It has been said that a shed is to a man what a handbag is to a woman
- both contain all the essentials for surviving in the modern
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Adrian Bell`s travels through East Anglia & lowland Britain capture the character of the countryside before modern agriculture altered the landscape & changed forever the way we eat & live. This new edition restores the original color lithographs & black & white line drawings by John Nash that appeared in the first edition. First published in 1939 by B.T. Batsford. ...

Rebecca Solnit`s essay ` Men Explain Things to Me` has become a touchstone of the feminist movement, inspired the term `mansplaining`, & established Solnit as one of the leading feminist thinkers of our time
- one who has inspired everyone from radical activists to Beyonce Knowles. Collected here in print for the first time is the essay itself, along with the best of Solnit`s feminist writings. From rape culture to mansplaining, from French sex scandals to marriage & the nuclear family, from Virginia Woolf to colonialism, these essays are a fierce & incisive exploration of the issues that a patriarchal culture will not necessarily acknowledge as `issues` at all. With grace & energy, & in the most exquisite & inviting of prose, Rebecca Solnit proves herself a vital leading figure of the feminist movement & a radical, humane thinker.
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Between 1900 & 1950 the British state amassed a huge collection of over 800 historic buildings, monuments & historic sites & opened them to the public. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. Of course, collections of paintings, sculptures, & books had been made by governments, but the British created an outdoor museum of national history. This book explains why the extraordinary collecting frenzy took place. It locates it in the fragile & nostalgic atmosphere of the interwar years, dominated by neo-romanticism & cultural protectionism. It dissects a government programme that established a modern state on deep historical & rural roots; in the words of the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, heritage was the rock out of which the nation`s children would be hewn. The government`s activities were mirrored by the establishment of dozens of voluntary bodies, including the Council for the Protection of Rural Engl&, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, & the National Trust. It was during the Second World War when the government realized that its collecting activities could not be sustained but that the National Trust could provide a vehicle for the continued collection of the nation`s heritage. It was the war too that extended for the first time protection to buildings that were occupied & not just ruins. The book sets all this activity, for the first time, in its political, economic & cultural contexts, painting a picture of a country traumatized by war, fearful of losing what was left of its history, & a government that actively set out to protect them. In the last chapter it brings the story up to date. ...

From five distinct cities around the world
- Sydney, Tokyo, Milan, London & New York
- photographer, art director & blogger

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When the First World War broke out, the Post Office was the biggest employer in the world, with its own company of volunteer part-time soldiers, The Post Office Rifles. Suddenly catapulted into conflict, ordinary postmen & messenger boys found themselves in the trenches of the Western Front, hoping that their own letters would reach home
- & relying on the letters & parcels they received for comfort & much-needed boosts to morale. By the war`s end, 1, 500 of them had been killed. Using the personal stories, letters & diary entries of the men who joined the Post Office Riffles, this is a moving account of how the war touched the lives of ordinary people
- how it changed communities, how women took up men`s work, &, of course, the vital role the mail played in winning the war.

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Men Without Women was a milestone in Hemingway`s career. Fiesta had already established him as a novelist of exceptional power, but with these short stories, his second collection, he showed that it is possible, within the space of a few pages, to recreate a scene with absolute truth, bringing to life details observed only by the eye of a uniquely gifted artist. Hemingway`s men are bullfighters & boxers, hired hands & hard drinkers, gangsters & gunmen. Each of their stories deals with masculine toughness unsoftened by woman`s h&. Incisive, hard-edged, pared down to the bare minimum, they are classic Hemingway territory
- they helped establish him as one of the great literary authors of the twentieth century, & one of the best American authors of all time.
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Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats & smoky bars, lonely hearts & mysterious women, baseball & the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all. Marked by the same wry humor that has defined his entire body of work, in this collection Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic ...

”I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.” Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats & smoky bars, lonely hearts & mysterious women, baseball & the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all. Marked by the same wry humor that has defined his entire body of work, in this collection Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic. ...

Menagerie Manor is the hugely entertaining account of how the well known & much-loved conservationist & author, Gerald Durrell, fulfilled a lifelong ambition by founding his very own private zoo in Jersey. With the help of an enduring wife, a selfless staff & a reluctant bank manager, the zoo grows. The reader is introduced to the village idiocy of Trumpy, the grey-winged trumpeter, who wakes the zoo every morning; the riotous antics of Claudius the tapir; the moving romance of N ...