Jiggy only jumped into the school broom cupboard for two minutes to avoid a teacher. So when he emerges from his hasty hiding spot into a parallel universe hes not impressed! & theres not a lion or a witch in sight... In this new world Jiggy finds he has swapped places with a boy called Juggy who is about to go on a school trip
- a trip to compete in the UK Extreme Ironing Championships...
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This is a story of triumph disaster & eventual survival ' against all odds. Herbert Werner was one of the few U-boat commanders whose skill daring & incredible luck saw him safely through to the end of the war. His is an epic & chilling description of the fearful havoc wrought by one small U-boat on the Atlantic convoys. But easy success ebbed away in the face of ever-improving Allied detection & attack techniques. The hunters became the prey to suffer appalling losses. Of 842 U-boats launched 779 were sunk 'iron-coffins' to 28 000 men. Herbert Werner's graphic account of war waged from beneath the sea of horror & cold cruel death is dedicated to the seamen of all nations who died in the Battle of the Atlantic. ...

It is a time of revolts & revolutions conflict & intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without & within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh & rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming metropolis to the brink. In the midst of this turmoil a mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion while treachery & violence incubate in unexpected places. In desperation a small group of renegades escapes from the city & crosses strange & alien continents in the search for a lost hope an undying legend. In the blood & violence of New Crobuzons most dangerous hour there are whispers. It is the time of the Iron Council. ...

From Anne Applebaum the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag" comes a major new work of historical & moral reckoning: the story of life behind the " Iron Curtain". Once the Nazis were defeated in 1945 the people of Central & Eastern Europe expected to recover the lives they had led before 1939. Instead they found themselves subjected to a tyranny that was in many ways as inhuman as the one which they had just escaped. This book explains how Communism was imposed on these previously free societies in the decade after the end of the Second World War. Applebaum describes in calm but devastating detail how political parties the church the media young peoples organisations
- the institutions of civil society on every level
- were all quickly eviscerated. Ranging widely across new archival material & many sources unknown in English she follows the communists tactics as they bullied threatened & murdered their way to power. She also chronicles individual lives to show the rapid choices people had to make
- to fight to flee or to collaborate. Within a remarkably short period after the end of the war Eastern Europe had been ruthlessly Stalinised. " Iron Curtain" is a brilliant history of a brutal period in European history but also a reminder of how fragile free societies are & how vulnerable they can be to the predations of determined & unscrupulous enemies."


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This is chosen 16 times as a ' Book of the Year'
- the top non-fiction pick of 2012. The best work of modern history I have ever
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Edie said George were going to do this together. Ill be right there with you. Anything anyone trying to get you is going to have to come past me first. But when George makes his promise he is not aware that high on the rooftops an unseen gargoyle is watching them hungrily quivering with anticipation for the moment when it will unfold its stone wings & pounce. The thing on the roof knows that nothing is over; nothing is finished. Ironhand takes us deeper into the layers of un-London the place where the good & the bad statues the spits & the taints walk & war. George & Edie must repay the debt which they owe the Gunner for his sacrifice. They must face unspeakable danger & doubt if they are to save him. This second title in the Stoneheart sequence by Charlie Fletcher will shake you with its imaginative grasp & vision. It is an epic excitement not to be missed.. . ...

AD 71. Germania Libera: dark dripping forests inhabited by bloodthirsty barbarians & legendary wild beasts a furious prophetess who terrorises Rome & the ghostly spirits of slaughtered Roman legionaries. Enter Marcus Didius Falco an Imperial agent on a special mission: to find the absconding commander of a legion whose loyalty is suspect. Easier said than done thinks Marcus as he makes his uneasy way down the Rhenus trying to forget that back in sunny Rome his girlfriend Helena Justina is being hotly pursued by Titus Caesar. His mood is not enhanced when he discovers his only allies are a woefully inadequate bunch of recruits their embittered centurion a rogue dog & its innocent young master; just the right kind of support for an agent unwillingly trying to tame the Celtic hordes. ...

In many ways this book tells a familiar story in British industry: of innovation & enterprise in the early decades.. .of worldwide dominance at a time when Britain was the workshop of the world.. .of wars & economic downturns.. .of foreign competition.. .and of relative & absolute decline on the path of de-industrialisation in the latter part of the twentieth century. For most of this period the farm machine industry grew & matured. It is an inspiring story of technological achievement & of industrial success as farmers & engineers brought iron & steel to fields which had previously been the domain of locally made timber implements & power provided by horses. Agricultural technology moved on inexorably from broad-cast seed & the sound of the threshing flail via the portable steam engine & the threshing machine right through to the modern world of giant tractors
- each with the power of 200 horses
- combine harvesters & impressively efficient farming methods. This book traces the broad sweep of the whole industry over 200 years looking at many individual companies & products to explain how & why the farm machinery industry developed in the way it did. Important individual machines are described & illustrated in detail. The British farm machine industry is unlikely ever again to be large by world standards nor to dominate the world stage as once it did. Yet the author traces a rich vein of innovation enterprise & technological inspiration often taking place within the large number of relatively small-scale craft-based workshops which were so prevalent in the early decades. Rather than mere manufacturing therefore perhaps it is this tradition of technical innovation & invention which marked out the British farm machinery industry for historical greatness & perhaps it is this tradition which will continue to mark it out in the future.

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Derby Day at Epsom Downs. A multitude of people crowd to watch the races: dukes & dustmen bishops & beggars privileged ladies & prostitutes. The gamut of Victorian society & a hotbed for crime & crooks of all kinds. With the nation a-flutter in the run up to this national event a disembodied head is discovered on a passenger train at Crewe; the first in a murky course of events that takes in murder fraud & race-fixing. Detective Inspector Robert Colbeck & his assistant are assigned to the case & are soon snarled up in a web of skulduggery stretching across the country. They are forced to ask themselves just how much is someone prepared to hazard to win? ...

Iron House is the remarkable story of two orphaned brothers separated by violence at a tender age. When a boy is savagely killed in their brutal orphanage one brother runs & takes the blame with him eventually finding his way to New York & into the heart of organized crime. Two decades later
- a seasoned killer
- he returns to North Carolina with a sentence on his head the mob in hot pursuit & his long-lost brother in trouble of a different kind. With vast sums in play political fortunes at risk & bodies piling up the brothers reunite to solve the mystery of their shared past in a tour de force narrative of loss courage & the aftermath of violence. A dark atmospheric thriller with a plot that will keep you guessing until the last moment.

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