Before people started writing about their tedious years in Provence or Tuscany or wherever, Derek Tangye and his wife gave up their urbane sophisticated life in London to move to a run down roofless cottage in Cornwall (that they could only lease, not buy) to earn a living from the land farming flowers - daffodils and violets - and potatoes in the 1950s!The early part of the book has fascinating details about cultivating flowers and potatoes on sloping fields near a cliff edge throughout the capricious and unpredictable Cornish seasons, dealing with potato salesmen, local farmers and getting the flowers on to the British Rail flower train. It sounds hideously boring, but bizarrely it's incredibly readable.You learn a lot about how much the UK has changed in the past 50 years or so and how places like Cornwall were in massive decay after the war. It's a great book to read if you're going down to Cornwall for a holiday and great to read if you want to get away in your mind at least from the grind of city life and dream about a simple, but very hard, life surrounded by nature and some lovely animals.

    This is the least of what happens, for the local watering hole soon becomes an out-and-out attraction for various eccentric characters ranging from uncouth rogues to members of academia.

    Written just before the British countryside was largely devastated by factory farming and the reckless use of herbicides and pesticides. Magical. The original book had photographs by the author, but this has b&w drawings for chapter headings only. Green cloth boards.

    This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Kingsley Amis’s scabrous debut leads the reader through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.More than just a merciless satire of cloistered college life and stuffy postwar manners, Lucky Jim is an attack on the forces of boredom, whatever form they may take, and a work of art that at once distills and extends an entire tradition of English comic writing, from Fielding and Dickens through Wodehouse and Waugh. As Christopher Hitchens has written, “If you can picture Bertie or Jeeves being capable of actual malice, and simultaneously imagine Evelyn Waugh forgetting about original sin, you have the combination of innocence and experience that makes this short romp so imperishable.”

    It begins with a row about a young man. My story begins, too, where the first woman's story began-in a garden. It was the back garden of our red-roofed villa in that suburban street, Laburnum Grove, Putney, S.W.

    Smith picks the pocket of a stranger, only to witness immediately the strangers murder. Smiths booty from the theft is an Important Document, no doubt worth quite a lot to somebody, which is proved by the pursuit of Smith by two very shady characters. Smith artfully dodges them and winds up in the odd company of a wealthy blind man, who takes Smith into his home and provides him with an education. But this new comfort is lost when Smith himself is suspected of the very murder he witnessed. Smith was a "Boston Globe--Horn Book" Honor Book, winner of the Phoenix Award, and a Carnegie Honor Book.

    . . . It helps us to go on, having Gary Snyder in our midst."--Los Angeles Times. Snyder is the author of many volumes of poetry and prose, including The Practice of the Wild and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Turtle Island. Reading tour.

    The Witch of Blackbird Pond with related readings.

    Fields, farms, hills and hedgerows appear altered, the wildlife behaves differently, and over time the terrain itself is transformed.In Rain, Melissa Harrison explores our relationship with the weather as she follows the course of four rain showers, in four seasons, across Wicken Fen, Shropshire, the Darent Valley and Dartmoor.Blending these expeditions with reading, research, memory and imagination, she reveals how rain is not just an essential element of the world around us, but a key part of our own identity too.

    The book was awarded the Eminescu Gold Medal' in 2000, when Eminescu was declared 'UNESCO-Year-2000-Poet-Of-The-Year'. The volume includes some the 'national' poet's time-honored gems like Luceafarul/The Evening Star, Glossa, Scrisoarea I / First Epistle Satire, Stelele-n Cer/Stars in the Sky, La Steaua/Onto the Star, among others.

    Against a magnificently embroidered backdrop of eighteenth-century France, he shows us Sade's incredible life of sexual appetite, adherence to Enlightenment principles, imprisonment, scandal, and above all inexhaustible imagination. Based on a decade of research and utilizing work never before published in English, The Marquis de Sade is a definitive work that confronts nearly two hundred years of myth to reveal a Promethean figure of astonishing complexity.

    "Possesses the suspense and chilling impact of Lord of the Flies." Washington Post Book World.

    'Electricity' is the story of a spirited, sensual young woman's adventures in 1880s, recounted with wit, candour and an intimacy of closely observed domestic and technical detail.

    Stumbling onward into adolescence he lays bare a young man's desperate attempts to make sense of a world distorted by alcohol, bullies and yes men, This striking first novel, or 'creative confession', is at turns hilarious and harrowing. Laced with lindes of unforgettable poetry it is that rare and wonderful thing - a book which had to be written.

    Drawing upon a lifetime of scientific expertise and abiding love of nature, Fortey uses his small wood to tell a wider story of the ever-changing British landscape, human influence on the countryside over many centuries and the vital interactions between flora, fauna and fungi.The trees provide a majestic stage for woodland animals and plants to reveal their own stories. Fortey presents his wood as an interwoven collection of different habitats rich in species. His attention ranges from the beech and cherry trees that dominate the wood to the flints underfoot; the red kites and woodpeckers that soar overhead; the lichens, mosses and liverworts decorating the branches as well as the myriad species of spiders, moths, beetles and crane-flies. The 300 species of fungi identified in the wood capture his attention as much as familiar deer, shrews and dormice.Fortey is a naturalist who believes that all organisms are as interesting as human beings – and certainly more important than the observer. So this book is a close examination of nature and human history. He proves that poetic writing is compatible with scientific precision. The book is filled with details of living animals and plants, charting the passage of the seasons, visits by fellow enthusiasts; the play of light between branches; the influence of geology; and how woodland influences history, architecture and industry. On every page he shows how an intimate study of one small wood can reveal so much about the natural world and demonstrates his relish for the incomparable pleasures of discovery.