Boies Penrose: Symbol of an Era by Robert Douglas Bowden In the smoke-filled back rooms of American politics, where deals were struck in whispers and power was the only currency that mattered, one man stood above the rest as the undisputed master of a brutal and magnificent game. Boies Penrose, the towering Republican boss of Pennsylvania, wielded influence so vast and so unapologetic that his very name became synonymous with the Gilded Age machine politics that shaped a nation. This gripp...

"With the London-Scottish Regiment During the First World WarThe 'Cockney Jocks' at war in Flanders and FranceThe wide distribution of Scots throughout Britain and the Empire led to the formation new 'Scottish' regiments and the London Scottish, formed in 1859 as a volunteer rifle corps and originally commanded by Lord Elcho, was a primary example. Elcho, anxious to embrace all the fighting men of Scotland into one brotherhood irrespective of their clan origins, uniquely clad...

Nightmares can’t really hurt you… can they?An evil from beyond the stars haunts a young boy and his father at Roswell Airbase. The survivors of a sunken warship take refuge on a deserted island, and discover they are not alone. And terror checks in at an old motel, when a vacationing family finds themselves trapped in an ancient curse…Scare Street journeys into the night to bring you a new volume of skin-crawling terror. This macabre collection con...

"The Ladies From Hell" was the nickname applied to the kilted units of the British and Canadian armies in the First World War . Clearly this is meant to paint the men in question as something out of the ordinary; soldiers so tough that they can cross-dress and still be shining examples of fighting manhood. R. D. Pinkerton's 'The Ladies From Hell' tell of his experience from the First World War.

The dark side is waiting…Fish N’ Chips lead a curious traveler to a sinister island, where the residents are more than they seem. Forbidden occult knowledge strands a pair of friends in a terrifying nexus of evil. And an ancient ice storm forces a wandering tribe to choose between following a bloodthirsty shaman, or the glowing lights in the sky…Venture into new realms of terror with Scare Street’s latest bone-chilling collection. This spine-tingli...

A TIMES and SPECTATOR Book of the Year'A love letter to the energising thrill of literature' SUNDAY TIMES'A lively book that seeks to enthuse us to read more deeply, more thoughtfully' THE TIMES'The best book about reading I have read for a very long time' STEPHEN FRYA joyful and enlightening masterclass in how reading attentively can change our lives

A darkly comic and moving memoir on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain, from the award-winning Oxford professor.‘A book that will stay with you for life’NATALIE HAYNES‘The best book about multiple sclerosis’THE TIMESWe all have trapdoors in our lives. Sometimes we jump off just in time... But sometimes we are unlucky. My own trapdoor was hidden in the consulting ...

'To die will be an awfully big adventure.' Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up, is one of the immortals of children's literature. J. M. Barrie first created Peter Pan as a baby, living in secret with the birds and fairies in the middle of London, but as the children for whom he invented the stories grew older, so too did Peter, reappearing in Neverland, where he was aided in his epic battles by the motherly and resourceful Wendy Darling. Since then Peter Pan has beco...

'What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him?' Ebenezer Scrooge is a bad-tempered skinflint who hates Christmas and all it stands for, but a ghostly visitor foretells three apparitions who will thaw Scrooge's frozen heart. A Christmas Carol has gripped the public imagination since it was first published in 1843, and it is now as much a part of Christmas as mistletoe or plum pudding. This edition reprints the sto...

Becoming Dickens tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England’s greatest novelist. In following the twists and turns of Charles Dickens’s early career, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst examines a remarkable double transformation: in reinventing himself Dickens reinvented the form of the novel. It was a high-stakes gamble, and Dickens never forgot how differently things could have turned out. Like the hero of Dombey and Son, he remained haunted by “what might ...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARDThis is the secret history of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.Wonderland is part of our cultural heritage. But beneath the fairy tale lies the complex history of the author and his subject. Charles Dodgson was a quiet academic but his second self, Lewis Carroll, was a storyteller, innovator and avid collector of ‘child-friends’. Carroll’s imagination was to give Alice Liddell, his 'dream-child', a fictional alter ego t...

Glasgow 1961.It is ten years since we last visited the close at 18 Dalbeattie Street in Maryhill.The stalwarts are still there...Ella, Drena, Rhea and 'Granny' Thomson (86).Irma the German war bride speaks fluent Scots nowadays. Well, 'Fluent' if you were brought up in the same close as the Broons and Oor Wullie.Glasgow's beloved trams still run on the Maryhill Road. But not for long. There will not be a tramcar left in Glasgow by the end of next year. The new...