When spoiled rich girl, Mary Lennox, is orphaned, she is shipped from India to live in her uncle`s enormous manor in faraway Engl&, where all is not quite as it seems. Before long, the lonely Mary finds a key to a secret garden that has been left untouched for ten years, & a whole new world of enchantment opens up to her. For the first time she learns to make friends
- with the talented animalcharmer, Dickon, & her sickly cousin, Colin
- & between them, the three children truly flourish as the garden reveals its haunting secrets -

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” The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett is a magical novel for adults & children alike `I`ve stolen a garden, ` she said very fast. ” People never like me & I never like people, ” Mary thought.` After losing her parents, young Mary Lennox is sent from India to live in her uncle`s gloomy mansion Misselthwaite Manor, on the wild English moors. Everybody says she is the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It is true, too. Mary is pale, spoilt & quite contrary. But she is also horribly lonely & has no one to play with. Then one day she hears about a secret garden in the grounds of the Manor that no one is allowed to enter; it has been kept locked & hidden for years. Then Mary uncovers an old key in a flowerbed
- & a gust of magic leads her to the hidden door. & when a friendly robin helps Mary find the key, she discovers the most magical place anyone could imagine... Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) was born in Manchester. She had a very poor upbringing & used to escape from the horror of her surroundings by writing stories. In 1865 her family emigrated to the USA where she married & became the successful author of many children`s books including ” Little Lord Fauntleroy” & ”A Little Princess”.
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” The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett is a magical novel for adults & children alike `I`ve stolen a garden, ` she said very fast. ` It isn`t mine. It isn`t anybody`s. Nobody wants it, nobody cares for it, nobody ever goes into it. Perhaps everything is dead in it already; I don`t know.` After losing her parents, young Mary Lennox is sent from India to live in her uncle`s gloomy mansion on the wild English moors. She is lonely & has no one to play with, but one day she learns of a secret garden somewhere in the grounds that no one is allowed to enter. Then Mary uncovers an old key in a flowerbed
- & a gust of magic leads her to the hidden door. Slowly she turns the key & enters a world she could never have imagined. With a heartwarming introduction by Sophie Dahl. A behind-the-scenes jounrey, including an author profile, a guide to who`s who, activities & more.. .a much-loved classic. Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) was born in Manchester. She had a very poor upbringing & used to escape from the horror of her surroundings by writing stories. In 1865 her family emigrated to the USA where she married & became the successful author of many children`s books including ” Little Lord Fauntleroy” & ”A Little Princess”.
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On the grounds of Misselthwaite, her Uncle Archibald`s estate near the Yorkshire moors, nine-year-old Mary Lennox finds a walled-in garden that has been locked securely for years. With the help of Dickon Sowerby, a young local boy who can charm animals, Mary cultivates the garden, an experiences that both improves her health & raises her spirits. Ultimately, the secret garden proves beneficial not only to Mary, but to her sickly cousin Colin. Nurtured with love & tenderness, the secret garden proves it has the power to heal the heart. First published in 1911, Frances Hodgson Burnett`s The Secret Garden is a much-loved classic of children`s literature. This illustrated edition, with full-colour plates by Charles Robinson, features an elegant bonded-leather binding, a satin-ribbon bookmark, distinctive gilded edging, & decorative endpapers. Decorative, durable, & collectible, it`s a book that will be cherished by readers of all ages. ...

Discover paradise
- through a break in a hedge, at the end of a brambly path, on the other side of an old stone wall. So close,
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Hatfield's Herbal is the story of how people all over Britain have used its wild plants throughout history, for reasons magical, mystical & medicinal. Gabrielle Hatfield has drawn on a lifetime's knowledge to describe the properties of over 150 native plants, & the customs that surround them: from predicting the weather with seaweed to using deadly nightshade to make ladies' pupils dilate appealingly, & from ensuring a husband's faithfulness with butterbur to warding off witches by planting a rowan tree. Filled with stories, folklore & remedies both strange & practical, this is a memorable & eye-opening guide to the richness of Britain's heritage. ...

Georgian London evokes images of elegant buildings & fine art, but it was also a city where prostitution was rife, houses of ill repute widespread, & many tens of thousands of people dependent in some way or other on the wages of sin. The sex industry was, in fact, a very powerful force indeed, & in The Secret History of Georgian London, Dan Cruickshank compellingly shows how it came to affect almost every aspect of life & culture in the capital. Examining the nature of the sex trade, he offers a tantalising insight into the impact of prostitution to give us vivid portraits of some of the women who became involved in its world. & he discusses the very varied attitudes of contemporaries
- those who sympathised, those who indulged, & those who condemned. As he powerfully argues, these women, & many thousands like them, not only shaped eighteenth-century London, they also helped determine its future development.
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In the early hours of an August morning a gunfight broke out in an Italian restaurant in Duisburg; in less than five minutes over seventy shots were fired into the bodies of six men. Both victims & assassins were members of the ` Ndrangheta crime organization; Calabria`s Mafia had extended the savage tentacle of its influence outside Italy for the first time. For the men of the ` Ndrangheta, time is still measured in hour-glasses & honour may only be washed with blood. Petra Reski dispels the Hollywood romance surrounding the Mafia to reveal the huge & menacing force lurking everywhere
- from street corner to parliament offices, construction site to corporate headquarters
- & involved in everything from petty extortion to the disposal of nuclear waste. Reski`s searing portrait of the criminals who have come to control not only Italy but vast swathes of Europe, is a journalistic tour de force.

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A chance meeting has New Zealand writer Laszlo Winter thinking back to his time in London in the late 1950s. The Empire might be in a state of collapse, but for young `colonials`, England remains a mythical place that draws them from the farthest corners of the globe. There was Australian Samantha Conlan, clever, desirable, hopelessly in love with married Jewish New Zealander Freddy Goldstein, who carried with him a dark history. Rajiv, an earnest young Indian at work on a study of Yeats & the Indian mind. The enigmatic Margot, whose bond with her athletic brother Mark troubled Laszlo in ways he didn`t quite underst&. Heather, the call girl with whom Laszlo exchanged lessons on Shakespeare for lessons in love. The great writers of the time, & the details of their lives are recorded by Samantha in her idiosyncratic research project that she named her Secret History of Modernism. There was all of that & more, & then there was Laszlo, knocking blindly about among them, despairing at his academic prospects, & gradually realising that he was, would only ever be, a storyteller. Now, years later, from the other side of the world, the people seem to spring to life again, in this beguiling work by one of New Zealand`s foremost writers. ...

The Secret History of Our Streets explores six roads spread across inner London
- from Camberwell, Holland Park & Islington to
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