But then, quite unexpectedly, a family tragedy obliges Grace to abandon her artistic talents and enter a life in service at the Hall. In this Upstairs Downstairs world of sadistic housekeepers and drunken butlers there is genuine hardship and drudgery for those employed in servicing the few.But Grace soon discovers that she has another talent when, through the merest chance, she manages to escape from the kitchen to the nursery floor. Here she learns to love Lady Lydiard's children as her own. Here, too, she learns her first lesson as a woman, that passion and sacrifice make awkward bedfellows. But if the love of her life, Brake Merrowby, brings her more sorrow than joy, her love for the children more than compensates for her enforced isolation in their world of muffins and rocking horses. As change reaches out to touch the great house, the realities of war leave their mark on the family. Yet for the children, grown and growing, when they stop to look back at the top-floor window they see only their nanny. Almost as if part of the fabric of the building, Grace grows to become not just the touchstone of their lives but in essence the mistress of the house itself.

    All at a crossroads in their lives. All with difficult choices to make. All badly in need of a holiday.PAULA: Beautiful, ambitious and successful, she works hard and plays hard. Men find her irresistible...except for the one man she really wants.BRENDA: In her late thirties, she longs for glamour and excitement. Tired of being a housewife stuck at home with her children, Brenda is determined to make changes in her life. Then the unthinkable happens.RACHEL: Shy and timid, she's always been dominated by her cold, intolerant father. But beneath the surface she is bubbling with suppressed rage. Does she have the courage to finally become her own woman?JENNIFER: She's a true friend. Paula comes to her with man troubles. Rachel tells her of family woes. Her sister Brenda is envious of Jennifer's high-powered career and successful marriage. Then tragedy strikes. Will Paula, Brenda and Rachel be there for Jennifer when she needs them?When the four women stay in a luxurious villa on a Greek island, they soon realize that they have embarked on more than just a foreign holiday. Amidst rows, arguments, laughter and fun they come to see each other in a different light. Can their friendships be sustained? Indeed, will their lives ever be the same again?

    He travels back in time to Viking adventures at the court of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople. Part of the 1995 Scottish Book Fortnight promotion.

    You probably thought you couldn't stand any more genius in one lifetime. Well, fasten your intellectual seat belts! Inside you'll find 100% guaranteed top quality brilliance on every page, as he winsomely and wisely answers questions like these: Can people really hear radio broadcasts through their teeth? What does Queen Elizabeth carry in that purse, anyway? So how DO porcupines mate? And many more. When you hear the answers, you'll be glad someone asked the questions.

    But she is also a woman haunted by her past which threatens to ruin her life - a lingering past of loneliness and rejection. And most dangerous of all, of burning vengeance.Lawrence McAllister is the man who walked out on her and broke her heart. Yet he is the only man who can help her fight her worst enemy - Dyllis Fisher, a woman who has vowed to destroy Kirsten's life at all costs. And in a world where bitter vengeance will know no limit, Kirsten needs all the help she can get...

    A widower with a small child and a busy medical career needed someone to make sure his domestic life ran smoothly. What she hadn't counted on was his decision to offer her the position. As his wife, she would have a comfortable lifestyle and everything that money could buy. But what was that, if Gijs couldn't offer her what she truly wanted�love?

    In the neo-puritanical nineties, it's a challenge to defend the rights of smokers and a privilege to promote their liberty. Sure, it hurts a little when you're compared to Nazi war criminals, but Nick says he's just doing what it takes to pay the mortgage and put his son through Washington's elite private school St. Euthanasius. He can handle the pressure from the antismoking zealots, but he is less certain about his new boss, BR, who questions whether Nick is worth $150,000 a year to fight a losing war. Under pressure to produce results, Nick goes on a PR offensive. But his heightened notoriety makes him a target for someone who wants to prove just how hazardous smoking can be. If Nick isn't careful, he's going to be stubbed out.

    The greatest judge never to be appointed to the Supreme Court, he is widely considered to be the peer of Justices Holmes, Brandeis, and Cardozo.

    . . Dad should never have brought it into the house. Crunchbag has escaped and he’s eaten Granny!’ Some dads bring home rabbits. Or dogs. Or parrots. Not Nicholas’s dad. The latest member of their family is Crunchbag – the ALLIGATOR! Soon he’s running riot in the bathroom and on the roof and even in the park! But he wouldn’t eat poor defenceless Granny . . . would he?

    Power Unseen portrays the many, diverse and often unexpected activities of microbes through a series of 75 vignettes, each focusing on one particular organism and its characteristic behavior. Illustrating microbial life in its astonishing diversity, this fascinating and entertaining book leaves the reader in no doubt that microbes, not macrobes, rule the world.

    Over 100 issues later, his magazine has inspired a poetry collection, a 5-vol. CD set, two documentaries, three plays, and this book. Illus.

    By linking research ranging from the ancient Greek "dream temples" and modern experiments in telepathy, REM, and lucid dreaming to his own research on human consciousness, he theorizes that dreaming is the basis for consciousness, and that it is through dreaming that we are able to manifest a sense of ourselves.

    This book aims to incorporate these advances in theory into clinical practice and to provide a practical approach to cognitive valuation at the bedside, based on methods developed at the Cambridge clinic over the past 15 years. Designed primarily for neurologists, psychiatrists and geriatricians in training who require a practical guide to assessing higher mental function, the book will also be of interest to clinical psychologists.In this long-awaited second edition, John Hodges has substantially re-organized and expanded on the original text. The book includes a new chapter devoted to the Revised Version of the Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination (ACE-R), with a description of its uses and limitations along with normative data. Given the importance of the early detection of dementia a chapter is dedicated to this topic which draws on advances over the past decade. Several new illustrative case histories have also been added and all of the case descriptions have been orientated around the use of the ACE-R in clinical practice.

    She & her brother were sent to be brought up in Beijing under the direct auspices of Premier Zhou Enlai as he wards. This is a personal story of a life lived in the highest court of China during the Great Leap Forward.

    Nicholson has a wonderful ear for the unintentionally funny cliches of modern speech and manners.” –Sunday Telegraph

    Arriving too late to the Orient, at a time when tourism and colonialism had already turned the exotic into the familiar, late nineteenth-century European travelers to the Middle East experienced a sense of belatedness, of having missed the authentic experience once offered by a world that was already disappearing. Behdad argues that this nostalgic desire for the other contains an implicit critique of Western superiority, a split within European discourses of otherness. Working from these insights and using analyses of power derived from Foucault, Behdad engages in a new critique of orientalism. No longer viewed as a coherent and unified phenomenon or a single developmental tradition, it is seen as a complex and shifting field of practices that has relied upon its own ambivalence and moments of discontinuity to ensure and maintain its power as a discourse of dominance. Through readings of Flaubert, Nerval, Kipling, Blunt, and Eberhardt, and following the transition in travel literature from travelog to tourist guide, Belated Travelers addresses the specific historical conditions of late nineteenth-century orientalism implicated in the discourses of desire and power. Behdad also views a broad range of issues in addition to nostalgia and tourism, including transvestism and melancholia, to specifically demonstrate the ways in which the heterogeneity of orientalism and the plurality of its practice is an enabling force in the production and transformation of colonial power.An exceptional work that provides an important critique of issues at the forefront of critical practice today, Belated Travelers will be eagerly awaited by specialists in nineteenth-century British and French literatures, and all concerned with colonial and post-colonial discourse.

    Cartoon illustrations throughout.