Hurt people hurt people. Say there was a novel in which Holden Caulfield was an alcoholic & Lolita was a photographer`s assistant &, somehow, they met in Bright Lights, Big City. He`s blinded by love. She by ambition. Diary of an Oxygen Thief is an honest, hilarious, & heartrending novel, but above all, a very realistic account of what we do to each other & what we allow to have done to us. ...

Originally produced in 1933 by the Kynoch Press, this perpetual week-to-view diary features beautiful wood block engravings by Eric Ravilious on each spread. Delightful illustrations represent the changing seasons, from roaring fires & snowy vignettes for the winter months to strawberries in the summer, bringing to life the simplicity of English rural countryside. Beautifully designed, this is the perfect gift for gardeners & nature lovers as well as fans of Ravilious` work. ...

Dibra Prefecture at 1:100, 000 in a series of handy size, waterproof & tear-resistant, contoured & GPS compatible road maps from the Tirana-based publishers Vektor. Landscape is presented by altitude colouring & contours lines at 100m intervals, with spot heights & a few more names of topographic features than found on Vektor’s 200K road maps of the country. National parks & nature reserves are prominently highlighted. The prefecture maps appear to show the same small local dirt roads as in the 200K series, but given the increase in scale do so with greater clarity & also provide more detailed GPS coordinates (latitude & longitude lines are drawn at 5’ intervals), useful when travelling across the more remote parts of the country. Railway lines are included & local airports are marked. Symbols highlight campsites, beaches, archaeological & historical sites, caves, etc. The maps also show subdivisions of prefectures & names of the communes, & indicate administrative status of towns. Map legend

Includes:: English. Please note: border crossings are prominently marked but beyond topographic colouring no road or other information is provided outside the country’s borders.

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Change behavior by rolling these dice featuring beautiful pictograms & choose a good deed for the day. For a more enjoyable (and less time-consuming) path to enlightenment--think of it as behavior modification therapy without the pricey shrinks & the Deepak Chopra. ...

A fascinating portrait of the river at the height of its Victorian prosperity. On the upper Thames it was the carefree era of regattas & riverside picnics, while London's tideway & great docks were busy with the comings & goings of barges, steamers & sailing ships servicing the world's largest port & the Empire on which the sun never set. This treasure trove of a book has descriptions of the villages & towns along the river from its source near Cricklade to the Nore Lightship. It is packed with practical advice, maps of popular destinations, locations of angling & bathing spots. Riverside inns to accommodate oarsmen are listed with details of how to return boats by train at a time when an annual season ticket between Windsor & Paddington cost as little as GBP18. ...

Five story books, each a classic Dickens novel retold for younger readers, presented in a beautifully designed gift box. The stories are: Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities & Great Expectations. All titles are taken from the Usborne Reading Programme. ...

” Charles Dickens, Francais naturalise, et Citoyen de Paris.” This is how Dickens signed a letter from France to his friend John Forster in 1847. Behind the joke lay a fascination for French life & culture & a sense of affinity with the country that would take him back often & that would find expression in some of his finest work. ” Dickens on France” brings together short stories, extracts from novels & travel writing. Among its journalistic highlights, are accounts of a train journey from London to Paris, a rough Channel crossing, the pleasures of Boulogne, & Parisian life in the 1850s & 1860s. Extracts from the travelogue Pictures from Italy, take us by coach from Paris to Marseille. The selected short stories include ” His Boots”, a section of ” Mrs Lirriper`s Legacy” & ” The Boy at Mugby”, & there are extracts from ”A Tale of Two Cities”, ” Little Dorrit”, ” Dombey & Son”, ” Nicholas Nickleby”, & ” Our Mutual Friend”. Dickens was interested primarily in the character of places he visited, the behaviour of people he observed in them, & in the sensation & psychology of travelling. These preoccupations keep the writing fresh & accessible. It requires no leap through time to appreciate his musings on his fellow passengers, his reflections on sitting in a Paris cafe, his random exploration of city streets or small country towns, or his opposition to cultural bigotry. Infused with energy, perception & open-mindedness, this collection vividly evokes life in France & Britain in the nineteenth century & reminds us, however much progress we make, how little we change. ” Dickens on France” is extensively annotated to provide historical & autobiographical contexts, & to highlight literary & other allusions. Brief chapter introductions & a general introduction to the volume, highlight key aspects of the selections & discuss the nature of Dickens`s enduring relationship with France. ...

The sense of place was of the utmost importance for Dickens, & nowhere is more synonymous with his name than London. The most splendid of all his characters, the city was the subject of scrupulous research: Dickens spent several hours a day exploring its streets & inhabitants. The pieces collected here reveal London to be the primary inspiration for one of the geniuses of English literature. ...

Few novelists have written so intimately about a city as Charles Dickens wrote about London. A near-photographic memory made his contact with the city indelible from a very young age & it remained his constant focus. In the first half of this book Peter Clark illuminates the settings of Dickens`s London scenes as they feature in his writing. Outside London, Kent meant more to Dickens than any other part of Britain. He had an idyllic childhood in Chatham & Kent features in his first works of fiction
- Sketches by Boz & The Pickwick Papers & in his favourite novel, David Copperfield. In his last ten years he wrote two novels with strong Kentish themes
- Great Expectations & The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He had his honeymoon outside Gravesend, & often spent the summer months in Broadstairs. Returning from one of his regular visits to Europe, he was in a railway accident at Staplehurst; an event that left a psychological mark on him for the rest of his life. In 1856 he bought Gad`s Hill Place, near Rochester, & eventually died there. The second half of this book takes the reader to the places Dickens knew & imaginatively wove into the tapestry of his stories: Chatham & Rochester, Canterbury & Dover.

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Few novelists have written so intimately about a city in the way that Charles Dickens wrote about London. A near photographic memory made his contact with the city indelible from a very young age & it remained his constant focus. Virginia Woolf maintained that, `we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens`, as he produces `characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks`. But the `character` he was drawn back to throughout his novels was London itself, all aspects of the capital from the coaching inns of his early years to the taverns & watermen of the Thames; these were the constant cityscapes of his life & work. Based on five walks through central London, Peter Clark illuminates the settings of Dickens` greatest works, his life, his journalism & his fiction. He also explores ` The First Suburbs` (Camden Town, Chelsea, Greenwich, Hampstead, Highgate & Limehouse) as they feature in Dickens` writing. ...