' Last night my son wanted to appease me because of some annoyance he had caused. Show me your desert things, he said, show me your crystals & stones. However tired & grumpy I might be, he knew how to revive me. I unwrapped everything from its newspaper roll. The chipped flint knives, the silica glass arrowheads, ancient porous pottery shards I'd found in the Gilf, fossils, the jawbone of a gazelle, palm nuts so desiccated they were like stone.. .' Robert Twigger's latest journey is in search of paradise: a desert adventure in the footsteps of seasoned explorers such as Theodore Almasy (the Inspiration for THE ENGLISH PATIENT) who tried to locate the lost oasis of Zezura, reportedly home to hoards of treasure, flocks of birds & a lush, verdant valley. The Egyptian Sahara is one of the most arid & hostile environments on earth. But it is also a wonder of desolate beauty, where in the ultra-clear light of the desert you can see for miles. Armed with plenty of water & a homemade wooden trolley (his Lada being too heavy for the sand), Twigger embarks on a desert trip ilke no other.. . ...

Featuring beautiful selections from Johanna Basford`s Lost Ocean, this set of 50 loose postcards in a premium gift box with a ribbon invites you to colour in shoals of exotic fish, curious octopuses, delicately penned seahorses & more
- all while exploring the magical depths of the sea. Perfect to colour, keep & share.
...

This is a beautiful new colouring book that takes you on a magical journey beneath the waves, from the creator of the worldwide bestsellers, Secret Garden & Enchanted Forest. With Lost Ocean, Johanna Basford invites colour-inners of all ages to discover an enchanting underwater world hidden within the depths of the sea. With intricate pen & ink illustrations to complete, colour & embellish, readers will meet shoals of exotic fish, curious octopuses & delicately penned seahorses, visit coral reefs & barnacle-studded shipwrecks, & discover intricate shells & pirate treasure. Secret Garden & Enchanted Forest fans & newcomers alike will delight in this creative journey into an inky new world. It also features a large double-sided pull-out poster to colour & keep. ...

Alma & Almut share a fascination for Australia & its ancient peoples; their ceremonies, sand drawings & body paintings. After Alma suffers a traumatic attack, they board a cheap flight from Sao Paulo to Sydney, & together begin their journey across their secret continent. Alma slowly recovers through a brief love affair with an Aboriginal artist, & both women become involved with the Angel Project in Perth, where actors dressed as angels are concealed around the city for the public to discover. In a seemingly unconnected story, a man staying at a remote Alpine spa unexpectedly meets a woman he encountered years before & with whom he shared a single night. It was in a faraway city & she was dressed as an angel. ...

From the great cathedral-like railways stations of the steam age to obscure lines built through spectacular landscapes to open up countries before the advent of motorised road transport, this book is a celebration of our lost railway heritage & the lines that can no longer be travelled. Through stunning images, Lost Railway Journeysfrom Around the World evokes the romance & drama of these journeys, taking the reader as close as they can possibly get to this lost world of dining cars, sleeping cars, station porters & international rail travel. Organised by continent, all of these routes have stories to tell & the lost journeys are captured in the old postcards & posters that accompany photographs drawn from collections & archives across the world. ...

Collins Arabic Big Cat is a guided reading series for ages 3 to 11. The series is structured with reference to the learning progression of Arabic at nursery & primary schools researched especially for Collins. This carefully graded approach allows children to build up their reading knowledge of Arabic step by step. Level 11 books provide more literary language, more complex sentence structures & less support from illustrations. Characters are more varied, with action sustained over several pages. Non-fiction titles include glossaries where necessary. Sentences are still short for better understanding. However, grammatical vowel endings are more evident to encourage fluent reading & to provide familiarity with some higher-level features of written Arabic. What happens when a happy pair of socks goes missing? Where do all the lost socks go? Discover the mystical world of sock land for yourself. ...

The Lost Tombs of Thebes
- Life in Paradise is a lavish, photographic collection celebrating the hundreds of unique & wonderfully
...

In an age when building developments seem to be advancing on every small plot of unspoilt countryside, it seems hard to imagine times when well-established settlements were declining & dying. Such times certainly did exist, & thousands of villages have perished. In fact, deserted settlement sites are all around us, & most British people will live within very few miles of an example. Empty houses only stand at the relatively recent settlements, like failed quarry villages. Elsewhere, hollows in the pasture marking former lanes & level platforms where dwellings once stood are more normal. In several of the more evocative cases, a ruined church presides over the site. Villages are not symbols of timeless stability as we are led to believe, & exist only for so long as they have a role to play. All the evidence suggests that villages can be lost & that a period of widespread abandonment might well return. This accessible, illustrated history & guide from Britain`s leading popular author on landscape history explores the contributing factors behind the desertion of our villages, & offers the reader practical advice for investigating lost villages in their locality. ...

Starting from its original conception & design by the owners & naval architects at the White Star Line through construction at Harland & Wolff`s shipyards in Belfast, Nick Barratt explores the pre-history of the Titanic. He examines the aspirations of the owners, the realities of construction & the anticipation of the first sea-tests, revealing that the seeds of disaster were sown by the failure to implement sealed bulkheads
- for which the original plans are now available. Barratt then looks at what it was like to embark on the Titanic`s maiden voyage in April 1912. The lives of various passengers are examined in more detail, from the first class aristocrats enjoying all the trappings of privilege, to the families in third-class & steerage who simply sought to leave Britain for a better life in America. Similarly, the stories of representatives from the White Star Line who were present, as well as members of the crew, are told in their own words to give a very different perspective of the voyage. Finally, the book examines the disaster itself, when Titanic struck the iceberg on 14 April & sunk hours later. Survivors from passengers & crew explain what happened, taking you back in time to the full horror of that freezing Atlantic night when up to 1, 520 people perished. The tragedy is also examined from the official boards of enquiry, & its aftermath placed in a historic context
- the damage to British prestige & pride, & the changes to maritime law to ensure such an event never took place again. The book concludes by looking at the impact on those who escaped, & what became of them in the ensuing years; &

Includes:: the words of the last living survivor, Millvina Dean.



...

Over three hundred years ago the first European colonialists set foot in Africa, Asia & the Caribbean to found permanent outposts of the great empires. This epic migration continued until after World War II when these tropical outposts became independent black nations, & the white colonials were forced, or chose, to return home. Some of these colonial descendants, however, had become outcasts in the poorest stratas of the society of which they were now a part. Ignored by both the former slaves & the modern privileged white immigrants, & unable to afford the long journey home, they still hold out today, hiding in remote valleys & hills, `lost white tribes` living in poverty with the proud myth of their colonial ancestors. Forced to marry within the tribe to retain their fair-skinned `purity` they are torn between the memory of past privileges & the present need to integrate into the surrounding society. The tribes investigated in this book share much besides the colour of their skin: all are decreasing in number, many are on the verge of extinction, fighting to survive in countries that alienate them because of the colour of their skin. Riccardo Orizio investigates: the Blancs Matignon of Guadeloupe; the Burghers of Sri Lanka; the Poles of Haiti; the Basters of Namibia; the Germans of Seaford Town, Jamaica; &, the Confederados of Brazil. ...