Drawing on over 2, 000 years of writing & experiences from all over the world, The Curious World of Christmas covers every ...

This is the story of Aurora Ortiz, who lives in Madrid, & who, at the age of only thirty, has been widowed & needs to find a job. Although she is in no position to choose, she would ideally like to work as a caretaker in a quiet block of flats where she would just watch life pass by. Aurora's aspirations are simple & few, & with the help of her neighbour & friend Fany, who lends her a computer, she composes what she considers a suitable curriculum vitae & proceeds to tramp the streets of the city in search of work. With her vitality & freshness, her innocence, her unconventional intelligence & her relative lack of commercial ambition, Aurora Ortiz is a new type of heroine, one whose ethos & view of the world run contrary to most contemporary trends, she is a character who might have emerged from one of Pedro Almod-var's films. The means by which she comes to terms with the burden & pressures of modern life will strike chords with many of her own European generation. ...

In the floating city of Sanctaphrax, fusty old professors scheme & bicker with each other as they study the weather in minute detail
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In the floating city of Sanctaphrax, fusty old professors scheme & bicker with each other as they study the weather in minute detail
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THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY is probably Edith Wharton's most savage satire on the manners of late nineteenth-century America. It is the story of the exquisitely beautiful but brutally ambitious Undine Spragg who marries her way into the high aristocracy of Europe, abandoning several husbands along the way. This novel, which has scences of comedy & even farce, is a commentary on both certain aspects of feminisim & certain aspects of capitalism in Edith Wharton's time. The novel makes a fitting companion to THE AGE OF INNOCENCE & THE HOUSE OF MIRTH & shows Wharton to be one of the greatest American novelists. ...

On 5 July 1884, the yacht Mignonette set sail from Southampton bound for Sydney. Halfway through their projected one hundred & twenty day voyage, Captain Tom Dudley & his crew of three men were beset by a monstrous storm off the coast of Africa. After four days of battling towering waves & hurricane gales, their yacht was finally crushed by a ferocious forty foot wave.

The survivors were cast adrift a thousand miles from the nearest landfall in an open thirteen foot dinghy without provisions, water or shelter from the scorching sun. When, after twenty four days, they were finally rescued by a passing yacht, the Moctezuma, only three men were left & they were in an appalling condition. The ordeal that they endured & the trial which followed their eventual return to England held the whole nation
- from the lowliest ship's deckhand to Queen Victoria herself
- spellbound during the following winter.

This is the true story of the voyage & the subsequent court case which outlawed for ever a practice followed since men first put to the ocean in boats: the custom of the sea.





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On 5 July 1884, the yacht Mignonette set sail from Southampton bound for Sydney. Halfway through their projected one hundred & twenty day voyage, Captain Tom Dudley & his crew of three men were beset by a monstrous storm off the coast of Africa. After four days of battling towering waves & hurricane gales, their yacht was finally crushed by a ferocious forty foot wave.

The survivors were cast adrift a thousand miles from the nearest landfall in an open thirteen foot dinghy without provisions, water or shelter from the scorching sun. When, after twenty four days, they were finally rescued by a passing yacht, the Moctezuma, only three men were left & they were in an appalling condition. The ordeal that they endured & the trial which followed their eventual return to England held the whole nation
- from the lowliest ship's deckhand to Queen Victoria herself
- spellbound during the following winter.

This is the true story of the voyage & the subsequent court case which outlawed for ever a practice followed since men first put to the ocean in boats: the custom of the sea.





...

On 5 July 1884, the yacht Mignonette set sail from Southampton bound for Sydney. Halfway through their projected one hundred & twenty day voyage, Captain Tom Dudley & his crew of three men were beset by a monstrous storm off the coast of Africa. After four days of battling towering waves & hurricane gales, their yacht was finally crushed by a ferocious forty foot wave.

The survivors were cast adrift a thousand miles from the nearest landfall in an open thirteen foot dinghy without provisions, water or shelter from the scorching sun. When, after twenty four days, they were finally rescued by a passing yacht, the Moctezuma, only three men were left & they were in an appalling condition. The ordeal that they endured & the trial which followed their eventual return to England held the whole nation
- from the lowliest ship's deckhand to Queen Victoria herself
- spellbound during the following winter.

This is the true story of the voyage & the subsequent court case which outlawed for ever a practice followed since men first put to the ocean in boats: the custom of the sea.





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Robert Langdon, Harvard Professor of symbology, receives an urgent late-night call while in Paris: the curator of the Louvre has been murdered. Alongside the body is a series of baffling ciphers. Langdon & a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, are stunned to find a trail that leads to the works of Da Vinci ...