He dreamed of the Viking ideal, sailing to distant shores and battling honorable foes. Laden with gold, he would return home in glory. The same life of adventure that his grandfather, Ulfrik Ormsson, experienced awaited him. It proved a false dream. Along with his cousin and best friend, Yngvar discovers a world unlike the sagas of the great heroes. He encounters murder and treachery. Raiding is nothing more than merciless theft. True riches remain elusive and sea kings dominate the waves. Yngvar trusts to his honor and courage to carry him. Yet powerful enemies swarm all around him. Fate guides him into the teeth of a clash between two of history's mightiest jarls. He will require all his cunning and daring to survive. So begins a new saga of Viking adventure and war. Join the shield wall once more and witness the fierce history of the Norsemen.

    Why? Because the willingness to be offensive sets free the ruthless observer in all of us, the spiteful perceptive angel who sees and tells, unimpeded by nicety or second thoughts. There is truth-telling, and more, in meanness. —from "Negative Capability: How to Talk Mean and Influence People"Tony Hoagland has won The Poetry Foundation's Mark Twain Award, recognizing a poet's contribution to humor in American poetry, and also the Folger Shakespeare Library's O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, the only major award that honors a poet's excellence in teaching. Real Sofistikashun, from the title onward, uses Hoagland's signature abilities to entertain and instruct as he forages through central questions about how poems behave and how they are made.In these taut, illuminating essays, Hoagland explores aspects of poetic craft—metaphor, tone, rhetorical and compositional strategies—with the vigorous, conversational style less of the scholar than of the serious enthusiast and practitioner. Real Sofistikashun is an exciting, humorous, and provocative collection of essays, as pleasurable a book as it is useful.

    Magsy O’Gara, her husband killed in the war, plodded through her daily routine as a hospital cleaner, dedicating all her spare time to Beth, her genius daughter. Pursued by men who admired her great beauty, she was determined to remain a widow. Nothing was to divert her from her gruelling schedule. Her goal was simple: Beth would become a doctor.Beth, however, wanted a normal life – a brother, a sister, a stepfather who might make her wonderful mother happy. So Beth was delighted when a personable man began to court Magsy.Across, the road at number 1, Nellie Hulme, trapped in a world of silence, watched the other two Saturday girls. Deaf since infancy, Nellie had a secret so huge that it amused her. What would folk have thought had they known her true position in life? And why did she ‘hear’ in her dreams?

     Nesta was a consort to King Henry I, wife to Gerald of Pembroke and the captive-lover to Owain of Poweys. She is thought to be the original mother to the Tudor and Stuart Dynasties which Princess Diana and John F Kennedy are both descendants.

    But in the 1950s and 1960s, they were a pop culture phenomenon. The Great Books of Western Civilization, fifty-four volumes chosen by intellectuals at the University of Chicago, began as an educational movement, and evolved into a successful marketing idea. Why did a million American households buy books by Hippocrates and Nicomachus from door-to-door salesmen? And how and why did the great books fall out of fashion?In A Great Idea at the Time Alex Beam explores the Great Books mania, in an entertaining and strangely poignant portrait of American popular culture on the threshold of the television age. Populated with memorable characters, A Great Idea at the Time will leave readers asking themselves: Have I read Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura lately? If not, why not?

    The Curtain is a seven-part essay by Milan Kundera, along with The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed composing a type of trilogy of book-length essays on the European novel.

    Setting out on his own exploration, Roberto Calasso enters the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of Kafka’s work to discover why K. and Josef K.–the protagonists of The Castle and The Trial–are so radically different from any other character in the history of the novel, and to determine who, in the end, is K. The culmination of Calasso’s lifelong fascination with Kafka’s work, K. is also an unprecedented consideration of the mystery of Kafka himself.

     James Shapiro illuminates both Shakespeare’s staggering achievement and what Elizabethans experienced in the course of 1599, bringing together the news and the intrigue of the times with a wonderful evocation of how Shakespeare worked as an actor, businessman, and playwright. The result is an exceptionally immediate and gripping account of an inspiring moment in history.

    In this collection of lively and provocative pieces he talks about what readers want from books and how to look at the literature we encounter in a new light.

    Amongst his few possessions is a dagger which bears an unknown heraldic symbol. He joins a band of mercenaries heading for Venice where the Christians are assembling for the Crusade. On his journey from boy to manhood, discovering a surprisingly natural aptitude for combat, he encounters a secret Brotherhood and their avowed enemy The Order of the Blooded Cross. “The Crusader’s Blade” is the first of three novels that draw heavily on historical detail, intermingling real and fictitious characters and events to give an enthralling portrait of the religious battles of the age.

    John's Cluniac monastery in Lewes. Nestled in the baby's clothing is gold and ruby crucifix of tremendous value, which puzzles the prior. The boy is named Nicodemus (Nick), and is raised by highly educated monks. Unlike other monastic orders that believe in hard labor, the Cluniacs employ servants in order to dedicated more time to study. Groomed since boyhood to be a warrior monk, Nick is ready to fight for God in the Second Crusade. The only thing that stands in his way is pretty Gwen, the daughter of a kitchen maid who constantly haunts his thoughts and stirs forbidden desires. Nick and many other crusaders board a ship heading for Dartmouth, but a storm veers it off course and they arrive in Lisbon, instead. There he meets the wealthy and powerful Lord Richard Fitzwilliam of Kent, who eventually hands Nick the key to unlock the secrets of his true identity and allow him to take his rightful place in English society. Now he must choose between God and Gwen. From the feudal nobility of Medieval England to the exciting recapture of Lisbon from the Moors, and the bloody battlefields of the exotic East, Forbidden is a tale of Honor, Desire, Denial, Love, and Destiny, which can sometimes be cruel…

    Revenge is ripe on his tongue, and he means to have it. His younger sister was raped by an English bastard, and he was going to make him pay even if it meant he had to execute his vengeance on the miscreant's younger, innocent sister. An eye for an eye was the way he saw it.Madeleine Wynton lived her life simply. She had her father and three older brothers, whom she loved dearly. Her life was calm, and while it may seem boring to others, it satisfied her and gave her purpose. She aspired to enter the abbey where she would further serve others. A life of service would surely save her and her mother’s souls from purgatory, wouldn’t it? That was the plan, that is, until she was kidnapped for ransom. Luck wasn't always on her side, but fortunately for her that day, it was. A rather large, intimidating, and surly Highlander came to her rescue. He took her back to the Highlands, promising to send word to her father that she was safe and ready to return home. The more time she spent with Connor and his family, though, the more she began to question everything she always held as truth. Connor was going to make the English reprobates pay, and not even those wide innocent eyes resting above that sharp tongue of Maddie's, was going to make him abandon his intentions. He was not only sending word to Maddie’s father in the form of a ransom, but he also intended to seduce the Englishwoman into his bed. The revenge would taste sweeter if she willingly gave herself to him. Regrettably, Connor didn’t anticipate falling for Maddie’s stubbornness, wit, or charm. It was a dilemma further complicated by his need to keep her safe from one man who wanted to kidnap Maddie for ransom, and another who bought her from her father. Connor needed to keep his secret if he wanted to spend his life with Maddie. Secrets have a way of coming to light no matter how hard you try to keep them in the dark, and his will have everyone questioning the life they thought they knew. Can the love Connor and Maddie nurtured on a net of lies survive the fall when the deceit unravels, or will their love be a casualty of vengeance?The Highlander Who Saved Me is a stand-alone historical romance novel that will have you holding on through twists and turns. The Heart of a Highlander…where the only thing fiercer than a warrior’s battle cry, is the way that he loves…

    It could not anticipate what was to come after, neither could it grasp what had happened in literary theory in the light of where it was to lead.

    Two nations. One crown. 1328. After years of civil unrest between England and France, Charles IV dies, leaving no apparent heir. His closest heir to the throne is Edward III of England, but it passes instead to Charles' cousin, Phillip, spurring both countries on to war.1346. Landing at Normandy, Edward's immense army makes inroads into French territory, burning everything in their path. But the mysterious assassination of an English knight reveals a terrible truth: there is a traitor in their midst. The king charges Simon Merrivale, the Prince of Wales’ herald, with solving the case.As the army marches on towards its destiny, at the awesome scenes of the Battle of Crécy, Simon will uncover a conspiracy that goes to the heart of the warring nations. Among the ashes and the rubble, their fate will be decided: on the battlefield... and in the shadows.

    From our suburban streets that still trace out the boundaries of long vanished farms to the Norfolk Broads, formed when medieval peat pits flooded, from the ceremonial landscapes of Stonehenge to the spread of the railways - evidence of how man's effect on Britain is everywhere. In "The Making of the British Landscape", eminent historian, archaeologist and farmer, Francis Pryor explains how to read these clues to understand the fascinating history of our land and of how people have lived on it throughout time. Covering both the urban and rural and packed with pictures, maps and drawings showing everything from how we can still pick out Bronze Age fields on Bodmin Moor to how the Industrial Revolution really changed our landscape, this book makes us look afresh at our surroundings and really see them for the first time.