Simon Finch – författare

12,000 years ago the area that now forms the southern North Sea was dry land: a vast plain populated by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. By 5,500 BC the entire area had disappeared beneath the sea as a consequence of rising sea levels. Until now, this unique landscape remained hidden from view and almost entirely unknown. The North Sea Palaeolandscape Project, funded by the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund, have mapped 23,000 km2 of this “lost world” using seismic data collected for mineral exploration. "Mapping Doggerland" demonstrates that the North Sea covers one of the largest and best preserved prehistoric landscapes in Europe. In mapping this exceptional landscape the project has begun to provide an insight into the historic impact of the last great phase of global warming experienced by modern man and to assess the significance of the massive loss of European land that occurred as a consequence of climate change. Contents: 1) Mapping Doggerland Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson; 2) Coordinating Marine Survey Data Sources (Mark Bunch, Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson); 3) 3D Seismic Reflection Data, Associated Technologies and the Development of the Project Methodology (Kenneth Thomson and Vincent Gaffney); 4. Merging Technologies: The integration and visualisation of spatial data sets used in the project (Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson); 5) A Geomorphological Investigation of Submerged Depositional Features within the Outer Silver Pit, Southern North Sea (Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson; 6) Salt Tectonics in the Southern North Sea: Controls on Late Pleistocene-Holocene Geomorphology (Simon Holford, Kenneth Thomson and Vincent Gaffney); 7) An Atlas of the Palaeolandscapes of the Southern North Sea (Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney, Kenneth Thomson with Kate Briggs, Mark Bunch and Simon Holford); 8) The Potential of the Organic Archive for Environmental Reconstruction: An Assessment of Selected Borehole Sediments from the Southern North Sea (David Smith, Simon Fitch, Ben Gearey, Tom Hill, Simon Holford, Andy Howard and Christina Jolliffe); 9) Heritage Management and the North Sea Palaeolandscapes Project (Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson).See further information at Mapping Doggerland

Vesuvio is the golden Voyager, destined to journey through every cavern of depravity in the ancient world. It is a time when Rome was at its most decadent and throbbing with the muscle of slavery, the First Century A.D., an age of sensual adventure and unbridled sexuality. Following Golden Voyager and Pagan Voyager, the earlier volumes in the spectacular Voyager trilogy, comes the final chapter in the adventures of Vesuvio, Rome''s greatest hero. Vesuvio is now a rich man but after his son Aurelius is kidnapped by bandits he must fight against Rome''s decadence and cruelty. Vesuvio hunts for his son with help from the mistress of the most decadent brothel in Imperial Rome and has to secure passage on a pleasure galley sailing across the Mediterranean to Ethiopia to rescue his son. Following the bandits from the opulent Ethiopian capital, Axum, to the Egyptian port of Alexandria Vesuvio is again cast into slavery and punished as the embodiment of Rome. Aurelius must prove himself to be his father''s equal to escape slavery and return to Rome. Majestic in scope and sizzling with fast-moving action, Voyager in Bondage recreates history''s most decadent era, a time of sprawling arenas of blood and lavish beds of unimaginable pleasure, for anyone who has enjoyed movies such as Spartacus or Gladiator.

Vesuvio is the golden Voyager, destined to journey through every cavern of depravity in the ancient world. It is a time when Rome was at its most decadent and throbbing with the muscle of slavery, the First Century A.D., an age of sensual adventure and unbridled sexuality. In this, the first part of the Voyager trilogy Vesuvio, a virile young Roman aristocrat, is kidnapped and thrown into slavery. He is bought by the pirate master Lucco, but Vesuvio proves irresistible to Lucco''s fiery wife and Lucco sells him again to be a sexual slave in the court of Mesopotamia, that land of intrigue and perversion. Far from the civilised world of Rome, Vesuvio comes to understand that there is a way for mankind to exist without slavery. He returns to Rome dreaming of universal freedom and is thrown into the Colosseum where only victory in a chariot race will save his life as Roman crowds clamour for displays of death and sex, when he must confront his greatest enemy across the bloody sand of the Flavian amphitheatre. Golden Voyager tells of honour and loss, punishment and revenge among unspeakable savagery and unquenchable lust. These are the enthralling adventures of a man destined for greatness in an epic saga of the Roman Empire for anyone who has enjoyed movies such as Spartacus or Gladiator.