When rich & imperious American widow Beatrice Chavender eats a forkful of inferior ham at her sister's country house near London, it affects the lives of everyone around her
- her sister, her brother-in-law, her sister's butler, her sister's poor relation Sally, Sally's fiance Lord Holberton, &, most of all, Mrs Chavender's own one-time fiance, ' Ham King' J. B. Duff, whose rotten product spoils her breakfast.
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Sonoko Kakiuchi is a cultured Osaka lady, unfortunately widowed young. But her story is unsettlingly at odds with her image. it is a tale of infatuation & deceit, of eliberate evil. Its theme is humiliation, its victim Sonoko's mild-mannered husb&. At is centre
- seductive, manipulating, enslaving
- is one of Tanizaki's most extraordinary characters, the beautiful & corrupt art student Mitsuko.

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Sonoko Kakiuchi is a cultured Osaka lady, unfortunately widowed young. But her story is unsettlingly at odds with her image. it is a tale of infatuation & deceit, of eliberate evil. Its theme is humiliation, its victim Sonoko's mild-mannered husb&. At is centre
- seductive, manipulating, enslaving
- is one of Tanizaki's most extraordinary characters, the beautiful & corrupt art student Mitsuko.

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Neal Stephenson follows his international bestseller, the WWII thriller Cryptonomicon, with a novel set in the 16th & 17th centuries, in a world of war, scientific, religious & political turmoil. With a cast of characters that

Includes:: Newton, Leibniz, Christopher Wren, Charles II, Cromwell & the young Benjamin Franklin, Stephenson again shows his extraordinary ability to get inside a place & time; as he did for the futures of his science fiction (Snowcrash, The Diamond Age) & for WWII (Cryptonomicon), here he does for the England of the Civil War & the Europe of the Wars of Religion & the Scientific Revolution. Quicksilver is yet another tour-de-force from a writer who is simply unique.

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It is sport's greatest event. The Ryder Cup
- Europe versus the USA, three days of golfing brilliance at the Belfry featuring
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Cleverly appropriated old-fashioned animation imagery & advertising styles of the 1920s & 1930s are put to use in Quimby the Mouse ...

Will the universe continue to expand forever, reverse its expansion & begin to contract, or reach a delicately poised state where it simply persists forever? The answer depends on the amount & properties of matter in the universe, & that has given rise to one of the great paradoxes of modern cosmology; there is too little visible matter to account for the behaviour we can see. Over 90 percent of the universe consists of 'missing mass' or 'dark matter'
- what Lawrence Krauss, in his classic book, termed 'the fifth essence'. In this new edition of The Fifth Essence, retitled Quintessence after the now widely accepted term for dark matter, Krauss shows how the dark matter problem is now connected with two of the hottest areas in recent cosmology: the fate of the universe & the 'cosmological constant.' With a new introduction, epilogue & chapter updates, Krauss updates his classic & shares one of the most stunning discoveries of recent years: an antigravity force that explains recent observations of a permanently expanding universe.
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When Arsene Wenger was appointed as manager by Arsenal Football Club in 1996, football fans everywhere gave a puzzled look & asked, 'who?'
They were soon to find out just what kind of man had become a part of English football, as Wenger added to Arsenal's first Double win by leading them to another in 1998 & a third in 2002. Since then, he has amused & entertained with his erudition & always pertinent evaluations of Arsenal's merits & those of the game in general.
Here are the most diverting & most intriguing comments of manager Arsene Wenger.

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Set in Reformation Europe, Q begins with Luther's nailing of his 95 theses on the door of the cathedral church in Wittenberg & traces the adventures & conflicts of two central characters, an Anabaptist, a member of the most radical of the Protestant sects, the anarchists of the Reformation, & a Catholic spy & informer, as they travel across Germany, Italy & the Netherlands. The four young writers who shelter behind the pseudonym Luther Blissett have created a world of intrigue, violence & intense political & religious passion. Far from the traditional historical novel, Q is the stuff of which cults are made. ...