This book is the first full-length history of the BBC World Service: from its interwar launch as short-wave radio broadcasts for the British Empire, to its twenty-first-century incarnation as the multi-media global platform of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The book provides insights into the BBC’s working relationship with the Foreign Office, the early years of the Empire Service, and the role of the BBC during the Second World War. In following the voice of the BBC through the Col...

DI Adam Ralston is no stranger to the dark side of human nature, but when a young art gallery worker is discovered in her South Side flat, brutally raped, her throat slit, and a single red rose laid upon her corpse, he is thrown into a bloody maelstrom of violence and suspicion unlike anything he has known before.Haunted by the death of a prison officer on a previous case, Ralston must also battle his own personal demons and hold his family together as tries to track down the killer...

Calling Cards is a psychological thriller marking the arrival of a new addition, Gordon Johnston, to the ranks of Scottish crime writers. It is about stress, trauma, addiction, recovery and denial. It highlights the influence of the corrupting desires for success or revenge.An anonymous email leads Glasgow West End Journalist Frank Gallen on a quest to unravel the links between a campaign against a housing development proposal in Kelvingrove Park; corruption in Glasgow City Council;...

From "Anna's Lovers"Our houses glow both from withinand on the outside: their night lightsand an almost perfectand wintry moon.The phrase "but for now" means among other things "making do," as if we had to settle for the bare minimum. In But for Now, Gordon Johnston presents poems where the mortal world is more than enough because there is more to it than the merely mortal and where it is possible to hear beyond the outmoded clanking of inherit...

From "Anna's Lovers"Our houses glow both from withinand on the outside: their night lightsand an almost perfectand wintry moon.The phrase "but for now" means among other things "making do," as if we had to settle for the bare minimum. In But for Now, Gordon Johnston presents poems where the mortal world is more than enough because there is more to it than the merely mortal and where it is possible to hear beyond the outmoded clanking of inherit...

Five grand for a couple of hours work?It seems easy money, but the deal ex-mercenary Max Iversson is chasing has gone disastrously wrong. Two of his friends are dead. And now he wants to find out who's behind their killings.Detective Sergeant John Gallan is also looking for answers. He's investigating the fatal poisoning of a nightclub doorman. But leads are scarce and, when they do appear, so do bodies.What neither man knows is that they are headin...

The hard-hitting and moving expose of a teenager whose abuse by police began when she was a 13-year-old and continued throughout her teens. What's the real story behind Louise Nicholas' claims of gang rape by policemen? What allowed her to bring her darkest and most harrowing secrets into the harsh light of public opinion? Louise Nicholas' life has turned full circle since she was raped by policemen nearly 30 years ago - she now advises senior police how to support rape vi...

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize"You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity," says The Village Voice. Indeed, Lydia Davis is mathematician, philosopher, sculptor, jeweler, and scholar of the minute. Few writers map the process of thought as well as she, few perceive with such charged intelligence.T...

From the Sunday Times bestselling author comes an epic tale of love, passion and heartbreak.In the summer of 1940, eyes are focussed on the skies above the South of England: the Battle for Britain has just begun. But Evie Lucas has eyes for no-one but a dashing young pilot called Tony. Evie has a glittering career as an artist ahead of her but seems only to be fascinated in sketching portraits of him…Seventy years later, recently widowed art historian Lucy is putting the pi...

About Threshold Songs, the voices in these poems perform at the interior thresholds encountered each day, where we negotiate the unfathomable proximities of knowing and not knowing, the gulf of seeing and feeling, the uncanny relation of grief to joy, and the borderless nature of selfhood and tradition. Both conceptual and haunted, these poems explore the asymmetry of the body's chemistry and its effects on expression and form. The poems in Threshold Songs tune us to the microtonal music o...

Sex, money, drugs and danger: they are all in a night’s work for millions of prostitutes around the world. But who are they? What are their lives like? And how do they really feel about what they do?Their answers are here, the unvarnished truth of life in the modern sex trade told by those who work in it. Author Julian Davies interviewed streetwalkers, call girls, brothel workers, dominatrix and even male escorts to uncover their twilight world: the tricks of the trade; the violent...

Time touches everything, and in doing so changes everything.The Arrow of Time examines the challenges, transformations and surprises wrought by change, and celebrates the ways we attempt to measure our lives against this invisible force. From John Constable’s home at East Bergholt to the shattered streets of Nanking, China, in 1937, Meyer offers a fresh and lyrically commanding statement of the impact that time, death and love have on our determination to ...