Mikhail Starin, Head of Soviet Intelligence in London, is a ruthless, cold-hearted individual. Known to have killed 24 people, including his own mother, he's now determined to get his hands on a hard-to-stabilize nuclear formula. There's only one thing for British Intelligence to do: send him back to Russia as quickly as possible. They scheme to leak details of a top-level Western military secret - knowing that when the Russians discover the secret is a double cross, Starin is history. Unfortunately there's only one man available to oversee the job: David Hale; young, honourable, but completely out of his depth. Rotten with Honour is a Cold War espionage thriller told with the trademark wit of Derek Robinson, bestselling and Booker-shortlisted author of Goshawk Squadron.
From the Phoney War of 1939 to the Battle of Britain in 1940, the pilots of Hornet Squadron learn their lessons the hard way. Hi-jinks are all very well on the ground, but once in a Hurricane's cockpit, the best killers keep their wits close. Newly promoted Commanding Officer Fanny Barton has a job on to whip the Hornets into shape before they face the Luftwaffe's seasoned pilots. And sometimes Fighter Command, with its obsolete tactics and stiff doctrines, is the real menace. As with all Robinson's novels, the raw dialogue, rich black humor and brilliantly rendered, adrenaline-packed dogfights bring the Battle of Britain, and the brave few who fought it, to life.
They joined an R.A.F. known as "the best flying club in the world," but when war pitches the young pilots of 409 Squadron into battle over Germany, their training, tactics and equipment are soon found wanting, their twin-engined bombers obsolete from the off. Chances of completing a 30-operation tour? One in three. At best. Robinson's crooked salute to the dogged heroes of the R.A.F.'s early bombing campaign is a wickedly humorous portrait of men doing their duty in flying death traps, fully aware, in those dark days of war, there was nothing else to do but dig in and hang on.
It's 1953, and Luis Cabrillo has burned through the small fortune he earned from both British and German Intelligence in WW2. Now he has only his wits, his confidence, and his dazzling skills at lying and cheating. Teaming up again with Julie Conroy (a corker of a New Yorker), he follows his wartime instincts and goes where arrogance breeds wealth: to Washington D.C. and Senator Joe McCarthy, high priest of America's holy war on Red treachery. Joe's problem is a sudden shortage of treachery. Luis can help him out, but for dollars. Big dollars. And when the C.I.A. gets into the act, followed by the K.G.B., F.B.I., M.I.6. and the Mafia, it makes for an explosive mixture ripe for a spark. In Red Rag Blues Derek Robinson lends his signature wit to the hysteria and paranoia of the McCarthy years, toying with the notion that the world's most powerful nation is sometimes the world's most stupid.
Fresh from school in June 1916, Lieutenant Oliver Paxton's first solo flight is to lead a formation of biplanes across the Channel to join Hornet Squadron in France. Five days later, he crash-lands at his destination, having lost his map, his ballast and every single plane in his charge. To his C.O. he's an idiot, to everyone else--especially the tormenting Australian who shares his billet--a pompous bastard. This is 1916, the year of the Somme, giving Paxton precious little time to grow from innocent to veteran.
Derek Robinson grew up against the backdrop of World War II in England. In this memoir, Robinson tells the story of his life and experiences and how the war affected his family. Born in 1934, he was the last of eight children. His father served in the army, and the family lived in different locations in England and Scotland. In Derek's Story, Robinson recalls the days of his carefree youth visiting the local blacksmith, playing in the verdant fields and orchards, and attending school. But life changed for him and others when war began September 3, 1939. He remembers the not-so-pleasant war life filled with ration books, mandatory blackouts, German raids, and watching war planes crash. This memoir follows Robinson as he lands his first job as an eyeglass maker and subsequent jobs at the cotton mills, the gas company, and the ambulance service. Derek's Story tells of his marriage in 1957, moving to Canada in 1965, and starting his own company. Filled with photos and family history, this account chronicles the successes of a man who started his life surrounded by war.
Rock Springs, Kentucky. A backwater miles from civilisation, but so far upstream that the riverboats can go no further, and with plenty of farmland there for the taking. Among the pioneers who choose to build their homes here are the Hudds and the Killicks, two families destined to spend the next century despising one another. Kentucky Blues is a powerful, unsentimental depiction of life through several generations, widely considered to be Robinson's most ambitious work. Told with his trademark dark humour, it is an epic tale of one small community's journey from its foundation in the 1820s, through the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, to the dawn of the modern age.
1943. British Intelligence has finally got to grips with the Eldorado Network, Germany's most successful spy ring. It turns out to be one man in a small room in Lisbon, inventing phony (but convincing) reports. For two years he pulled the wool over German Intelligence's eyes, and made a killing. The British soon find that Eldorado's a real handful. They bring him to England, so they can manage his dispatches, and discover that living with a genius can be a headache. Eldorado rapidly creates a team of top sub-agents around him. None of them exists. But power--even imaginary power--is intoxicating, and he begins to treat his fake sub-agents as if real. Big trouble ahead. Artillery of Lies is the hair-raising sequel to The Eldorado Network, all the more funny for being soundly based on the true story of a real Second World War spy.
1941. Hitler is rampant. Spain is neutral. Madrid, like Casablanca, the launching pad for spies from all sides. The most daring and audacious of all is codenamed "Eldorado." Young, inexperienced, hotheaded, he had no right to survive, let alone succeed. Now his network is the most valuable in Europe, and the fates of armies lie in his hands. But who does he work for? Or is he only in it for himself? One thing's for sure. War may be a dirty business, but it certainly brings home the bacon. Based on a true story, The Eldorado Network is the first novel in Derek Robinson's acclaimed Luis Cabrillo Quartet. A tense and gripping espionage thriller from a master of action and suspense.
In Why 1914?, Derek Robinson--trained as a historian, shortlisted for the Booker Prize--applies his novelist's skills to asking how and why Europe hurried into such a massive disaster. He captures a world of kings and Kaisers, generals and infantrymen. None of them knew what a big European war meant. All the combatant nations assumed it would be short, and each expected to win. The roots of such folly began in the nineteenth century. Robinson traces the earliest warning signs, leading to a sudden crisis and an impulsive war that went massively wrong from the start. This book is the ideal introduction to the key question of the Great War: why did Europe explode?
Here, for the first time, is an intimate and fascinating portrait of Rudolf Nureyev off-stage - a man who was an exacting, unpredictable, parsimonious and often immature individual, yet who, at the same time, aroused great affection in a host of friends. Simon Robinson frankly recalls his eventful year working for Nureyev. He did everything for this hopelessly impractical dancer except be his lover, much to Nureyev's disappointment. It was the Russian's insatiable sexual appetite that eventually destroyed him. Nureyev had six houses on three continents but no staff in any of them and he couldn't cook, drive, write a letter, tie a necktie or even change a light bulb. In 1990 Simon Robinson, until then professional crew on a racing yacht, became his PA. For the next twelve months they travelled from the Caribbean to America to Europe, living in luxury in Nureyev's New York and Paris apartments and in spartan isolation on his tiny Mediterranean island. Nureyev's explosive nature was exhausting to live with and many times during their year together Robinson nearly quit - and Nureyev nearly sacked him. It didn't happen, however, because Nureyev needed his PA's calm reliability to ballast his own rocky life, and because Robinson knew that genius must make its own rules.
Known for his black humor and expertise in military aviation, Derek Robinson is best renowned for his novels on the Royal Flying Corps. The Goshawk Squadron was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. World War One pilots were the knights of the sky, and the press and public idolised them as gallant young heroes. At just twenty-three, Major Stanley Woolley is the old man and commanding officer of Goshawk Squadron. He abhors any notion of chivalry in the clouds and is determined to obliterate the decent, gentlemanly outlook of his young, public school-educated pilots--for their own good. But as the war goes on he is forced to thrown greener and greener pilots into the meat grinder. Goshawk Squadron finds its gallows humor and black camaraderie no defense against a Spandau bullet to the back of the head.
From 1941 to 1943 it was the Germans. Then it was the turn of the British. Come the Cold War, he's conning McCarthy. Now he's going head to head with the L.A. mob. For high stakes con artist Luis Cabrillo, once known as Eldorado, the million-dollar spy, trouble is never far away. And when he and his corker-of-a-New-Yorker squeeze, Julie Conroy, run into the cream of Los Angele's shady side, the result is a heady brew of disorganized crime, hot dollars, triple virgins and dead bodies in the begonias. The fourth and final Luis Cabrillo novel is yet another fiendishly plotted rollercoaster ride of wit and wisecracking, as the Second World War's most daring and audacious spy finds that old habits die hard, even in peacetime.
Flight Lieutenant Silk, a twice-decorated Lancaster pilot in WW II, rejoins the R.A.F. and qualifies to fly the Vulcan bomber. Piloting a Vulcan is an unforgettable experience: no other aircraft comes close to matching its all-round performance. And as bombers go, it's drop-dead gorgeous. But there's a catch. The Vulcan has only one role: to make a second strike. To act in retaliation for a Russian nuclear attack. Silk knows that knows that if he ever flies his Vulcan in anger, he'll be flying from a smoking wasteland, a Britain obliterated. But in the mad world of Mutually Assured Destruction, the Vulcan is the last--the only--deterrent. Derek Robinson returns with another rip-roaring, gung-ho R.A.F. adventure, one that exposes and confronts the brinkmanship and saber-rattling of the Cold War Era.
North Africa, 1942. Dust, heat, thirst, flies. A good clean fight, for those who like that sort of thing, and some do. From an advanced landing field, striking hard and escaping fast, our old friends from Hornet Squadron (Piece of Cake) play Russian roulette, flying their clapped-out Tomahawks on ground-strafing forays. Meanwhile, on the ground, the men of Captain Lampard's S.A.S. patrol drive hundreds of miles behind enemy lines to plant bombs on German aircraft. This is the story of a war of no glamor and few heroes, in a setting often more lethal than the enemy.
It's 1917, and Captain Stanley Woolley joins an R.F.C. squadron whose pilots are starting to fear the worst: their war over the Western Front may go on for years. A pilot's life is usually short, so while it lasts it is celebrated strenuously. Distractions from the brutality of the air war include British nurses; eccentric Russian pilots; bureaucratic battles over the plum-jam ration; rat-hunting with Very pistols; and the C.O.'s patent, potent cocktail, known as "Hornet's Sting." But as the summer offensives boil up, none of these can offer any lasting comfort.
This book is a study of group theoretical properties of two dis parate kinds, firstly finiteness conditions or generalizations of fini teness and secondly generalizations of solubility or nilpotence. It will be particularly interesting to discuss groups which possess properties of both types. The origins of the subject may be traced back to the nineteen twenties and thirties and are associated with the names of R. Baer, S. N. Cernikov, K. A. Hirsch, A. G. Kuros, 0.]. Schmidt and H. Wie landt. Since this early period, the body of theory has expanded at an increasingly rapid rate through the efforts of many group theorists, particularly in Germany, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Some of the highest points attained can, perhaps, be found in the work of P. Hall and A. I. Mal'cev on infinite soluble groups. Kuras's well-known book "The theory of groups" has exercised a strong influence on the development of the theory of infinite groups: this is particularly true of the second edition in its English translation of 1955. To cope with the enormous increase in knowledge since that date, a third volume, containing a survey of the contents of a very large number of papers but without proofs, was added to the book in 1967.
Short, brisk and highly readable, this account stands out from the flood of books written for the Centenary of the Great War. In Why 1914?, Derek Robinson - trained as a historian, shortlisted for the Booker Prize - applies his novelist's skills to asking how and why Europe hurried into such a massive disaster. He captures a world of kings and Kaisers, generals and infantrymen. None of them knew what a big European war meant. All the combatant nations assumed it would be short, and each expected to win. The roots of such folly began in the nineteenth century. Robinson traces the earliest warning signs, leading to a sudden crisis and an impulsive war that went massively wrong from the start. This book is the ideal introduction to the key question of the Great War: why did Europe explode?
The war to end all wars, people said in 1918. Not for long. By 1919, White Russians were fighting Bolshevik Reds for control of their country, and Winston Churchill (then Secretary of State for War) wanted to see Communism "strangled in its cradle". So a volunteer R.A.F. squadron, flying Sopwith Camels, went there to duff up the Reds. "There's a splendid little war going on," a British staff officer told them. "You'll like it." Looked like fun. But the war was neither splendid nor little. It was big and it was brutal, a grim conflict of attrition, marked by incompetence and corruption. Before it ended, the squadron wished that both sides would lose. If that was a joke, nobody was laughing.
Still in the Dream Time celebrates the natural and metaphysical worlds in a voice that is at once contemporary and classical, in forms that range from the epigram to the ode. The poems speak the "moments of inbetween" where, poised between presence and absence, a reader might hear the whispers of the unseen soul.
Migraine Art includes more than 300 powerful illustrations and paintings created by migraine sufferers from around the world. It provides a thoroughly unique window into the subjective world of the migraine sufferer. The idea of collecting migraine art started with a number of public competitions in the 1980s, which encouraged artists, both amateur and professional, to illustrate the pain, the visual disturbances, and the effect migraines had on their lives. The book includes hundreds of these submissions as well as detailed descriptions of different types of migraine visual phenomena. Covering such topics as migraine signs, triggers, and treatments, as well as types of visual hallucinations and somatic sensations and experiences, the book offers a comprehensive view of the migraine experience. Each category of visual disturbance is accompanied by related artwork. A description of migraine visual experiences of famous historical figures, such as Blaise Pascal and Lewis Carroll, provide historical background on the topic. The book also includes a history of four Migraine Art competitions and information about the Migraine Art collection.
This solution booklet is a supplement to the book "A Course in Linear Algebra with Applications". It will be useful to lecturers and to students taking the subject since it contains complete solutions to all 283 exercises in the book.
Provides information on how civil service remuneration systems work in African countries. Successful reform in civil service remuneration systems in Africa is of particular importance for countries in the process of structural adjustment because of its effect on the overall structural programme.
A group is defined by means of the laws of combinations of its symbols," according to a celebrated dictum of Cayley. And this is probably still as good a one-line explanation as any. The concept of a group is surely one of the central ideas of mathematics. Certainly there are a few branches of that science in which groups are not employed implicitly or explicitly. Nor is the use of groups confined to pure mathematics. Quantum theory, molecular and atomic structure, and crystallography are just a few of the areas of science in which the idea of a group as a measure of symmetry has played an important part. The theory of groups is the oldest branch of modern algebra. Its origins are to be found in the work of Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813), Paulo Ruffini (1765-1822), and Evariste Galois (1811-1832) on the theory of algebraic equations. Their groups consisted of permutations of the variables or of the roots of polynomials, and indeed for much of the nineteenth century all groups were finite permutation groups. Nevertheless many of the fundamental ideas of group theory were introduced by these early workers and their successors, Augustin Louis Cauchy (1789-1857), Ludwig Sylow (1832-1918), Camille Jordan (1838-1922) among others. The concept of an abstract group is clearly recognizable in the work of Arthur Cayley (1821-1895) but it did not really win widespread acceptance until Walther von Dyck (1856-1934) introduced presentations of groups.
With over 60 illustrations explaining every facet of the game and featuring all the latest law changes, this is an essential sourcebook for both amateur and professional player alike."--BOOK JACKET.
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