What are the 79 wackiest excuses for being late to school? How do you stop a maniac dentist from terrorising children? Why is the new smartphone so ridiculously dumb? And what does it take to get every single student at Milford Junior School put on detention? Find out in this hilarious collection of short stories. One thing is guaranteed - you will NEVER pick the endings!
From the national bestselling author of Weave of Absence comes a mystery set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where weaving studio owner Della Wright finds herself tangled up in murder…. Della and her friend Jenny are remodeling Dream Weaver, turning their shared business space into two separate shops. But after the work is completed, building inspector Howard Swanson refuses to grant Jenny the permit to reopen her coffee shop. Determined to get to the bottom of the hold-up, Della heads to Howard’s office to defend Jenny’s livelihood, only to find the inspector dead—and the police spinning a yarn about Della being responsible. Although Della’s boyfriend, Matthew, an ex-FBI criminologist, claims there’s no need to worry, Della is convinced that the cops have it in for her. Now she must nab the real killer before she’s shuttled off to jail…. FEATURES WEAVING TIPS!
From R.L. Stine, master horror author of the Goosebumps series and the Fear Street trilogy—now streaming on Netflix—comes another spooky tale! Dragged into a haunted house by his friend Aaron, Max finds some objects that he thinks might help his ghost friends Nicky and Tara. But when he takes them home for further research, he upsets a whole colony of evil ghosts—and sends a crazy human-melting Heat Ghost after the girl of his dreams! When Max realizes what he’s done, he embarks on a wild ride across town to keep the ghost from melting his classmates. Will he make it in time—or will his whole school melt into the ground, with all his friends inside?
This in-depth investigation into the art, politics and murderous cynicism of Renaissance Milan is is an academic detective story sketched out with erudition and journalistic panache. Debunking the outrageous claim by the notorious Lancashire forger Shaun Greenhalgh that he produced the mesmerizing portrait of a young girl that zoomed into the art world limelight in 2009, Hewitt proves that Leonardo was on intimate terms with both the sitter - Bianca Sforza, teenage daughter of the Duke of Milan - and her husband, Galeazzo Sanseverino, the Duke's Army Captain, effective Number Two and, as Hewitt convincingly demonstrates, the subject of Leonardo's enigmatic portrait The Musician. Hewitt brings the tragic Bianca to life, suggests why and by whom she was likely murdered,and explains why her Leonardo portrait was included in one of the most lavish books ever produced - whose co-illustrator, Giovan Pietro Birago, was paid even more than Leonardo. Finally, in one of the most significant artistic discoveries of recent times, Hewitt shows how Birago's artistic colleagues had no hesitation in lampooning the venerable Leonardo as a Ginger-Haired Gay. 'A remarkable book and a work of impressive scholarship yeteminently readable, helped along by the author's characteristic light touch,the snapshots of the major players and the quality of the illustrations. As adetective story it takes some beating. Chronicling Simon's discoveries, thefascinating people he met on his journey, and the exotic locations he ended upin, his role in piecing it all together is a story in itself' - JOHNFALDING formerly Arts Reporter, Financial Times 'A magnificent journey through time. An amazing book fromfirst page to last' - FRANÇOISE JOULIE Curator of Drawings, Musée du Louvre,Paris
Bongs, goats, amps, and a lot of naked nuns! In five decades of wretched existence, doom metal has evolved into a vast orchard of unearthly delights. Explore its unholy rites with THE DOOMSTERÍS MONOLITHIC POCKET ALPHABET, the definitive illustrated lexicon of all things doom. Or be doomed!
The medieval wall paintings that remain in English churches are for the most part shadows of their former selves – the rare fragments of this beautiful art to have survived not only the Reformation but also successive waves of iconoclastic zeal and unsympathetic restoration. The whitewashed walls of most parish churches belie the riot of colour and decoration that once adorned them, but the remnants of paintings tucked into corners or rescued from later layers of paint help us to understand the role of art in medieval religion. Roger Rosewell here offers a guide to the role played by medieval wall paintings, as religious, didactic and commemorative works of art, telling the stories of those who created them and those who used them on a daily basis. He also compares and contrasts religious and domestic wall paintings, using beautiful colour photography throughout.
"All disasters are in some sense man-made." Setting the annus horribilis of 2020 in historical perspective, Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling disasters. Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? Why did only a few Asian countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? While populist leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work--pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters. In books going back nearly twenty years, including Colossus, The Great Degeneration, and The Square and the Tower, Ferguson has studied the foibles of modern America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online fragmentation. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, cliodynamics, and network science, Doom offers not just a history but a general theory of disasters, showing why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are getting worse at handling them. Doom is the lesson of history that this country--indeed the West as a whole--urgently needs to learn, if we want to handle the next crisis better, and to avoid the ultimate doom of irreversible decline.
'A beguiling author who interweaves past and present' The Times Teenager Lewis Hoxworthy discovers a disturbing painting in a medieval barn; a find which excites archaeologist Neil Watson, who is excavating an ancient manor house nearby. But when a man is found shot through the head in Lewis's father's field and Lewis himself goes missing, it is Neil's friend, Detective Inspector Wesley Peterson, who faces one of his most intriguing cases yet. It seems that the Devon village of Derenham is full of secrets, both ancient and modern. As Neil uncovers the story of Derenham's medieval past, it becomes clear that the Doom, a 500-year-old painting of hell and judgement, holds the key to the mystery. And as events reach a terrifying climax, Wesley has to act swiftly if he is to save a young life . . . Whether you've read the whole series, or are discovering Kate Ellis's DI Wesley Peterson novels for the first time, this is the perfect, gripping mystery if you love reading Elly Griffiths and Ann Cleeves.
