On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe what had happened: the age of flight had begun, with the first heavier-than-air, powered machine carrying a pilot. Who were these men & how was it that they achieved what they did? David Mc Cullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the surprising, profoundly human story of Wilbur & Orville Wright. Far more than a couple of unschooled Dayton bicycle mechanics who happened to hit on success, they were men of exceptional courage & determination, & of far-ranging intellectual interests & ceaseless curiosity, much of which they attributed to their upbringing. In this thrilling book, Mc Cullough draws on the immense riches of the Wright Papers, including private diaries, notebooks, scrapbooks, & more than a thousand letters from private family correspondence to tell the human side of the Wright Brothers` story, including the little-known contributions of their sister, Katharine, without whom things might well have gone differently for them. ...

The Wright Floor Globe is an authentic reproduction from a drawing found in the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation archives. It ...

From the grand tour to the global village, novelists & poets have made particularly observant travellers. Many writers have been prone to wanderlust, eager to explore the world & draw inspiration from their travels. They recorded their notes in letters, journals, essays & books. In some cases, these became celebrated examples of travel writing, but there are many more accounts which remain overlooked. In The Writer Abroad, Lucinda Hawksley takes us on a literary journey around the world, through extracts from Arthur Conan Doyle in Australia, Joseph Conrad in the Congo, Charles Dickens in Italy, Henry James in France, Mary Wollstonecraft in Sweden, & many more. ...

During forty years of travel, V. S. Naipaul has created a wide-ranging body of work, an exceptional & sustained meditation on our world. Now his finest pieces of reflection & reportage
- many of which have been unavailable for some time
- are collected in one volume. With an abiding faith in modernity balanced by a sense of wonder about the past, Naipaul has explored an astonishing variety of societies & people through the prism of his experience. Whether writing about Indian mutinies & despair, Mobutu`s mad reign in Zaire, or the New York mayoral elections, he demonstrates time & again that no one has a shrewder intuition of the ways in which the world works. Infused with a deeply felt humanism, The Writer & the World attests powerfully not only to Naipaul`s status as the great English prose stylist of our time but also to his keen, often prophetic, understanding.

...

Maps can transport us, they are filled with wonder, the possibility of real adventure & travels of the mind. This is an atlas of the journeys that writers make, encompassing not only the maps that actually appear in their books, but also the many maps that have inspired them & the sketches that they use in writing. For some, making a map is absolutely central to the craft of shaping & telling their tale. A writer’s map might mean also the geographies they describe, the worlds inside books that rise from the page, mapped or unmapped, & the realms that authors inhabit as they write. Philip Pullman recounts a map he drew for an early novel; Robert Macfarlane reflects on his cartophilia, set off by Robert Louis Stevenson & his map of Treasure Island; Joanne Harris tells of her fascination with Norse maps of the universe; Reif Larsen writes about our dependence on GPS & the impulse to map our experience; Daniel Reeve describes drawing maps & charts for The Hobbit trilogy of films; Miraphora Mina recalls creating ‘ The Marauder’s Map’ for the Harry Potter films; David Mitchell leads us to the Mappa Mundi by way of Cloud Atlas & his own sketch maps. & there’s much more besides. Amidst a cornucopia of images, there are maps of the world as envisaged in medieval times, as well as maps of adventure, sci-fi & fantasy, maps from nursery stories, literary classics, collectible comics – a vast range of genres. ...

Writtenby well know BBC DJ Mike Read Theauthor is Chairman of the British Plaque Trust, the body set up to revive the Blue Plaque scheme Publishedto coincide with the unveiling of the BBC`s plaque to Buddy Holly Major UK publicity & marketing campaign ...

From clay tablets to the printing press. From the pencil to the internet. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter. This is the true story of literature -- of how great texts & technologies have shaped cultures & civilizations & altered human history. The inventions of paper, the printing press & the world wide web are usually considered the major influences on the way we share stories. Less well known is the influence of Greek generals, Japanese court ladies, Spanish adventurers, Malian singers & American astronauts, & yet all of them played a crucial role in shaping & spreading literature as we know it today. The Written World tells the captivating story of the development of literature, where stories intersect with writing technologies like clay, stone, parchment, paper, printing presses & computers. Central to the development of religions, political movements & even nations, texts spread useful truths & frightening disinformation, & have the power to change lives. Through vivid storytelling & across a huge sweep of time, The Written World offers a new & enticing perspective on human history. ...

“ The Wrong Kind of Snow” is the complete daily companion to how the weather made Britain. It is a fact universally acknowledged that the British are obsessed with the weather. This is not surprising as no country in the world has such unpredictable weather, with such power to rule people`s lives. Rain gave us Inspector Morse & the sliding tackle. Fog gave us the Cat’s Eye, Impressionism & chains on front doors. Wind brought a Protestant monarchy. Hail gave us the Norwich Union insurance company. Storms gave us the pencil, the lifeboat, the Norfolk Broads & the first weather forecast. & cold, grey days? Penicillin. In Britain, what isn’t affected by the weather? Since the first chilly Roman sat on Hadrian’s Wall & pulled his socks on before his sandals (yes, they’re the culprits), British life & British weather have been inseparable.* 31 January: The Big Freeze of 1963 brings the FA Cup competition to a halt: every football pitch in Britain is frozen: the third round takes 66 days to complete: the Pools Panel is formed as a result. * 9 February: British Rail blames the ` Wrong Kind of Snow`. It was a journalist`s phrase, but on this day in 1991 it stuck to the beleagured BR like flesh to ice. * 15 July: The exceptionally hot & steamy summer of 1858 caused the Great Stink of London, resulting in the building of London`s sewage system, still in use today. On the same day in 1930, rainfall in Yorkshire was so heavy that the Whitby lifeboat makes a rescue two miles inl&.* 10 September: A violent storm rather than British sea power defeats the Spanish Armada in 1588. Had the weather held & the fleet reached home, it would have been hailed as a Spanish triumph. Four centuries later, bad light & rain stop play at the Oval. This is the story of a people forever caught out in the rain (or by the wrong kind of snow). But it’s also the story of a country that knows how to appreciate a fine day. It’s about an obsession with fresh air
- & the thousands of ways we’ve devised to make the most of it. Because, beneath our restless skies, there’s something only we know: in Britain there’s no such thing as a dull day. An incredibly addicted book, you’ll find yourself coming back to it time & time again.
...

This classic & touching tale by Edward Ardizzone is brought back into print in 2016. One day, Johnny gets out on the wrong side of the bed. His day starts badly & gets worse from there
- until he finds a sixpence & decides to turn things around. This wordless story, told only by Ardizzone`s trademark cross-hatched illustrations, is a heartwarming story about the very familiar feeling of nothing going your way.
...

The Wrong Way Home is an account of travelling from London to Sydney the hard way. A severe case of hippie envy impelled Peter Moore to travel from London to Sydney without setting foot in an aeroplane. With woefully inadequate funds & little real hope of actually making it through such notorious hot spots of difficulty such as the Balkans, Iran & Afghanistan, Moore spent eight months navigating his way through twenty five countries, experiencing a journey both exasperating & exhilarating. ...