Who has time nowadays to put in the graft to succeed? & why bother when the truly important things in life only take a quarter of an hour to master? Here Tom Cutler proves that following the path to becoming disgustingly rich stylish intelligent thin happy classy successful & a legend in the bedroom need take no longer than it does to cut your toenails or listen to The Archers. You can learn how to become as popular as your dog. Which sports car suits your personality? How to work out the date of your death. Are you a genius? With Tom Cutler's help you will soon find inner perfection & hugely impress your family friends & work colleagues. From the author of the brilliant A Gentleman's Bedside Book" this is a hilariously funny but deeply practical guide to self-improvement." ...

At St Oswalds a long-established boys grammar school in the north of England a new year has just begun. For the staff & boys of the school a wind of unwelcome change is blowing. Suits paperwork & Information Technology rule the world; & Roy Straitley the eccentric veteran Latin master is finally
- reluctantly
- contemplating retirement. But beneath the little rivalries petty disputes & everyday crises of the school a darker undercurrent stirs. & a bitter grudge hidden & carefully nurtured for thirteen years is about to erupt.

...

Gentlemen v Players was a first-class cricket match first played in 1806 which was subsequently an annual fixture at Lords between teams consisting of amateurs (the Gentlemen) & of professionals (the Players). The amateur was not merely someone who played the sport in his spare time but a particular type of first-class cricketer. The key difference between the amateur & the professional was much more than one of remuneration whereby the one received expenses for playing & the other was paid a wage. It was shaped by English class structure through the perception that the amateur had a higher station in life & was therefore a class apart from the professional. The great Yorkshire player Len Hutton was asked to go amateur if he wanted to captain Engl&. This book focuses on the final ten years of amateurism & the Gentlemen v Players fixture starting with Charles Williams own presence in the (amateur) Oxbridge teams that included future England captains such as Peter May Colin Cowdrey & MJK Smith & concluding with the abolition of amateurism in 1962 when all first-class players became professional. The amateur innings was duly declared closed. Charles Williams the author of a richly acclaimed biography of Donald Bradman was himself a first-class cricketer for Oxford University & Essex
- & an amateur. His vivid social history-cum-memoir looks at the attempt in post-war Britain to recreate a Golden Age one whose expiry exactly coincided with the beginnings of top-class one-day cricket & a cricket revolution.
...

The English love affair with the landscape garden reached its height in the eighteenth century when the creation of some of our greatest gardens set a stylistic lead which Continental Europe was eager to follow. In this informed & entertaining book Timothy Mowl reveals how this development in garden style came about through an interaction between the garden owners who had a vision of what these gardens might become & the professionals who had the expertise to realise this vision. Ideas technologies & discoveries were exchanged & theories were absorbed popularised & then discarded in a fascinating sequence of action & reaction. It was a mould-breaking revolutionary period in garden history. Mowl takes the reader on a fascinating journey to the magnificent gardens at Chiswick Stowe Castle Howard Painshill Stourhead & an astonishing host of lesser Edens & casts a fresh & illuminating perspective on the great age of the English Arcadia (1620-1820). ...

Everyone loves a romantic rogue whose exciting exploits feature a cheeky disregard for the law narrow escapes & lots of love interest. Even at the height of highway robbery activity it was thought that the death penalty was too harsh for these wayward scoundrels. There was the ever-courteous Claude du Vall the epitome of gentlemanliness; the infamous Katherine Ferrars who was the inspiration for the film The Wicked Lady; Dick Turpin the most famous highwayman of them all; & lesser-known characters like William Gordon whose corpse was subjected to an experiment in reanimation. All these & more form an entertaining volume that will keep the reader glued to the page following the mounted thief in his or her endless match against the law & a death by public hanging. ...

Gently wades through a torrent of suspects when a body is found floating face down in the river. Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing
- thats if you can call having too many suspects too many potential murderers a good thing. What Gently has to work out is which of them had the cold blooded nerve to smash the victims skull & dump him in the river.
...

There's blood in the heather & a murderer on the loose when Gently pays a quite visit to the Highlands of Scotl&. Had Brenda Merryn not been such a strong-willed woman & had she not been so much in love with George Gently driving all the way to Scotland for a holiday with Gently's sister & brother-in-law might have been a bit of a challenge. Spying on a heavily armed private army of nationalists being held at gunpoint on the hillside being held prisoner in a filthy outhouse & becoming involved in a murder would be unthinkable. For Gently it's all in a day's work & his holiday is put on hold while he stalks a murderer in the mountains with Brenda by his side. ...

If a tiger mauled a man to death would he bother burying the corpse? An escaped tiger that terrorizes a little market town is shot dead by a police marksman having caused nothing more than a minor panic. A year later a man is found mauled to death & neatly buried in his own back garden. The only thing Gently can be sure of is that the tiger didnt bury the body so who did? ...

When small-time gambler & petty crook Steinie Taylor turns up dead in a hopper of flour at a country bakery Gently has to figure out not only how he got there but also why his prime suspects all appear to have dark secrets to hide. Why had the deceased villain & two of his friends been spending money like it was going out of fashion? Where had they acquired the cash? Why had they strayed from their usual haunts? Why did Taylors friends both disappear? In the kind of town where everyone usually knows everything about their neighbours there are a few surprises in store for the locals & the investigation becomes ever more sinister when one of Taylors cronies is also found dead. The race is on to find the third man before the killer can claim him as another victim. ...

Adam Nicolson tells the story of England through the history of fourteen gentry families
- from the 15th century to the present
...