For nearly three hundred years, from the end of the eighth century AD until Approx. 1100, the Vikings set out from Scandinavia across the northern world a dramatic time that would change Europe forever. This book explores the Viking conquest & settlement across Britain & Irel&, covering the core period of Viking activity from the first Viking raids to the raids of Magnus Barelegs, king of Norway. This lively history looks at the impact of the Viking forces, the development of societies within their settlements, their trades & beliefs, language & their interactions with native peoples. Drawing on the superb collection of the British Museum, together with other finds, sites & monuments, The Vikings in Britain & Ireland is a richly-illustrated introduction to the culture, daily life & times of the Vikings & their legacy which is still visible today. ...

Above Florence & the valley of the Arno stood the Villa Diana, in one of the oldest inhabited parts of Italy, at the end of an old Etruscan road that wound among olive groves & lines of cypresses. The home of Poliziano in the fifteenth century, it had been occupied by the troops of seven different armies during World War Two but otherwise escaped damage, if one overlooked the looting of the grand piano. It was here that Alan Moorehead, known as one of the greatest correspondents of that war, moved in 1948 to travel through Italy & write this celebrated book. His experiences illustrate the issues of the day, yet surrounded as always by extreme physical beauty & governed by the rhythms of the seasons. He describes with wit such diverse matters as the daily drama of life among the servants, the reviving fortunes of Portofino, the 500-year-old horse race around the main square of Siena, the gondoliers` union in Venice, & a traffic clash between a family of pigs & a cart full of crucifixes. ...

Florence, 1943. Two sisters, Isabella & Caterina Cammaccio, find themselves surrounded by terror & death; & with Italy trapped under the heel of a brutal Nazi occupation, bands of Partisans rise up. Soon Isabella & Caterina will test their wits & deepest beliefs as never before. As the winter grinds on, they will be forced to make the most important decisions of their lives. Their choices will reverberate for decades. In the present day, Alessandro Pallioti, a senior policeman agrees to oversee a murder investigation, after it emerges the victim was once a Partisan hero. When the case begins to unravel, Pallioti finds himself working to uncover a crime lost in the twilight of war, the consequences of which are as deadly today as they were over sixty years ago. ` Grindle vividly evokes Florence as few tourists see it.. . Here is the perfect summer holiday read` Literary Review ` Grindle saves her best story-weaving to the thrilling denouement that creates a surprise as unexpected & delicious as the finest Florentine cuisine` Daily Express ...

The Village by Nikita Lalwani, the prize-winning author of Gifted, is a disturbing & utterly gripping modern morality tale set in contemporary India which will appeal to readers of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss & Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. Ray, a young British-Asian woman arrives in the afternoon heat of a small village in India. She has come to live there for several months to make a documentary about the place. For this is no ordinary Indian village
- the women collecting water at the well, the men chopping wood in the early morning light have all been found guilty of murder. The village is an open prison. Ray is accompanied by two British colleagues &, as the days pass, they begin to get closer to the lives of the inhabitants of the village. & then it feels too close. As the British visitors become desperate for a story, the distinction between innocence & guilt, between good intentions & horrifying results becomes horribly blurred. Set in a village modelled on a real-life open prison in India, The Village is a gripping story about manipulation & personal morality, about how truly frail our moral judgement can be. Nikita Lalwani has written a dazzling, heartfelt & disturbing novel which delivers on all the promise of her first. Nikita Lalwani was born in Rajasthan & raised in Cardiff. Her first novel Gifted was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize & shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award & won the Desmond Elliott Prize. She lives in London.
...

” The Village” by Nikita Lalwani, the prize-winning author of ” Gifted”, is a disturbing & utterly gripping modern morality tale set in contemporary India which will appeal to readers of Kiran Desai`s ” The Inheritance of Loss” & Jhumpa Lahiri`s ” The Namesake”. Ray, a young British-Asian woman arrives in the afternoon heat of a small village in India. She has come to live there for several months to make a documentary about the place. For this is no ordinary Indian village
- the women collecting water at the well, the men chopping wood in the early morning light have all been found guilty of murder. The village is an open prison. Ray is accompanied by two British colleagues &, as the days pass, they begin to get closer to the lives of the inhabitants of the village. & then it feels too close. As the British visitors become desperate for a story, the distinction between innocence & guilt, between good intentions & horrifying results becomes horribly blurred. Set in a village modelled on a real-life open prison in India, ” The Village” is a gripping story about manipulation & personal morality, about how truly frail our moral judgement can be. Nikita Lalwani has written a dazzling, heartfelt & disturbing novel which delivers on all the promise of her first. Nikita Lalwani was born in Rajasthan & raised in Cardiff. Her first novel ” Gifted” was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize & shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award & won the Desmond Elliott Prize. She lives in London.
...

We have lived in villages a long time. The village was the first model for communal living. Towns came much later, then cities. Later still came suburbs, neighbourhoods, townships, communes, kibbutzes. But the village has endured. Across Engl&, modernity creeps up to the boundaries of many, breaking the connection the village has with the l&. With others, they can be as quiet as the graveyard as their housing is bought up by city `weekenders`, or commuters. The ideal chocolate box image many holidaying to our Sceptred Isle have in their minds eye may be true in some cases, but across the country the heartbeat of the real English village is still beating strongly
- if you can find it. To this mission our intrepid historian & travel writer Tom Fort willingly gets on his trusty bicycle & covers the length & breadth of England to discover the essence of village life. His journeys will travel over six thousand years of communal existence for the peoples that eventually became the English. Littered between the historical analysis, will be personal memories from Tom of the village life he remembers & enjoys today in rural Oxfordshire.
...

Cultural commentator John Strausbaugh`s The Village is the first complete history of Greenwich Village, the prodigiously influential & infamous New York City neighborhood. From the Dutch settlers & Washington Square patricians, to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire & Prohibition-era speakeasies; from Abstract Expressionism & beatniks, to Stonewall & AIDS, the connecting narratives of The Village tell the story of America itself. Illustrated with historic black-&-white photographs, The Village features lively, well-researched profiles of many of the people who made Greenwich Village famous, including Thomas Paine, Walt Whitman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Twain, Margaret Sanger, Eugene O` Neill, Marcel Duchamp, Upton Sinclair, Willa Cather, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Jackson Pollock, Anais Nin, Edward Albee, Charlie Parker, W. H. Auden, Woody Guthrie, James Baldwin, Maurice Sendak, E. E. Cummings, & Bob Dylan. ...

Don Whillans has an iconic significance for generations of climbers. His epoch-making first ascent of Annapurna`s South Face, achieved with Dougal Haston in 1970, remains one of the most impressive climbs ever made
- but behind this & all his other formidable achievements lies a tough, recalcitrant reality: the character of the man himself. Whillans carried within himself a sense of personal invincibility, forceful, direct & uncompromising. It gave him sporting superstar status
- the flawed heroism of a Best, a Mc Enroe, an Ali. In his own circle, his image was the working-class hero on the rock-face, laconic & bellicose, ready to go to war with the elements or with any human who crossed his path on a bad day.

...

What happens when you relocate to the perfect house, in the perfect village in Provence, & nearly ten years later the shine has gone? Garden designer Alex Dingwall-Main is facing lavender fatigue, strife at home, neighbourly warfare & non-paying business clients. He is on the verge of packing his bags & starting all over again, back in Engl&. Until one Spring day he is offered an opportunity by a wealthy & very grateful client; a treasure hunt for 12 bottles of exquisite French wine. It would be a journey through the country`s finest vineyards, chateaux & villages. With a hangover & an uncertain heart, Alex decides to give it one more try & sets off in search of the France he fell in love with so many years ago. The people, the gardens & the wine that he encounters make for an adventurous & beautiful summer, & life-changing decisions are reached... ...

For generations, Argentine wine was famously bad
- oxidised, unpalatable & often mixed with a low-class French grape called Malbec.
...