Underground, Overground
Underground, Overground

Author: Andrew Martin

Publisher: Profile Books

Published: 2012-04-26

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1847658075

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Why is the Victoria Line so hot? What is an Electrical Multiple Unit? Is it really possible to ride from King's Cross to King's Cross on the Circle line? The London Underground is the oldest, most sprawling and illogical metropolitan transport system in the world, the result of a series of botch-jobs and improvisations.Yet it transports over one billion passengers every year - and this figure is rising. It is iconic, recognised the world over, and loved and despised by Londoners in equal measure. Blending reportage, humour and personal encounters, Andrew Martin embarks on a wonderfully engaging social history of London's underground railway system (which despite its name, is in fact fifty-five per cent overground). Underground, Overground is a highly enjoyable, witty and informative history of everything you need to know about the Tube.

Night Trains
Night Trains

Author: Andrew Martin

Publisher: Profile Books

Published: 2017-02-09

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1782832122

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Night trains have long fascinated us with the possibilities of their private sleeping compartments, gilded dining cars, champagne bars and wealthy travellers. Authors from Agatha Christie to Graham Greene have used night trains to tell tales of romance, intrigue and decadence against a rolling background of dramatic landscapes. The reality could often be as thrilling: early British travellers on the Orient Express were advised to carry a revolver (as well as a teapot). In Night Trains, Andrew Martin attempts to relive the golden age of the great European sleeper trains by using their modern-day equivalents. This is no simple matter. The night trains have fallen on hard times, and the services are disappearing one by one. But if the Orient Express experience can only be recreated by taking three separate sleepers, the intriguing characters and exotic atmospheres have survived. Whether the backdrop is 3am at a Turkish customs post, the sun rising over the Riviera, or the constant twilight of a Norwegian summer night, Martin rediscovers the pleasures of a continent connected by rail. By tracing the history of the sleeper trains, he reveals much of the recent history of Europe itself. The original sleepers helped break down national barriers and unify the continent. Martin uncovers modern instances of European unity - and otherwise - as he traverses the continent during 'interesting times', with Brexit looming. Against this tumultuous backdrop, he experiences his own smaller dramas, as he fails to find crucial connecting stations, ponders the mystery of the compartment dog, and becomes embroiled in his very own night train whodunit.

The Somme Stations
The Somme Stations

Author: Andrew Martin

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2011-03-03

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0571271863

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On the first day of the Somme enlisted railwayman Jim Stringer lies trapped in a shell hole, smoking cigarette after cigarette under the bullets and the blazing sun. He calculates his chances of survival - even before they departed for France, a member of Jim's unit had been found dead. During the stand-off that follows, Jim and his comrades must operate by night the vitally important trains carrying munitions to the Front, through a ghostly landscape of shattered trees where high explosive and shrapnel shells rain down. Close co-operation and trust are vital. Yet proof piles up of an enemy within, and as a ferocious military policeman pursues his investigation into the original killing, the finger of accusation begins to point towards Jim himself . . .

How to Get Things Really Flat
How to Get Things Really Flat

Author: Andrew Martin

Publisher: The Experiment

Published: 2009-09-15

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 1615191089

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Includes actual instructions! “You might not think that a book about cleaning could be funny but this made me laugh out loud” (The Financial Times). For many reasons, men often neglect housekeeping chores—even when they share the house with other humans who wish they could get some help in that department. How to Get Things Really Flat combines witty observations, true tales of family life, useful information that takes the mystery out of such phenomena as dishwashers and vacuums, and answers to timeless questions including: When dusting, where does the dust go? What is the worst thing that can happen while ironing? Is housework therapeutic? How can I impress people with bicarbonate of soda? Aren’t men supposed to be dirty? And more! “A delightfully amusing tale about the joys and tribulations of doing housework that also serves as a very good primer on how to actually do housework . . . His main target audience is men. But women, I think, will also find Martin’s observations funny and many of his tips helpful . . . And if, after laughing your way through Martin’s text, you’re still not into doing housework, he has a tip for that, too: Hire a cleaner.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune “Martin’s lighthearted but quite handy guide looks at the reasons why men don’t help out around the house as much as they ought to and proposes what can be done about that . . . After reading this offbeat and thoroughly delightful guide to housework, it’s hard to imagine anyone not wanting to give this stuff a try. Martin does what your mother never could: he makes doing chores seem fun, exciting, and rewarding.” —Booklist

THE DEPRIVED.
THE DEPRIVED.

Author: RON S KING

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2012-05-12

Total Pages: 609

ISBN-13: 1471702111

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This story begins in the County of Cork in Ireland in the 1850s, at the time of potato famine. Life was hard and austere, with many of Ireland's young seeking to emigrate abroad, to escape starvation and to find work in the 'Promised' lands of America and Australia, though many also sought work in England, in Liverpool and London. This book describes the life and times of Michael O'Brien and his family, his wife Mary and his two children, Sam and Beth. It tells of Michael's need to leave his home and travel to London with his family in the hope of finding work in London. The only job he finds is as a 'Hole-Man', working in the open 'Cesspits', in diabolical conditions. The book goes on to follow the lives of Mary and then onto the daughter, Beth and finally to the son, Sam.

The Bobby Dazzlers
The Bobby Dazzlers

Author: Andrew Martin

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 9780571212293

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If you were looking to hire a crack team of criminals to undertake a tricky and delicate burglary, the Bobby Dazzlers would be your worst nightmare. There's Walter Bowler, a violent bike thief looking to move on to better (or preferably worse) things. There's the dope dealer and family man, Bill. There's a cockney half wit called Dean Martin (who must nevertheless be treated with respect because of his ultra-hard cousin, Neville). And then there's the youngest of the four, a light-fingered youth with a morbid fear of trains. When they're asked to steal four strange-looking chairs from a museum in the North York Moors, something - everything - is bound to go pear-shaped. The Bobby Dazzlers follows their stumbling progress in a funny, macabre thriller about jealousy, drugs, media-friendly Yorkshiremen, salmon fishing, modernist chair design and gruesome death (both accidental and pre-meditated), all set against a backdrop of beautiful Georgian architecture and some of England's finest countryside.

That which Hath Wings
That which Hath Wings

Author: Richard Dehan

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 1918

Total Pages: 666

ISBN-13:

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In January, 1914, Francis Athelstan Sherbrand, Viscount Norwater, only son of that fine old warrior, General the Right Honourable Roger Sherbrand, V.C., K.C.B., first Earl of Mitchelborough, married Margot Mountjohn, otherwise known as "Kittums," and found that she was wonderfully innocent-for a girl who knew so much. It was a genuine love-match, Franky being a comparatively poor Guardsman, with only two thousand a year in addition to his pay as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Bearskins Plain, and Margot a mere Cinderella in comparison with heiresses of the American canned-provision and cereal kind. It had seemed to Franky, standing with patent-leathered feet at the Rubicon dividing bachelorhood from Benedictism, that all his wooing had been done at Margot's Club. True, he had actually proposed to Margot at the Royal Naval and Military Tournament of the previous June, and Margot, hysterical with sheer ecstasy, as the horses gravely played at push-ball, had pinched his arm and gasped out: "Yes, but don't take my mind off the game just now; these dear beasts are so heavenly! ..."

That Which Hath Wings
That Which Hath Wings

Author: Richard Dehan

Publisher: Good Press

Published: 2021-05-19

Total Pages: 524

ISBN-13:

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That Which Hath Wings' is a gripping World War I fiction by Irish author Clotilde Graves who wrote under the pseudonym of Richard Dehan. The intriguing characters, absorbing storyline and war themes made this one of the most celebrated works of its time.

Reading Across the Pacific
Reading Across the Pacific

Author: Robert Dixon

Publisher: Sydney University Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 1920899669

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Reading Across the Pacific is a study of literary and cultural engagement between the United States and Australia from a contemporary interdisciplinary perspective. The book examines the relations of the two countries, shifting the emphasis from the broad cultural patterns that are often compared, to the specific networks, interactions, and crossings that have characterised Australian literature in the United States and American literature in Australia. In the 21st century, both American and Australian literatures are experiencing new challenges to the very different paradigms of literary history and criticism each inherited from the 20th century. In response to these challenges, scholars of both literatures are seizing the opportunity to reassess and reconfigure the conceptual geography of national literary spaces as they are reformed by vectors that evade or exceed them, including the transnational, the local and the global. The essays in Reading Across the Pacific are divided into five sections: 'National literatures and transnationalism', 'Poetry and poetics', 'Literature and popular culture', 'The Cold War', and 'Publishing history and transpacific print cultures'.

Death on a Branch Line
Death on a Branch Line

Author: Andrew Martin

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2009-04-02

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0571252206

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It is the summer of 1911 and as Britain is gripped by paranoia about German spies and secret preparations for war, railway detective Jim Stringer decides to set out for a much-needed holiday. But before he can leave he finds himself escorting a young aristocrat, Hugh Lambert, who is on his way to be executed for the murder of his father. When Hugh warns that a second murder is imminent in his isolated village, Jim sees a chance to kill two birds with one stone. And so, as he visits the village with his wife Lydia on the pretext of holidaying, Jim finds he has one weekend in which to stop another murder and unravel a conspiracy of international dimensions . . . 'Enough historical details and rural oddbods for a BBC serial, a baffling plot and - most importantly - good writing.' Scotland on Sunday 'Fascinating . . . Altogether an entertaining read.' Crimesquad.com 'An eccentric and engaging novel.' Sunday Times 'The period detail is wonderful . . . The story builds up a good head of steam early on and rattles along nicely to a satisfying conclusion.' Guardian