The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World explains how Disney World works and how to use that knowledge to make every minute and every dollar of your vacation count. With advice that is direct, prescriptive, and detailed, it takes the guesswork out of travel by unambiguously rating and ranking everything from hotels, restaurants, and attractions to rental car companies. With an Unofficial Guide, you know what’s available in every category, from the best to the worst and step-by-step detailed plans allow the reader to make the most of their time at Disney World.

    Yet just a hundred years ago is was the ancestral pile of the Fitzwilliams - an aristocratic clan whose home and life were fuelled by coal mining. Black Diamonds tells of the Fitzwilliams' spectacular decline: of inheritance fights; rumours of a changeling and of lunacy; philandering earls; illicit love; war heroism; a tragic connection to the Kennedys; violent death; mining poverty and squalor; and a class war that literally ripped apart the local landscape. The demise of Wentworth and the Fitzwilliams is a riveting account of aristocratic decline and fall, set in the grandest house in England.

    He became the savior of his country, as prime minister during the most perilous period in British history, World War II, and is now perhaps even more beloved in America than in England.And yet Churchill was also very often in the wrong: he brazenly contradicted his own previous political stances, was a disastrous military strategist, and inspired dislike and distrust through much of his life. Before 1939 he doubted the efficacy of tank and submarine warfare, opposed the bombing of cities only to reverse his position, shamelessly exploited the researchers and ghostwriters who wrote much of the journalism and the books published so lucratively under his name, and had an inordinate fondness for alcohol that once found him drinking whisky before breakfast. When he was appointed to the cabinet for the first time in 1908, a perceptive journalist called him “the most interesting problem of personal speculation in English politics.” More than a hundred years later, he remains a source of adulation, as well as misunderstanding.This revelatory new book takes on Churchill in his entirety, separating the man from the myth that he so carefully cultivated, and scrutinizing his legacy on both sides of the Atlantic. In effervescent prose, shot through with sly wit, Geoffrey Wheatcroft illuminates key moments and controversies in Churchill’s career—from the tragedy of Gallipoli, to his shocking imperialist and racist attitudes, dealings with Ireland, support for Zionism, and complicated engagement with European integration.Charting the evolution and appropriation of Churchill’s reputation through to the present day, Churchill’s Shadow colorfully renders the nuance and complexity of this giant of modern politics.

    Includes: To Hell and Back, Two Boys Attacked by a Monster, The Snake and the Rosary, and many more. These dreams led to many conversions and will instruct, admonish and inspire today!

    In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form. Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth. The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose materialist metaphysics he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century ur-form of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time--from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons--as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique. Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south--Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples--and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of dialectics at a standstill. She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of afterimages to have the last word.

    With 16 pages of illustrations and 3 maps.One of the greatest non-fiction books I've ever read . . . Hughes brings us an entire world. --Los Angeles Times

    Did you also know, for example, that there is a tiny, working jail cell that looks like a fat lamppost, situated at the southeast corner of Trafalgar Square, that still has a direct phone link to Scotland Yard? Or indeed, that the entrance to Buckingham Palace that faces down the Mall is actually the back door, not the front? Whether you're a visitor to the capital, a dailuy commuter or one its 7.5 million inhabitants, this book is an alternative, and often bonkers, guide to the city.

    Travelling through the villages and districts that make up the world's most dynamic metropolis I Never Knew That About London unearths the hidden gems of legends, firsts, inventions, adventures and birthplaces that shape the city's compelling, and at times, turbulent past. See the Chelsea river views that inspired Turner in his final years and find out where London's first nude statue is. Explore London's finest country house in Charlton and unearth the secrets of the Mother of Parliaments . Spy out the village that gave its name to a car and the Russian word for railway station. Discover which church steeple gave us the design of the traditional wedding cake, where the sandwich was invented and where in Bond Street you can see London's oldest artefact. Visit the house where Handel and Jimi Hendrix both lived. Climb the famous 311 steps of the Monument, go from East to West and back again at Greenwich and fly the world's biggest big wheel. Brimming with facts, stories and snippets providing a spellbinding insight into the history of London, this beautifully illustrated gem of a book is guaranteed to inform and amuse in equal measure.

    They can be born into wealth or poverty, enjoying every privilege or struggling to make ends meet. They have parents -- gods, kings and emperors, governments, visionaries and madmen -- as well as friends and enemies. They have duties and responsibilities. They can endure crises of faith and purpose. They can succeed or fail. They can live. And, sooner or later, they die. In Fallen Glory, James Crawford uncovers the biographies of some of the world's most fascinating lost and ruined buildings, from the dawn of civilisation to the cyber era. The lives of these iconic structures are packed with drama and intrigue. Soap operas on the grandest scale, they feature war and religion, politics and art, love and betrayal, catastrophe and hope. Frequently their afterlives have been no less dramatic -- their memories used and abused down the millennia for purposes both sacred and profane. They provide the stage for a startling array of characters, including Gilgamesh, the Cretan Minotaur, Agamemnon, Nefertiti, Genghis Khan, Henry VIII, Catherine the Great, Adolf Hitler, and even Bruce Springsteen. Ranging from the deserts of Iraq, the banks of the Nile and the cloud forests of Peru, to the great cities of Jerusalem, Istanbul, Paris, Rome, London and New York, Fallen Glory is a unique guide to a world of vanished architecture. And, by picking through the fragments of our past, it asks what history s scattered ruins can tell us about our own future.

    And a very strange, very English obsession. But where did this fixation develop? And what does it tell us about ourselves?In The Art of the English Murder, Lucy Worsley explores this phenomenon in forensic detail, revisiting notorious crimes like the Ratcliff Highway Murders, which caused a nationwide panic in the early nineteenth century, and the case of Frederick and Maria Manning, the suburban couple who were hanged after killing Maria's lover and burying him under their kitchen floor. Our fascination with crimes like these became a form of national entertainment, inspiring novels and plays, prose and paintings, poetry and true-crime journalism. At a point during the birth of modern England, murder entered our national psyche, and it's been a part of us ever since.The Art of the English Murder is a unique exploration of the art of crime and a riveting investigation into the English criminal soul by one of our finest historians.

    He was 45: a literary legend, a national treasure, married with ten children. This meeting sparked a love affair that lasted over a decade, destroying Dickens's marriage and ending with Nelly's near-disappearance from the public record. In this remarkable work of biography, Claire Tomalin rescues Nelly from obscurity, not only returning the neglected actress to her rightful place in history, but also giving us a compelling and truthful account of the great Victorian novelist. Through Dickens's diaries, correspondence, address books, and photographs, Tomalin is able to reconstruct the relationship between Charles and Nelly, bringing it to vivid life. The result is a riveting literary detective story—and a portrait of a singular woman.

    This Grand Lie turns the entire understanding of Islam upside down. The Muslims who kill for Islam know that our ruling elite are lying to us about Islam.At the very start of the book two things are asked of the reader:if the reader is a Muslim, then he is asked to put the book down so that understanding his own religion better does not turn him into a killer;any other reader is asked to just turn to the first pages of the Koran presented in the second half of the book; if within 5 minutes s/he is not convinced that Islam is a religion of war obsessed with the subjugation of non-Muslims, then that reader is asked to to return to the first half of the book and read that until they are convinced that what is presented in this book was mainstream scholarly opinion in the West before 9/11. One of the ways in which Islam protects itself from non-Muslims is that the normal Koran is encrypted. McLoughlin & Robinson decrypt the Koran. But they know that most people do not want to spend months or years learning the ins and outs of Islam. Most people just want to be left alone to get on with their lives. Yet when terrorism in the name of Islam abounds and the state is systematically deceiving your children, then we all owe a duty to our relatives, our society and our civilisation to know, without any doubt at all, that our ruling elite are systematically lying to us about Islam, the religion of war and terrorism.McLoughlin & Robinson explain the concept of "abrogation" and prove how fundamental this concept is to Islam. They show that any of the verses which our lying leaders pluck out to claim that Islam is a religion of peace has either been garbled or is a verse that has been cancelled.The ordinary man or woman cannot rely on Muslims to tell us the truth (because to Muslims Islam is the only truth and Islam authorizes Muslims to employ deception, for example as Taqiyya or Kitman). We cannot rely on writers, clergy, journalists or academics - because they are either in hock to Muslim donors, or because they are Leftists who are allied to Islam, or because such people are simply too scared of Muslims killing them if they speak the truth. You don't have to believe McLoughlin and Robinson's claims. The book has over 600 references, which link to the work of other acknowledged authorities on Islam (Western scholars, mainstream translators of the Koran, Muslim and ex-Muslim experts). The book shows you what those who went before us in our own society were saying about Islam. For centuries they were warning the West about Islam. And all their warnings have been concealed by the Quisling elite who have sold your descendants into slavery or civil war. It really is that serious.Those shallow ideologues who dismiss Mohammed's Koran because it is not written by Muslims are missing a vital principle: our society doesn't demand that only Nazis explain Mein Kampf, or that only Communists can criticise Marx, Stalin, etc. If there were Christian terrorists whom the Pope would not denounce, then it is the explanations of non-Christians who would be favoured. Our society regards those who are not proponents of an ideology as more credible and more objective critics of an ideology than those who are already indoctrinated by that ideology. As McLoughlin & Robinson show in the first 100 pages, it is precisely this demand that only Muslims can have an opinion on Islam (as idiotic as saying "only Nazis can speak about Nazism") which has allowed Muslims to fool the electorate in countries across the West. If the people of the West had not been deceived by the Quisling ruling elite, every country would have already elected parties who would have kept Islam outside the borders of our nations.

    After a whirlwind courtship, a move across the world, and the unexpectedly difficult re-entry from a year overseas, Leeana finds her life (and her soul) has been changed forever.With an artist’s eye, Tankersley uses each chapter to piece together moments and memories from her journey—a handwritten note from Kuwait, a braid of fringe from a Persian rug, an original poem, a bit of basting thread, a swatch of black silk from a borrowed abaya, a mesquite leaf, a Navy SEAL trident, a receipt from the Russian-Georgian restaurant on Louisiana Street—to create a work of unexpected beauty.Found art emerges … a literary collage created from salvaged stories of loss, hope, and belief that just might change your soul, too.

    The book provides not only amusement, but a commentary on how America has changed, and a celebration of those places that have been forgotten by conventional history.

    . . the ideal volume for anyone with a desire to know more about the struggle between Christianity and Islam in the Near East. . . . Beautifully illustrated, this informative guide to the major Crusades not only clearly defines the conflict and traces the individual campaigns but also places in context the historical roots of the 21st century tensions between Islam and the West."---Monterey County Herald"The book is a model of organization and pertinent illustration, with maps, sidebars, a chronology and an accessible bibliography. Given so fine and comprehensive an introduction, readers are likely to turn to the classic prose narratives, both Christian and Islamic. They will also have a new appreciation of the current Christian-Islamic conflict and its many roots."---ForeWord"[Crusades] is attractively illustrated and has a great number of boxes and sidebars offering a more detailed examination of people and events that are mentioned in the main text. A useful introduction to the subject for students and interested readers alike, [and] a fine addition to both public and academic libraries."---Library Journal* Includes more than 150 photographs, maps, and specially commissioned artworks, all in full color* With special features on a variety of key topics, from Jerusalem: City of Holy Places to the Glories of the Ottoman Empire