In one moment every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop. Gentle art teacher Walter Hartright has fallen in love with his student Laura. But she is marrying the wicked Sir Percival who wants to destroy her reputation & steal her fortune. In the face of his powerful friends only Lauras resourceful sister Marian & faithful Walter can save her from his wicked machinations & the terrors of the insane asylum. But who is the mysterious woman in white who haunts the moonlit roads & hidden graveyards? & will her secret save Laura
- or destroy them all?
...

Wilkie Collins is a master of mystery & The Woman in White is his first excursion into the genre. When the hero Walter Hartright on a moonlit night in north London encounters a solitary terrified & beautiful woman dressed in white he feels impelled to solve the mystery of her distress. The intricate plot is peopled with a finely characterised cast from the peevish invalid Mr Fairlie to the corpulent villain Count Fosco & the enigmatic woman herself ...

Contrary opinionated & headstrong Becky Collins
- daughter of Charlotte Lucas & Mr. Collins
- has always defied her staid upbringing

...

Oscar Wildes audacious drama of social scandal centres around the revelation of Mrs Arbuthnots long-concealed secret. A house party is in full swing at Lady Hunstantons country home when it is announced that Gerald Arbuthnot has been appointed secretary to the sophisticated witty Lord Illingworth. Geralds mother stands in the way of his appointment but fears to tell him why for who will believe Lord Illingworth to be a man of no importance. ...

Staged in 1893 when Wilde had already achieved fame wealth & notoriety A Woman of No Importance was another attempt to fuse comedy of manners with high melodrama. Gerald Arbuthnot is a young man on the make with an American heiress & the post of secretary to the brilliant but dissolute Lord Illingworth within his reach. When he asks his mother to celebrate with them it turns out that Illingworth is Gerald's father who seduced & abandoned his mother twenty years earlier. Loyalty weighs heavier than ambition & Gerald declines the association with Illingworth. This edition which also analyses Wilde's various drafts & revisions of the play argues that the playwright here continued to explore the rivalry between an older man & woman for the affection of a beautiful young man. ...

The unputdownable multi-million copy bestseller charting the rags to riches story of Emma Harte. In 1905 a young kitchen maid leaves Fairley Hall. Emma Harte is sixteen single & pregnant. By 1968 she is one of the richest women in the world ruler of a business empire stretching from Yorkshire to the glittering cities of America & the rugged vastness of Australia. But what is the price she has paid? A Woman of Substance is as impossible to put down as it is to forget. This multi-million copy bestseller is truly a novel of our times. ...

For the first time ever a fascinating look at the remarkable life of Barbara Taylor Bradford. From the cobbled streets of Yorkshire to the sweeping avenues of Manhattan Barbara's own story is as dramatic a tale as any one of her bestsellers. Barbara Taylor Bradford's rise to fame & fortune was a difficult one. But from an early age her mother marked her out for glory
- at any cost. The drive & ambition instilled in Barbara were to reap huge rewards. From humble beginnings in Yorkshire she took London's Fleet Street by storm. & then with the creation of Emma Harte the unforgettable heroine of her first novel A Woman of Substance she inspired women the world over
- & became one of the world's bestselling authors. This is the first time that Barbara Taylor Bradford has been involved in a memoir of any kind & this unique collaboration has produced an extraordinary story. For Emma Harte's rise from Edwardian kitchen maid single & pregnant to one of the richest women in the world uncannily mirrors Barbara's own family history
- something which was as much of a shock to Barbara as it will be to her millions of fans... An incredible story of suffering loss & triumph over adversity not to be missed.


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His first book The Great Immigration Scandal" (2004) blew the whistle on abuses within the Home Office & led to the resignation of the immigration minister Beverley Hughes. Although attacked at the time by the government & the liberal media for alarmism Moxons analysis has now been adopted by most of the major political parties. Indeed his views on the dangers of multiculturalism were even echoed by the Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality leading the Evening Standard to claim Moxon appears not so much a racist as a visionary. But immigration was never his primary interest in fact he joined the Home Office in order to study its HR policy as part of a decade-long investigation of men-women. This book is the result. Notwithstanding its provocative title " The Woman Racket" is a serious scientific investigation into one of the key myths of our age
- that women are oppressed by the patriarchal traditions of Western societies. Drawing on the latest developments in evolutionary psychology Moxon finds that the opposite is true
- men or at least the majority of low-status males
- have always been the victims of deep-rooted prejudice. As the prejudice is biologically derived it is unconscious & can only be uncovered with the tools of scientific psychology. The book reveals this prejudice in fields as diverse as healthcare employment family policy & politics: compared to the long & bloody struggle for universal male suffrage women were given the vote in an historical blink of the eye."


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THE WOMAN UNKNOWN: Deirdre Fitzpatrick is married to a man who wants to know where she really goes when supposedly taking care of her sick mother & calls on the expertise of Kate Shackleton amateur sleuth extraordinaire to investigate. THE GENTLEMAN: Everett Runcie is a banker facing ruin & disgrace. His American heiress wife will no longer pay for his mistakes or tolerate his infidelity & is seeking a divorce. THE MURDER: When a chambermaid enters Runcies hotel room she is shocked to find that he is alone & dead. Suddenly Kate is thrown into the depths of an altogether more sinister investigation. Can she uncover the truth of her most complex & personal case to date? ...

THE WOMAN UNKNOWN: Deirdre Fitzpatrick is married to a man who wants to know where she really goes when supposedly taking care of her sick mother & calls on the expertise of Kate Shackleton amateur sleuth extraordinaire to investigate. THE GENTLEMAN: Everett Runcie is a banker facing ruin & disgrace. His American heiress wife will no longer pay for his mistakes or tolerate his infidelity & is seeking a divorce. THE MURDER: When a chambermaid enters Runcies hotel room she is shocked to find that he is alone
- & dead! Suddenly Kate is thrown into the depths of an altogether more sinister investigation. Can she uncover the truth of her most complex & personal case to date?
...