These new adventures are the only ones to be specially authorised by Dame Jean Conan Doyle, celebrating the centennial of Holmes' first appearance in print.Greeted with unanimous acclaim, the traditionally crafted stories feature dazzling encounters with Holmes rising to new challenges and revealing new feats of brilliant, deductive logic ... culminating in a mental duel of frightening intensity with the master criminal Moriarty. And Watson - God bless him - has his share of the spotlight too.

    Emerging from his angst-filled childhood, he rushes into the throes of the twentieth century on the Western Front during the Great War, and quickly changes his role on the battlefield from cannon fodder to cameraman. When he becomes a prisoner of war, he discovers Rousseau's Confessions, and dedicates his life to bringing the memoir to the silver screen. Plagued by bad luck and blind ambition, Todd becomes a celebrated London upstart, a Weimar luminary, and finally a disgruntled director of cowboy movies and the eleventh member of the Hollywood Ten. Ambitious and entertaining, Boyd has invented a most irresistible hero.

    Time passes and opinions change. “Why should we go on supporting a book which we detest?” Rose Curtland asks. “The brotherhood of Western intellectuals versus the book of history,” Jenkin Riderhood suggests. The theft of a wife further embroils the situation. Moral indignation must be separated from political disagreement. Tamar Hernshaw has a different trouble and a terrible secret. Can one die of shame? In another quarter a suicide pact seems the solution. Duncan Cambus thinks that since it is a tragedy, someone must die. Someone dies. Rose, who has gone on loving without hope, at least deserves a reward.

    But now, in the 25th century, humans serve giant beetles and spiders as slaves and often as food.Slaves all, or servants - except for those who live in the desert, spending most of their time underground. For Niall and his family, life is hard, but together they eke out an existence until the day Niall does what was said to be impossible.He kills a spider.This powerful act brings Niall to the attention and seat of the Spider Lord. But as he finds himself deep within the hostile city of the spiders, Niall also meets allies: Odina, a spider servany born and bred, and Bill, no mere man but an honorary beetle.Niall's special gift makes him useful to the spiders, who want access to their city's greatest mystery: an impenetrable white tower. But Niall alone can enter, and what he finds inside are the very facts of our planet's history and humanity's last chance for freedom and a future.Armed with the secrets of the white tower, the humans mount an epic struggle for power against the vast and brutal forces of the tyrannical Spider Lord.

    When a woman and her young daughter are deserted at the start of World War II, he offers them a roof over their heads, and a shared, if dubious future.

    In this award-winning biography, Donald R. Howard recreates the public, private, and poetic life of this extraordinary man. Chaucer was born in the latter half of the fourteenth century, an age of revolution and devastation when Europe was convulsed by the Hundred Years' War, the Black Death, and the social and intellectual upheavals that marked the "autumn of Feudalism." The son of a wealthy London vintner, he maneuvered his way into the turbulent courts of Edward III and Richard II, and thus, without holding noble rank himself, he was able to witness the violent drama of royal power. It was, as Howard demonstrates, the perfect vantage point for a poet. Chaucer's own poetic development from the mannered medieval style of The Book of the Duchess to the rich, comic, human complexity of the Canterbury Tales reflects the transformation of his world. With the Canterbury Tales and the darker, more formal epic Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer established English for all time as a language of literature.

    It could be argued that he dared, in fact, to be the first modern poet. . . .Above all, Blake teaches us that the imagination is a portion of the divine principle, that "Energy is Eternal Delight," and that "everything that lives is Holy." Human liberty and imagination have never been better served.

    While we know much of Beatrix Potter from her classic children

    His eleven-volume work, written between 1660 and 1669, was first published in 1825. Ever since, this chronicler of his time has held readers' fascination. The essential anthology of selections from Samuel Pepys's famous diary is finally available in paperback. By collecting passages by subject, it provides a fresh look at some of the themes running through Pepys's massive work. Robert and Linnet Latham's lively presentation shows Pepys the man of fashion, the booklover, the musician and theatergoer as well as Pepys the husband and Pepys the public servant. Through descriptions of the everyday and of historic events like the Fire and the Plague, Pepys's life and times are revealed in all their richness and variety. For fans of the Diary, this work offers the opportunity to rediscover favorite passages; for anyone unfamiliar with Pepys, this anthology serves as a delightful introduction.

    From Poe's tales of mystery and imagination to P. D. James's A Taste for Death, Keating delivers a highly-readable evaluation of 100 authors and their masterpieces. This collection is a must for all devoted mystery readers.

    She had many admirers - Peter Quennell, Feliks Topolski, Cyril Connolly, King Farouk, George Weidenfeld, Derek Jackson, the list is not exhaustive - some of whom she married. Tears Before Bedtime and Weep No More were first published separately in 1987 and 1989; they then appeared in one paperback volume in 1993. It is in this form they are being reissued in Faber Finds . As Jeremy Lewis, her literary executor, puts it these memoirs 'combine waspishness and wit in equal measure. She had a keen eye for the absurd, and a ruthless ability to skewer friends and foes alike with an exact and colourful turn of phrase ...' 'Uniquely savage memoirs of rackety highbrow life ... One feels Balzac is the novelist who would best do justice to all this in fictional form.' Anthony Powell 'Provides some of the funniest reading I can remember.' Auberon Waugh, Independent 'The two volumes together make a memorable portrait. She deserves to have her likeness preserved and by a writer as good as herself.' Frank Kermode, Guardian