Bloomsbury

In this critically acclaimed novel, Harry Rent finds himself young and single and lost after the passing of his wife. Although numbed by his life’s unexpected turn, Harry becomes fixated on Molly, an obsidian-haired, twenty-two-year-old waitress. Meanwhile, Harry is forced to fend off Clare, his sister-in-law, who is convinced that Harry is...

This volume presents a theory of the circus as a secular ritual and introduces a method to analyze its performances as multimodal discourse. The book's fifteen chapters cover the range of circus specialties (magic, domestic and wild animal training, acrobatics, and clowning) and provide examples to show how cultural meaning is produced, extended...

'There's no way to soften this, so I'll say it outright. I already have a wife.'In a single sentence Walter Radcliffe destroyed everything Kate Sullivan had lived for up to their wedding day.Coventional family life in 1920s rural Somerset left her totally unprepared for the shame and disgrace of being jilted. Desperate to escape, she accepts the...

At approximately 5:15pm on the afternoon of May 11, 1812, Spencer Perceval, the all-powerful Prime Minister of Great Britain, was fatally shot at short range in the lobby of Parliament. His assailant was John Bellingham, a man who blamed his government for not intervening when he was unjustly imprisoned in Russia. The killer made no effort to...

This was the end of the story that had started 'Once upon a time, in a rainy country, there was a king...' The end had not happened in a rainy country, but on a bone-dry Spanish hillside, three hundred metres from where Van der Valk had left a lot of blood, some splintered bone, a few fragments of gut, and a ten-seventy-five Mauser rifle bullet. No...

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is widely held to be one of the most important thinkers in the history of philosophy. His contributions to ethics, political philosophy and psychology in particular were hugely innovative and he was regarded by his contemporaries as a major intellectual figure.This comprehensive and accessible guide to Hobbes's life and...