Patricia Craig – författare

The detective story, with its roots in Poe's Chevalier Dupin mysteries and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, first achieved mass popularity in the 1890s with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Its success has a good deal to do with its pungency, and with its power to intrigue and absorb the reader while abiding by the rules of the genre (however flexible these have become). Every age has produced a kind of detective fiction which exemplifies its distinctive manners and customs, from the sedate tales which began to appear in the wake of Sherlock Holmes to the debonair detection of the 1920s and after.The sleuth short story took off in many directions, with such writers as Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Crofts, Carter Dickson, and Edmund Crispin bringing the upmost expertise and ingenuity to bear on the detective theme. An increasing realism is apparent in the post-war era, though with no diminution in entertainment value, and as we come up to the present, the detective story has been adapted further to accommodate sexual comedy and other facets of modern life.This collection of 33 stories shows the scope, vigour, and enduring fascination of the detective story, as well as indicating its importance as a barometer of social attitudes and literary practices. It gathers together a wide range of stories, many unfamiliar by writers of the calibre of Agatha Christie, Julian Symons, Ngaio Marsh, G. K. Chesterton, P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Nicholas Blake, Michael Innes, and H. R. F. Keating.

The field of detective fiction is vast, and The Oxford Book of Detective Stories brings together the best short fiction from around the world to show how different nationalities have imposed their own stamp on the genre. As well as English and American stories from acknowledged masters such as Ellery Queen, Dashiell Hammett, and Agatha Christie, the anthology includes stories by Simenon, Conan Doyle, Sarah Paretsky, and Ian Rankin, and roams across Europe and further afield to embrace Japan, Denmark, Holland, Italy, Argentina, Czechoslovakia, and other countries. Women detectives, police procedurals, the amateur sleuth, locked-room mysteries are all here, and in her introduction Patricia Craig examines the figure of the detective in international literature.

From humble beginnings as a small desert laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology has evolved into a thriving international center of plant molecular biology that sits today on the campus of Stanford University. In the last hundred years it has witnessed immense changes in biological thinking, and been at the forefront of innovative research. This fourth in a series of five histories of the Carnegie Institution touches on the tangled beginnings of ecology, the baroque complexities of photosynthesis, the great mid-century evolutionary synthesis and the adventurous start of the plant molecular revolution.

From humble beginnings as a small desert laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology has evolved into a thriving international center of plant molecular biology that sits today on the campus of Stanford University. In the last hundred years it has witnessed immense changes in biological thinking, and been at the forefront of innovative research. This fourth in a series of five histories of the Carnegie Institution touches on the tangled beginnings of ecology, the baroque complexities of photosynthesis, the great mid-century evolutionary synthesis and the adventurous start of the plant molecular revolution.

This third volume of Patricia Craig’s trilogy or memoir – following her celebrated Asking for Trouble and A Twisted Root: Ancestral Entanglements in Ireland – takes its title from Louis MacNeice: “My diehard countrymen like drayhorses/drag their ruin behind them”. A memoir of her upbringing in Belfast and life in London, from the 1960s onwards – but with scenes from childhood, adolescence, and later. A view of the Troubles from elsewhere but based on a strong familiarity with Belfast attitudes and exigencies. Some dramatic incidents not in the public sphere – for example, the funeral of hunger-striker Joe McDonnell – are included. Much brilliant literary content is covered, as well as personal involvement with some notable Belfast characters, such as Sinn Féin’s Rita O’Hare, a close friend from schooldays (though later estranged).

Ireland is a country that arouses strong opinions: everyone has a view on its character, its foibles, its charm and its waywardness. It has inspired some of the best poetry and nurtured some of the best writers in the world, and in "The Oxford Book of Ireland" poets, novelists, artists, dramatists, historians, philosophers, peasants and aristocrats are brought together to celebrate and commemorate the nation and its people. Irish history lives more in the present than that of other countries, and there are constant reminders in these pages of past triumphs and tragedies, and their continuing impact on the national psyche. Conquest, famine, emigration, the decline of the language, the struggle for identity and independence are all charted here with a raw and passionate immediacy. Interwoven with episodes of national turbulence are lyrical sections on the Irish landscape and countryside, on the cities and the suburbs, the climate and the folk culture: high jinks and conviviality alongside reminiscence and disputation.

This title presents three central objectives in the light of rural Asia's 30-year population increase. They are to review trends and patterns in the quality of life, identify and analyze options for private and public policies and programmes to improve the quality of life, and to assess future prospects for the quality of life in the light of major influences such as globalization, privatization, and technological change. Such influences have the potential to reshape fundamentally the structure and performance of all national economies in Asia.