Conway opens with her assessment of her life, passions, possibilities & the making of her decision to leave Canada & return to the United States to become Smith's first woman president. Settling into her new environment, she is at once struck by the beauty of the Connecticut Valley & the Olmstead-designed Smith campus
- but also by the College's financial problems & a quarrelsome & complaining faculty engaged in disputes & trivial lawsuits. The jolt of energy she gets from being in the presence of several thousand young women enables her to take on the various Smith constituencies: the self-appointed custodians of the great western male tradition of humanistic learning, the puzzled liberals, the younger male feminists, the 'lady scholars doing intellectual petitpoint', & the young committed feminists of all stripes. We see her harnessing the negative energies in more positive directions, redefining & redesigning parts of the institution, strategising, positioning herself & building a political base, introducing feminist scholarship into the curriculum, creating a programme for older students & a funded research centre, adding fields of study & athletic programmes, developing strong career counselling, changing investment strategy, increasing the endowment
- &, in general, mobilising the institution to share the urgency she felt for shaping the kind of women's institution that would attract the students of the '90s & beyond. Through it all we see her continuing to cope with her husband John's ill health & learning to protect & sustain her inner self in the quiet solitude of gardening at their country home
- a North American variant of the solitude of her native Australian plains. As the end of the Smith decade approaches she reviews what she has learned & decides that she has had her education & that it is time to 'graduate'.


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The first major retelling of the Greek myths & legends, A WONDER-BOOK was published in 1852. The American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne was a friend of the poet Longfellow & had much earlier suggested they collaborate on a story for children based on the legend of Pandora's Box, but this never materialized. Hawthorne went ahead on his own, adding five other myths which he adapted very freely in a romantic & readable style, used deliberately to remove the classical tales from what he called 'cold moonshine. ' Hawthorne's book was criticized by adults for his bowdlerization, but it has always been popular with children & has attracted many illustrators, none more distinguished than Arthur Rackham who made his pictorial contribution in 1922. ...

Hilary Burde, saved by education from a delinquent childhood, cheated out of Oxford by a tragic love tangle, cherishes his obsessive guilt & disappointment in a dull, orderly civil service job. When the man whom he has harmed & betrayed reappears as head of his department, Hilary hopes for forgiveness, even for redemption & a new life, but finds himself haunted by a ghostly repetition. ...

Hilary Burde, saved by education from a delinquent childhood, cheated out of Oxford by a tragic love tangle, cherishes his obsessive guilt & disappointment in a dull, orderly civil service job. When the man whom he has harmed & betrayed reappears as head of his department, Hilary hopes for forgiveness, even for redemption & a new life, but finds himself haunted by a ghostly repetition. ...

'A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees, ' as William Blake so aptly put it. What he probably meant, being a publisher & a printer himself, was that the wise man cuts down the tree & turns the resultant paper into a one-size-fits-all book packed with the sagest advice, quips "ations from some of the wisest & funniest people whose counsel you could ever wish to hear.

A Word from the Wise is a one-stop shop with over 6, 000"es. It's a vast resource, but every one is a gem, from such knowledgeable souls as Hunter S Thompson, The Talmud, Dorothy Parker & Daffy Duck.

With each"e handily placed within every possible category you could think of, & with more"es in every genre than anywhere else, A Word From the Wise is a must for anyone who thinks they could do with knowing a little bit or a lot more.

'A"ation at the right moment is like bread in a famine' The Talmud

' Imagination is more important than knowledge' Albert Einstein

' If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars' John Paul Getty

' Violence is the repartee of the illiterate' George Bernard Shaw

' Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition' Timothy Leary

'A narcissist is someone better-looking than you are' Gore Vidal















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* In A World by Itself, six distinguished British historians offer the most definitive & compelling history of the British ...

A chronological history of the world, which begins with hunting & gathering, & continues with the most fundamental transition in the whole of human history
- the adoption of farming & the settled communities it produced. It then examines the beginning of 'civilisation' in the Americas & the Pacific, before their first contact with Europeans. Eurasia dominates the central part of the book, with the empires of China & the Mongols & the rise of Islam. This is followed by a section on world balance after Europeans had made contact with the long-established societies of the Americas & Asians, while the last part deals with the massive economic changes of the modern world. Themes include contact between different cultures & how history interlocks; the passing on of ideas, technology & religions; how 'civilisation' spread; the relationship between settled societies & nomadic groups; the importance of trade; how Europe moved from the periphery to the centre in the last 1, 000 years; & the coming of industrialisation.
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Conventional accounts of world history tend to focus on the rise of Western civilisation & concentrate on the story of ancient Greece, the Roman empire & the expansion of Europe. The histories of the great civilisations of China, India & Japan, & therefore the experience of the majority of the world's people, have been relegated to a minor place. World History adopts a radically different approach. Starting from the assumption that the human story has to be seen in the round, it examines the evolution of humans, their lives as hunters & gatherers & their eventual adoption of agriculture, before looking at the emergence of civilisation across the globe; in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus Valley, Mesoamerica & Peru. It goes on to tell the story of the earliest empires, emphasising not just their differences but also their similarities. It explains how contacts were established between them & how technologies, ideas & the world's great religions travelled from one to another. It describes the great empires of Islam, of China & of the Mongols. Only towards the end of the story does Europe come slowly to dominate the world, against the background of technical innovations & social & economic change. ...

Conventional accounts of world history tend to focus on the rise of Western civilisation & concentrate on the story of ancient Greece, the Roman empire & the expansion of Europe. The histories of the great civilisations of China, India & Japan, & therefore the experience of the majority of the world's people, have been relegated to a minor place. World History adopts a radically different approach. Starting from the assumption that the human story has to be seen in the round, it examines the evolution of humans, their lives as hunters & gatherers & their eventual adoption of agriculture, before looking at the emergence of civilisation across the globe; in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus Valley, Mesoamerica & Peru. It goes on to tell the story of the earliest empires, emphasising not just their differences but also their similarities. It explains how contacts were established between them & how technologies, ideas & the world's great religions travelled from one to another. It describes the great empires of Islam, of China & of the Mongols. Only towards the end of the story does Europe come slowly to dominate the world, against the background of technical innovations & social & economic change. ...

A packet of letters, found in an attic, leads a young girl into the world of love. The attic is in Montefort, a corroding country house in County Cork, which harbours a group of people held together by odd ties of kinship or habit, & haunted by the memory of its former owner who was killed in France as a young man. At Montefort, under the domination of the deceased's cousin & heiress, Antonia, & in the midst of an unusually hot & dry summer, young Jane pursues her own imaginings. Not far off an immigrant from another world
- a rich promiscuous, parvenue Englishwoman Lady Latterly, who will play a part in Jane's awakening.
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