Claws and whiskers! A spirit of uncertainty and unrest has settled upon the Cougar village. Cheshire Cougar, the brave and noble Marquis of Cougars, has been brought back from the Battle of Eastern Pass on a travois. The leader of the Cougar clan has lost his ability to smell out those enslaved to the dragon and the Council is scared. Just as the residents of the forest valley are adjusting to the return of the Marquis of Cougars, Cheshire turns the social world upside down by appointing N...

Handicapped thoroughbred farm owner, Trenton Stewart may seem eccentric and resigned to live a quiet and bland life on his farm. However, few know that the former police officer turned farm owner casts a long shadow. A shadow from which he vanishes and the Ranger, a black cloaked vigilante emerges to balance the scales of justice. This faceless avenger has dwelled within the shadow of the men who were the head of the Stewart household for generations only to emerge when victims of injustic...

The main point of this book is to be a Christian servant. As such, you have to maintain a mindset of humility in submission to God's leading. This book illuminates four response patterns to the call and concludes with scriptures that should encapsulate our walk. Luke 17:10 (NIV) says, "So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.'"

The essays in this volume examine selected national, regional European, and international policies of Charles de Gaulle, giving consideration to their significance in his own time, and today. Not everything de Gaulle did withstands the test of time. Nor, obviously, was everything beyond criticism in his own time. Nonetheless, a main finding, in the words of one essayist, is that de Gaulle had an 'uncanny sense of where history was going' and the skill to position his country accordingly. D...

Is the West in Decline? is a collection of ten essays by prominent scholars of international relations and current history, many of them associated with the European Studies program of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The essays explore the question of decline from several perspectives: theoretical, historical, counterfactual, and contemporary. Thomas Row’s essay uses alternative history to show how an unfallen Habsburg Empire might have evolved into a state syst...

War threatens the rich, green fields of Wessex in Hardy’s historical novel, The Trumpet-Major. The Napoleonic Wars are at their height, and upheaval and uncertainty plague British soil. In the midst of it all the impoverished beauty Anne Garland finds herself at the centre of a love quadrangle. She is torn between the persistent and annoying Festus Derryman, her womanising childhood sweetheart Bob Loveday, and the reliable and thoughtful John Loveday, the eponymous Trumpet-Major. Who will ...

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...

In the remote wildness of Egdon Heath, the crossed love affairs and marriages of a small group of people are played out against the background of nature’s beauty and indifference to mankind. Through a series of vivid incidents and encounters, The Return of the Native moves in a relentless drive towards tragedy, as the plans and dreams of the lovers miscarry, defeated by chance, or destiny or self-deception. In their unhappy stories, Hardy gives us a powerful dramatisation of his bleak phil...

Supreme Court justices have long relied on law clerks to help process the work of the Court. Yet few outside the Court are privy to the behind-the-scenes bonds that form between justices and their clerks.In Of Courtiers and Kings, Todd C. Peppers and Clare Cushman offer an intimate new look at the personal and professional relationships of law clerks with their justices. Going beyond the book’s widely acclaimed predecessor, I n Chambers, the vignettes collected he...

Thomas Hardy was born in the hamlet of Upper Bockhampton about three miles east of Dorchester in Dorset, England, on 2nd June 1840.Despite a fairly wide education and being an avid reader his parents thought it unlikely he would lead a successful scholarly or clerical career and he was apprenticed in 1856, at age 16, to a local architect whose speciality was in church restoration. Hardy’s only opportunity to read was in the morning before work between the hours of five and eight.

Most studies of Buddhist communities tend to be limited to villages, individual temple communities, or a single national community. Buddhist monastics, however, cross a number of these different framings: They are part of local communities, are governed through national legal frameworks, and participate in both national and transnational Buddhist networks. Educating Monks makes visible the ways Buddhist communities are shaped by all of the above—collectively and often simultaneous...

These British Isles, moored across from mainland Europe, are more often seen as a world unto themselves. Restless and creative, they often warred amongst themselves until they began a global push to forge a World Empire of territory, of trade and of language.Here our ambitions are only of the literary kind. These shores have mustered many masters of literature. So this anthology’s boundaries includes only those authors who were born in the British Isles - which as a geographical de...