Ben & Clare are staying with Aunt Gwen in Antmouth for the summer. They've been told the coast there is haunted by the ghosts of smugglers, but they are soon much more alarmed by the living residents of the village. There's the tall thin fellow in charge of the Insect Zoo, who acts like the worst kind of mad scientist. & then there's all the fish-eyed golfers who seem to be spying on them. Why do their golf balls seem to get everywhere
- even into the cottage itself? & what is going on in the big Bosswood estate at the top of the hill, where a mysterious dome rises above the trees? Most frightening of all, why do people from the village keep vanishing? Once again, in this fourth Ben & Claire Swift thriller, the thin curtain of normality is ripped aside, plunging the reader into a bizarre world of hidden terror!
...

Egyptian mummies, Michaelangelo's drawings, sculptures from Greece & Rome, exquisite porcelain from China, bronze masterpieces from Africa, the remarkable finds from Sutton Hoo
- these are just some of the awe-inspiring objects in the British Museum's famous collections. But the Museum is more than just a treasure house: it is a London landmark, a tourist magnet, a national & international resource- a museum of the world for the world.

Keeping this remarkable institution running is a team of 1000 staff who supervise the galleries, plan major exhibitions & manage a flow of nearly 5 million visitors a year. Rupert Smith has been granted special access to the huge variety of people who work in the Museum, including expert curators, conservators, heavy-object handlers & the people who clean the fabulous new glass roof of the Great Court.

Accompanying a major ten-part BBC television series, The Museum takes us behind the scenes for the first time to see how this amazing place works. Illustrated with over 120 colour photographs, & with a foreword by the Museum




...

All human cultures seem to make music
- today & through history. But why they do so, why music can excite deep passions,
...

Why have all human cultures
- today & throughout history
- made music?
Why does music excite such rich emotion?
How



...

Robert, a young traveller, finds himself in the small Ontario town of Sunshine, in the middle of a party at the town's wildlife park. A stranger he picked up on the way has given him a dirty yellow notebook & told him to give it to an Alice Pedersen. But Alice Pedersen disappeared two years ago. Six months before Robert's arrival, human remains have been recovered from the local shoreline. Stoddart Fremlin has been arrested on suspicion of murder. Daniel Barrie, who was having an affair with Alice & who left for England immediately after her disappearance, has unexpectedly returned. At the same time, Rocket de Witt, one of the last people to see Alice alive, has left town. & amid all this, there is a tiger on the loose. The mystery of Alice's disappearance slowly unravels, at the same time revealing the dark & murky secrets of the inhabitants of Sunshine. ...

Yambo, a sixty-ish rare book dealer who lives in Milan has suffered a loss of memory; not the kind of memory neurologists call 'semantic' (Yambo remembers all about Julius Caesar & can recite every poem he has ever read), but rather his 'autobiographical' memory: he no longer knows his own name, doesn't recognize his wife or his daughters, doesn't remember anything about his parents or his childhood.
His wife, who is at his side as he slowly begins to recover, convinces him to return to his family home in the hills somewhere between Milan & Turin. Yambo promptly retreats to the sprawling attic, cluttered with boxes of newspapers, comics, records, photo albums & adolescent diaries. There, he relives the story of his generation: Mussolini, Catholic education & guilt, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Cyrano de Bergerac. As he recovers his memory, two voids remain shrouded in fog: a terrible event he experienced during the resistance, & the vague image of a girl whom he loved at sixteen, then lost.
But a relapse occurs. Now in a coma, his memories run wild, & life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the frames to find at last the face of the girl he loves: she descends the stairs of their high school & morphs into a Dante-esque promise (or threat) of the afterlife, as he struggles harder to capture her simple, innocent, real-life image
- the schoolgirl he never forgot.
Copiously illustrated throughout with images from comics, book jackets, record sleeves & other printed ephemera, The Mysterious Flame is a fascinating & hugely entertaining new novel from the incomparable Umberto Eco.



...

Yambo, a sixty-ish rare book dealer who lives in Milan has suffered a loss of memory; not the kind of memory neurologists call 'semantic' (Yambo remembers all about Julius Caesar & can recite every poem he has ever read), but rather his 'autobiographical' memory: he no longer knows his own name, doesn't recognize his wife or his daughters, doesn't remember anything about his parents or his childhood.
His wife, who is at his side as he slowly begins to recover, convinces him to return to his family home in the hills somewhere between Milan & Turin. Yambo promptly retreats to the sprawling attic, cluttered with boxes of newspapers, comics, records, photo albums & adolescent diaries. There, he relives the story of his generation: Mussolini, Catholic education & guilt, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Cyrano de Bergerac. As he recovers his memory, two voids remain shrouded in fog: a terrible event he experienced during the resistance, & the vague image of a girl whom he loved at sixteen, then lost.
But a relapse occurs. Now in a coma, his memories run wild, & life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the frames to find at last the face of the girl he loves: she descends the stairs of their high school & morphs into a Dante-esque promise (or threat) of the afterlife, as he struggles harder to capture her simple, innocent, real-life image
- the schoolgirl he never forgot.
Copiously illustrated throughout with images from comics, book jackets, record sleeves & other printed ephemera, The Mysterious Flame is a fascinating & hugely entertaining new novel from the incomparable Umberto Eco.



...