' Round-heeled' is an old-fashioned term for a promiscuous woman of easy virtue. It's a surprising way for a respectable English teacher of a certain age, with a passion for the novels of Anthony Trollope, to describe herself, but then that's just the first of many surprises to be found in this poignant, funny, unique memoir. Inspired by Eric Rohmer's film Autumn Tale, Jane Juska, a smart, energetic divorcee, decided she'd been celibate too long, & placed a personal ad in her favourite newspaper, The New York Review of Books. The response was overwhelming, & Juska took a sabbatical from teaching to meet some of the men who replied. & since her ad made it clear that she wasn't expecting just h&-holding, her dates zipped from first base to the full monty in record time. Juska is a totally engaging, perceptive writer, funny & frank about her exploits. It's high time someone revealed the fact that older single people are as eager for sex & intimacy as their younger counterparts. Jane Juska's brave, honest memoir will probably raise eyebrows & blood pressure, but it will undoubtedly appeal to the very large audience of grown-up readers who will be fascinated & inspired by her daring adventure. ...

' Before I turn 67
- next March
- I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope

...

The young George III was a poignant figure, humdrum on the surface yet turbulent beneath: hiding his own passions, he tried hard to be a father to his siblings & his nation. This intimate, fast-moving book tells the intertwined stories. His sisters were doomed to marry foreign princes & leave home forever; his brothers had no role & too much time on their hands
- a recipe for disaster. At the heart of Tillyard's story is Caroline Mathilde, who married the mad Christian of Denmark in her teens, but fell in love with the royal doctor Struensee: a terrible fate awaited them, despite George's agonized negotiations. Around this tragedy, Stella Tillyard weaves the dramas of the rakish Duke of York; the Duke of Cumberl&, caught up in a notorious divorce; the Duke of Gloucester, secretly married, to the fury of the King. Desperate for control, George constructed the Royal Marriage Act, which still bedevils the royal family today. At the same time he faced his tumultuous American colonies. & at every step a feverish press pounced on the gossip, fostering a new national passion
- a heated mix of celebrity & sex.

Tillyard conjures up a Georgian world of war & peace, the choppy seas & backwaters of international diplomacy in a changing world of ancien régimes & radical ideas
- the history of private passions & public disgrace, rebellion & exile, in a curtain raiser to the revolutions which convulsed two continents.




...

The young George III was a poignant figure, humdrum on the surface yet turbulent beneath: hiding his own passions, he tried hard to be a father to his siblings & his nation. This intimate, fast-moving book tells the intertwined stories. His sisters were doomed to marry foreign princes & leave home forever; his brothers had no role & too much time on their hands
- a recipe for disaster. At the heart of Tillyard's story is Caroline Mathilde, who married the mad Christian of Denmark in her teens, but fell in love with the royal doctor Struensee: a terrible fate awaited them, despite George's agonized negotiations. Around this tragedy, Stella Tillyard weaves the dramas of the rakish Duke of York; the Duke of Cumberl&, caught up in a notorious divorce; the Duke of Gloucester, secretly married, to the fury of the King. Desperate for control, George constructed the Royal Marriage Act, which still bedevils the royal family today. At the same time he faced his tumultuous American colonies. & at every step a feverish press pounced on the gossip, fostering a new national passion
- a heated mix of celebrity & sex.

Tillyard conjures up a Georgian world of war & peace, the choppy seas & backwaters of international diplomacy in a changing world of ancien régimes & radical ideas
- the history of private passions & public disgrace, rebellion & exile, in a curtain raiser to the revolutions which convulsed two continents.




...

In March 1965, Marine Lieutnant Philip J. Caputo landed in Danang with the first ground combat unit committed to gith in Vietnam. Sixteen months later, having served on the line in one of modern history's ugliest wars, he returned home
- physically whole, emotionally wasted, his youthful idealism shattered. A decade later, Caputo would write in A Rumor of War, ' This is simply a story about war, about the things men do in war & the things war does to them'. It is far more then that. It is, a Theodore Solotaroff wrote in the New York Times Book Review, 'the troubled conscience of America speaking passionately, truthfully, finally'. It is the book that shattered America's deliberate indifference to the fact of the men it sent to fight in the jungles of Vietnam, & in the years since it was first published it has become a basic text on that war. But in the literature of war that stretches back to Homer, it has also taken its place as an esteemed classic to rank alongside All Quiet on the Western Front & The Naked & the Dead.
...

A Russian Diary is the book that Anna Politkovskaya had recently completed when she was murdered in a contract killing in Moscow. ...

A Russian Diary is the book that Anna Politkovskaya had recently completed when she was murdered in a contract killing in Moscow. ...

Even in the heat of battle, Geoff Fulton, a professional soldier, would always carry with him the memory of the night he was on leave, when his timely intervention rescued fourteen-year-old Lizzie from the oldest of perils for a young girl, & thereby began to change her life. Lizzie came from a desperately poor home, ruled by a slatternly stepmother only too ready to profit from setting the girl along the same sordid road as her elder sister had been made to take.

The year was 1937 & the place a rural enclave of County Durham, where Geoff had been born & raised in the old farmhouse that remained the home of his parents, even though most of its land had been sold off to neighbouring Low Tarn Hall. There his father still worked as estate manager for the demanding Ernest Bradford-Brown, self-made owner of this & many another property. Anxious about his increasingly handicapped mother & seeing in Lizzie a girl of spirit, Geoff concluded that she might, with care & training, solve his problem & benefit herself. So, after a quick visit to outface the protesting Mrs Gillespie, he was soon back home with his willing protegée.

Then, in 1943, when Geoff returned wounded from the desert war, it was to find a Lizzie he hardly recognised
- mature & highly attractive. For her part, she soon came to realise that he too had changed. Embittered by his experiences at war & rejected by Ernest Bradford-Brown's daughter Janis after a lengthy relationship long opposed by her irascible father, to Lizzie he now showed a ruthless streak that was at considerable odds with the caring man who had, all those years ago, rescued her from poverty & deprivation.




...

Delve into this sack of stories & you will find.. . a Martian wearing Granny's jumper, that well-known comic fairy-tale pair Handsel & Gristle, a unicorn, a leprechaun, a princess who is a pig, & many other strange & exciting characters. You won't want to stop reading until you get right to the bottom of the sack!

A carefully chosen selection of stories for 8 year olds from Pat Thomson's successful anthology range

...

'IT'S TIME YOU KNEW THE TRUTH, ' 'ABOUT YOUR FATHER. ' 'WHAT ABOUT HIM?' 'HIS FIRST WIFE, ' SHE SAID. 'SHE DIDN'T DIE OF CANCER. ' 'HOW DID SHE DIE?' 'HE MURDERED HER. ' At the age of fourteen Lorenzo Carcaterra made a shocking discovery. Behind closed doors he & his mother survived the erratic, violent outbursts of his father. A powerful man, he tempered his rage with affection. To a young boy he was a man to both love & fear. Until Lorenzo learned a shattering fact that forever changed his life. His father was a murderer. ...