1601. Queen Elizabeth I is dying. With no heir for the kingdom, potential successors secretly maneuver to be in position when the inevitable occurs. The leading candidate is King James VI of Scotland, but there is a problem. The queen's spymasters fear that James' claim to be a Protestant are untrue. If he secretly shares his family's Catholicism, then forty years of religious war will have been for nothing, and a bloodbath will ensue. It falls to Geoffrey Belloc to devise a test to discover the true nature of King James's soul. Belloc enlists Mahmoud Ezzedine, a Muslim physician from the Ottoman Empire, as his undercover agent. -- adapted from jacket
Lincolnshire is England’s second-largest county–and one of the least well-known. Yet its understated chronicles, unfashionable towns and undervalued countryside conceal fascinating stories, and unique landscapes: its Wolds are lonely and beautiful, its towns characterful; its marshlands and dynamic coast are metaphors of constant change. From plesiosaurs to Puritans, medieval ghosts to eighteenth-century explorers, poets to politicians, and Vikings to Brexit, this marginal county is central to England’s identity. Canute, Henry IV, John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford all called Lincolnshire home. So did saints, world-famed churchmen and reformers–Etheldreda, Gilbert, Guthlac and Hugh, Robert Grosseteste, John Wycliffe, John Cotton, John Foxe and John Wesley–as well as Isaac Newton, Joseph Banks, John Harrison and George Boole. Lincolnshire explorers went everywhere: John Smith to Jamestown, George Bass and Matthew Flinders to Australia, and John Franklin to a bitter death in the Arctic. Artists and writers have been inspired–including Byrd, Taverner, Stukeley, Stubbs, Eliot and Tennyson–while Thatcher wrought neo-liberalism. Extraordinary architecture testifies to centuries of both settlement and unrest, from Saxon towers to sky-piercing spires; evocative ruined abbeys to the wonder of the Cathedral. And in between is always the little-known land itself–an epitome of England, awaiting discovery.
N rural eastern Pennsylvania, nine-year-old Jane MacLeod is writing a book about the happy family she desperately wishes she had. Her mother, Via, is dissatisfied and petulant, always resentful of the time Jane's father, Emlin, a heart surgeon, must spend with his patients at the hospital. One night in 1964, the family (including Jane's two younger brothers and sister and Via's homosexual brother, Uncle Francis) gathers to watch the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. All goes well until Emlin discovers that someone has taken the phone off the hook, so that he can't receive emergency calls. Angrily, he accuses Via (who accuses Jane) and rushes off to the hospital. He is killed in an automobile accident. Fifteen years later, Jane has moved to London, where she's become friends with bohemians Nigel and Colette. A political bombing and an affair with aloof (and married) American writer Clay West lead Jane to confront her long-buried guilt over her parents' unhappiness and father's death.
England on Edge traces the collapse of the government of Charles I, the disintegration of the established church, and the accompanying cultural panic that led to civil war. Focused on the years 1640 to 1642, it examines social and religious turmoil and the emergence of an unrestrained popular press. Hundreds of people not normally seen in historical surveys make appearances here, in a drama much larger than the struggle of king and parliament.
This book discusses the prejudices that have distorted understandings of the city of Milton Keynes and focuses upon the original thinking that went into the planning of Milton Keynes.
In his continuing adventures, Twig, now sixteen years old, joins the crew of his father's sky pirate ship and embarks on a dangerous mission to collect the powerful stormphrax, a substance that purifies water and also prevents the city of Sanctaphrax from floating away.
'A richly textured comic masterpiece' - Thomas Fleming Present day Dublin. Ambrose Sheehy-O'Connor is an unlikely protagonist whose wayward energy and imagination explode in unpredictable directions in a country consuming itself in culture wars. Ambrose is a 23 year old misfit, who has an otherworldly encounter, and becomes convinced he has a mission to convert a secularizing Ireland to his own bizarre religion. His strange appearance, gaucherie and naivety - plus a theology blended from medieval Christianity, fantasy novels and computer games - horrify his mother and spark ridicule and violent hatred. But he also finds devotees looking for any kind of leader. His quest brings him into confused, comical and calamitous contact with believers and unbelievers from disillusioned nuns to glamorous socialites, leftist chat-show hosts to sleazy New Age healers - all brought together in a fable of change and continuity. A Modern Journey is a compelling, complex and well-written literary novel. It is about one man's journey from obscurity to notoriety and indifference to enlightenment in modern Ireland. Praise for A Modern Journey "Catholic conservatives and modernizers, disillusioned nuns, glamorous socialites, ultra-nationalists, leftist chat-show hosts, sleazy New Age healers, pious Travellers - what's not to like in such an irresistible mix!" - Ruth Dudley Edwards, author of Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure "Finely written, deft characterization, funny, compulsive...Turner's concerns are philosophical and portentous, in the European tradition of social movement and ideas, yet he cloaks this evisceration of a corner of our contemporary world in adept drollery. A comic tour de force of import, Joycean in its magnificent flow." - Stoddard Martin , author of Wagner to the Waste Land "A richly textured comic masterpiece that manages to satirize the post-Christian West.... Derek Turner pulls no punches as he takes us on his magic carpet ride through the Irish landscape...This novel... has something to offend every postmodern sensibility." - Thomas Fleming, author of The Morality of Everyday Life "I know of no other living novelist who produces such taut sentences, so barbed, so seamlessly invested with classic references...and so satirically murderous...an author of quicksilver intelligence and X-ray eyes." - Tito Perdue, author of William's House Derek Turner has written for The Times, Daily Mail, Sunday Telegraph, Literary Review, Country Life, and many other journals in Europe and America. He is also the author of the novel Sea Changes and Displacement which is a Kindle Single.
This “sobering tale of the real consequences of gender bias” explores how Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women (Harvard Magazine) In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation’s inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age. In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government’s systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation’s largest computer user—the civil service and sprawling public sector—to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole. Drawing on recently opened government files, personal interviews, and the archives of major British computer companies, Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy. Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.
Everybody Out of the Pond At the Water's Edge will change the way you think about your place in the world. The awesome journey of life's transformation from the first microbes 4 billion years ago to Homo sapiens today is an epic that we are only now beginning to grasp. Magnificent and bizarre, it is the story of how we got here, what we left behind, and what we brought with us. We all know about evolution, but it still seems absurd that our ancestors were fish. Darwin's idea of natural selection was the key to solving generation-to-generation evolution -- microevolution -- but it could only point us toward a complete explanation, still to come, of the engines of macroevolution, the transformation of body shapes across millions of years. Now, drawing on the latest fossil discoveries and breakthrough scientific analysis, Carl Zimmer reveals how macroevolution works. Escorting us along the trail of discovery up to the current dramatic research in paleontology, ecology, genetics, and embryology, Zimmer shows how scientists today are unveiling the secrets of life that biologists struggled with two centuries ago. In this book, you will find a dazzling, brash literary talent and a rigorous scientific sensibility gracefully brought together. Carl Zimmer provides a comprehensive, lucid, and authoritative answer to the mystery of how nature actually made itself.
