The Promised End explores how the endings of Shakespeare's tragedies work – how, in effect, they resist conventional closure. It looks back from the endings of five plays – Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear – to explore how their structures of action, imagery and the interaction of different genres – comedy, tragedy and romance – bring them to conclusions that are both inevitable and yet strangely incongruous, beyond explanation and moral understanding, almost too t...

The Companion to Mendelssohn, is written by leading scholars in the field. In fourteen chapters they explore the life, work, and reception of a composer-performer once thought uniquely untroubled in life and art alike, but who is now broadly understood as one of the nineteenth century's most deeply problematic musical figures. The first section of the volume considers issues of biography, with chapters dedicated to Mendelssohn's role in the emergence of Europe's modern musical institutions...

Pete Mercer takes us on an unforgettable journey through the dangerous backstreets of 21st-century Iraq, and reveals that the realities of the ongoing War on Terror are not all that they seem.Northern Iraq, 2004 - a lawless region so dangerous the regular coalition armies were reluctant to put their soliders in harm's way. Enter the 'civilian contractors': private armies in all but name. Working alongside the US Army, men from all corners of the globe volunteered to risk their lives day af...

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, most Americans probably encountered European classical music primarily through hymn tunes. Hymnody was the most popular and commercially successful genre of the antebellum period in the United States, and the unquenchable thirst for new tunes to sing led to a phenomenon largely forgotten today: in their search for fresh material, editors lifted hundreds of tunes from the works of major classical composers to use as settings of psalms and hymns. T...

Afghan Heat is a fast paced story of an SAS operative based on real operations in Afghanistan. From SAS selection through to a tour on the battlefields of Afghanistan. The book follows individual operations where special forces, aircraft, and the latest surveillance technology are fused together - in order to capture key figures or simply take out an enemy stronghold.The books account is both gritty and graphical as it follows the SAS, battling at times against overwhelming odds in...

Frontline offers an insight into the life of just one soldier out of the many thousands in the British Infantry deployed to Afghanistan. These modern day heroes risk their lives on a daily basis to help bring peace to a troubled country.Some of these soldiers are fresh out of school, or college, and within a few months find themselves in a war zone fighting for their lives.The book gives a candid account of life on the front line. The highs and the lows of fighting a war tho...

Flying at 120 knots with the unique roar from its aerodynamic rotors and twin turbines the AH64 Apache is the world's most fearsome attack helicopter its pilots refer to it as 'Riding the Dragon'. The Taliban would more often than not flee rather than suffer its 30mm cannon, 2.75 rockets or Hellfire missiles. Some of the Apache systems are truly amazing such as being able to read a car number plate at 4.2Km away with its 127 times-magnification day TV camera. A thermal camera so powerful i...

"A book that conveys the realities of life for the sniper in Afghanistan, the highs and lows, the fear, boredom and excitement . . . thrilling." — FiretrenchFew soldiers are deemed good enough to be selected and trained as snipers and even fewer qualify. As a result, snipers are regarded as the elite of their units and their skills command the ungrudging respect of their fellows—and the enemy. The author is one such man who recently served a full tour of du...

Nine men. 2,000 enemies. No back-up. No air support. No rescue. No chance...First in - the official motto of one of the British Army's smallest and most secretive units, 16 Air Assault Brigade's Pathfinder Platoon. Unofficially, they are the bastard son of the SAS. And like their counterparts in Hereford, the job of the Pathfinders is to operate unseen and undetected deep behind enemy lines.When British forces deployed to Iraq in 2003, Captain David Blakele...

After spending a year in Germany as a security guard with the 50th Ordnance Company, Curtis Gay went to Viet Nam as a Private First Class. Six months later he was a Sergeant in the 25th Infantry Division and experienced some of the most intense fighting of the war. This book is his story.Curtis spent a year as a Drill Sergeant at Fort Dix, New Jersey before leaving the Army in 1968. After a long career in the electrical industry, he is retired and lives in Durham, North Carolina wi...

The Sunday Times No.1 bestseller.They were branded as cowards and accused of being the British Special Forces Squadron that ran away from the Iraqis. But nothing could be further from the truth. Ten years on, the story of these sixty men can finally be told.In March 2003 M Squadron - an SBS unit with SAS embeds - was sent 1,000 kilometres behind enemy lines on a true mission impossible, to take the surrender of the 100,000-strong Iraqi Army 5th Corps. From ...

From retired Air Force pilot Marshall Harrison comes a remarkable memoir of aerial warfare in Vietnam. In his third combat tour, Harrison found himself converted from the high performance world of jets to the awkward-looking OV-10 Bronco and assigned as a FAC forward air controller. A captivating tale of valor, brotherhood, and patriotism unravels in the pages of A Lonely Kind of War, Forward Air Controller, Vietnam, a posthumous release by this published author through Xlibris. Harrison i...