Cyril Hobbins ' The Toy Maker from Kenilworth' introduces a wide range of traditional wooden toys dolls & games from around the world. Many of the toys here have stood the test of time proving over the centuries their everlasting appeal to all age groups. The book is richly illustrated throughout with a wealth of Cyril's beautiful watercolour pictures of his toys. This unique book will provide a valuable resource for those wishing to make toys those interested in the history of toys & toymaking & for school teachers for whom the book offers a range of material relevant to many aspects of the National Curriculum. All the featured toys are accompanied by their historical background & full instructions on how to make them. ...

This is the fully updated second edition of the popular guidebook Traffic-Free Cycle Trails" containing more than 400 cycle routes around Britain. Written by Nick Cotton the book

Includes:: a great variety of routes on former railway paths canal towpaths & forest trails. First published in 2004 " Traffic-Free Cycle Trails" has become one of the country's most popular cycling books. It has proven invaluable for finding that safe & peaceful bike ride increasingly the target of a growing number of families. Readers of the first edition have been surprised with the discovery of local trails of which they were unaware & those travelling with the book have been able to find quality trails in unfamiliar areas throughout the UK without wasting time! It

Includes:: route description of rides in every region of Britain. It features an easy-to-use format & is packed with useful information in regional sections. It is helpful for parents planning safe rides with children & novice riders looking to escape traffic."



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He'd been her friend for years. He said he loved her. Then she realised she didn't know him at all... When everything seemed to be falling apart in Sophie's life she was thankful for her friend Kas who was always at the end of a phone ready to listen & to offer comfort & advice. Her father's cold dislike of her & then her parents' divorce had left her with a deep distrust of men. But gradually Kas made her believe there was at least one man who truly cared about her. But she was wrong. At first when Sophie went to stay for a few days with Kas in Italy he was kind & caring as he'd always been. But three days after she arrived everything changed. His eyes were cold as he described the things he expected her to do 'for love'. But soon Sophie's bewilderment turned to fear as he punched & shouted at her & threatened to kill her adored younger brothers if she didn't do exactly as she was told...to sell her body on the streets to pay off Kas's debts. Terrified of Kas the police & the men whose pleasures she was forced to satisfy Sophie worked seven nights a week for the next six months on the dark & lonely streets of a town in northern Italy. Subjected regularly to Kas's verbal mental & physical abuse she knew she would never escape. & then one day after she'd been admitted to hospital with stomach pains
- & knowing that Kas would kill her if he found out
- she dared to phone her mother. But who would reach her first?

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Tragedy at Law follows a rather self-important High Court judge Mr Justice Barber as he moves from town to town presiding over cases in the Southern England circuit. When an anonymous letter arrives for Barber warning of imminent revenge he dismisses it as the work of a harmless lunatic. But then a second letter appears followed by a poisoned box of the judges favourite chocolates & he begins to fear for his life. Enter barrister & amateur detective Francis Pettigrew a man who was once in love with Barbers wife & has never quite succeeded in his profession
- can he find out who is threatening Barber before it is too late?
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The doomed hero of The Tragedy of Arthur is Arthur Phillips a young man struggling with a larger-than-life father a con artist who works wonders of deception but is a very unreliable parent. Arthur is raised in an enchanted world of smoke & mirrors where the only certain fact is his fathers & beloved sisters shared love for the works of William Shakespeare
- a love so pervasive that Arthur becomes a writer in a misguided bid to win their approval. Near the end of his life Arthurs father shares with him a treasure that he has kept for half a century: a previously unknown play by Shakespeare titled The Tragedy of Arthur. Arthur & his sister also inherit their fathers mission to see the play published & acknowledged as the Bards last great gift to humanity. Unless of course its their fathers last & greatest deception.
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In LORD JOHN & THE PLAGUE OF ZOMBIES Lord John Grey is posted to Jamaica to assist the Governor as he faces a most unusual kind of uprising among the colony's slave population. In THE SPACE BETWEEN Jamie Fraser's step-daughter Joan is on her way to an abbey in Paris to become a nun
- but when she meets the Comte St Germain a wealthy French aristocrat rumoured to deal in the occult
- she discovers her destiny lies on quite a different path. In THE CUSTOM OF THE ARMY Lord John Grey is summoned as a witness in a court martial in the wilds of Acadia only to find himself playing a crucial role in the Battle of Quebec. In A LEAF ON THE WIND OF ALL HALLOWS a WW2 Spitfire pilot called Jerry Mac Kenzie crashes near a stone circle & wakes up in the eighteenth century. Can the strange man he meets
- who impossibly seems to know him
- help him return to his wife & baby son before a terrible fate overtakes them?



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In LORD JOHN & THE PLAGUE OF ZOMBIES Lord John Grey is posted to Jamaica to assist the Governor as he faces a most unusual kind of uprising among the colony's slave population. In THE SPACE BETWEEN Jamie Fraser's step-daughter Joan is on her way to an abbey in Paris to become a nun
- but when she meets the Comte St Germain a wealthy French aristocrat rumoured to deal in the occult
- she discovers her destiny lies on quite a different path. In THE CUSTOM OF THE ARMY Lord John Grey is summoned as a witness in a court martial in the wilds of Acadia only to find himself playing a crucial role in the Battle of Quebec. In A LEAF ON THE WIND OF ALL HALLOWS a WW2 Spitfire pilot called Jerry Mac Kenzie crashes near a stone circle & wakes up in the eighteenth century. Can the strange man he meets
- who impossibly seems to know him
- help him return to his wife & baby son before a terrible fate overtakes them?



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I had never seen Master John Wyclif so afflicted. He was rarely found at such a loss when in disputation with other masters. He told me later when I had returned them to him that it was as onerous to plunder a bachelor scholars books as it would be to steal another mans wife. I had at the time no way to assess the accuracy of that opinion for I had no wife & few books.. . So begins another delightful & intriguing tale from the life of Hugh de Singleton surgeon in the medieval village of Bampton near Oxford & bailiff of Bampton Castle at the behest of Lord Gilbert Talbot. Hugh sets his cap at the delightful Kate who proves equally resourceful in the search for the missing books. Some very determined adversaries are out to stop him permanently if necessary
- but are they motivated by greed or a more personal animosity? Then the corpse of a poor scholar who had tried to sell one of the books is found in the river: but he had not simply drowned.. .
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How do you lose music? Then having lost it what do you do next? Nick Coleman found out the morning he woke up to a world changed forever by Sudden Neursosensory Hearing Loss. The Train in the Night is an account of one mans struggle to recover from the loss of his greatest passion in life
- & to go one step further than that: to restore his ability not only to hear but to think about & feel music. Of all our relationships with art the one we enjoy with music is the most complex the most mysterious & for reasons that cannot be explained by science alone the most emotionally charged. Nothing about that relationship is simple. & yet it is perhaps through music that we make the most intimate contact with our sense of who we really are at our most naked unsophisticated honest & simplified. Through psalms symphonies love songs ballads boogie... Where to start though for the newly deaf? Well you can start suggested a famous neurologist by trying to remember every beautiful piece of music youve ever heard & then by thinking about that music over & over again until it begins to assume a new kind of form in your brain. You never know what might happen after that. & so thats what the author did. He went back to the origins of his passion
- the series of big bangs which kicked off his musical universe
- & then worked his way forwards through the back catalogue. The Train in the Night is a memoir not quite like any other. It is about growing up obviously. But it is also about becoming young again & trying to see the world for what it is whether through the eyes of a teenage punk or those of a middle-aged music critic & father of two. It is about taste & love & suffering & delusion. It is about longing to be Keith Richards. It is funny heartbreaking & above all true. It is a hymn to music.


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On an icy dawn morning in Paris in January 1943 a group of 230 French women resisters were rounded up from the Gestapo detention camps & sent on a train to Auschwitz
- the only train in the four years of German occupation to take women of the resistance to a death camp. Of the group 49 survivors would return to France. Here is the story of these women
- told for the first time. A Train in Winter is a portrait of ordinary people of their bravery & endurance & of the friendships that kept so many of them alive. Longlisted for the 2012 Orwell Prize.

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