In his first book since the acclaimed The Running Sky Tim Dee tells the story of four green fields. Four fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, & their natural & human histories. Four real fields
- walkable, mappable, man-made, mowable & knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested & changing. Four fields
- the oldest & simplest & truest measure of what a man needs in life
- looked at, thought about, worked in, lived with, written. Dee`s four fields, which he has known for more than twenty years, are the fen field at the bottom of his Cambridgeshire garden, a field in southern Zambia, a prairie field in Little Bighorn, Montana, USA, & a grass meadow in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Meditating on these four fields, Dee makes us look anew at where we live & how. He argues that we must attend to what we have made from the wild, to look at & think about the way we have messed things up but also to notice how we have kept going alongside nature, to listen to the conversation we have had with grass & fields. Four Fields is a profound, lyrical book by one of Britain`s very best writers about nature. It is shortlisted for the 2014 Ondaatje Prize.


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Clare Leighton was one of the finest engravers of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, when she settled in the countryside with her long-term partner, the political journalist Henry Noel Brailsford, she turned her creativity to the l&. Gardening became her passion. Her obsession. This is the story of the garden she carved from meadowland deep in the Chiltern Hills. ` Phrases & images fill you with delight... This is the most honest writing I`ve ever read `--Carol Klein. ...

FOUR LIONS explores the changing landscape of postwar England through the careers of four iconic England football captains: Billy Wright, Bobby Moore, Gary Lineker & David Beckham. Between Wright, who fought in World War II, & Beckham, whose battles against Germany were played out on the football field, huge shifts in English society were mirrored by seismic changes to the national game as television transformed the way in which it is financed & consumed. In Engl&, more than any other nation, the man with the captain`s armband has symbolic significance: he embodies the nation. & these four lions embody half a century of change: Wright smoked a pipe & had a side parting; Moore, hero of `66, exuded the cool of his era but never found a role beyond football; the savvy, telegenic Lineker hung up his boots to become the face of BBC football; while in the tattooed body of Beckham can be read the impact of commercialisation, corporate sponsorship & the cult of celebrity. ...

Taken from the highly acclaimed Oxford Ibsen, this collection of Ibsen`s plays

Includes:: A Doll`s House,

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The incredible true story of four ordinary working mums from Yorkshire who took on an extraordinary challenge & broke a world record along the way, proving it`s never too late to go on a life-changing adventure, experience the beauty & power of the elements, push the very limits of your abilities & rediscover who you are. Janette, Frances, Helen & Niki, though all from Yorkshire, were four very different women, all juggling full time jobs alongside being mothers to each of their 2 children. They could never be described as athletes, but they were determined to be busy & the local Saturday morning rowing club was the perfect place to go to have a laugh & a gossip, get the blood pumping in the open air, & feel invigorated. Brought together by their love of rowing, they quickly became firm friends, & it wasn`t long before they cooked up a crazy idea over a few glasses of wine: together, they were going to do something that fewer people than had gone into space or climbed Everest had succeeded in doing. They were going to cross 3, 000 miles of treacherous ocean in the toughest row in the world, The Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge. Yes, they had children & husbands that they would be leaving behind for two months, yes they had businesses to run, mortgages to pay, responsibilities. & there was that little thing of them all being in their 40s & 50s. But two years of planning, preparation, fundraising, training & difficult conversations later, & they found themselves standing on the edge of the San Sebastian harbour in the Canary Islands, petrified, exhilarated & ready to head up the race of their lives. This is the story of how four friends together had the audacity to go on a wild, terrifying & beautiful adventure, not to escape life, but for life not to escape them. ...

` Never before had the world seen four such giants co-existing. Sometimes friends, more often enemies, always rivals, these four men together held Europe in the hollow of their hands.` Four great princes
- Henry VIII of Engl&, Francis I of France, Charles V of Spain & Suleiman the Magnificent
- were born within a single decade. Each looms large in his country`s history &, in this book, John Julius Norwich broadens the scope & shows how, against the rich background of the Renaissance & destruction of the Reformation, their wary obsession with one another laid the foundations for modern Europe. Individually, each man could hardly have been more different -- from the scandals of Henry`s six wives to Charles`s monasticism
- but, together, they dominated the world stage. From the Field of the Cloth of Gold, a pageant of jousting, feasting & general carousing so lavish that it nearly bankrupted both France & Engl&, to Suleiman`s celebratory pyramid of 2, 000 human heads (including those of seven Hungarian bishops) after the battle of Mohacs; from Anne Boleyn`s six-fingered hand (a potential sign of witchcraft) that had the pious nervously crossing themselves to the real story of the Maltese falcon, Four Princes is history at its vivid, entertaining best. With a cast list that extends from Leonardo da Vinci to Barbarossa, & from Joanna the Mad to le roi gr&-nez, John Julius Norwich offers the perfect guide to the most colourful century the world has ever known & brings the past to unforgettable life.


...

` Never before had the world seen four such giants co-existing. Sometimes friends, more often enemies, always rivals, these four men together held Europe in the hollow of their hands.` Four great princes
- Henry VIII of Engl&, Francis I of France, Charles V of Spain & Suleiman the Magnificent
- were born within a single decade. Each looms large in his country`s history &, in this book, John Julius Norwich broadens the scope & shows how, against the rich background of the Renaissance & destruction of the Reformation, their wary obsession with one another laid the foundations for modern Europe. Individually, each man could hardly have been more different -- from the scandals of Henry`s six wives to Charles`s monasticism
- but, together, they dominated the world stage. From the Field of the Cloth of Gold, a pageant of jousting, feasting & general carousing so lavish that it nearly bankrupted both France & Engl&, to Suleiman`s celebratory pyramid of 2, 000 human heads (including those of seven Hungarian bishops) after the battle of Mohacs; from Anne Boleyn`s six-fingered hand (a potential sign of witchcraft) that had the pious nervously crossing themselves to the real story of the Maltese falcon, Four Princes is history at its vivid, entertaining best. With a cast list that extends from Leonardo da Vinci to Barbarossa, & from Joanna the Mad to le roi gr&-nez, John Julius Norwich offers the perfect guide to the most colourful century the world has ever known & brings the past to unforgettable life.


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Brian Keenan`s fascination with Alaska began as a small boy, while reading Jack London`s wondrous, ” Call of the Wild”. With a head full of questions about its inspiring landscape & a heart informed by his love of desolate & barren places, Brian Keenan sets out for Alaska to discover its four geographical quarters, from snowmelt in May to snowfall in September, & en route, finds a land as fantastical as a fairytale, but whose vastness has a very peculiar type of allure... From dog-mushing on a frozen lake beneath the whirling colours of the aurora borealis, to camping in a two dollar tent in the tundra of the arctic circle, Brian Keenan seeks out the ultimate wilderness experience & along the way, encounters hard-core survivalists who know what struggle & endurance mean, from their daily battle with nature to exist. He discovers that true wilderness is as much a state of mind, as it is a place. & ultimately to make Alaska home, one must surrender to the l&. ...

Here are poets past & present, from Chaucer, Shakespeare & Wordsworth to Whitman, Dickinson & Thoreau; from Keats, Blake & Hopkins to Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes & Amy Clampitt. Here are poems that speak of the seasons as measures of earthly time or as states of mind or as the physical expressions of the ineffable. From Robert Frost`s tribute to the evanescence of spring in ” Nothing Gold Can Stay” to Langston Hughes` moody ” Summer Night” in Harlem; from the ”stopped woods” in Marie Ponsot`s ” End of October” to the chilling ”mind of winter” in Wallace Stevens` ” The Snow Man”, the poems in this volume engage vividly with the seasons &, through them, with the ways in which we understand & engage with the world outside ourselves. ...

On the same day that his wife gave birth to twins, Anthony Doerr received the Rome Prize, an award that gave him a year-long stipend & studio in Rome! ` Four Seasons in Rome` charts the repercussions of that day, describing Doerr`s varied adventures in one of the most enchanting cities in the world, & the first year of parenthood. He reads Pliny, Dante, & Keats -- the chroniclers of Rome who came before him -- & visits the piazzas, temples, & ancient cisterns they describe. He attends the vigil of a dying Pope John Paul II & takes his twins to the Pantheon in December to wait for snow to fall through the oculus. He & his family are embraced by the butchers, grocers, & bakers of the neighbourhood, whose clamour of stories & idiosyncratic child-rearing advice is as compelling as the city itself. This intimate & revelatory book is a celebration of Rome, a wondrous look at new parenthood & a fascinating account of the alchemy of writers. ...