Andrew Martin - Böcker

This book discusses and analyses an important chess variation that is very modern and yet highly under-represented in chess literature.

The incredible story of Gyles Mackrell and his Burmese, elephant-assisted wartime rescue mission.In the summer of 1942, Gyles Mackrell – a decorated First World War pilot and tea plantation overseer, performed a series of heroic rescues in the hellish jungles of Japanese-occupied Burma – with the aid of twenty elephants.At the age of 53, Mackrell went into the ‘green hell’ of the Chaukan Pass on the border of North Burma and Assam. Here, Mackrell and a team of elephant riders rescued Indian army soldiers, British civilians and their Indian servants, from the pursuing Japanese, directing the elephants through raging rivers, and territory infested with sand flies, mosquitoes and innumerable leeches. Those he saved were all on the point of death from starvation or fever: that summer was spent in a fight against time.Now in Andrew Martin’s hands this tale of heroics is given the shape of a suspenseful adventure, a wartime rescue whose facts are the stuff of fiction. ‘Flight By Elephant’ is a gripping chronicle of war and survival, starring everyone’s favourite animal – the powerful, exotic and hugely loveable elephant.

Such novels as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days have made Jules Verne the most widely translated of all French authors. But he has typically been categorized as the father of science fiction or a writer of harmless fantasies for children. Now, in this brilliantly original new book, Andrew Martin relocates Verne squarely at the centre of the literary map.Dr Martin shows that a recurrent narrative (exemplified in short stories by Napoleon Bonaparte and Jorge Luis Borges), relating the strange destiny of a masked prophet who revolts against an empire, runs through Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires. This approach illuminates the paradoxical coalition in Verne of realism and invention, repression and transgression, imperialism and anarchy.In this book Verne emerges not just as a key to the political and literary imagination of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but as a model for reading fiction in general.

This book analyzes the interaction of European social models - the institutions structuring labor markets' supply side - and their turbulent macroeconomic environment from the deep Europe-wide recession, ending Germany's post-unification boom, through monetary union's establishment, to the Great Recession following the recent financial crisis. The analysis reaches two conclusions challenging the dominant view that the social models caused unemployment by impairing labor markets' efficiency in the name of equity. First, the social models' employment and distributive effects are far outweighed by their macroeconomic environment, especially in the Eurozone, where its truncated structure of economic governance transformed the Great Recession into a sovereign debt crisis. Second, instead of a trade-off between efficiency and equity, the employment effects of counteracting markets' tendency to generate inequality depends on the macroeconomic conditions under which it occurs and how it is done.

Europeans use 'social models' to refer to the combination of welfare state, industrial relations, and educational institutions jointly structuring what we can think of as the supply-side of the labor market. The dominant view in controversy over the social models has been that in the name of equity they have impaired the labor market's efficiency, thereby causing unemployment. But doubt is cast on this supply-side-only diagnosis by powerful macroeconomic developments, from the Europe-wide recession following Germany's post-unification boom to the deepest economic crisis since the interwar Great Depression, which the Eurozone's truncated economic governance structure transformed into a sovereign debt crisis, threatening the Euro's and even EU's very survival. This book explores the interaction of Europe's diverse social models with the major developments that shaped their macroeconomic environment over the quarter century since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It concludes that this environment rather than the social models are primarily responsible for the immense social costs of the crisis.

Cyber space is easily the most complex thing humans have ever created. With billions of people and devices all connected together, vulnerability and compromise are inevitable. The complexity continues to grow, and with it comes the emergent insecurity brought by an ever-developing frontier where digital devices and connected people meet. Security challenges present themselves increasingly often and with ever-greater impacts. This is not going to change anytime soon.Although the internet has transformed communication, business, and social life for the better, the construct of 'cyber space' is incredibly fragile and presents endless risk. Connecting every corner of our lives to those of billions across the world, the frontier is slender between the good and the bad, benefit and catastrophe, real and fake, security and insecurity. Cyber security advice can be confusing, contradictory, and sometimes utterly detached from reality. Too easily, people feel guilty for not knowing what to do, or failing to live up to expectations. People, particularly business leaders and policy makers, must daily make security-sensitive decisions, sometimes unknowingly, without being security experts.Securing the Digital Frontier doesn't offer easy answers, but instead explains sixteen dimensions of this dynamic problem and its current partial solutions. The strong technology of encryption has become commonplace, and is a huge benefit if deployed well: but how can you tell? Programming errors give rise to security problems, but why can we not eliminate them? Privacy is tied up with security, but can the two work against each other? Cyber space is international: how can domestic laws protect us? And what happens when those laws come into conflict with technologies like encryption? Why do you need a punctuation symbol and a capital letter in your password, anyway? Through a grasp of the big picture, through technical and human perspectives, we can begin to explore ways to unwind some of the complexity and find ways to contain the risk.

This highly original study is concerned with the theory of knowledge. It approaches the subject in a new way by exploring the recurrent paradox which equates pure ignorance with perfect knowledge, twin ideals free from the impurities and imperfections of discourse. The author combines the techniques of literary criticism and intellectual history in order to examine the literary, philosophical, theological, and political ramifications of this anxiety about, and ambition to transcend, the limits of the text. Dr Martin begins by tracing a network of interlocking motifs and images - beginning and end, nescience and omniscience, genesis and renascence, savagery and civilization - across a broad spectrum of texts from the Book of Genesis through the Renaissance (in particular the works of Nicholas of Cusa and Erasmus) to Rousseau. The central section of the book translates these temporal oppositions into the spatial antithesis of East and West in the Orientalism of Hugo, Napoleon and Chateaubriand. A final chapter draws together these apparently disparate themes in a consideration of the dichotomy of science and literature in Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires.

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is one of the most important developments in modern European politics. Building on two decades of monetary integration it transfers monetary policy, a core function of the modern state, to an independent European Central Bank (ECB) and limits member states' fiscal policy discretion. The ECB insists that growth and employment depend on 'flexibilizing' Europe's labor markets through deep reforms of the social policies and employment relations which comprise the 'European social model'. Member states retain authority over these areas at the heart of national politics, but how will EMU affect the domestic politics of institutional change? Will EMU reinforce de-regulation and retrenchment or will it facilitate reforms that maintain the protections against economic insecurity, inequality, and unilateral employer power the European model has provided? To address these questions, a transatlantic team of leading experts analyzes the evolving tensions between monetary integration and national social policies.

'Genuinely gripping ... A brilliant evocation of Edwardian working-class life - the sort of thing DH Lawrence might have written had he been less verbose or been blessed with a sense of humour.' Peter Parker, Evening StandardThe second Jim Stringer adventure, The Blackpool Highflyer is a superbly atmospheric thriller of sabotage, suspicion and steam. 'Unique and important ... There is no one else who is writing like Andrew Martin today.' Ian Marchant, Guardian'Evokes Edwardian Yorkshire and Lancashire, their great industrial prosperity and singular ways of living, quite brilliantly in a historical whodunnit which for its fresh and stealthy approach to past times deserves the adjective Bainbridgean.' Ian Jack, Guardian (Books of the Year)'A steamy whodunnit ... This may well be the best fiction about the railways since Dickens.' Michael Williams, Independent on Sunday

York, Winter, 1906 - two brothers have been shot to death. Meanwhile, Jim Stringer meets the Lost Luggage Porter, humblest among the employees of the North Eastern Railway company. He tells Jim a tale which leads him to the roughest part of town, a place where the police constables always walk in twos. Jim is off on the trail of pickpockets, 'station loungers' and other small fry of the York underworld. But then in a tiny, one-room pub with a badly smoking fire he enters the orbit of a dangerous, disturbed villain who is playing for much higher stakes . . .

When railwayman Jim Stringer moves to the garish and tawdry London of 1903, he finds his duties are confined to a mysterious graveyard line. Perplexingly, the men he works alongside have formed an instant loathing for him. And his predecessor has disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Can Jim work out what is going on before he too is travelling on a one-way coffin ticket aboard the Necropolis Railway? A gripping detective story, fabulously rich in atmosphere and period detail, The Necropolis Railway steams toward an unexpected conclusion.

A train hits a snow drift in the frozen Cleveland Hills. In the process of clearing the line a body is discovered, and so begins a dangerous case for struggling Edwardian railway detective, Jim Stringer. Jim's new investigation takes him to the mighty blast furnaces of Ironopolis, to Fleet Street in the company of a cynical reporter from The Railway Rover, and to a nightmarish spot in the Highlands. Jim's faltering career in the railway police hangs on whether he can solve the murder - but before long the pursuer becomes the pursued, and Jim finds himself fighting not just for his job, but for his very life as well.

It's the sweltering summer of 1911, and one Friday evening a young aristocrat arrives into the custody of detective Jim Stringer, a man recently found guilty of murdering his father in the sleepy village of Adenwold. He warns Jim of another murder likely to happen in the same village - that of his brother, a reclusive intellectual. When Jim and his wife Lydia arrive at Adenwold they encounter a host of likely suspects and the intended victim, and suddenly Jim has one weekend in which to stop a murder and unravel a conspiracy of international dimensions...

One night, in a private boarding house in Scarborough, a railwayman vanishes, leaving his belongings behind...It is the eve of the Great War, and Jim Stringer, railway detective, is uneasy about his next assignment. It's not so much the prospect Scarborough in the gloomy off-season that bothers him, or even the fact that the last railwayman to stay in the house has disappeared without trace. It's more that his governer, Chief Inspector Saul Weatherhill, seems to be deliberately holding back details of the case - and that he's been sent to Scarborough with a trigger-happy assistant. And when Jim encounters the seductive and beautiful Amanda Rickerby a whole new personal danger enters Jim's life...

On the first day of the Somme enlisted railwayman Jim Stringer lies trapped in a shell hole, smoking cigarette after cigarette under the bullets and the blazing sun. He calculates his chances of survival - even before they departed for France, a member of Jim's unit had been found dead. During the stand-off that follows, Jim and his comrades must operate by night the vitally important trains carrying munitions to the Front, through a ghostly landscape of shattered trees where high explosive and shrapnel shells rain down. Close co-operation and trust are vital. Yet proof piles up of an enemy within, and as a ferocious military policeman pursues his investigation into the original killing, the finger of accusation begins to point towards Jim himself . . .

Baghdad 1917. Captain Jim Stringer, invalided from the Western Front, has been dispatched to investigate what looks like a nasty case of treason. He arrives to find a city on the point of insurrection, his cover apparently blown - and his only contact lying dead with flies in his eyes. As Baghdad swelters in a particularly torrid summer, the heat alone threatens the lives of the British soldiers who occupy the city. The recently ejected Turks are still a danger - and many of the local Arabs are none too friendly either.For Jim, who is not particularly good in warm weather, the situation grows pricklier by the day. Aside from his investigation, he is working on the railways around the city. His boss is the charming, enigmatic Lieutenant-Colonel Shepherd, who presides over the gracious dining society called The Baghdad Railway Club - and who may or may not be a Turkish agent. Jim's search for the truth brings him up against murderous violence in a heat-dazed, labyrinthine city where an enemy awaits around every corner.

North East India, 1923. On the broiling Night Mail from Calcutta to Jamalpur, a man is shot dead in a first class compartment. Detective Inspector Jim Stringer was sleeping in the next compartment along. Was he the intended target? Jim should have known that his secondment to the East Indian Railway, with a roving brief to inspect security arrangements, would not be the working holiday he had hoped for. The country seethes with political and racial tension. Aside from the Jamalpur shooting, someone is placing venomous snakes - including giant king cobras - in the first class compartments of the railway. Jim also has worries on the home front: his daughter has formed a connection with a Maharajah's son, who may in turn have a connection to Jim's incredibly rude colleague, the bristling Major Fisher. Jim must do everything he can to keep his family safe from harm, as he unravels the intrigues that surround him...

Detective Superintendent George Quinn - Mayfair resident and dandy with a razor-sharp brain - has set up a new police unit, dedicated to investigating the super-rich. When he is shot in mysterious circumstances, DI Blake Reynolds is charged with taking over. But Reynolds hadn't bargained for Quinn's personal assistant - the flinty Victoria Clifford - who knows more than she's prepared to reveal...The trail left by Quinn leads to a jewellery theft, a murderous conspiracy among some of the most glamorous (and richest) Russians in London - and the beautiful Anna, who challenges Reynolds' professional integrity. Reynolds and Clifford must learn to work together fast - or risk Quinn's fate.Set in the heart of twenty-first-century Mayfair, a world of champagne, Lamborghinis and Savile Row suits, The Yellow Diamond is a brilliant new venture from one of our best loved crime authors - meticulously plotted, wonderfully humane and hugely enjoyable.

Founded by Al O'Connor in 1973, the steelband program at Northern Illinois University was the first of its kind in the United States. Thanks to the talent and dedication of O'Connor, Cliff Alexis, Liam Teague, Yuko Asada, and a plethora of NIU students and staff members, the program has flourished into one of the most important in the world. Having welcomed a variety of distinguished guest artists and traveled to perform in locales around the US and in Taiwan, Trinidad, and South Korea, the NIU Steelband has achieved international acclaim as a successful and unique university world music program. This fascinating history of the NIU Steelband traces the evolution of the program and engages with broader issues relating to the development of steelband and world music ensembles in the American university system. In addition to investigating its past, Steelpan in Education looks to the future of the NIU Steelband, exploring how it attracts and trains new generations of elite musicians who continue to push the boundaries of the steelpan. This study will appeal to musicians, music educators, ethnomusicologists, and fans of the NIU Steelband.

First published in 1950, A Commentary on the Charter of the United Nations presents a collection of documentary material detailing various aspects of the UN Charter. It discusses themes like the evolution of the Charter; purposes and principles; Pacific settlements of disputes; the General Assembly; the Security Council; International Economic and Social Co-Operation; the Economic and Social Council; the International Court of Justice; transitional security arrangements etc. to show how, during the first three years of the existence the organs of the United Nations have applied and interpreted the provisions of the Charter. This is an important historical reference work for scholars and researchers of international law, international relations and international politics and diplomacy.

First published in 1950, A Commentary on the Charter of the United Nations presents a collection of documentary material detailing various aspects of the UN Charter. It discusses themes like the evolution of the Charter; purposes and principles; Pacific settlements of disputes; the General Assembly; the Security Council; International Economic and Social Co-Operation; the Economic and Social Council; the International Court of Justice; transitional security arrangements etc. to show how, during the first three years of the existence the organs of the United Nations have applied and interpreted the provisions of the Charter. This is an important historical reference work for scholars and researchers of international law, international relations and international politics and diplomacy.

A young Northern woman called May is working inthe fabrics department of a grand London department store when a detectivecomes in, clutching a scrap of fabric. Any idea what this is . . ? May’ssuperiors aren’t interested, so she takes the piece of oddly carpet-like cloth– patterned in pretty yellows, purples and blues – and gets rid of the officerby offering to find out.It turns out to be a piece of railway moquette –but from which line, since no-one appears to have seen this striking pattern before - and how does it solve a murder? May’s investigations takeher out into Metroland, up to the textile mills of Halifax, and finally to the Isleof Wight. Can this plucky young woman solve the Moquette Mystery?Seats of London – a left-field guide to the colourful array of patterns adorningLondon’s Tube train, bus and train seats since the Thirties – has become an unlikely bestseller, and is already in its sixth printing. The Moquette Mystery is a kind of sequel , as well as a quirky and unique crime novel in its own right.

First published in 1984. This book represents a major study of union responses to the economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. Abjuring governmental or managerial outlooks, it argues that unions, as representatives of essential producer groups, would be central to the renegotiation of the economic world. The work also stresses the importance of situating union responses to the crisis within the socio-historical evolution of their political economies during the rise and decline of the post-war economic boom. The Social Democratic affiliation of unions in Britain, West Germany and Sweden make them particularly comparable. This title will be of interest to students of politics and economics.