An unabashed celebration of the joys of food & cooking, Hot Sun, Cool Shadow follows the story of award-winning food-writer Angela Murrills & the artist Peter Matthews, who travel together to the southerly French region of Languedoc. The Languedoc is famed for its landscape, legendary gastronomical pleasures & rich culture, stretching from the Rhone to the Pyrennees, it is one of Europe`s oldest provinces & one of it`s most fertile regions. Hot Sun, Cool Shadow, is a vivid account of their quest for the finest wines, cuisine & characters. Along the way they discover ancient houses, take in the scenery that inspired great artists like Henry Matisse, retrace the steps of Toulouse-Lautrec, & recreate typical dishes of the region; finally settling themselves in this staunchly independent agricultural region, where life moves at a steady pace under the mellow sun. Hot Sun, Cool Shadow

Includes:: over eighty illustrations by renowned artist Peter Matthews.

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From festive party punches to cosy bedtime treats, here you'll find the perfect winter tipple. What could be more welcome on a cold wintry day than a hot drink with a kick. Whether you prefer a whisky-based toddy, aromatic mulled wine, coffee laced with a little brandy or a spiced tea, you'll find a tempting array of tasty & warming treats for every winter occasion in this collection of delicious recipes. Warming Toddies & Cocktails to try include Hot Tea Toddy; Hot Buttered Rum; & Blue Blazer. Mulls & Punches are perfect when entertaining a crowd
- recipes include Orange Mulled Wine; Swedish Glogg; & Hot Rum & Cider Punch. Nogs & Creamy Drinks make an indulgent treat
- choose from Egg Nog Latte; Honey Rum Baba; & Spiced Rum Chocolate. Tipsy Coffees include the classic Irish Coffee; Mocha Maple Coffee; & Caribbean Cafe. Finally, Non-alcoholic Warmers are perfect for drivers or when just relaxing at home
- try an exotic Saffron Milk; Pumpkin Latte; or Indian Chai Masala.


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The elite hotels of Africa serve as an interface between the tribal, religious, social & cultural aspects of Africa & the global uniformity of international business culture. They are also the places where the unseen resources of many African countries
- oil, diamonds, minerals
- are bartered away behind closed doors. These are environments which have a strangely hybrid quality
- their design, their cuisine, musak & global TV echoing `international` standards. Yet they are ultimately sites of tension, where cultures collide & conflict. At the same time, however, these hotels are viewed by their local communities as symbols of achievement which contradict the more usual representations of Africa. Far from being despised as enclaves of the rich, these hotels have become `objects of desire`, the dream venue for weddings & where to be invited to a business conference is to have reached the pinnacle of success. & for most hotel employees there is the reassurance of wages that are higher than they could earn elsewhere & therefore their duties are carried out with pride & self-assurance.


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Sam is a war photographer famous for her hauntingly beautiful pictures of the dead. After a particularly gruelling assignment, she checks into an expensive hotel. Unfortunately she has chosen the exact moment terrorists attack the hotel. Abhi, the hotel manager, begs her to stay quiet & stay put. Abhi has never wanted to be a hero; a disappointment to his army father & brother. He thought he`d come to a safe haven at the hotel, a place where he could be himself. Now stuck inside the sealed-off manager`s office in the middle of a terrorist attack, he is desperately trying to keep those still alive safe. His lover Dieter is amongst the hostages in the bar & the photographer Sam, refusing to stay in her room, is roaming through the hotel taking pictures, potentially coming face to face with the terrorists at any moment. A small child, Billy, is found alive under the bodies of his dead parents & Abhi has to persuade the non-maternal Sam to bring him back to her room. He`s hurt & Sam has no clue how to look after a child. As the tension mounts & more people are killed, the bond between Sam & Abhi, between Sam & Billy, grows. If any of them get out alive, none of them will ever be the same... ...

` Something strange occurs to guests as soon as they check in. Even if in real life they are perfectly well-mannered, decent people with proper balanced relationships, as soon as they spin through the revolving hotel doors the normal rules of behaviour no longer seem to apply.` All of the following is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. All the anecdotes, the stories, the characters, the situations, the highs, the lows, the scams, the drugs, the misery, the love, the death & the insanity are exactly as was told by Anonymous
- someone who has spent his whole career working in hotels at the heart of London`s luxury hotel industry. However, for legal reasons, the stories now take place in a fictitious hotel known as Hotel Babylon. More than a decade is compressed into a day. Everything else is as it should be. The rich spend money, the hotel makes money & the chambermaids still fight the bellboys over a two-pound coin. It`s just another twenty-four hours in an expensive London hotel.
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Rio de Janeiro. A family hotel whose clients reflect Brazilian society, multi-racial, with starkly contrasting backgrounds, & destitute. Rio is the perfect backdrop with its dictatorships, drug wars, child gangs & violent policing tactics. The first victim is found decapitated in bed, the head lying on the floor of his room. An eerie Mona Lisa smile on the victim`s face & no evidence of a struggle indicate a murderer received as a friend. Other hotel guests are eventually killed, all decapitated. A classical crime novel in one way but really an opportunity for the author to describe Brazilian society, especially those left behind. Fascinating back stories are told such as that of the maid who dreams of making it in television soaps, & the female pimp who has survived incestuous rape, wrapped in a suspenseful intrigue that could have been thought up by Ruth Rendell. ...

The story of a remarkable time & place: Los Angeles from the dawn of the singer-songwriter era in the mid-Sixties to the peak of The Eagles` success in the late Seventies. ` Hotel California` is an epic tale of songs & sunshine, drugs & denim, genius & greed, & is the first in-depth account of the LA Canyons scene between 1967 & 1976. Hoskyn`s history of this vital period in the development of today`s great musical influences spans the rise of Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, The Eagles, James Taylor & Jackson Browne, & focuses on the brilliance & determination of David Geffen, the man who linked them all. Covering genius, drug-crazed disintegration, & the myriad relationships between these artists & the songs that issued from them, & drawing on extensive interviews with countless stars, singers, writers, managers, executives & scenesters, ` Hotel California` is a pop-culture classic. ...

Into the rarefied atmosphere of the Hotel du Lac timidly walks Edith Hope, romantic novelist & holder of modest dreams. Edith has been exiled from home after embarrassing herself & her friends. She has refused to sacrifice her ideals & remains stubbornly single. But among the pampered women & minor nobility Edith finds Mr Neville, & her chance to escape from a life of humiliating spinsterhood is renewed... This book is the winner of the Booker Prize in 1984. ...

Amid the rubble of a city blasted by a civil war that many fear will cross borders & engulf Europe, the Hotel Florida on Madrid's chic Gran Via has become a haven for foreign journalists & writers. It is here that six people meet & find their lives changed forever. Ernest Hemingway, his career stalled, his marriage sour, hopes that this war will give him fresh material & a new romance; Martha Gellhorn, an ambitious young journalist hungry for love & experience, thinks she will find both with Hemingway in Spain. Robert Capa & Gerda Taro, idealistic & ground-breaking young photographers based in Paris, want to capture history in the making & are inventing moder photojournalism in the process. & Arturo Barea, chief of the Republican government's foreign press office, & Ilsa Kulcsar, his Austrian deputy, are struggling to balance truth-telling with their loyalty to their sometimes-compromised cause
- a struggle that places both of their lives at risk. Hotel Florida traces the tangled wartime destinies of these three couples
- & a host of supporting characters from Antoine de Saint-Exupery to John Dos Passos
- living as intensely as they had ever done, against the backdrop of a critical moment in history. Amanda Vaill has mined teh raw material of unpublished letters, diaries, & reels of film
- including Martha Gellhorn's personal papers, which shed new light on her & Hemingway's activities during the war, & Capa & Taro's recently rediscovered ' Mexican Suitcase' negatives, which permit an unprecedented frame-by-frame close-up of their experiences. The result is a narrative of love & reinvention that is, finally, a story about truth, finding it, telling it
- & living it, whatever the cost.




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Amid the rubble of a city blasted by a civil war that many fear will cross borders & engulf Europe, the Hotel Florida on Madrid`s chic Gran Via has become a haven for foreign journalists & writers. It is here that six people meet & find their lives changed forever. Ernest Hemingway, his career stalled, his marriage sour, hopes that this war will give him fresh material & a new romance; Martha Gellhorn, an ambitious young journalist hungry for love & experience, thinks she will find both with Hemingway in Spain. Robert Capa & Gerda Taro, idealistic & ground-breaking young photographers based in Paris, want to capture history in the making & are inventing moder photojournalism in the process. & Arturo Barea, chief of the Republican government`s foreign press office, & Ilsa Kulcsar, his Austrian deputy, are struggling to balance truth-telling with their loyalty to their sometimes-compromised cause
- a struggle that places both of their lives at risk. Hotel Florida traces the tangled wartime destinies of these three couples
- & a host of supporting characters
- living as intensely as they had ever done, against the backdrop of a critical moment in history. It is a narrative of love & reinvention that is, finally, a story about truth, finding it, telling it
- & living it, whatever the cost.



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