Everyman's Library Barbreck – serie

Balmoral Castle and it’s 50,000-acre estate has been the private Highland retreat of The Royal Family since the 1850s.Queen Victoria and Prince Albert fell in love with the Scottish Highlands in the 1840s and built the present Grade A listed castle in 1856, one of the very favourite homes of The Royal Family ever since, hosting kings, queens, tsars, kaisers, statesmen, prime ministers and many others.Much of the interior of the castle can now be visited together with a new restaurant, café, visitor centre and shop.Well-marked footpaths allow visitors to walk over much of the estate, with its astonishing views of one of the most beautiful and wild parts of Scotland.A unique guide and gift book to be treasured.

Rosemary Shrager is mostly self taught, she has worked for Pierre Koffmann and Jean-Christophe Novelli. Now, in more than a hundred recipes, she shows us how to produce the very greatest cuisine at home.

From the end of the last Ice Age (10,000 years ago) to the death of Winston Churchill in 1965,Adrian Sykes narrates the history and achievements of these islands,their inhabitants and their origins,through the stories of some 3000+ men & women who have shaped not just our history but the modern world. The story is interspersed with countless inventions,deeds of daring do and wickednesses,as well as the origins of innumerable words and phrases,often surprisingly early,from Nosey Parker - Elizabeth I of her Archbishop of Canterbury,to mayonnaise - the battle of Mahon,which the victorious French admiral celebrated by inventing mayonnaise and after which we hanged Admiral Byng who lost it "to encourage the others",as Voltaire put it. Sykes astonishes on every page, whether with the origin of everyday phrases or nursery rhymes or the countless inventions of the British, from the lead pencil (1568), the tin can, the bicycle, screw propeller and jet engine to DNA, LCD crystals, cement, the electric kettle, the vacuum cleaner and Marmite.Beautifully illustrated and with maps of exceptional clarity,this is a book hard to put down in which you learn something very surprising on every page.

From the end of the last Ice Age (10,000 years ago) to the death of Winston Churchill in 1965, Adrian Sykes narrates the history and achievements of these islands,their inhabitants and their origins,through the stories of some 3000+ men & women who have shaped not just our history but the modern world. The story is interspersed with countless inventions, deeds of daring do and wickednesses, as well as the origins of innumerable words and phrases,often surprisingly early.From Nosey Parker - Elizabeth I of her Archbishop of Canterbury,to mayonnaise - the battle of Mahon,which the victorious French admiral celebrated by inventing mayonnaise and after which we hanged Admiral Byng who lost it "to encourage the others",as Voltaire put it. Sykes astonishes on every page, whether with the origin of everyday phrases or nursery rhymes or the countless inventions of the British, from the lead pencil (1568), the tin can, the bicycle, screw propeller and jet engine to DNA, LCD crystals, cement, the electric kettle, the vacuum cleaner and Marmite.Beautifully illustrated and with maps of exceptional clarity,this is a book hard to put down in which you learn something very surprising on every page.

'Open this book with reverence. It is a hymn to England - the old England, the England of beach huts and Constable skies.' Clive Aslet.This beautiful book acts both as a touchstone for people’s memories and as a guide to the visually lovely places and artefacts that we can still see and enjoy today, but as far away from a traditional ‘tourist’ guide as can be imagined.There is probably no illustrated book as eclectic as this. Where else will a Hornby clockwork train be happy alongside a Tiptree jam jar, or a Romney Marsh church rub along with a set of Len Deighton book jackets? A personal natural history of fungi and flowers will segue into an essay on Typhoo tea packets; London transports of delight into unique views of English market towns.Ruined Norfolk churches, the pleasures of seaside holidays, the mysteries of landmark fir trees. All these things are written about with passion, knowledge and humour.

A skinny Jewish kid from Philadelphia training to fight and likely die in the U.S. invasion of Japan in 1945, Stanley Weiss came home to the death of his loving but weak father, who left his mother penniless. Vowing on the spot not to let his insecurities limit him as they had his father, Weiss pledged that his mother would never have to worry. Later, a humiliation suffered at the hands of his wealthy girlfriend’s famous father ignited in him a determination to better himself in every way and live life to the fullest. Inspired by a Humphrey Bogart movie, Weiss moved to a foreign country to hunt for treasure—where Rule Number One was ‘’Don’t Die.’’ Along the way, his zest for living has taken him from the company of legendary artists and poets in Mexico, to writers and beatniks in 1960s San Francisco and Hollywood; from drunken nights with a notorious spy to friendships with three of the men who played James Bond; from glamorous parties in Gstaad and Phuket to power politics in London and Washington, DC. A story of growth, tenacious focus, and good humor, it stretches from the days of ‘’Don’t Die’’ to Weiss’s response when asked why business executives were interested in preventing nuclear war: ‘’Being dead is bad for business.’’ For those who believe the world is shaped by ordinary people who push themselves to do extraordinary things, Stanley Weiss’s story will inspire and surprise while reminding us all that being dead is bad for business—and being boring is bad for life.Stanley

This is a story – like all stories – about love and hate, friendship and betrayal, life and death, and above all, the kind of world we want to build. Like Wildfire Blazing is the debut novel by Mark Getty – and is an enigmatic look at the way power is exercised, ominously paralleling our current political landscape. Written in a unique, poetic style, imbued with wit and laden with references to ancient Greek and Roman history, this is unlike anything else you will read this year. "We know that tonight we may not see dusk, and that from tomorrow’s dawn our homes may never house us again. But now, right now, we are here in this world of trees, and sun, and wind, and rivers that run to seas, and seas that rise and fall like a beating heart …. We have good and bad and great and small; we have me for now, we have you, forever, I pray. But above all, we have hope. Tomorrow can wait."This book is a strikingly beautiful publication that evokes the quality of a private press publication of another era.

The at-a-glance layout of this guide allows collectors to plan their next trip to the United States or Europe around their collecting passion, providing them with the necessary information to find collections on, or related to their enthusiasm.

More from Unmitigated England is just that. Even more from the pen and camera of Peter Ashley, whose bestselling Unmitigated England prompted A. N. Wilson in his Daily Telegraph column to call it 'an absolutely stunning illustrated book'. This new volume promises more of Peter Ashley's very English passions, including breweries, paintings, children's books, canals and Christmas; with everything illustrated from the author's seemingly inexhaustive collections of photographs, watercolours and scrapbook items. And once again with an irreverent and often funny commentary that reminds us of an England that is both in the past and waiting to be discovered.

The Estancia is the story of a young boy growing up in the upper classes of the Argentine in the 1950s, set against the turbulent backdrop of Peronist rule. Revealing a now vanished society of the families of the great houses of Buenos Aires, their fin-de-siècle lifestyle, and the estancias which fed them, it is an autobiographical novel based on the author’s life. Narrated through the voice of Martín, a precocious. ten-year-old boy, it explores his intense and suffocating upbringing. After a childhood trapped and seduced in a domineering household of multiple mothers and an emotionally absent father, Martin believes he has finally escaped when taken on a cruise to Europe by his elderly great aunt. However, despite being freed from the steamy bathroom rituals of his family, the past continues to confront him and a secret surrounding his birth is revealed. Accompanying him on his journey of self-discovery, this vividly described panorama of the old New World explores the demise of high society and the incarceration of anyone showing disrespect for the government. Interspersed with flashbacks of his ancestor Ramos Mejia, who lived among the Pampa Indians and settled in the first estancia lands of the region, it is a poignant memoir of a truly unique life.

Between 1942 and 1944 a very small, very secret, very successful clandestine unit of the Royal Navy, operated between Dartmouth in Devon, and the Brittany Coast in France. It was a crossing of about 100 miles, every yard of it dangerous. The unit was called the 15th Motor Gunboat Flotilla: crewed by 125 officers and men, it became the most highly decorated Royal Naval unit of the Second World War.The 15th MGBF was an extraordinary group of men thrown together in the most secret of adventures. Very few were regular Royal Naval officers: instead the unit was made up of mostly Royal Naval Volunteer Officers and 'duration only' sailors. Their home was a converted paddle steamer and luxury yacht, but their work could not have been more serious. Their mission was to ferry agents of SIS and SOE to pinpoint landing sites on the Brittany coast in Occupied France. Once they had landed their agents, together with stores for the Resistance, they picked up evaders, escaped POWs who had had the good fortune to be collected by escape lines run by M19, as well as returning SIS and SOE agents.It is a story that is inextricably entwined with that of the many agents they were responsible for - Pierre Hentic, Yves Le Tac, Virginia Hall, Albert Hué, Jeannie Rousseau, Suzanne Warengham, François Mitterrand and Mathilde Carré, as well as many others. Without the Flotilla, such intelligence gathering networks as Jade Fitzroy and Alliance would never have developed, and SOE's VAR Line and MI9's Shelburne Escape Line would never have been realised. Drawing on a huge amount of research on both sides of the Channel, including private archives of many of the families involved, A Dangerous Enterprise brings the story of this most clandestine of operations brilliantly to life.

The best-selling biography of the greatest spy you've never heard of. A Suspicion of Spies is the first biography of 'Biffy' Dunderdale and tells the intriguing story of an extraordinary man – suave, sophisticated, genial and rich but also a ruthless and effective spymaster. Following his career, that spanned the Russian Revolution to the Cold War and beyond, A Suspicion of Spies is awash with stories of adventure, bravery, glamour and exoticism.1916, Russia. A 17-year-old Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale is working for his father, taking submarines from Vladivostok to St Petersburg for the Russian Imperial Navy. He takes a submarine out for sea trials along with a naval dockyard crew he’d never met before. Spotting a group of German ships, he gives the order to attack and sinks four of them. On returning to Kronstadt, breaking free from an anti-submarine net with just 30 minutes of oxygen left, he opens the hatch to find every gun in the port facing him and his crew. Fluent in Russian, he quickly defuses the situation. For this action he is awarded by Tsar Nicholas II the Order of St. Stanislav and the Order of St. Anne, imperial Russia’s highest knighthood for military valour and ‘bravery in battle’.Biffy, born and raised in Odessa, soon learnt to operate at all levels of Odessan society. Clearly highly intelligent, by 16 he was studying Naval Architecture and Naval Engineering in St Petersburg - broadening his education further in the waterfront bars of both Odessa and St. Petersburg.Aged 18 he was engaged by Naval Intelligence as an interpreter on account of his language skills, English, Russian, French, Polish and German. He would soon grow into a buccaneering member of the British Secret Intelligence Service in a career spanning forty years which Biffy described as ‘40 years of licensed thuggery.’Biffy appears in over 60 books and websites and yet no one has ever written the story of his life. ‘He was rather like a ghost one knew was there but the apparition never stood still long enough for a clear view.’ A Suspicion of Spies is the first ever biography of Biffy and tells the intriguing story of an extraordinary man – suave, sophisticated, genial and rich but also a ruthless and effective spymaster. Following his career, that spanned the Russian Revolution to the Cold War and beyond, A Suspicion of Spies is awash with stories of adventure, bravery, glamour and exoticism.Biffy was a lifelong friend of Ian Fleming and many have considered him to be the blueprint for Bond. There is likely some truth in this. The tales of action and intrigue found in this comprehensive biography could be taken straight from the pages of From Russia with Love, which Biffy acted as ‘consultant’ for.This biography is the story of the complicated intrigues of the world of intelligence. It is what the British are good at and Biffy was one of the best.

This story is not just another history of the SAS. It is the only biography of an extraordinary man, ‘whose courage made it easier for us to be brave’. Brian Franks, tough, capable and charismatic and loved by officers and soldiers alike, is largely unknown outside the Special Operations world but has been credited by David Stirling as being one of the five founding fathers of the SAS. A dashing bon viveur, he could move freely in all sections of society, from members of the royal family to junior soldiers. He was close friends with a wide range of characters. David Niven, Ian Fleming, Evelyn Waugh, and Winston Churchill as well as his military comrades – the Stirling Brothers, Paddy Mayne, Roy Farran and Bob Laycock. Set against the backdrop of World War II and the Cold War, Franks’ life was one of bravery, intrigue and glamour.As for the title of this book, in 1918 Franks wrote a letter to his parents from his prep school. The letter, written on lined, dusty pink paper, began, ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy, I hope you are well. Please send me an axe and four balloons…’. The reason for this strange request was never explained, but if the rest of Franks’ life is anything to go by, the possibilities are endless.