Drawing on a huge body of source material from different languages and countries throughout Europe, it provided a clear and comprehensive narrative and analytical account of the subject. It has established itself as the classic text with reviewers, students and the general reader.This second edition has been thoroughly revised to include the very latest research. The updated bibliographical information provides an invaluable resource, synthesising the major work in the field, in all languages, up to 1996.Written with great clarity and liveliness, the book brings alive the period in all its aspects. It covers the horrors of the war and the contorted politics of the period. It deals with all the major figures, including Wallerstein and Richelieu, Gustavus Adolphus and Tilly, the Winter King and the Habsburg emperors. For range and depth of coverage there is no other work like it. It has become the definitive book on the subject.

    Though originally denounced as pornographic, Kvachi's tale is one of the great classics of twentieth-century Georgian literature -- and a hilarious romp to boot.

    Not for long. By 1919, White Russians were fighting the Bolsheviks (Reds) for control of their country, and Winston Churchill (then Minister for War) wanted to see Communism 'strangled in its cradle'. So a volunteer R.A.F. squadron, flying Sopwith Camels and DH9 bombers, went there to duff up the Reds. 'There's a splendid little war going on,' a British staff officer told them. 'You'll like it.' Looked like fun. But the war was neither splendid nor little. It was big and it was brutal, a grim conflict of attrition, marked by cruelty, betrayal and corruption. Before it ended, the squadron wished that both sides would lose. If that was a joke, nobody was laughing. "A Splendid Little War" tests the pilots' gallows humour in a world of armoured trains and elegant barons, gruesome religious sects and anarchist guerrillas, unreliable allies and pitiless enemies. The comedy of this war, if it exists, is very bleak. Derek Robinson is at once our finest living comic novelist and a master of military fiction. Biggles was never like this.

    Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them.Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace--the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror--and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.

    With a name redolent both of dim antiquity and of a modern world and its tensions, the Armenians founded a civilization and underwent a diaspora that brought many of the great ideas of the East to Western Europe. Today, shrunk to a tenth of its former size and wracked by war with Azerbaijan and by earthquakes, its people still retain one of the world's most fascinating and misunderstood cultures.

    (Reprinted)

    A note on how to interpret the information given in an apparatus criticus is also included.

    It represents the ideal of an unattainable yet infinitely desirable goal, the possibility of perfection. Initially conceived in literature, it became a Christian icon which has been re-created in a multitude of forms over time even though the Grail has no specific material attributes or true religious significance.Richard Barber traces the history of the legends surrounding the Holy Grail, beginning with Chretien de Troyes's great romances of the twelfth century and the medieval Church's religious version of the secular ideal. He pursues the myths through Victorian obsessions and enthusiasms to the popular bestsellers of the late twentieth century that have embraced its mysteries. Crisscrossing the borders of fiction and spirituality, the quest for the Holy Grail has long attracted writers, artists, and admirers of the esoteric. It has been a recurrent theme in tales of imagination and belief which have laid claim to the highest religious and secular ideals and experiences. From Lancelot to Parsifal, chivalric romances to Wagner's Ring, T. S. Eliot to Monty Python, the Grail has fascinated and lured the Western imagination from beyond the reach of the ordinary world.

    Editor Faubion Bowers provides a foreword and many informative notes to the poems.

    When a mercurial Moscow blonde and a visiting British businessman conduct an affair through their Russian interpreter it reveals all the deceptions of love and East-West relations.

    They are best known as the "Four Branches of the Mabinogi," and comprise the tales of Pwyll, Branwen, Manawydan, and Math. The remaining stories also spring from the same tree, and together they form a collection that comprises the core of the ancient Welsh mythological cycle. They are also among the best the medieval Celtic literature has to offer.In the first thoroughly revised edition and translation of this world classic since Lady Charlotte Guest's famous Mabinogion went out of print, Mr. Ford has endeavored to present a scholarly document in readable, modern English. Basing his criteria on the latest scholarship in myth, he includes only those stories that have remained unadulterated by the influence of the French Arthurian romances. These are, in addition to the "Four Branches," the tale of "Kulhwch and Olwen," which is rooted in the mythological origins of Arthur, seen here in his role of divine hunter in pursuit of the swine-god; "Lludd and Lleuelis," which reaches beyond its immediate Celtic sources into ancient Indo-European ideologies; and the long unavailable "Tale of Taliesin," which offers insights into Celtic concepts of the archetypal poet-seer and the acquisition of Divine Wisdom.

    No other version has so vividly expressed the horror, cruelty, beauty, and outrageous imaginative flight of Dante's original vision.

    Well…uninhabited by humans, at least. Reports abound of such creatures as flying dinosaurs, goblins, shape shifters, and vicious bloodsuckers. Whether it’s the Mogollon Monsters or the weird Ninimbe (tiny elves anywhere from two inches to three feet tall) Arizona seems to have them, along with killer cacti and the Can Can Merman. Now, that’s weird!

    Containing over sixty selections from the finest of Russia's medieval authors, much of the material published in this anthology has never before been available in English. Medieval Russian Epics, Chronicles, and Tales is a vital resource for readers interested in learning more about the writings that influenced Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov.Editor Serge A. Zenkovsky completely revised the text and enlarged the book, adding almost one hundred pages of new material, including:- Sviatoslav's Early Campaigns - The Siege of Kiev and Olga's Death - Vladimir Monomakh: Instruction to His Children - Tale of the Life and Courage of the Pious and Great Prince Alexander - Narrative of the Pious Prince Dovmont and His Courage - The Writing of Daniil the Prisoner - Orison on the Life and Death of Grand Prince Dmitry Ivanovich - Afanasy Nikitin's Journey Across Three Seas - Ivan Funikov: Message of a Nobleman to a Nobleman - Epic of Sukhan - Simeon Polotsky: Excerpt from Ode on the Birth of Peter I - Simeon Polotsky: The Law - Simeon Polotsky: The Merchant Class - Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich: The Rules of FalconryIn addition to a comprehensive introduction, the editor has prefaced each selection with detailed information about its literary and historical background, and has included a glossary and brief chronology of Russian history and culture.

    It is difficult for us now, even with all our engineering and architectural skills, to imagine the extraordinary ways these medieval houses of worship were constructed. Midway through the twelfth century, the building of cathedrals became a crusade to erect awe-inspiring churches across Europe. In their zeal, bishops, monks, masons, and workmen created the architectural style known as Gothic, arguably Christianity’s greatest contribution to the world’s art and architecture. The style evolved slowly and almost accidentally as medieval artisans combined ingenuity, inspiration, and brute strength to create a fitting monument to their God. Here are the dramatic stories of the building of Saint-Denis, Notre Dame, Chartres, Reims, and other Gothic cathedrals.