The Dropout offers a sly edgy new twist on themes from The Graduate & American Pie & is a 21st-century coming-of-age drama. 19-year-old Paul Barrett is having a tough time at university. His American girlfriend Meredith is a Silver Ring virgin who wont put out. Their best friend Neil has a worrying crush on Paul. When Meredith dumps Paul & Neil commits suicide Paul drops out of uni & retreats to the south-coast hometown he calls Boredom-on-Sea where he goes to work for his uncle Jack selling furniture to continental buyers. Two more women enter his life: Jenny his uncles foxy stepdaughter; & Christine Jacks gold-digging mistress the office receptionist. & Paul attracts another gay admirer. His life is heading to the brink
- & taking other lives with him. Pauls is the young voice of today
- always hoping to get laid it takes him a while to realise that what hes really looking for is love.

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For more than four decades Frank Langella has enjoyed a singular life & career. This extremely versatile actor is also a brilliant writer with a perceptive eye & a gift for the telling detail. Dropped Names: Famous Men & Women As I Knew Them" is a collection of illuminating portraits of the people he has met & known as well as deeply revealing memories told with a rare honesty. With sharp wit & a skillful narrative style Langella affectingly limns portraits of lost friends enemies idols & liaisons that are funny moving wicked sometimes shocking & totally addictive. Woven throughout are the threads of his own experiences from his early years in Bayonne New Jersey to his most recent successes. An entertaining & totally compelling read " Dropped Names" is a mesmerizing performance from a dazzling & original talent. We are taken on an exceptional journey with scores of renowned souls now lost to us but Langellas ability to contrast their public personas with their private selves brings them back to vivid life." ...

On 15 May 1957/58 Vickers Valiant V-Bomber XD818 under the command of Wg Cdr Kenneth Hubbard OC 49 Squadron RAF dropped Britains first live thermonuclear bomb. The success of Operation Grapple broadcast to the world that the UK had the resolve & the capability to protect her own democracy & that of her Commonwealth. It was a major breakthrough that ensured Britain maintained her place in the most senior influential positions of the United Nations & other corridors of world power & in the ensuing years provide Britains deterrent throughout the decades of the Cold War. The theme of this book is to explain how the RAF selected & trained the crews who would be responsible for the precision dropping of the several weapons that would detonate during Grapple. It also provides a complete background to the parts played by all other services during this unique period in British history. ...

Ethan Blake is seventeen & desperate to escape from his dead-end life. When he sees someone B.A.S.E. jump from the top of his block of flats it changes the way he sees the world for ever. Soon Ethan is caught up in the adrenaline-fuelled world of skydiving. Hes a natural so its no surprise when hes invited to join an elite skydive team but is he signing up for more than just jumping out of planes? The teams involved in covert military operations
- missions that require a special kind of guts missions so secret even MI5 denies all knowledge.
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The Raiders are a talented young skydiving team
- with a secret. They are also a highly trained group of covert operatives carrying
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The Raiders are a talented young skydiving team
- with a secret. They are also a highly trained group of covert operatives carrying
...

A litter of kittens a train of camels a pride of lions: these are some of the animal collective nouns you may already know. But have you heard of a parcel of hogs an embarrassment of pandas or a business of ferrets? Then turn the pages of this book to discover a collection of lesser-known & sometimes more fanciful ones... ...

Droving has been hugely important in shaping farming practice across Northumberland for 1 000 years or more. The necessity of transporting sheep & cattle has changed the landscape & developed the roads & buildings & at one time animals would be herded from as far a field as Scotland & Irel&. Today the scene is very different but the legacy of the drovers can still be seen & enjoyed all over the region. Local archaeologists Ian Roberts Alan Rushworth & Richard Calrton have been determined to preserve this history on behalf of the Northumberland National Park Authority. Following the development of droving in Northumberland from prehistoric times through Middle Ages the eighteenth century & right up to date they offer the definitive history of this significant activity. ...

One of the great classics of Scottish history The Drove Roads of Scotland interweaves folklore social comment & economic history in a fascinating account of Scotlands droving trade & the routes by which cattle & sheep were brought from every corner of the land to markets in central Scotl&. In pastoral Scotland the breeding & movement of livestock were fundamental to the lives of the people. The story of the drove roads takes the reader on an engrossing tour of Scottish history from the lawless cattle driving by reivers in the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries to the legitimate movement of stock which developed after the Union of the Crowns by which time the large-scale movement of stock to established markets had become an important part of Scotlands economy & a vital aspect of commercial life in the Empire. Haldanes work is one of the great classics of Scottish history. ...

Shortly after completing THE DROWNED & THE SAVED Primo Levi committed suicide. The matter of his death was sudden violent & unpremiditated & there were some who argue that he killed himself because he was tormented by guilt
- guilt that he had survived the horrors of Auschwitz while others better than he had gone to the wall. THE DROWNED & THE SAVED is Levis impassioned attempt to understand the rationale behind the concentration camps was completed shortly before his tragic death in 1987. THE DROWNED & THE SAVED dispels the myth that Primo Levi forgave the Germans for what they did to his people. He didnt & couldnt forgive. He refused however to indulge in what he called the bestial vice of hatred which is an entirely different matter. The voice that sounds in his writing is that of a reasonable man...it warns & reminds us that the unimaginable can happen again. A would-be tyrant is waiting in the wings with beautiful words on his lips. The book is constantly impressing on us the need to learn from the past to make sense of the senseless PAUL BAILEY
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