Sir Walter Winterbottom was arguably the most influential man in modern English football. He is known as the first England team manager but more than that he was an innovator of modern coaching sports administrator & a man ahead of his time; a man who had a profound effect on English football & who laid the foundations for England's success in 1966. Walter managed them all from Lawton to Charlton & inspired many to become coaches: Ron Greenwood Bill Nicholson Jimmy Hill & Bobby Robson were amongst his disciples & took his gospel to the clubs they managed. Born in 1913 Winterbottom started out as a teacher & physical education instructor playing amateur football in his spare time. He was soon signed up by Manchester United playing his first game 1936 & winning promotion to the First Division in 1938. A spinal ailment curtailed his career but during World War II he served as an officer in the Royal Air Force before the FA appointed him as national director of coaching & England team manager in 1946. He remains the ony manager to have taken the national side to more than two World Cup finals & was created an OBE in 1963 & a CBE in 1972 before being knighted in 1978. Walter died in 2002 but his legacy continues to inspire many in football today especially with the opening of the new St George's Park football academy. With interviews & insight from top football names this book
- written by Winterbottom's son-in-law
- also draws on personal diaries photographs & letters. However this is more than just a biography of one man
- it's the story of how modern football came about.


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Sir William Garrow was born in Middlesex in 1760 & called to the Bar in 1783. He was the dominant figure at the Old Bailey from 1783 to 1793 later becoming an MP Solicitor-General Attorney-General & finally a judge & lawmaker within the Common Law Tradition. Garrow is now in the public-eye for daring to challenge entrenched legal ways & means. His gifts to the world include altering the relationship between judge & jury (the former had until then dominated over the latter in criminal trials) helping to forge the presumption of innocence rules of evidence & ensuring a general right to put forward a defence using a trained lawyer. He gave new meaning to the trial advocates forensic art of cross-examination later diverting skills honed as a radical to help the Crown when it was faced with alleged plots treason & sedition. This is a generous work in which well-known legal historian & biographer John Hostettler & family story-teller Richard Braby (a descendant of Garrow) combine their skills & experience to produce a gem of a book. The lost story of Sir William Garrow & its rediscovery will prove enlightening for professional & general readers alike & provide an invaluable missing-link for legal & social historians. It is also a remarkable work of genealogical research which will register strongly with family historians. ...

There are some books you never forget. Some stories that can change your world. This is one of them. Author Nora Sutherlin thought she knew everything about being pushed to your limits. But in a world where passion is pain nothing is ever that simple. Now Nora must face up to the choices she has made...and to the man she left behind. This story is about discovering who you really are...and who you want to be. The Siren" is a love story that will leave you bruised shaken & begging for more." ...

Norman Douglas one of the 20th centurys great travellers in Italy was for most of his life inextricably passionately connected to the Bay of Naples. This breathtaking sweep of sea & coastline
- dominated by Vesuvius & with Pozzuoli & Sorrento standing sentinel
- was Douglas first experience of Italy. It was here on the island of Capri that he died some 55 years after first buying a villa in Naples. Siren Land" Douglas first travel book is a homage to a part of the world that captivated him more than any other. Weaving the myths of the Sirens into the landscape & history of the region Douglas writes with knowledge & an irrepressible exuberance of the past & the present of legends & archaeology folklore & daily life patron saints local ghosts wine & the wind. As the summer draws to a close Douglas prose becomes suffused with a melancholy tinged with excitement at what still remains to be discovered: relics of Roman rule of old Hellas or medieval romance... These are the delights of Siren Land. What makes " Siren Land" exceptional is the quality of the telling. Weaving scholarship impressions fact & fantasy into an intricate fabric as enchantingly entertaining & full of human interest as the best of fairy tales or ancient myths. One of the most memorable books of its genre
- Mark Holloway in his introduction to " Siren Land"."


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Mystery & adventure for four young detectives in Ancient Roman times... It's summer in the Bay of Naples
- time for fun & relaxation.
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A fascinating account from award-winning author Adam Nicolson of the history of Nicolsons own national treasure his family home: Sissinghurst. Sissinghurst is world-famous as a place of calm & beauty a garden slipped into the ruins of a rose-pink Elizabethan palace. But is it entirely what its creators intended? Has its success over the last thirty years come at a price? Is Sissinghurst everything it could be? The story of this piece of land an estate in the Weald of Kent is told here for the first time from the very beginning. Adam Nicolson who now lives there has uncovered remarkable new findings about its history as a medieval manor & great sixteenth-century house from the days of its decline as an eighteenth-century prison to a flourishing Victorian farm & on to the creation by his grandparents Vita Sackville-West & Harold Nicolson of a garden in a weed-strewn wreck. Alongside his recovery of the past Adam Nicolson wanted something else: for the land at Sissinghurst to live again to become the landscape of orchards cattle fruit & sheep he remembered from his boyhood. Could that living frame of a mixed farm be brought back to what had turned into monochrome fields of chemicalised wheat & oilseed rape? Against the odds he was going to try. This paperback edition will be fully updated to cover the first year of Adam Nicolsons endeavour to revive the estate & return it to the glories of its past. More than just a personal biography of a place this book is the story of taking an inheritance & steering it in a new direction just as an entrepreneur might take hold of a company or just as all of us might want to take our dreams & make them real. ...

Nothing can break the bond between sisters.. . When Beatrice gets a frantic call in the middle of Sunday lunch to say that her younger sister Tess is missing she boards the first flight home to London. But as she learns about the circumstances surrounding her sister's disappearance she is stunned to discover how little she actually knows of her sister's life
- & unprepared for the terrifying truths she must now face. The police Beatrice's fiance & even their mother accept they have lost Tess but Beatrice refuses to give up on her. So she embarks on a dangerous journey to discover the truth no matter the cost.
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Its two years after the events of Girl Missing & life is not getting any easier for sixteen-year-old Lauren as exam pressure & a recent family tragedy take their toll. Laurens birth mother takes Lauren & her two sisters on holiday in the hope that some time together will help but a few days into the holiday one of the sisters disappears under circumstances very similar to those in which Lauren was taken years before. Can Lauren save her sister & stop the nightmare happening all over again? ...

It's two years after the events of Girl Missing & life is not getting any easier for sixteen-year-old Lauren as exam pressure & a recent family tragedy take their toll. Lauren's birth mother takes Lauren & her two sisters on holiday in the hope that some time together will help but a few days into the holiday one of the sisters disappears under circumstances very similar to those in which Lauren was taken years before. Can Lauren save her sister & stop the nightmare happening all over again? ...

Daughters of the formidable Isabella & Ferdinand of Spain Katherine & Juana were born in to a world of privilege & luxury that ...