saw the corrupt and bloody reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, as well as the Year of the Four Emperors. It also saw the rise of Vespasian, the destitute son of a provincial senator who brought peace to the empire after years of strife, court intrigue, and murder. Written from the perspective of Caenis, a female slave who was Vespasian's forbidden love, the future emperor advances in his climactic struggle for power. But as Vespasian brings hope to the people of Rome...he brings only despair to the one woman who loves him most.

    A commander on both land and sea, he led his armies to victory after victory.But like the heroes in a great Greek tragedy, he was a victim of his own pride, arrogance, excess, and ambition. Accused of crimes against the state, he was banished from his beloved Athens, only to take up arms in the service of his former enemies.For nearly three decades, Greece burned with war and Alcibiades helped bring victories to both sides — and ended up trusted by neither.Narrated from death row by Alcibiades’ bodyguard and assassin, a man whose own love and loathing for his former commander mirrors the mixed emotions felt by all Athens, Tides of War tells an epic saga of an extraordinary century, a war that changed history, and a complex leader who seduced a nation.

    This wry tale follows bumbling bureaucrat Walter F. Starbuck from Harvard to the Nixon White House to the penitentiary as Watergate’s least known co-conspirator. But the humor turns dark when Vonnegut shines his spotlight on the cold hearts and calculated greed of the mighty, giving a razor-sharp edge to an unforgettable portrait of power and politics in our times.

    Here, many famous names are mentioned and there is obviously a grave risk that families and friends are going to take offence... Uncle Oswald discovers the electrifying properties of the Sudanese Blister Beetle and the gorgeous Yasmin Howcomely, a girl absolutely soaked in sex, and sets about seducing all the great men of the time for his own wicked, irreverent reasons.

    The manner is what Goethe called 'a cultured comic language'-a genre which he regarded as not possible in Geman and which he felt Byron managed superbly.

    edition includes 16 pages of supplementary materials.Cover design by Richard L. AquanCover illustration from the Mary Evans Picture Library; painting of Great Fire of London on stepback

    From these sparse facts, one of our most distinguished novelists has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving work of fiction.Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impale their dead and converse with the spirit world. But then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilization and nature, as enacted by a poet who once catalogued the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it.

    Including sections on Greek and Roman Gods, Minor Deities, Heroes and the practices of the time, it also includes a large number of illustrations. This version has been specially formatted for today's e-readers, and is a fantastic addition to any eBook collection. Whether you are a student of ancient history, or just want to know more about Zeus, Saturn, Icarus and the

    But this year strange things were happening, terrifying things that had never happened before. Inexplicable sounds and smells; new, unimaginable creatures half glimpsed through the leaves. What the people didn't, and perhaps never would, know, was that the day of their people was already over.From the author of Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors is a startling recreation of the lost world of the Neanderthals, and a frightening vision of the beginning of a new age.

    With the country in the grip of the Black Death, brothers John and William fear that they will shortly die and go to Hell. But as the end draws near, they are given an unexpected choice: either to go home and spend their last six days in their familiar world, or to search for salvation across the forthcoming centuries – living each one of their remaining days ninety-nine years after the last.   John and William choose the future and find themselves in 1447, ignorant of almost everything going on around them. The year 1546 brings no more comfort, and 1645 challenges them still further. It is not just that technology is changing: things they have taken for granted all their lives prove to be short-lived.   As they find themselves in stranger and stranger times, the reader travels with them, seeing the world through their eyes as it shifts through disease, progress, enlightenment and war. But their time is running out – can they do something to redeem themselves before the six days are up?

    Hailed by critics as animating "the grand sweep and the intimate details that bring the distant past vividly to life" (Economist) in a way that makes "your hair stand on end" (Christian Science Monitor) and spanning nearly a thousand years of history, this "highly informative, highly readable" (Dallas Morning News) work examines not just how we think of ancient Rome but challenges the comfortable historical perspectives that have existed for centuries. With its nuanced attention to class, democratic struggles, and the lives of entire groups of people omitted from the historical narrative for centuries, SPQR will to shape our view of Roman history for decades to come.

    Part 1 King Henry IV. Part 2 King Henry V King Henry VI. Part 1 King Henry VI. Part 2 King Henry VI. Part 3 King Richard III King Henry VIII Troilus and Cressida Coriolanus Titus Andronicus Romeo and Juliet Timon of Athens Julius Caesar Macbeth Hamlet King Lear Othello Anthony and Cleopatra Cymbeline Pericles Venus and Adonis Rape of Lucrece Sonnets Lover's Complaint Passionate Pilgrim Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music Phoenix and the Turtle

    Volume 1 was published in 1776, going thru six printings; 2-3 in 1781; 4-6 in 1788-89. It was a major literary achievement of the 18th century, adopted as a model for the methodologies of historians.The books cover the Roman Empire after Marcus Aurelius, from 180 to 1590. They take as their material the behavior & decisions that led to the eventual fall of the Empire in East & West, offering explanations.Gibbon is called the 1st modern historian of ancient Rome. By virtue of its mostly objective approach & accurate use of reference material, his work was adopted as a model for the methodologies of 19-20th century historians. His pessimism & detached irony was common to the historical genre of his era. Although he published other books, Gibbon devoted much of his life (1772-89) to this one work. His Memoirs of My Life & Writings is devoted largely to his reflections on how the book virtually became his life. He compared the publication of each succeeding volume to a newborn.Gibbon offers an explanation for why the Roman Empire fell, a task difficult because of few comprehensive written sources, tho he wasn't the only historian to tackle the subject. Most of his ideas are taken from what few relevant records were available: those of Roman moralists of the 4-5th centuries. According to Gibbon, the Empire succumbed to barbarian invasions because of lost of civic virtue. They'd become weak, outsourcing defence to barbarian mercenaries, who became so numerous & ingrained that they took over. Romans had become effeminate, incapable of tough military lifestyles. In addition, Christianity created belief that a better life existed after death, fostering indifference to the present, sapping patriotism. Its comparative pacifism tended to hamper martial spirit. Lastly, like other Enlightenment thinkers, he held in contempt the Middle Ages as a priest-ridden, superstitious, dark age. It wasn't until his age of reason that history could progress.

    Eight hundred years earlier, on the eve of a brutal crusade that will rip apart southern France, a young woman named Alais is given a ring and a mysterious book for safekeeping by her father. The book, he says, contains the secret of the true Grail, and the ring, inscribed with a labyrinth, will identify a guardian of the Grail. Now, as crusading armies gather outside the city walls of Carcassonne, it will take a tremendous sacrifice to keep the secret of the labyrinth safe.

    Jerome's Three Men in a Boat includes an introduction and notes by Jeremy Lewis in Penguin Classics.Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a 'T'. But when they set off, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather forecasts and tins of pineapple chunks - not to mention the devastation left in the wake of J.'s small fox-terrier Montmorency. Three Men in a Boat was an instant success when it appeared in 1889, and, with its benign escapism, authorial discursions and wonderful evocation of the late-Victorian 'clerking classes', it hilariously captured the spirit of its age.In his introduction, Jeremy Lewis examines Jerome K. Jerome's life and times, and the changing world of Victorian England he depicts - from the rise of a new mass-culture of tabloids and bestselling novels to crazes for daytripping and bicycling.