What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist—the Facts of Daily Life in 19th-Century England


Daniel Pool - 1993
    Author Daniel Pool provides countless intriguing details (did you know that the "plums" in Christmas plum pudding were actually raisins?) on the Church of England, sex, Parliament, dinner parties, country house visiting, and a host of other aspects of nineteenth-century English life—both "upstairs" and "downstairs."An illuminating glossary gives at a glance the meaning and significance of terms ranging from "ague" to "wainscoting," the specifics of the currency system, and a lively host of other details and curiosities of the day.

Spanish For Beginners: ¡Hola, Lola!


Juan Fernández - 2018
    He is just starting to learn Spanish from the very beginning. Reading about his daily life in the capital of Spain, you will learn about Spanish culture and improve your language skills along the way. This story is the first part in a series of Spanish Easy Readers called SPANISH FOR BEGINNERS, whose aim is to help you learn Spanish from scratch and reach an intermediate level. Therefore, the difficulty of the text and the language used in this short story have been adapted to help students revise and consolidate their grammar and vocabulary in Spanish at level A1 on the Common European Framework of Reference. Repetition, repetition, repetition… Repetition is key in this book: you will read the same words, the same expressions and the same grammar structures again and again. When learning new words and new expressions in a foreign language, repetition is essential. You need to read (and hear) the same words again and again, in different contexts, in order to understand its meaning and to be able to remember them later on. That is the reason we say this book is carefully designed to help you revise and consolidate fundamental vocabulary and basic grammar structures studied in any Spanish beginner course: you will read the same words, the same expressions and the same grammar structures again and again, in different contexts, in order to help you understand its meaning and be able to remember them later on. Vocabulary and comprehension questions. Each chapter comes with a list of the main vocabulary used in the text and reading comprehension questions to help you understand the story and learn the vocabulary and grammar involved.

The Living Road


Ajit Harisinghani - 2015
    From arid land to verdantfields, from jungles with glimpses of elephants and tigersto tea gardens…Along the way, he meets a yogi and his singing goat, exploresancient caves, is frightened in a wild life sanctuary, sees aschizophrenic bicycle and helps a police inspector overcomehis stammering problem. A variety of experiences later, heis finally in Thimpu where a Buddhist monk reveals theroad-map to being happy.A funny, honest and entertaining real-life adventure storythat promises to surprise, shock and perhaps even liberate!

Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: Royal Family Life


Ruth Binney - 2012
    From difficult childhoods to fashion icons, from love matches to divorces, and from unrehearsed coronations to assassination attempts and untimely deaths.Curiosity about Britain’s rulers and their next of kin never seems to wane, and it is this compendium about the lives of the members of the Royal Family that makes this so utterly compelling.

Gangs of Manchester: The Story of the Scuttlers


Andrew Davies - 2008
    The scuttlers were the hooligans of their day and for thirty years they held the streets of Manchester and Salford in a grip of fear. The Gangs of Manchester traces the history of the scuttlers from the Rochdale Road War of 1870-1, through the antics of such infamous fighters as the Bellis brothers of Salford and John Hillier, the King of the Scuttlers, until the demise of the gangs at the turn of the century.

High: Confessions of an International Drug Smuggler


Brian O'Dea - 2006
    Among the advertiser's references was the U.S. district attorney who was responsible for his arrest in 1990. The O'Dea family is well known in the Canadian province of Newfoundland, where Brian's father owned the local brewery before going into politics. But the family's prominence could not protect their middle son. Abused as a child by his local priest, Brian turned to using and selling drugs for the escape and excitement they offered. By the early 1980s, he was operating a $100 million a year, 120-man business, and had developed a terrifying cocaine addiction. Under increasing threat from the DEA in 1986, he quit the trade - and the drugs - and began working with recovering addicts in Santa Barbara. Despite his life change, the authorities caught up with him years later and Brian was arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years at Terminal Island Federal Penitentiary in Los Angeles Harbor. A born storyteller, Brian O'Dea candidly recounts his incredible experiences in the streets of Bogota with a false-bottom suitcase lined with cocaine, to the engine compartment of an old DC-6 whose engines were failing over the Pacific, to the cell blocks overcrowded with small-time dealers who had fallen victim to the justice system's perverse bureaucracy of drug sentencing. Weaving together extracts from his prison diary with the vivid recounting of his outlaw years and the dawning recognition of those things in his life that were worth living for, High tells the remarkable story of a remarkable man in the late-1980s drug business.

Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century


Harold Koda - 2006
    Featuring beautiful color photographs of the exhibition’s installation, details of the garments, and supplementary historical material, the book demonstrates how the extravagant clothing of the period reiterated the splendor of Rococo and Neoclassical interiors.

Law and Disorder: Confessions of a Pupil Barrister


Tim Kevan - 2010
    He has just one year to win, by foul means or fair, the sought-after prize of a tenancy in chambers. Competition is fierce, but, armed with a copy of Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War', BabyBarista launches a no-holds barred fight to the death to claim the prize.

Jane Austen's England


Roy A. Adkins - 2013
    Jane Austen’s England explores the customs and culture of the real England of her everyday existence depicted in her classic novels as well as those by Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Drawing upon a rich array of contemporary sources, including many previously unpublished manuscripts, diaries, and personal letters, Roy and Lesley Adkins vividly portray the daily lives of ordinary people, discussing topics as diverse as birth, marriage,  religion, sexual practices, hygiene, highwaymen, and superstitions.From chores like fetching water to healing with  medicinal leeches, from selling wives in the marketplace to buying smuggled gin, from the hardships faced by young boys and girls in the mines to the familiar sight of corpses swinging on gibbets, Jane Austen’s England offers an authoritative and gripping account that is sometimes humorous, often shocking, but always entertaining.

Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present


Alison Matthews David - 2015
    Clothing is designed to protect, shield and comfort us, yet lurking amongst seemingly innocuous garments we find hats laced with mercury, frocks laden with arsenic and literally 'drop-dead gorgeous' gowns.Fabulously gory and gruesome, Fashion Victims takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the lethal history of women's, men's and children's dress, in myth and reality. Drawing upon surviving fashion objects and numerous visual and textual sources, encompassing louse-ridden military uniforms, accounts of the fiery deaths of Oscar Wilde's half-sisters and dancer Isadora Duncan's accidental strangulation by entangled scarf; the book explores how garments have tormented those who made and wore them, and harmed animals and the environment in the process. Vividly chronicling evidence from Greek mythology to the present day, Matthews David puts everyday apparel under the microscope and unpicks the dark side of fashion.Fashion Victims is lavishly illustrated with over 125 images and is a remarkable resource for everyone from scholars and students to fashion enthusiasts.

Baby Day by Day


Ilona Bendefy - 2012
    Using a unique chronological structure that helps parents navigate baby's first 365 days, "Baby Day by Day" provides new parents with everything they need to know about looking after their child, from birth to twelve months.Written by a panel of pediatricians, child psychologists, nutritionists, and complementary medicine experts, "Baby Day by Day" provides an unbiased approach to baby care that gives the pros and cons of various approaches, including sleep training, managing crying, and breastfeeding issues.Providing answers to common queries and baby dilemmas, suggestions for age-appropriate games and developmentally stimulating things to do with your baby, as well as a comprehensive health section discussing common childhood ailments, "Baby Day by Day" also looks at the most recent discoveries about how babies' minds work and how parents can use these insights to guide their child's development.

Hustling Hard For A Happily Ever After: …and how I made my dreams a reality one mantra at a time...


Frankie Love - 2020
    She believes you can too.

Albert, Prince Consort


Hector Bolitho - 2014
    Indeed, it is difficult to guess which of the two would be more averse to the other’s speeches. It may also occur to the reader that, whereas Prince Philip has acted as a modernising and almost dashing influence on the Queen, Albert appears to have been a staid and restraining one on Victoria. For it must be remembered that Queen Elizabeth had been Heiress Apparent for far longer than Victoria, who was, when she married, a gay young girl by the standards of her age. Although it is fairly certain that Albert and Prince Philip would have disliked each other on sight, they have both been guided by the highest sense of duty. It is this sense of duty, in spite of considerable hostility and dislike of the ‘foreign ways’, that make Albert’s life of such interest. If he had accomplished nothing else, his influence on the dealings with the Union States of America, just before his death, would ensure him an important place in British History. In ‘Albert, Prince Consort’, Hector Bolitho explores the life and personality of Prince Albert, from his birth in Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, his marriage and restraining influence on Queen Victoria and his early death from typhoid. Hector Bolitho is deservedly renowned for his Royal Biographies. ‘Flowing and lively biography’ - Cobden Sanderson (Henry) Hector Bolitho (28 May 1897 – 12 September 1974) was a prolific author, novelist and biographer. In total, he had 59 books published. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent publisher of digital books.

The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York


Patricia Cline Cohen - 1998
    Patricia Cline Cohen goes behind these first lurid accounts to reconstruct the story of the mysterious victim, Helen Jewett. From her beginnings as a servant girl in Maine, Helen Jewett refashioned herself, using four successive aliases, into a highly paid courtesan. She invented life stories for herself that helped her build a sympathetic clientele among New York City's elite, and she further captivated her customers through her seductive letters, which mixed elements of traditional feminine demureness with sexual boldness.But she was to meet her match--and her nemesis--in a youth called Richard Robinson. He was one of an unprecedented number of young men who flooded into America's burgeoning cities in the 1830s to satisfy the new business society's seemingly infinite need for clerks. The son of an established Connecticut family, he was intense, arrogant, and given to posturing. He became Helen Jewett's lover in a tempestuous affair and ten months later was arrested for her murder. He stood trial in a five-day courtroom drama that ended with his acquittal amid the cheers of hundreds of fellow clerks and other spectators.With no conviction for murder, nor closure of any sort, the case continued to tantalize the public, even though Richard Robinson disappeared from view. Through the Erie Canal, down the Ohio and the Mississippi, and by way of New Orleans, he reached the wilds of Texas and a new life under a new name. Through her meticulous and ingenious research, Patricia Cline Cohen traces his life there and the many twists and turns of the lingering mystery of the murder. Her stunning portrayals of Helen Jewett, Robinson, and their raffish, colorful nineteenth-century world make vivid a frenetic city life and sexual morality whose complexities, contradictions, and concerns resonate with those of our own time.From the Hardcover edition.

Sock-Yarn Shawls: 15 Lacy Knitted Shawl Patterns


Jen Lucas - 2013
    They come in many colorways and fiber contents--and they're everywhere. Best of all, they're versatile; you can use these fabulous fibers for a lot more than socks. You can make shawls!Learn how to work from a knitting chart; instructions for 15 striking shawls are charted "and "written outGet tips for choosing the right yarn--from fiber content to color--plus tips on using stitch markers, making shawls bigger, and moreMake great gifts; find a variety of knitted-shawl patterns to suit yourself and your friends