Londoners & visitors alike are fascinated by the life of the capital beneath their feet. Lost Rivers, pipes of many kinds, sewers, crypts & catacombs, tunnels used or abandoned, ring mains, railways, secret bunkers & pneumatic tubes are all there in a sometimes complex arrangement. This book tells the reader what can be found & seen right up to date, including the considerable engineering achievements of the past & present; the Roman amphitheatre under Guildhall; the first tunnel beneath the Thames, the world`s first underground railway, & the first proper sewerage system installed in any city. ...

Peel back the layers under a London street & you`ll discover a haunting, dreamlike world of h&-laid brick sewers, forgotten tube stations, World War II evacuation shelters, secret government bunkers, & tunnel boring machines laying new sewer, communication & transport grids. Bradley L. Garrett has worked with explorers of subterranean London to collect an astonishing array of images documenting forbidden infiltrations into the secret bowels of the city. This book takes readers through progressively deeper levels of London`s historical & contemporary architecture below the streets. Beautifully designed to allow for detailed viewing & featuring bespoke illustrations by artist Stephen Walter, Subterranean London reveals the locations few dare to go, & even fewer succeed in accessing. ...

Under the monumental Rome lies another Rome with its fascinating & unsuspected treasures of art & history. There are nympheums, places of pleasure & physical & spiritual refreshment; columbaria with their astonishing funerary architecture; & hypogeums & underground passages that still preserve precious works of art beneath churches, palaces & even in the basements of unpromising-looking houses. However, subterranean Rome does not consist only of mysterious & sacred places, for we also find urban & secular structures like the quarters of the Seventh Cohort of Guards, or the famous Golden House, the Domus Aurea. This text provides a cross-section that best embodies the variegated panorama of subterranean Rome. ...

Subterraneans is another frenetically typed (in three days) ride into the world of Jack Kerouac, for although classed as fiction The Subterraneans is, like all of his work, closely related to his own life while encapsulating his great vision of America. Leo Percepied, aspiring writer & self-styled free-wheeling bum, gravitates to the subterraneans, impoverished intellectuals who haunt the bars of San Francisco. One of them is Mardou Fox, part Negro, part Cherokee, beautiful & a little crazy, whose dark eyes full of suffering & sweetness find recognition in Leo. But, afraid of his growing involvement, Leo sets out to destroy their love through betrayal & drunkenness. ...

A selection of the finest stories by this female Chekhov Teffi`s genius with the short form made her a literary star in pre-revolutionary Russia, beloved by Tsar Nicholas II & Vladimir Lenin alike. These stories, taken from the whole of her career, show the full range of her gifts. Extremely funny
- a wry, scathing observer of society
- she is also capable, as capable even as Chekhov, of miraculous subtlety & depth of character. There are stories here from her own life (as a child, going to meet Tolstoy to plead for the life of War & Peace`s Prince Bolkonsky, or, much later, her strange, charged meetings with the already-legendary Rasputin). There are stories of emigre society, its members held together by mutual repulsion. There are stories of people misunderstanding each other or misrepresenting themselves. & throughout there is a sly, sardonic wit & a deep, compelling intelligence. Teffi was a phenomenally popular writer in pre-revolutionary Russia
- a favourite of Tsar Nicholas II & Vladimir Lenin alike. She was born in 1872 into a prominent St Petersburg family & emigrated from Bolshevik Russia in 1919. She eventually settled in Paris, where she became an important figure in the emigre literary scene, & where she lived until her death in 1952. A master of the short form, in her lifetime Teffi published countless stories, plays & feuilletons. After her death, she was gradually forgotten, but the collapse of the Soviet Union brought about her rediscovery by Russian readers. Now, nearly a century after her emigration, she once again enjoys critical acclaim & a wide readership in her motherl&. ` Made me fall in love...[ Teffi] can write in more registers than you might think, & is capable of being heartbreaking as well as very funny. I wish she were still alive, & I could have met her. But then I realised she would have seen right through me. I can`t recommend her strongly enough` Nicholas Lezard, Guardian, Book of the Week


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Such a Long Journey is set in Bombay against the backdrop of war in the Indian subcontinent & the birth of Bangladesh, telling the story of the peculiar way in which the conflict impinges on the lives of Gustad Noble, an ordinary man, & his family. Such a Long Journey is a brilliant first novel by one of the most remarkable writers to have emerged from the Indian literary tradition in many years. It was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, & won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers Prize. ...

Her father died instantly, her mother in the hospital. She has learned to say this flatly & without emotion, the way she says her name (Marina), her doll`s name (also Marina) & her age (seven). Her parents were killed in a car crash & now she lives in the orphanage with the other little girls. But Marina is not like the other little girls. In the curious, hyperreal, feverishly serious world of childhood, Marina & the girls play games of desire & warfare. The daily rituals of playtime, lunchtime & bedtime are charged with a horror; horror is licked by the dark flames of love. When Marina introduces the girls to Marina the Doll, she sets in motion a chain of events from which there can be no release. With shades of Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Guillermo Del Toro & Mariana Enriquez, Such Small Hands is a beautifully controlled tour-de-force, a bedtime story to keep readers awake. ...

This insightful collection is the perfect gift for Michael Morpurgo fans who want to understand how writing works & where stories begin. Revealing essays from Michael about more than twenty of his most popular novels are combined with key extracts from his books along with historical context & illuminating background information from Michael`s brother Mark. stunning illustrations from Michael Foreman, photographs & facsimiles complete the immersive experience. ...

Recycling, buying locally-sourced food & vintage clothing, checking air miles & carbon footprints
- our ever-growing obsessions
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Languedoc-Roussillion (not forgetting the Midi-Pyrenees & Aquitaine) are the regions of France most settled by English expatriate colonists. Caroline Conran has spent much time there since the early 1970s & her collection of recipes reflect years of travel, conversation, cooking, eating & drinking. She has shared her knowledge with English readers in a previous book, Under the Sun: Caroline Conran`s French Country Cooking, but here she concentrates upon this single region of Languedoc which curls up from the Spanish border along the Mediterranean coast as far as the Rhone valley. This is not polite France, this is `in your face` France; it`s history buried amidst the Crusades & Cathars, its towns & cities
- Nimes, Toulouse, Carcassonne, Narbonne, Perpignan, Montpellier, Beziers
- making up a fiecely independent region. Its people are passionate about rugby, about hunting & foraging, with a cuisine of their own, more Southern, simpler, more earthy, & less influence by the Michelin style of cooking than the rest of France. There will be information on the particular specialities such as chestnuts, sweet onions, Bouzigues mussels & oysters, salt cod, poufres (baby octopus), charcuterie, salades sauvages (salads of wild plants), the rose-coloured garlic of Lautrec, wild asparagus & local mushrooms. There are descriptions of places where oysters, truffles chestnuts or calcots
- a giant spring onion, eaten roasted on a fire of vine-prunings
- are the obsession of everyone in the community.



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