After the German surrender in November 1918, the German High Seas Fleet was interned at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, the anchorage for the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet throughout the First World War. Determined not to see his ships fall into the hands of the Allied Powers as the protracted peace negotiations at Versailles dragged on, the German commander, Admiral Von Reuter, decided to scuttle his fleet and secretly passed orders between his ships for their skeleton crews to open the seac...

For over a hundred years there have been sleeper trains running to a variety of destinations around the British Isles. The longest running services are those between England and Scotland, which started in 1873. The Scottish sleeper services, now branded as the Caledonian Sleeper and currently operated by Serco, are due to have seventy-five brand new Mk 5 carriages introduced into service in the spring of 2018 that will create a new level of hotel-style service. In this book, illustrated th...

Nicholas Hawksmoor is one of a number of distinguished architects who worked in the seventeenth century. Others included Sir Christopher Wren, Inigo Jones, and Sir John Vanbrugh. But while we remember Wren for St Paul’s Cathedral, Inigo Jones for the Banqueting House in Whitehall, and Vanbrugh for Blenheim Palace, Hawksmoor has no major work associated with him, and remains relatively unknown in comparison with his contemporaries. This lavishly illustrated guide to his London churches, inc...

Oxford’s history begins with the story of a king’s daughter, Frideswide, who founded a nunnery in the meadows where the River Thames and River Cherwell meet. A settlement grew up around her shrine, which was built on the site of the present cathedral and it was also a good place for cattle to cross, hence the name ‘Ox-Ford’. A Norman castle was built after the Conquest, and students were first attracted there in the reign of Henry I. The town and university continued to grow through the ra...

Of all the environments most conducive to a little murder and intrigue, the overnight sleeper train is the best. The combination of a private sleeping compartment, a journey through the hours of darkness to a far-flung destination and a closed environment isolated from the outside world offers an ideal opportunity for committing a crime and unravelling a mystery. This book explores the enduring popularity of night trains as the setting for murder and mayhem in fiction over the past 150 yea...

Award-winning poet David O’Meara captures one family’s precarious balance between misery and hope in his debut novel.Twenty-year-old Georgia is reeling from severe depression after the death of her best friend when she arrives in South Korea. Everyone teaching English is there for one of two reasons—adventure or escape—and she quickly falls in with a group of other foreigners. She eases into a life of late-night bars, riotous student protests and surfing until some...

Like the rhapsodists, the storytellers of ancient Greece, A Pretty Sight shapes voices of the past and present into a stitched song lifted and sounded toward the next century. Haunted by ‘time's frame / that dark shape near the edge of the canvas,’ O’Meara's new book explores aspects of culture, art, war, rebellion and technology, offering defiance amid decay.‘O’Meara is a poet of the personal. Of the person. In and amongst the social documentary and human observation at w...

Winner of the 2009 Lampman-Scott Award (for the best book of poetry in the National Capital Region) and shortlisted for the 2009 ReLit Award Lucid accurate detail and music at every turn.Many of the poems in Noble Gas, Penny Black explore the subject of departure and arrival, an ongoing theme in David O’Meara’s work. Travel – being between places, in stations and airports and unfamiliar cities – creates a psychological, emotional space rife with reassessment, where the individual dwells si...

In this issue of Rheumatic Disease Clinics, guest editors Drs. Alexa Simon Meara and David Liew bring their considerable expertise to the topic of Rheumatic Immune-Related Adverse Events. Immune checkpoint inhibitors sometimes cause rheumatic-disease-like symptoms, or rheumatic immune-related adverse events (irAEs). In this issue, top experts discuss the utility of laboratory investigations for rheumatic irAEs; the future of biomarkers in rheumatic irAEs; integrating rheumatic irAE researc...

Stellar Transformations: Movie Stars of the 2010s circles around questions of stardom, performance, and their cultural contexts in ways that remind us of the alluring magic of stars while also bringing to the fore the changing ways in which viewers engaged with them during the last decade. A salient idea that guides much of the collection is the one of transformation, expressed in these pages as the way in which post-millennial movie stars are in one way or another reshaping ideas...

Lucid accurate detail and music at every turn.Many of the poems in Noble Gas, Penny Black explore the subject of departure and arrival, an ongoing theme in David OMearas work. Travel-being between places, in stations and airports and unfamiliar cities-creates a psychological, emotional space rife with reassessment, where the individual dwells simultaneously in the future and in the past. At the same time, OMeara imbues the domestic with a similar compelling transience, in poems on love ...

Sir John Betjeman was born at the start of the twentieth century, and lived to become Poet Laureate, an accomplished writer and campaigner, and something of a national treasure. All his life he loved churches, which are woven into his poetic output. He wrote extensively about churches and architecture, telling a journalist in 1955 ‘If I have a mission, it is to show people things which are beautiful so that they will very soon realise what is ugly. When you look at things, instead of just ...