An invaluable guide for both casual opera fans and aficionados, 100 Great Operas is perhaps the most comprehensive and enjoyable volume of opera stories ever written.From La Traviata to Aïda, from Carmen to Don Giovanni, here are the plots of the world’s best-loved operas, told in an engaging, picturesque, and readable manner. Written by noted opera authority Henry W. Simon, this distinctive reference book contains act-by-act description...

The Bastille is most known for being destroyed - it has endured as a symbol of absolute power that fell to popular anger. But few people, even in France, know anything about the actual prison, notably what it was like inside and the details of how the prisoners were really treated.As it happens, Linguet, once quite famous as a lawyer and journalist, was not only in it, but wrote about the experience, and did so only a few years before it fell - some of have said this book provoked i...

**The first panoramic history of the Western world from the 1970s to the present day—from the Cold War to the 2008 financial crisis and wars in the Middle East—Empire of Democracy is “**a superbly informed and riveting historical analysis of our contemporary era” (Charles S. Maier, Harvard University).Half a century ago, at the height of the Cold War and amidst a world economic crisis, the Western democracies were forced to undergo a profound transformatio...

The inside story—from the organizer himself--of the largest unrecovered cash haul in history. This full account brings readers behind the heist memorialized in Goodfellas, a crime that has baffled law enforcement for decades. From Henry Hill himself, The Lufthansa Heist is the last book he worked on before his 2012 death.On December 11, 1978, a daring armed robbery rocked Kennedy Airport, resulting in the largest unrecovered cash haul in world history, totaling six million dollars....

Fielding's comic masterpiece of 1749 was immediately attacked as `A motley history of bastardism, fornication, and adultery'. Indeed, his populous novel overflows with a marvellous assortment of prudes, whores, libertines, bumpkins, misanthropes, hypocrites, scoundrels, virgins, and all too fallible humanitarians. At the centre of one of the most ingenious plots in English fiction stands a hero whose actions were, in 1749, as shocking as they are funny today. Expelled from Mr Allworthy's c...

The short-lived Ministry of Information (MoI, 1939–1946) had an outsized impact. It played a key role in the Allied war effort, and its work has reverberated in British culture ever since: from its much darker version (as the 'Ministry of Truth') in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four to memes based on the slogan 'Keep Calm and Carry On'. But despite its long legacy, it has been the subject of only limited scholarly investigation. This multi-authored volume offers the first comprehensiv...

One of the most daunting ghost stories to ever be written, Henry James' The Turn of the Screw follows the transformation of Miles (age 10) and Flora (age 8) from well-behaved children to deceitful liars. When a governess comes to their country estate to look after the children, she and Flora are separately visited by ghosts. However, Flora denies the experience and Miles claims to never have been visited by one, even when evidence supports an evil plot between the children and the ghosts. ...

A collection of contemporary adaptations of the best-known works of Henry Fielding - plus bonus documentary programmeDubbed 'the father of the English novel' by Sir Walter Scott, Henry Fielding is well known for his ribald humour and ironic, satirical fiction. Collected here are four of his most famous works, including his comic masterpiece Tom Jones, as well as a fascinating documentary exploring the foundling motif in fiction.Tom Jone...

A concise technical history of the German Albatros D.I and D.II type scouts.In 1916 German aerial domination had been lost to the French and British fighters. German fighter pilots requested an aircraft that was more powerful and more heavily armed, and the Albatros design bureau set to work on what was to become an iconic aircraft design. By April 1916, they had developed the Albatros D.I, that featured the usual Albatros semi-monocoque wooden construction with a ...

This collection gathers a set of seminal papers from the emerging area of ethics and climate change. Topics covered include human rights, international justice, intergenerational ethics, individual responsibility, climate economics, and the ethics of geoengineering. Climate Ethics is intended to serve as a source book for general reference, and for university courses that include a focus on the human dimensions of climate change. It should be of broad interest to all those concern...

The intelligence failures exposed by the events of 9/11 and the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have made one thing perfectly clear: change is needed in how the U.S. intelligence community operates. Transforming U.S. Intelligence argues that transforming intelligence requires as much a look to the future as to the past and a focus more on the art and practice of intelligence rather than on its bureaucratic arrangements. In fact, while the recent restructuring, includin...

The Ultimate Math Library: 23 Must-Have Books assembles a capacious canon of mathematical writing in which proof, puzzle, philosophical speculation, scientific exposition, and imaginative fiction meet. Ranging from foundational reflections on method and probability to geometrical fantasy, recreational problems, and investigations of form in nature, the volume reveals mathematics as both a rigorous language and a literary-cultural practice. Its standout texts illuminate how abstraction can ...