This jolly birthday card for your uncle designed exclusively for WHSmith features an illustration of a groovy uncle dancing & the words &8216;party on down &8216;cause you&8217;re the coolest unc in town! on the front. Greeting inside reads &8216; Have a great birthday&8217;. Comes complete with a blue envelope ready for posting. Approximate dimensions: 22 x 10cm ...

A Blandings novel Uncle Fred is one of the hottest earls who ever donned a coronet. Or as he crisply puts it There are no limits literally none to what I can achieve in the springtime. Even so his gifts are stretched to the limit when he is urged by Lord Emsworth to save his prize pig the Empress of Blandings from the enforced slimming cure of the haughty Duke of Dunstable. Pongo Twistleton knows his debonair but wild uncle shouldnt really be allowed at large
- especially when disguised as a brain surgeon. He fears the worst. & in yet another brilliant novel by the master of English comedy Pongo will soon find his fears are amply justified.
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Pongo Twistleton is in a state of financial embarrassment again. Uncle Fred meanwhile has been asked by Lord Emsworth to foil a plot to steal the Empress his prize pig. Along with Polly Pott (daughter of old Mustard) they form a deputation to Blandings Castle bent on doing a bit of good"." ...

Uncle Montague lives alone in a big house & his regular visits from his nephew give him the opportunity to relive some of the most frightening stories he knows. But as the stories unfold a newer & more surprising narrative emerges one that is perhaps the most frightening of all. Uncle Montagues Tales of Terror it transpires are not so much works of imagination as dreadful lurking memories. Memories of an earlier time in which Uncle Montague lived a very different life to his present solitary existence. ...

This new edition is based on the original 1852 book published in two volumes &

Includes:: all original illustrations.

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R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) is a major writer of our time one of the finest religious poets in the English language & one of Wales's greatest poets. His output was prolific: over six decades he published some 25 individual collections of poems as well as several volumes of prose. A substantial number of his poems however have hitherto remained uncollected & often elusive
- poems published in newspapers magazines & journals (many of them obscure) as well as in private or limited editions. Uncollected Poems
- published to mark the centenary of Thomas's birth
- brings together for the first time a rigorous selection of the best of these. The fruit of several years' research by Tony Brown & Jason Walford Davies the volume makes available work which spans the whole of Thomas's career
- from an early sonnet to his first wife M.E. Eldridge (included in his first unpublished collection Spindrift in the late 1930s) & an early Iago Prytherch poem published in the Dublin Magazine to poems which are powerful expressions of the metaphysical meditations of his later years. R.S. Thomas's Uncollected Poems takes its place alongside Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Dent 1993; Phoenix 2000) Selected Poems (Penguin 2003) & Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 (Bloodaxe Books 2004). It gives readers of R.S. Thomas's work access to much new & fascinating material. Uncollected Poems is a companion volume to R.S. Thomas's Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 (Bloodaxe Books 2004) the sequel to Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Dent 1993; Phoenix Press 2000) which only covers his collections up to Experimenting with an Amen (1986). Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 reprints in full the contents of R.S. Thomas's last five collections The Echoes Return Slow (Macmillan 1988: unavailable for many years) & Bloodaxe's Counterpoint (1990) Mass for Hard Times (1992) No Truce with the Furies (1995) & the posthumously published Residues (2002). There is no overlap between the two Bloodaxe editions: none of the poems in Residues uncollected at the time of his death in 2000 is included in Uncollected Poems.



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In alternating chapters enigmatic Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos & crime writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II create an uproarious murder mystery with intersecting storylines. Those chapters written by the famously masked Marcos originate in the mountains of Chiapas Mexico where amid a hallucinatory blend of different voices we meet Elias a Zapatista detective tasked with locating missing people. Taibo's chapters star his Coca-Cola-&-cigarette-consuming series detective Hector Belascoaran Shayne: a PI specialising in cases stranger than reality. The two stories collide absurdly & dramatically in the sprawl of Mexico City. The ugly history of the city's political violence rears its head & both detectives find themselves in an unlikely dance of death with forces at once criminal historical & political. ...

As a mother wife employer & editor of the Review of Applied Ethics Isabel Dalhousie is aware that to be human is to be responsible. So when a neighbour brings her a new & potentially dangerous puzzle to solve once again Isabel feels she has no option but to shoulder the burden. A masterpiece painting has been stolen from Duncan Munrowe old-fashioned philanthropist father to two discontented children & a very wealthy man. As Isabel enters into negotiations with the shadowy figures who are in search of a ransom a case where heroes & villains should be clearly defined turns murky: the list of those who desire the painting
- or the money
- lengthens & hasty judgement must be avoided at all cost. Morals it turns out are like Scottish clouds: complex changeable & tricky to get a firm grip on; they require a sharp observational eye a philosophical mindset & the habit of kindness. Fortunately for those around her Isabel Dalhousie is in possession of all three.

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Katarina Bishop has worn a lot of labels in her short life: Friend. Niece. Daughter. Thief. But for the last two months she's simply been known as the girl who ran the crew that robbed the greatest museum in the world. That's why Kat isn't surprised when she's asked to steal the infamous Cleopatra Emerald so it can be returned to its rightful owners. There are only three problems. First the gem hasn't been seen in public in thirty years. Second since the fall of the Egyptian empire & the suicide of Cleopatra no one who holds the emerald keeps it for long
- & in Kat's world history almost always repeats itself. But it's the third problem that makes Kat's crew the most nervous & that is...the emerald is cursed. Kat might be in way over her head but she's not going down without a fight. After all she has her best friend -- the gorgeous Hale
- & the rest of her crew with her as they chase the Cleopatra around the globe dodging curses & realizing that the same tricks & cons her family has used for centuries are useless for this heist. This time Kat's going to have to make up her own rules...

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Kentons career as a journalist depends on his facility with languages his knowledge of European politics & his quick judgement. Where his judgement sometimes fails him however is in his personal life. When he travels to Nuremberg to investigate a story about a top-level meeting of Nazi officials he inadvertently finds himself on a train bound for Austria after a bad night of gambling. Stranded with no money Kenton jumps at the chance to earn a fee helping a refugee smuggle securities across the border. Yet he soon discovers that the documents he holds have far more than cash value
- & that they could cost him his life!
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