Novels which transform our ideas about human possibilities, biographies which celebrate the achievements of extraordinary individuals, polemical works of non-fiction which oblige us to alter our views of the world or of human society: all of us can remember reading at least one book which made us think about the world anew. Here, the author of the popular Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide, selects the very best books which may or may not have changed the world, but which have certainly changed the lives of thousands of people who have read them. Some examples of titles included: Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - a poignant recording of the author's triumph over the obstacles of being black and poor in a racist society. Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist. Santiago's meeting with the alchemist opens his eyes to the true values of life, love and suffering The Diary of Anne Frank Half a century later the story of a teenager coming to maturity in the most terrible of circumstances remains profoundly moving. Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet Gibran's poetic essays reveal his thoughts on everything in life from love and marriage to the enigmas of birth and death. Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Pirsig's narrator creates a philosophical masterpiece that has the power to change lives.
An informative, lively guide through the rich mythology of Robin Hood, across all mediumsEveryone knows the story of England's greatest folk hero, the outlaw who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. This highly entertaining book begins with the search for the historical Robin, looking at the candidates for the "real Robin Hood" who have been proposed over the years, from petty thieves to Knights Templar, before moving on to examine the many ways in which he has been portrayed in literature and onscreen. He began as the hero of dozens of late medieval ballads, appeared in plays by contemporaries of Shakespeare, and in the Romantic era was reinvented by Walter Scott as a Saxon champion in the struggle against the Normans. During the 19th century, Robin Hood emerged as a hero in children's literature, while more recently he has been portrayed as everything from proto-socialist man of the people to anarchist thug. In the cinema he put in an appearance as early as 1908 and Douglas Fairbanks and then Errol Flynn turned him into the typical hero of Hollywood swashbucklers. In the last 20 years, Kevin Costner and Russell Crowe have provided their own very different interpretations of the character. On the small screen, Robin has been the hero of half a dozen TV shows from the 1950s series starring Richard Greene, which used many writers blacklisted by Hollywood, via the well-remembered Robin of Sherwood in the 1980s, to the recent BBC series. Robin Hood is still very much with us, as the subject of graphic novels and computer games. Robin is an archetypal hero who, it seems, can never die. This engaging book charts his life so far.
A reliable guide to what science fiction is" Christopher Priest, award-winning science fiction author "A really good introduction to the genre" SFX Magazine "Perceptive and glorious" Ian Watson, author of the screenplay for Steve Spielberg's A.I. Want to become a science fiction buff? Want to expand your reading in your favourite genre? This is a good place to start! From the publishers of the popular Good Reading Guide comes a rich selection of some of the finest SF novels ever published. With 100 of the best titles fully reviewed and a further 500 recommended, you'll quickly become an expert in the world of science fiction. The book is arranged by author and includes some thematic entries and special categories such as SF film adaptations, SF in rock music and Philip K. Dick in the mass media . It also includes a history of SF and a new definition of the genre, plus lists of award winners and book club recommendations. Foreword by Christopher Priest, the multiple award-winning SF author.
DIVA London Year is an anthology of short diary entries, one or more for each day of the year, which, taken together, provides an impressionistic portrait of life in the city from Tudor times to the twenty-first century. This ebook edition, with its own distinct cover, has been optimised for the digital reader. A hyperlinked contents page makes it easy for the reader to dip in and out of the book while each 'page' is dedicated to a separate day. To further improve formatting, the illustrations from the printed edition have been omitted. We promise this does not detract from the reading experience. This ebook serves as the perfect accompaniment to the print edition. There are more than two hundred featured writers, with a short biography for each. The most famous diarist of all - Samuel Pepys - is there, as well as some of today’s finest diarists like Alan Bennett and Chris Mullin. There are coronations and executions, election riots and zeppelin raids, duels, dust-ups and drunken sprees, among everyday moments like Brian Eno cycling in Kilburn or George Eliot walking on Wimbledon Common. Vividly evoking moments in the lives of Londoners in the past, providing snapshots of the city’s inhabitants at work, at play, in pursuit of money, sex, entertainment, pleasure and power, the ebook of A London Year is the perfect read for all who live in or love this eternal, ever-changing city./div
Historical fiction is a hugely popular genre of fiction providing fictional accounts or dramatizations of historical figures or events. This latest guide in the highly successful Bloomsbury Must-Reads series depicts 100 of the finest novels published in this sector, with a further 500 recommendations. A wide range of classic works and key authors are covered: Peter Ackroyd, Margaret Attwood, Sarah Waters, Victor Hugo and Robert Louis Stevenson to name a few. If you want to expand your reading in this area, or gain a deeper understanding of the genre - this is the best place to start! Inside you'll find: - An extended Introduction to historical fiction - 100 titles highlighted A-Z by novel with 500 Read-on recommendations - Read-on-a-theme categories - Award winners and book club recommendations
Deciding what to read next when you've just finished an unputdownable novel can be a daunting task. The Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide features hundreds of authors and thousands of titles, with navigation features to lead you on a rich journey through some the best literature to grace our shelves. This greatly expanded edition includes the latest contemporary authors and landmark novels, an expanded non-fiction section, a timeline setting historical events against literary milestones, prize-winner and book club lists. An accessible and easy-to-read guide that no serious book lover should be without. "The essential guide to the wild uncharted world of contemporary and 20th century writing." Robert McCrum, The Observer
Sherlock Holmes meets Flashman in the first installment of Adam Carver's adventures: from the foggy streets of London to the bandit-infested wilds of Greece, this is a wonderfully exuberant piece of Victoriana It is 1870. When amateur archaeologist Adam Carver and his loyal but obdurate retainer Quint are visited in their lodgings in London's Doughty Street by an attractive young woman, their landlady is not pleased. The visitor's arrival pitches Carver and Quint headlong into an elaborate mystery which comes to center on the existence (or not) of a lost text in Ancient Greek, one that may reveal the whereabouts of the treasure hoard of Philip II of Macedonia. Two deaths soon ensue as master and manservant follow what clues they can grasp in the roughest and most genteel parts of the teeming metropolis, with the whiff of cordite and blackmail never far from their nostrils. The scene shifts to Athens and the wilder fastness of a Greece gripped by political unrest as Carver and Quint join forces with Adam's former Cambridge tutor in an attempt to track down the elusive text. But nothing is quite what it seems, and no one involved is prepared for the final, shocking denouement amidst the extraordinary hilltop monasteries of Meteora.
A large number of people each year make their reading decisions on the basis of prizes like the Booker and Orange Guide to Fiction. This new title in the successful Must-Read series provides an overview of prize-winning fiction over the decades. With 100 titles fully featured and over 500 read-on recommendations, this unique survey of literature incorporates some of the finest contemporary fiction ever produced including Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (Booker), Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up (John Llewellyn Rhys), Andrea Levy's Small Island (Orange), Louis de Bernieres's Captain Corelli's Mandolin (Commonwealth Writers' Prize), Zadie Smith's White Teeth (Guardian First Book Award), Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (Booker). As well as Booker and Pullitzer prize-winners the book also finds room for those that have triumphed in less familiar prizes, such as the Betty Trask and the John Lewellyn Rhys. It looks at prize winners in certain genres such as crime and science fiction, as well as prize winners from other countries: the French Prix de Goncourt and the Australian Miles Franklin award. Because of the sheer range of prizes across countries and genres - this is a diverse and rich list that no book worm would want to be without.
“An in-depth biography of the world’s most famous detective that will intrigue Sherlockians and non-Sherlockians alike.” —Publishers Weekly He has been called a genius and a fraud, a hero and an addict, but who really was Sherlock Holmes? With an attention to detail that would make his subject envious, Nick Rennison combs the literature for clues, omissions, and inconsistencies in Dr. Watson’s immortal narration. He delves into Holmes’s contact with prominent historical figures—including Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud—and uncovers startling, new information. How did a Cambridge dropout and bit player on the London stage transform himself into a renowned consulting detective? Did he know the identity of Jack the Ripper? When did Holmes and his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, first cross paths? Did Sherlock Holmes, protector of the innocent, commit the very act he so often worked to prevent, the cold-blooded, premeditated murder of Moriarty? Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography answers these questions and many more as it careens through the most infamous crimes and historic events of the Victorian age, all in pursuit of the real man behind the greatest detective in modern fiction—and, just perhaps, nonfiction.
Want to become a classic novel buff, or expand your reading of some of the finest novels ever published? With 100 of the best titles fully reviewed and a further 500 recommended, you'll quickly set out on a journey of discovery.
Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography blends what we already know of the great sleuth's career with carefully documented social history to answer the questions admirers have long puzzled over. Nick Rennison reveals for the first time Holmes's influence on the political events of late 19th-century England and his connections to the British criminal underworld. It also brings to light his close friendships with key figures of the day, including Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud, and exposes the truth about his cocaine use.
Fantasy is one of the most visible genres in popular culture - we see the creation of magical and imagined worlds and characters in every type of media, with very strong fan bases in tow. This latest guide in the successful Bloomsbury Must-Read series covers work from a wide range of authors: Tolkien, Philip Pullman, Terry Pratchett, Michael Moorcock, Rudyard Kipling and C.S Lewis to very contemporary writers such as Garth Nix and Steven Erikson. If you want to expand your range of reading or deepen your understanding of this genre, this is the best place to start.
Want to become a crime novel buff, or expand your reading in your favourite genre? This is a good place to start! From the publishers of the popular, Good Reading Guide comes a rich selection of the some of the finest crime novels ever published. With 100 of the best titles fully reviewed and a further 500 recommended, you'll quickly become an expert on the world of crime. The book also allows you to browse by theme, includes 'a reader's fast-guide to the world of crime fiction' as well listing the top 10 crime characters and their creators, award winners and book club recommendations.
1922 was a year of great turbulence and upheaval. Its events reverberated throughout the rest of the twentieth century and still affect us today, 100 years later. Empires fell. The Ottoman Empire collapsed after more than six centuries. The British Empire had reached its greatest extent but its heyday was over. The Irish Free State was declared and demands for independence in India grew. New nations and new politics came into existence. The Soviet Union was officially created and Mussolini's Italy became the first Fascist state. In the USA, Prohibition was at its height. The Hollywood film industry, although rocked by a series of scandals, continued to grow. A new mass medium - radio - was making its presence felt and, in Britain, the BBC was founded. In literature it was the year of peak modernism. Both T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses were first published in full. In society, already changed by the trauma of war and pandemic, the morals of the past seemed increasingly outmoded; new ways of behaving were making their appearance. The Roaring Twenties had begun to roar and the Jazz Age had arrived. 1922 also saw the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, the arrest of Mahatma Gandhi, the death of Marcel Proust, the election of a new pope, the release of the first major vampire movie, and the brief imprisonment in Munich of an obscure right-wing demagogue named Adolf Hitler. In a sequence of vividly written sketches, Nick Rennison conjures up all the drama and diversity of an extraordinary year.
Raymond Chandler's immortal private detective Philip Marlowe first appeared in a magazine called Black Mask in the 1930s. But Black Mask was not the only pulp magazine of the period to publish crime fiction. There were newsstands full of them with titles like Dime Detective, Spicy Mystery Stories and Ten Detective Aces. And there were plenty of other private eyes in action. This was the era in which the hard-boiled American detective was born and Nick Rennison's anthology gathers together an exciting selection of stories about the rivals of Philip Marlowe. From the intriguingly named Cellini Smith to the two-fisted female crime-solver Violet McDade, from the Filipino detective Jo Gar to the quick-witted, fast-shooting Marty Quade, these characters have their own style and originality. Authors like Norbert Davis, reputedly the favourite crime author of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Raoul Whitfield and Robert Reeves may not have the reputations of Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, another famous name who began his career writing for the pulps, but they knew how to tell a thrilling story. They deserve to be remembered and admired, and this collection highlights more than a dozen of them. Praise for Nick Rennison: 'Fascinating and highly readable' - Daily Mail 'The exemplary editorial notes are often as entertaining as the stories' - Times (Crime Club) 'Entertaining and thoroughly readable canter through the events of a century ago... Fascinating' - Observer 'Vivid... In this enjoyable slice of popular history, Rennison assembles a month-by-month almanac, including all the most notable moments from science, politics, art and culture' - Guardian '[An] intriguing anthology' - Mail on Sunday 'A book which will delight fans of crime fiction' - Verbal Magazine
London has always been home to outsiders. To people who won't, or can't, abide by the conventions of respectable society. For close to two centuries these misfit individualists have had a name. They have been called Bohemians.This book is an entertaining, anecdotal history of Bohemian London. A guide to its more colourful inhabitants: Rossetti and Swinburne, defying the morality of high Victorian England; Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley in the decadent 1890s; The Bloomsburyites and the Bright Young Things; Dylan Thomas, boozing in the Blitz; and Francis Bacon and his cronies, wasting time and getting wasted in 1950s Soho.It's also a guide to the places where Bohemia has flourished: the legendary Café Royal, a home from home to artists and writers for nearly a century, the Cave of the Golden Calf, the Colony Room, the Gargoyle Club and more.The story of Bohemian London is one of drink and drugs, sex and death, excess and indulgence. It's also a story of achievement and success. This book provides a lively and enjoyable portrait of the world in which Bohemian Londoners once lived, and perhaps still do.
Which 100 novels represent the finest American literature ever produced? Let this book be your guide. Ordered A-Z by author this latest title in the popular Must-Read series provides a rich resource for your reading. It features 100 titles from 19th century classics: Melville's Moby Dick and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, to the 1920s generation: Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, the Beat generation (Kerouac's On the Road) to the major writers of today: Toni Morrison (Beloved) Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections), Donna Tartt (The Secret History) and Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible). All the major figures are covered from Fenimore Cooper to the present day, as well as lesser known and more offbeat writers that you may not yet have discoverd such as Dawn Powell, William Maxwell and Marilynne Robinson. The Read-On suggestions provide up to 500 recommendations for further titles and a long Introduction provides contextual and historical background on American fiction, providing great value and everything you need to expand your range of reading.
An absorbing history, bringing explorers' tales vividly to life Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the men who went to Antarctica with Captain Scott, said "Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time that has ever been devised." Yet there has never been a shortage of volunteers willing to endure the bad times in pursuit of the glory that polar exploration sometimes brings. This compelling book tells the memorable stories of the men and women who have risked their lives by entering the white wastelands of the Arctic and the Antarctic, from the compelling tales of Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen, to lesser known heroes such as Fridtjof Nansen and Robert Peary. This history also looks at the hold that the polar regions have often had on the imaginations of artists and writers in the last 200 years examining the paintings, films, and literature that they have inspired.
Why did London Underground once employ a one-legged man to ride up and down the escalators at Earl's Court tube station? What did Hitler plan to do with Nelson's Column? Why is London's only medieval mummy a prostitute named Clarice la Claterballock? How did a beer flood in Tottenham Court Road drown nine people? Where can you see a pair of Queen Victoria's knickers? Containing chapters covering London past and present; buildings and streets; famous and unexpected Londoners; arts, literature and crime; plus much much more, the 180 lists will amaze, amuse and inform. More than simply a keepsake for tourists, every self-respecting Londoner needs this book.
Every day thousands of people worldwide consult Roget's Thesaurus. How many stop to consider why that endlessly useful reference book is so called? Of those who know that it owes its name to the man who first devised it, how many know anything more about him? Yet Peter Mark Roget was one of the most remarkable men of the nineteenth century and he achieved much in his long life. He did not even begin the great work of classification which bears his name until he was 70. Before that, the polymathic Roget had already made his own contributions to knowledge in a dozen different fields from optics and anatomy to mathematics and education. He would probably have been surprised that his posthumous reputation rests on his thesaurus. No doubt he would have expected that it would be his involvement in the foundation of the University of London that would be his lasting legacy. Or his books on magnetism, galvanism and physiology. Or his scientific papers on persistence of vision, with their later impact on the development of motion pictures. Or his association with major thinkers such as the computer pioneer Charles Babbage and the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The range of his interests was astonishing and, for sixty years, he was at the centre of the intellectual revolution of his times. Nick Rennison's biography reveals the full story of Roget's involvement with the great issues and the great personalities of the nineteenth century and recounts the forgotten life behind one of the most famous of all reference books.
Featuring a broad range of contemporary British novelists from Iain Banks to Jeanette Winterson, Louis de Bernieres to Irvine Welsh and Salman Rushdie, this book offers an excellent introductory guide to the contemporary literary scene. Each entry includes concise biographical information on each of the key novelists and analysis of their major works and themes. Fully cross-referenced and containing extensive guides to further reading, Fifty Contemporary British Novelists is the ideal guide to modern British fiction for both the student and the contemporary fiction buff alike.
Whitaker's Almanack is a famous UK reference work, and is renowned for its high quality information about current affairs. Its readers are intensely loyal to the work. Several hundred each year complete the fiendishly difficult prize quiz contest which accompanies the book. Whitaker's 2004 Quiz Companion is aimed at these people and all those who like doing tricky quizzes Categories include: architecture, broadcasting, celebrity, clothes and fashion, current affairs, deaths/obituaries, environment, food and drink, history, kids' stuff, language, law, music, royalty, Shakespeare, sport, time and space.
Connecting people with places, London’s distinctive Blue Plaque scheme highlights the buildings where some of the most remarkable men and women in our history and culture have lived and worked. From Richard Burton to Karl Marx, Marie Stopes to Jimi Hendrix, this fully updated 4th edition of The London Blue Plaque Guide has over 900 entries and provides an essential companion to the famous people who have made their homes in the city. It includes updated maps and a useful list of names by profession as well as location. As the definitive guide to the fascinating historical figures who have lived in London, it will be invaluable to residents and tourists alike.
The set includes three paperback books—just the books needed for homework assignments, independent studies, and to satisfy a child's curiosity about his world. The Kingfisher First Dictionary contains more than 1,500 words, giving readers a useful guide to help build their reading and writing abilities. The Kingfisher First Thesaurus is a fascinating word finder, with more than 100 main entry words with their similar words and opposites, perfect for enabling readers to build a bigger vocabulary. The Kingfisher First Encyclopedia, new in paperback and fully updated, is the ideal first encyclopedia for young readers, with 100 easy-to-understand entries on a range of favorite topics.
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