Homeward Bound meets The Hidden Lives of Dogs in a poignant, gift-worthy collection of true canine odysseys of returning home.For centuries, dogs have made impossible journeys. They’ve walked up to 3000 miles, crossing rivers, mountains, and deserts to find their home again. Some navigated using trains, boats, and ships. Several crossed the Atlantic to get home. Some managed to find a beloved owner or family in a completely unknow...

How dangerous were fairies? In the late seventeenth century, they could still scare people to death. Little wonder, as they were thought to be descended from fallen angels, and to have the power to destroy the world itself. Such beliefs, along with some remarkably detailed sightings, lingered on well into the twentieth century.In literature and art fairies often retained this edge of danger. From the wild magic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, through the dark glamour of Keats...

Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, which saw kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribe, swallow or wear human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin in an attempt to heal themselves of epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression. In this comprehensive and accessible text, Richard Sugg shows that, far from being a medieval therapy, corpse medicine was at its ...

Homeward Bound meets The Hidden Lives of Dogs in a poignant, gift-worthy collection of true canine odysseys of returning home.For centuries, dogs have made impossible journeys. They’ve walked up to 3000 miles, crossing rivers, mountains, and deserts to find their home again. Some navigated using trains, boats, and ships. Several crossed the Atlantic to get home. Some managed to find a beloved owner or family in a completely unknow...

What was it like to live in a Victorian Household? What time did the servants have to get up? What was the food like and who cooked it? How did the clothing differ for the different types of servants? How much did the servants get paid? This book shows you what it was really like to live in Victorian times, for those both above and below stairs.

'Witty and erudite ... stuffed with the kind of arcane information that nobody strictly needs to know, but which is a pleasure to learn nonetheless.' Nick Duerden, Independent.'Particularly good ... Forsyth takes words and draws us into their, and our, murky history.' William Leith, Evening Standard.The Etymologicon is an occasionally ribald, frequently witty and unerringly erudite guided tour of the secret labyrinth that lurks beneath the English language.What is t...

Proverbs ... weve all grown up with them and we probably repeat them without much thought. Yes, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and absence makes the heart grow fonder, but these sayings have almost become clichés and it is the same in every country and culture. Such pearls of wisdom play a key role in the moral guidance of societies everywhere. Sometimes the wisdom is distinctly odd, sometimes it has become outdated and sometimes it is simply contradictory. After all, do many ...

What is the connection between God and East Sheen? How do you talk your way out of an Albanian jail? Why do dictators love to make comic books? How does a missed penalty-kick lead to a bloody war? Theodore Dalrymple, a psychiatrist who gives expert witness in murder cases, has a passion for sideways thinking. In The Pleasure of Thinking he takes us on a witty and erudite voyage along the hidden pathways that bring ideas together. At once light-hearted and enlightening, it is an amusing fli...

Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy is the most thorough and detailed life of Marlowe since John Bakeless's in 1942. It has new material on Marlowe in relation to Canterbury, also on his home life, schooling, and six and a half years at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and includes fresh data on his reading, teachers, and early achievements, including a new letter with a new date for the famous 'putative portrait' of Marlowe at Cambridge. The biography uses for the first time the La...

The History of Torture tells the complete story of torture, from its earliest uses right up to the present day. The book explains the tools and techniques of torture, from the first use of the rack in Ancient Greece to the use of modern drugs to elicit confessions. The book also details the fight against torture through the work of international campaigners such as Amnesty International. A subject which – in moral terms at least – permits no shades of grey is dealt with in an objective and...

Who Cooked the Last Supper? overturns the phallusy of history and gives voice to the untold history of the world: the contributions of millions of unsung women.Men dominate history because men write history. There have been many heroes, but no heroines. Here, in Who Cooked the Last Supper?, is the history you never learned—but should have!Without politics or polemics, this brilliant and witty book overturns centuries of preconceptions to r...

L'Allegro (which means "the happy man" in Italian) is invariably paired with the contrasting pastoral poem, Il Penseroso ("the pensive man"), which depicts a similar day spent in contemplation and thought. Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.