In Court brings together stories written over a span of many years. Some stories draw on feelings of exile & homesickness in America, some on friendships with others from South Africa, some on events during visits back. On the surface, some deal only with Americans. All probe dislocation & imposed identity. They reach out to readers who feel out of place or recall being in place somewhere else. ...

In darkness I count my blessings like Manman taught me. One. I am alive. Two. There is no two. Haiti 2010: in the aftermath of the earthquake a boy lies trapped beneath the rubble: terrified, thirsty & alone. Shorty is a child of the slums, a teenager who has seen enough violence to last a lifetime & who has been inexorably drawn into the world of the gangsters who rule his broken city: men who dole out money with one hand & death with the other. But Shorty has a secret: a flame of revenge that burns inside him, fuelling his determination to find his beloved twin sister, stolen from him five years ago. In the darkness the lines between the present & the past begin to blur &, as Shorty fights for life, his struggle becomes part of a two-hundred-year-old story
- a story of courage & betrayal, of freedom & of hope. Shorty may not be quite as alone as he believes...
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What would dogs ask for, if they knew how? In the ” Sunday Times” bestseller ” In Defence of Dogs” John Bradshaw, an anthropologist at Bristol University who has been at the centre of the latest research into what makes dogs tick, gives us the answers. Overturning the most common myths about dogs` emotions & behaviour, this book shows how we should really treat our pets, & stands up for dogdom: not the wolf in canine clothes, not the small furry child, not the trophy-winner, but the real dog, who wants to be part of the family & enjoy life. ...

In this volume, English historian Richard Evans offers a defence of the importance of his craft. At a time of deep scepticism about our ability to learn anything from the past, even to recapture any serious sense of past cultures & ways of life, Evans shows us why history is both possible & necessary. His demolition of the wilder claims of post-modern historians, who deny the possibility of any realistic grasp of history, seeks to be witty & well-balanced. He takes us into the historians` workshop to show us just how good history gets written, & explains the deadly political dangers of losing a historical perspective on the way we live our lives. This new edition contains an extensive afterword by the author. ...

Barcelona, early 1930s: Natalia, a pretty shop-girl from the working-class quarter of Gracia, is hesitant when a stranger asks her to dance at the fiesta in Diamond Square. But Joe is charming & forceful, & she takes his h&. They marry & soon have two children; for Natalia it is an awakening, both good & bad. When Joe decides to breed pigeons, the birds delight his son & daughter
- & infuriate his wife. Then the Spanish Civil War erupts, & lays waste to the city & to their simple existence. Natalia remains in Barcelona, struggling to feed her family, while Joe goes to fight the fascists, & one by one his beloved birds fly away. A highly acclaimed classic that has been translated into more than twenty languages, In Diamond Square is the moving, vivid & powerful story of a woman caught up in a convulsive period of history.
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Don Mc Cullin`s view of England is rooted in his wartime childhood & growing up around Finsbury Park in the fifties. His first published photograph was a picture of a gang from his neighbourhood, which appeared in a newspaper after a local murder; Mc Cullin always balanced his anger at the unacceptable face of the nation with tenderness or compassion.” In England” combines some of his greatest work with an entirely new body of photographs. Mc Cullin sees his home country with its perpetual social gulf between the affluent & the desperate in mind. He continues in the same black & white tradition as he did between foreign assignments for the ” Sunday Times” in the sixties & seventies, when his view of a deprived Britain seemed as dark as the conflict zones from which he`d just escaped. This book marks his return to the cities & landscape he knew as a young photographer. At a time when we might believe the world has changed beyond our imagination, Mc Cullin shows us a view of England where the line between the wealthy & the deprived is as defined as ever. This time he adds wry humour to his lyricism, as if the nation is as absurd as it is tragic. ...

In 1966 Dervla Murphy travelled the length & breadth of Ethopia, first on a mule, Jock, whom she named after her publisher, & later on a recalcitrant donkey. The remarkable achievement was not surviving three armed robberies or the thous&-mile trail, but the gradual growth of affection for & understanding of another race. ...

Geert Mak spent the year 1999 in Europe criss-crossing the continent, tracing its history from Verdun to Berlin, St Petersburg to Auschwitz, Kiev to Srebrenica. He set off in search of evidence & witnesses, looking to define the condition of Europe at the verge of a new millennium. The result is mesmerising: Mak`s rare double talent as a sharp-eyed journalist & a hugely imaginative historian makes ” In Europe” a dazzling account of that journey, full of diaries, newspaper reports & memoirs, & the voices of prominent figures & unknown players; from the grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II to Adriana Warno in Pol&, with her holiday job at the gates of the camp at Birkenau. But Mak is above all an observer. He describes what he sees at places that have become Europe`s well-springs of memory, where history is written into the landscape. At Ypres he hears the blast of munitions from the Great War that are still detonated twice a day. In Warsaw he finds the point where the tram rails that led to the Jewish ghetto come to a dead end in a city park. And in an abandoned creche near Chernobyl, where tiny pairs of shoes still stand in neat rows, he is transported back to the moment time stood still in the dying days of the Soviet Union. Mak combines the larger story of twentieth-century Europe with details that suddenly give it a face, a taste & a smell. His unique approach makes the reader an eyewitness to his own half-forgotten past, full of unknown peculiarities, sudden insights & touching encounters. ” In Europe” is a masterpiece; it reads like the epic novel of the continent`s most extraordinary century. ...

' Cesar Montero was dreaming about elephants. He'd seen them at the movies on Sunday...' Only moments later, Cesar is led away by police as they clear the crowds away from the man he has just killed. But Cesar is not the only man to be riled by the rumours being spread in his Colombian hometown
- under the cover of darkness, someone creeps through the streets sticking malicious posters to walls & doors. Each night the respectable townsfolk retire to their beds fearful that they will be the subject of the following morning's lampoons. As paranoia seeps through the town & the delicate veil of tranquility begins to slip, can the perpetrator be uncovered before accusation & violence leave the inhabitants' sanity in tatters?
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