Jack Fletcher is running for his life. The port of Nagasaki is within reach but the Shoguns samurai are closing in fast for the kill. So is too Jacks old school rival Kazuki. Every road is blocked & every mountain pass guarded as Jack makes his final dash for safety. But with all of Japan hunting him hes going to need a miracle to survive. & even if he reaches the end of the road will there be a ship bound for home? Or will he be burned at the stake first? Only the Ring of Sky knows his fate... ...

The year is 1868 & Sherlock Holmes is fourteen. His life is that of a perfectly ordinary army officers son: boarding school good manners a classical education -- the backbone of the British Empire. But all that is about to change. With his father suddenly posted to India & his mother mysteriously unwell Sherlock is sent to stay with his eccentric uncle & aunt in their vast house in Hampshire. So begins a summer that leads Sherlock to uncover his first murder a kidnap corruption & a brilliantly sinister villain of exquisitely malign intent.. . The Death Cloud is the first in a series of novels in which the iconic detective is reimagined as a brilliant troubled & engaging teenager -- creating unputdownable detective adventures that remain true to the spirit of the original books. ...

Sherlock knows that Amyus Crow his mysterious American tutor has some dark secrets. But he didn't expect to find a notorious killer hanged by the US government apparently alive & well in Surrey
- & Crow somehow mixed up in it. When no one will tell you the truth sometimes you have to risk all to discover it for yourself. & so begins an adventure that will take Sherlock across the ocean to America to the centre of a deadly web
- where life & death are cheap & truth has a price no sane person would pay...

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The year is 1868 & fourteen-year-old Sherlock Holmes faces his most baffling mystery yet. Mycroft his older brother has been found with a knife in his hand locked in a room with a corpse. Only Sherlock believes that his brother is innocent. But can he prove it? In a chase that will take him to Moscow & back Sherlock must discover who has framed Mycroft & why.. .before Mycroft swings at the gallows. Young Sherlock Holmes is a series of novels in which the iconic detective is reimagined as a brilliant troubled & engaging teenager -- creating unputdownable detective adventures that remain true to the spirit of the original books. ...

Teenage Sherlock has come up against some challenges in his time but what confronts him now is baffling. His friend & her father have vanished. Their house looks as if nobody has ever lived in it. Sherlock begins to doubt his sanity until a clever clue points him to Scotl&. Following that clue leads him into a mystery that involves kidnapping bodysnatchers & a man who claims he can raise the dead. Before he knows it Sherlock is fighting for his life as he begins to work out out what has happened to his his friends. Will he be fast enough to save them? Sherlock Holmes. Think you know him? Think again. ...

Kidnapped & taken to China Sherlock finds himself plunged into adventure. How can three men be bitten by the same poisonous snake in different parts of Shanghai? Who wants them dead & why? The answer seems to lie in a message hidden in a diagram like a spider's web. But solving it leads to an even more urgent question: what has all this got to do with a plot to blow up an American warship? Sherlock is about to brave terrors greater than any he has faced before.. . Sherlock Holmes: think you know him? Think again. ...

Stalin remains one of the creators of our world
- like Hitler the personification of evil. Yet Stalin hid his past & remains mysterious.
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Most people today think of Winston Churchill as simply the wartime British bulldog
- a jowly cigar-chomping old fighter demanding
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By the age of just twenty-two Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) had produced over 160 paintings many of them ambitious compositions of remarkable quality. This book offers an in-depth study of the artists early career spanning the eight years between 1613 when the artist was just fourteen to his departure for Italy from Antwerp in October 1621. Were the paintings he created during these years his only legacy he would still be recognized as one of the greatest artists of the 17th century. Van Dycks precocious talents are brilliantly demonstrated in the many important works reproduced here among them such strikingly original masterpieces as The Betrayal of Christ" & " Saint Jerome in the Wilderness". Others " The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem" & " The Lamentation" for example reveal Van Dyck at his most experimental in search of new ways of increasing the visual impact of his compositions. Van Dyck was also one of the first painters to rise to the challenge of Rubens omnipresent influence evident in works such as " Christ Crowned with Thorns"." ...

I delight in this work wrote the young Victoria shortly after she became Queen. She was an engaging creature high-spirited & eager to be amused. But her early years were difficult ones. Fatherless from the age of eight months she was brought up at Kensington Palace in an atmosphere thick with family feuds backbiting & jealousy
- the focus of conflicting ambitions. Though her uncle William IV was anxious to bring her into Court circles her German mother & the calculating John Conroy were equally determined that she should remain under their control. The little Queen who succeeded to the throne a month after her eighteenth birthday was greeted by a unanimous chorus of praise & admiration. She embraced the independence of her position & often forced her will on those around her. She met & married Albert marking the end of her childhood & the beginning of a glorious legend.
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