused as I had only a few minutes ago seduced a man in this room. But I have never been in this room before. I sit back onto the couch I have never sat on before. I look at a table I have never pushed away before. I watch Dean enter and sit in his chair. I have never seen Dean before. Not this Dean. Everything has changed in an instant. I was cruising along a highway of happiness and confidence. But I hit a red light." Things are tough for Mia, a beautiful eighteen-year-old prostitute in 2008. Her whimsical outlook on life and guilty conscience have resulted in her eviction from her pimp's home. She hasn't a dime to her name or anywhere to go. Then a voice calls out to her. A voice that belongs to a young man who offers her shelter and doesn't seem to have a sinister bone in his body...yet. A seductive and unapologetic game of cat and mouse between a moralistic hooker and a sadistic killer takes center stage in this tale of lost innocence, depraved sexuality, grisly violence, and the darkest sides of human nature. Sexy, humorous, and oddly uplifting when the violent gut punches subside, Red Light and Other Tales is a solid debut in mature and happily impolite genre fiction.
A beautifully illustrated collection of new Doctor Who stories, each featuring one of the twelve Doctors on a festive adventure in theTARDIS. Written by six authors and with a full-page colour illustration for each story, these tales are full of magic, mystery, wonder, excitement - and everything else that fans love about a Doctor Who Christmas special.
In Mondo Nano Colin Milburn takes his readers on a playful expedition through the emerging landscape of nanotechnology, offering a light-hearted yet critical account of our high-tech world of fun and games. This expedition ventures into discussions of the first nanocars, the popular video games Second Life, Crysis, and BioShock, international nanosoccer tournaments, and utopian nano cities. Along the way, Milburn shows how the methods, dispositions, and goals of nanotechnology research converge with video game culture. With an emphasis on play, scientists and gamers alike are building a new world atom by atom, transforming scientific speculations and video game fantasies into reality. Milburn suggests that the closing of the gap between bits and atoms entices scientists, geeks, and gamers to dream of a completely programmable future. Welcome to the wild world of Mondo Nano.
The Virgin Encyclopaedia of the Blues is a complete handbook of information and opinion about the history of the most classically simple, enduring and inspiring genre in the history of popular music. All entries have been created from the massive database of The Encyclopaedia of Popular Music, which has swiftly and firmly established itself as the undisputed champion of contemporary music reference books. Brand new research ensures that the 1000 entries are bang up-to-date and cover everyone - the musicians, bands, songwriters, producers and record labels - who has made a significant impact on the development of the blues. It brings together pioneers like Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, the influence of Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon on the blues boom of the 1960s, and the most recent blues resurgence featuring Keb'Mo, Larry Garner and Jonny Lang. As well as the giants of the blues, this encyclopaedia has the range and depth to include performers who flew the blues flag during fallow periods, the 1980s band Roomful of Blues for example, or acts like Paul Butterfield, Chicken Shack, Stevie Ray Vaughan, who took the music to a wider, whiter, audience. Some blues musicians, including John Lee Hooker and Taj Mahal, seem to last forever. Others simply defined the genre, like Lead Belly, Bessie Smith and Howlin' Wolf. Whomever you remember or want to know more about, each entry gives the essential elements - dates, career facts, discography and album ratings - as well as a sense of context, striking a balance between the extremes of the self-opinionated and the bland.
The last two decades have seen an explosive increase in the ethnic diversity of the workforce, growth in international business, and the emergence of many more multinational companies. The potential for problems as companies operate across borders and managers manage in countries which have different values, norms and cultural behaviors is great. By looking at organizational psychology in a cross-cultural context, we can gain an understanding of the challenges facing organizations and business today. This text breaks new ground in introducing organizational psychology from a cross cultural perspective. It provides a foundational overview of the current major theories in organizational psychology, and illuminates the impact of cultural differences on organizational dynamics. It also makes available specific research concerning our current understandings of how these dynamics play out in particular regions and countries, such as autocratic versus democratic leadership styles in Africa and Europe or conflict management in Asia. The volume offers a welcome introduction to the topic to those in industrial/organizational psychology, international relations and management, and international business/MBA programs focusing on international issues.
Calloway reminds us that neither Indians nor Colonists were a monolithic group resulting in a more nuanced appreciation for the complexity of cultural relationships in Colonial America. He provides an essential starting point for studying the interaction of Europeans and Indians in early American life.
50,000 copies sold, now in paperback... If you can think impossible thoughts, then you can do impossible things!! The power of change: create new thinking for new solutions! Includes a new introduction demonstrating the "power of impossible thinking," plus access to exclusive book summary and authors' interview at the book's companion Web site. The Power of Impossible Thinking is about getting better at making sense of what's going on around you so you can make decisions that respond to reality, not inaccurate or obsolete models of the world. This bestseller reveals how mental models stand between you and the truth and how to transform them into your biggest advantage! Learn how to develop new ways of seeing, when to change to a new model, how to swap amongst a portfolio of models, how to understand complex environments and how to do "mind R and D," improving models through constant experimentation. Jerry Wind and Colin Crook review why it's so hard to change mental models and offer practical strategies for dismantling "hardened missile silos". Finally they show how to access models quickly through intuition, and assess the effectiveness of any mental model. Purchasers of this book gain access to audio summaries on a companion web site, along with a new half-hour interview with the authors.
What makes a good scandal? Money, politics and power, and a huge dose of media interest. Scandal reigns in the world of politics, celebrity, business, religion, royalty and art, and this book covers it all - from Watergate to Michael Jackson, Diana to Oscar Wilde. Distinguished writer Colin Wilson delves into the murky intrigues of British and American life to bring the most scandalous secrets to light. Containing brand new chapters on Michael Jackson, ENRON, the death of David Kelly, the Catholic Church sex scandals and the cash-for-honours scandal, and an updated chapter on OJ Simpson, here are the embarrassing true stories the rich and famous tried but failed to hide.
Bervie and Beyond reaches back to the early 1700s and into the lives of the author's paternal ancestry in North East Scotland, and then endeavours to trace the lives of all his fellow descendants through to around the mid-1900s. It tells the story of a not very successful smuggler who turned legitimate and established the first linen mill in Scotland. It progresses to his son Walter, who published several books in the early 1800s before being lured to Irelandby Chief Secretary Robert Peel to publish the Dublin Journal newspaper. But it was the next generation which brought real success. Alex Thom developed what was to become the leading Irish printing company, culminating in appointment as the country's Queen's Printer. Alex amassed a huge personal fortune which enabled him to establish his beloved Thom's Directory. By his own efforts it grew in content and stature, and quickly became the primary reference source for all things Irish. It was his greatest achievement, and the Irish nation will forever remember him for it. But wealth and a second marriage created downsides, with family divisions and a widow who took "spreading the joy" (to other than family) to a new art form. In the following generations we learn of a suicide, successful migration toArgentinaandSouth Africa, and in TheAntipodes, destitution.
Czech-born refugee Karel Reisz (1926-2002) is widely regarded as one of the seminal figures in post-war British cinema. Along with Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson, Reisz was a founder member of the independent Free Cinema ‘movement’ which attacked the parochial middle-class values of home-grown studio product with a vigorous commitment to everyday working-class subject matter and a poetically-charged film style. This was immediately recognisable in the aesthetic of the international success of Reisz’s first feature, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). As the import of Free Cinema rapidly dissipated during the ‘Swinging London’ era, Reisz confronted the changing cultural mores of the 1960s and ‘70s with a series of ambivalent films that critique the anarchic free spirit of the times, including Morgan (1966), Isadora (1968), The Gambler (1974) and Dog Soldiers (1978). Drawing on Reisz’s early film criticism for Sequence and Sight and Sound, as well as interdisciplinary methodologies, this first career-length study explores Reisz’s personal brand of character-based realism, offering the spectator a privileged insight into an artist’s developing response to subjective and historical dislocation. The book should thus prove invaluable to film scholars, cultural historians and the Reisz aficionado.
This book uses diaries written by ordinary British people over the past two centuries to examine and explain the nature and extent of everyday mobilities, such as travel to school, to work, to shop or to visit friends, and to explore the meanings attached to these mobilities. After a critical evaluation of diary writing, the ways in which mobility changed over time, interacted with new forms of transport technology, and varied from place to place are examined. Further chapters focus on the roles of family and life course, gender, income and class, and journey purpose in shaping mobilities, including immobility. It is argued that easy and frequent everyday mobilities were experienced by most of the diarists studied, that travellers could exercise their own agency to adapt easily to new forms of transport technology, but that factors such as gender, class, and location also created significant mobility inequalities.
George Washington's place in the foundations of the Republic remains unrivalled. His life story--from his beginnings as a surveyor and farmer, to colonial soldier in the Virginia Regiment, leader of the Patriot cause, commander of the Continental Army, and finally first president of the United States--reflects the narrative of the nation he guided into existence. There is, rightfully, no more chronicled figure. Yet American history has largely forgotten what Washington himself knew clearly: that the new Republic's fate depended less on grand rhetoric of independence and self-governance and more on land--Indian land. Colin G. Calloway's biography of the greatest founding father reveals in full the relationship between Washington and the Native leaders he dealt with intimately across the decades: Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Guyasuta, Attakullakulla, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Cornplanter, Red Jacket, and Little Turtle, among many others. Using the prism of Washington's life to bring focus to these figures and the tribes they represented--the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware--Calloway reveals how central their role truly was in Washington's, and therefore the nation's, foundational narrative. Calloway gives the First Americans their due, revealing the full extent and complexity of the relationships between the man who rose to become the nation's most powerful figure and those whose power and dominion declined in almost equal degree during his lifetime. His book invites us to look at America's origins in a new light. The Indian World of George Washington is a brilliant portrait of both the most revered man in American history and those whose story during the tumultuous century in which the country was formed has, until now, been only partially told.
This fascinating selection of more than 180 photographs traces some of the many ways in which Crieff & Strathearn has changed and developed over the last century.
Recollections from a selection of concerts the author went to in the UK during the 1980s and 90s. Ranging from big names like Queen and ZZ Top to less well known bands such as Stump and Urge Overkill, the book describes events that made the gigs memorable such as a fire alarm going off during a gig, a guitarist performing an encore naked and a singer pushing a drunken fan off the stage.
Through world wars and civil strife, the Bangor Express has never missed an issue, but now it is losing money hand-over-fist and Rob Cullen, fresh off the plane from his London news desk, has absolutely no idea that he's the man to save it. Rob's back in Northern Ireland for the first time in 20 years for the funeral of his one-time mentor, the late editor of the aforementioned Express. Tomorrow morning the Guardian reporter intends to be on the first plane back to London, but that's before an exceptionally good night out and the promise of £1,500 for just one day's work lures him into the Express offices. It's been a long time since Rob had a real story to get his teeth into... and with the Bangor Express, that's just what he's going to get. From armed robberies to arson attacks there is no shortage of front-page news. Just as well Rob can rely on the Express crew to back him up. They're like a family. A dysfunctional, highly unpopular and poverty-stricken family.
The Sports Fact: the bedrock of any self-respecting fan, the trump card of the pub conversation. We cant quote Shakespeare or remember our loved ones birthdays - superfluous! - but we can list, in alphabetical order, the last three strikers for our teams to have a 20-goal season, together with the names of their wives, children, aunts, favourite TV shows, golf handicap...glory! And so it is that Fighting Talk, the Saturday morning bastion of world-class punditry, introduces five years of accrued knowledge, one liners, quips, and anecdote all gleaned from, or in the style of, the hugely popular show. Discover Sports Facts as pithy as what kind of chocolate bar Victoria Beckham was munching on as she gave birth to first son Brooklyn, or whether a World Cup victory have any effect on the victorious nations GDP, or even Also, be challenged by the divisive Defend the Indefensibles in which our crack team of writers support motions as scurrilous as the best thing about the Grand National is seeing a horse gets shot, or that its really true women really cant throw.
Colin Bycroft's second midlife crisis struck in 2004 when he sold his motorbike (fruits of the first midlife crisis) and bought a pushbike. This book tells how Colin cycled 'End to End' from Land's End to John O' Groats to prove to himself he was still as resourceful as he used to be, and to raise money for The Parkinson's Disease Society. Profits from this book will also go to the PDS.
The barbarians are coming and what do they bring? A vivid, turbulent novel following the fates of two very different people in a land that is not their own drawn together at The Hour Of The Thin Ox In tranquil, prosperous Bryland, a young heiress learns of a new engine of war which will bring terrible change in its wake. In the distant, arrogant nation of Escaly, the elderly Imperial Geometer is sent upon an unexpected and frightening mission. In the dark, feverish jungles of Belanesi, a strange half-human people wait for a season of rain and the call of a mysterious piper. At the Hour of the Thin Ox three cultures collide, with violent and paradoxical consequences.
The harrowing story of the Allied airmen who experienced the true horrors of Nazism firsthand. It was the summer of 1944 as liberating Allied forces surged towards Paris following the D-Day landings. For a large group of downed airmen being held in that city’s infamous Fresnes Prison, they were about to face evacuation into the blackest, bloody heart of Germany and experience the most acute evil of the war. Amid great secrecy, those 168 airmen – including several from Australia and New Zealand – were transported on a filthy, overcrowded nightmare train journey which ended at the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp, accompanied by orders for their execution. At Buchenwald they witnessed extreme depravity that would haunt them to the end of their days. Yet, on returning home, they were confronted by decades of denials from their own governments that they had ever been held in one of Hitler’s most vile concentration camps. In conducting his original deep research for this book – now completely expanded and updated – Colin Burgess personally interviewed or corresponded with dozens of the surviving airmen from a number of nations, including their valorous leader, New Zealand Squadron Leader Phil Lamason. Destination Buchenwald tells a compelling story of extraordinary bravery, comradeship and endurance, when a group of otherwise ordinary servicemen were thrust into an unimaginable Nazi hell. 'This was the first book to provide an insight into our experiences as a group of captured allied airmen, betrayed to the Gestapo, tortured and deported to Buchenwald concentration camp. I consider it to be one of the best interpretations of the events as it reflects the voices of the survivors and their challenges to stay alive in such dehumanising circumstances.' Sqn Ldr Stanley Booker, RAF (Rtd.), MBE, Légion D'Honneur: Last surviving member of the Buchenwald airmen
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