The "utterly fascinating" untold story of Soviet Russia's global military mapping program—featuring many of the surprising maps that resulted (Marina Lewycka, author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian).From 1950 to 1990, the Soviet Army conducted a global topographic mapping program, creating large-scale maps for much of the world that included a diversity of detail that would have supported a full range of military planning. For big cities like Ne...

Lower Deck, first published in 1945, is a journal-like, exciting recounting of life aboard a Royal Navy destroyer, the H.M.S. Sikh (due to wartime regulations, the ship's name in the book is the H.M.S. Skye); the ship is stationed in the eastern Mediterranean in the defense of Malta. Centering on the lives of the crewmen who are part of a gun crew, the book portrays the ship's almost daily encounters with German and Italian ships and planes (as the author...

John Davies is a poet and carver of wooden birds, whose prior career as an academic has taken him from his Port Talbot birthplace to teach English Literature in North Wales (where he now lives) and North America. Birds and the river Clwyd are the threads that ties the whole together.

"...incredibly well-researched historical fiction.""...high brow horror for intellectuals that intertwines the delicate art of voice with historical events and the supernatural."-THE PORTSMOUTH REVIEW. 4.5 / 5.The First Vampire provides an alarmingly plausible explanation of why and how the first human was transformed into a vampire, against a backdrop of factual Eastern European history. The historical insights clear up many of the myths and misconceptions of the Dra...

The book presents the conclusions of a psychologist seeking to make sense of contemporary particle physics as described in a number of popular science texts and media articles, written by physicists, seeking to explain the workings of the sub-atomic world. The accounts, it is argued, are a) mutually exclusive and contradictory, and b) metaphysical or magical in essence.Themes of the book include: a discussion of the way we allow physicists to invent things that have no perceivable qualitie...

Stretching from the Ice Ages to the present day, this masterful account traces the political, social and cultural history of the land that has come to be called Wales.Spanning prehistoric hill forts and Roman ruins to the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution and the series of strikes by Welsh miners in the late twentieth century, this is the definitive history of an enduring people: a unique and compelling exploration of the origins of the Welsh nation, its development and its ro...

Throughout the long centuries of human history is the want, and the need, to share information, to exchange ideas and for that knowledge and experience, for curiosity and learning, to be the basis of a civil society.In literature the ambition is much narrower. In order to be known, to be popular, you had to be published. And for that people had to know you existed and your ideas worth reading. Obviously for most of humanity’s time people couldn’t read and texts couldn’t be publishe...

Dog's life, old man, a dog's life; you can't get away from that. Arthur Woodroffe's voice was quite cheerful as he framed this indictment of the life of a general practitioner in a poor neighbourhood, but his companion frowned and shook his head impatiently. "You are still re-acting to the pernicious influences of that damnable war," he said. "You're hankering after the intoxication of saving wounded under fire; exciting stunts of that sort; Sbana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus. You've go...

In his Preface to the Unpleasant Plays, Mr Shaw boasts his possession of "normal sight." The adjective is the oculist's, and the application of it is Mr Shaw's, but while the phrase is misleading until it is explained to suit a particular purpose, it has a pleasing adaptability, and I can find none better as a key to the works of Mr H.G. Wells. We need not bungle over the word "normal," in any attempt to meet the academic objection that it implies conformity to type. In this connection, th...

John Davys Beresford was born on 17th March 1873. His life was blighted by infantile paralysis which left him partially disabled.After an education at Oundle school he trained to be an architect. However, he quickly decided that his life was to be centred on a literary career. His first offerings were in drama and as a journalist.As well as being a book reviewer for the Manchester Guardian he contributed to New Statesman, The Spectator, Westminster Gazette, and the Theosoph...

For many of us illness refers solely to the physical. Accidents and disease wear us down, hiccup our life from childhood to old age. But everyone empathises, understands and helps us on the road to recovery.Mental illness though can still carry a stigma. A case of ‘you’re not trying hard enough’, ‘or knuckling down and getting on with it’. But in more recent decades mental issues have come to be recognised as an illness, a disease rather than an affliction. We all remember horror s...

On 8 September 1936 – in what is recognised as one of the defining moments in modern Welsh history – a Baptist minister, a university lecturer and a schoolteacher set fire to the partly built RAF aerodrome at Penrhos on the Llŷn Peninsular, then calmly reported their actions to the police at nearby Pwllheli. The 'Fire' represented the final act in a high profile, passionate, yet ultimately unsuccessful eighteen-month campaign to prevent the destruction of Penyberth, the renowned farmhouse ...