Daniel Vickery, the editor of the Western Flying Post, wrote in A Sketch of the Town of Yeovil (1856) that ‘The town is surrounded on the South East by three remarkable hills – Babylonhill, Windmill-hill [Wyndham Hill], and Newton-hill. From these several points there are prospects so rich in fertility, verdure, and beauty, and smiling prosperity – such brightness, a greenness, and a repose – that the spectator is wrapt in admiration of the view thus spread around and beneath him.’ The Yeo...

Somerset is a beautiful county – 'The Land of Summer' – and it is also one of the oldest English counties. However, beneath the beauty lies a Somerset that is sometimes shocking, often surprising. Once again Jack Sweet tells some of these stories, including the unsolved brutal murder of young Betty Trump at Buckland St Mary, a terrific storm that struck the Somerset coast in 1903, a prison break, violent robbery, tragedies in the air, at sea and in the river, to the strange tale of a young...

Yeovil Memories covers a wide range of stories, from a tragic drowning in the River Yeo in 1856, the hardships of the savage winter of 1861 and that of two families who lost their cottages in a fire in February 1906, the lucky escape of a Westland test pilot as his aircraft broke up in mid-air in August 1934, and the top of the music charts of August 1952, to pop concerts in the Liberal Hall in 1965. Jack Sweet seeks to jog the collective memory of Yeovil’s past, reliving memories, good, b...

Jack William Sweet relates shocking true events and personal stories which have terrified and horrified this seemingly placid county over the centuries. Spanning one hundred and fifty years, from early nineteenth-century witchcraft to the fear of spies and tragic deaths of the First World War, he recounts mysterious tales of the Highway Robberies of 1872, a Violent Death in Crewkerne, Bigamy, and the sinister murder of John Edney by his young wife Sophia. For many, Somerset evokes images o...

The explosion was heard and felt miles away. All 35 workers and Uyghur "patients" were killed except Dr. Gao Ming, the new director of the "Specialized Facility for Mental Health Solutions" in Urumqi, western China, 200 miles from the Kazakhstan border. This secret Chinese Communist Party laboratory did experimental brain surgery on Uyghur dissidents to test whether cognitive abilities could be surgically enhanced. The answer was "Yes." The Party expanded the experiment in a nearby hospita...

Bumbling British graduate Tom Toft is a man without a plan. Struggling gallantly with his own antipathy, he stumbles into a doctorate in political philosophy at a prestigious American university, determined to find his purpose in life. When, in an uncharacteristic moment of luck, Tom secures a scholarship from an obscure philanthropic organisation, suddenly his future is looking bright across the pond.The result of the 2016 presidential election galvanises Tom to put theory into practice b...

There are two fundamental economic systems in the world. These are autocracy and capitalism. Autocracy means rule by one person or a small group. Power is concentrated here. Autocracy usually leads to murder on a mass scale as seen with Nazism as in Germany or Communism as in Russia. This propensity for state murder disqualifies this as a viable ideology. Sooner or later, the masses clamber over the walls and dispose of the autocracies. The mill that keeps capitalism turning is technology....

Cats, being exceptionally clever, let humans think that they control the destiny of a country. In rocky times for Russia and the Soviet Union, cats step forward and control the vertical, control the horizontal. As the Soviet Union splinters, and as Russia re-awakens,cats gather midnight in a crummy Leningrad courtyard, to hear tales of their heroes. Off to the side, a tubby tabby, named simply "Koshka," dreams of becoming a wonder cat. William Jack holds a masters degree and a doctorate fr...

"Put me in a car with Bill Sibley on a road trip across the nation and everything will be just fine. His spectacular voice, his aptitude for creating instantly indelible characters in richly funny scenes, his perfect pacing and splendid particularity are dazzling and hypnotic. Storyteller supreme! Here We Go Loop De Loop lifted my mood entirely."- Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People's Poet Laureate, Poetry Foundation"Wonderful example of generous escapism and a book to be recomm...

The environmental impacts of construction are momentous. How can architects minimise these by making responsible material choices? Material choices have a global impact. The design and construction industry are responsible for 39% of all carbon emissions in the world. Despite the great desire among architects to address this, it can be difficult to compare materials directly, let alone understand the repercussions of selecting materials for use in different parts of a building or of sourci...

The judgment of the UK Supreme Court in R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union is of fundamental legal, constitutional and political significance. The Supreme Court's judgment discussed the relative powers of Parliament and the Government, the relationship between Westminster and the devolved legislatures, and the extent to which the UK's membership of the EU had changed the UK constitution, both prior to and even after departure. It also provided further e...

A pictorial history of events that occurred during World War I in 1918.The final book in a series of five titles which graphically cover each year of the war. Countless thousands of pictures were taken by photographers on all sides during the First World War. These pictures appeared in the magazines, journals, and newspapers of the time. Some illustrations went on to become part of postwar archives and have appeared, and continue to appear, in present-day publicatio...