Roy McMillan
1) Pirates!
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Which pirate incubated chickens in camel-dung? What would Blackbeard do if you didn't hand over your jewellery (it wasn't nice)? Which pirate was called 'The Exterminator'? Where's the treasure buried? Why were two women dressed as men on the same pirate ship? Who made the Jolly Roger famous? And who was the greatest pirate ever?
This history answers all these questions and many more; it is the ideal introduction to the facts behind the great legends...
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"From the internationally best-selling author of Fatherland and the Cicero Trilogy--a chilling and dark new thriller unlike anything Robert Harris has done before. 1468. A young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives in a remote Exmoor village to conduct the funeral of his predecessor. The land around is strewn with ancient artifacts--coins, fragments of glass, human bones--which the old parson used to collect. Did his obsession with the past lead to...
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A servant and former slave is accused of murdering her employer and his wife in this astonishing historical thriller that moves from a Jamaican sugar plantation to the fetid streets of Georgian London.
The brutal double murder of renowned scientist George Benham and his eccentric French wife, Marguerite, has set London abuzz. Crowds pack the courtroom, the newspapers print lurid theories about the killings. But Frannie Langton claims she cannot recall...
4) Conclave
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"The Pope is dead. Behind locked doors of the Sistine chapel, 118 cardinals from around the world will cast their votes in the world's most secretive election. They are holy men, but they are men of the world, and they have rivals. And over the next seventy-two hours one of them will become the most powerful spiritual figure on earth."--Jacket.
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"Want to be a lifelong learner? Think small. Forget spending 10,000 hours in the pursuit of perfecting just one thing. The true path to success and achievement lies in the pursuit of perfecting lots and lots of small things--for a big payoff. Combining positive psychology, neuroscience, self-help and more, this delightfully illuminating book encourages us to circumvent all the reasons we "can't" learn and grow (we're too busy, it's too complicated,...
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Edward Posnett journeys to some of the most far-flung locales on the planet to bring us seven wonders of the natural world -- eiderdown, vicuña fiber, sea silk, vegetable ivory, civet coffee, guano, and edible birds' nests -- that promise ways of using nature without damaging it. To the rest of the world these materials are mere commodities, but to their harvesters they are imbued with myth, tradition, folklore and ritual, and form part of a shared...
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"For two months every year, from 1946 to his death eighteen years later, Ian Fleming lived at Goldeneye, the house he built on a point of high land overlooking a small white sand beach on Jamaica's stunning north coast. All the James Bond novels and stories were written here. This book explores the huge influence of Jamaica on the creation of Fleming's iconic post-war hero"--Dust jacket flap.
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A dark, fantastical satire of Communist utopianism by the author of The Master and Margarita.
Lauded Russian author and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov's A Dog's Heart (sometimes translated as The Heart of a Dog) is a zany, violent, and whimsical satire of the failures inherent in the dream of a Communist utopia, following dog-turned-human Sharik as he tries and fails utterly to live a life of goodness and virtue-but goodness and virtue as defined by...
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For almost two millennia, cathedrals have been among the most imposing, astonishing and inspiring buildings in Europe. Regardless of faith, their scale and architectural daring has never ceased to spark wonder. This guide traces the development of the cathedral from its earliest beginnings as a Bishop's house, through the Romanesque and Gothic periods and up to the most extravagant contemporary designs around the world. In doing so, it sheds light...
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The French Revolution marked the birth of modern Europe. From the storming of the Bastille to the horrors of the guillotine, the events of 1789 and after are among the most stirring—and most disturbing—in the continent's history. But what really happened in France during those turbulent closing years of the 18th century? And what does it mean for us in the 21st? This text tells the story of a nation's traumatic journey from absolute monarchy through...
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Latitude is a gloriously exciting tale of adventure and scientific discovery that has never been told before.
Crane, the former president of the Royal Geographic Society, documents the remarkable expedition undertaken by a group of twelve European adventurer-scientists in the mid-eighteenth century. The team spent years in South America, scaling volcanoes and traversing jungles before they achieved their goal of establishing the exact shape of the...
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The Pax Britannica trilogy is Jan Morris' magnificent history of the British Empire from 1837 to 1965. This final volume charts the decline and dissolution of what was once the largest empire the world had known. From the first signs of decay in the imperial ambition in the Boer Wars, through the global shifts in power evident in the two World Wars, it offers a perspective that is honest, evocative and occasionally elegiac.
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The Pax Britannica trilogy is Jan Morris' epic story of the British Empire from the accession of Queen Victoria to the death of Winston Churchill. Heaven's Command, the first volume, takes us from the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1837 to the Diamond Jubilee in 1897. The story moves effortlessly across the world, from the English shores to Fiji, Zululand, the Canadian prairies and beyond.
15) The Black Gang
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A fearsome cadre of ex-soldiers joins Bulldog Drummond on his second explosive adventure Eight evil men assemble in an English country house. Thieves, white slavers, drug dealers, and communists, they share one common goal: the destruction of everything that England holds dear. Police surround the manor in preparation for a raid. Suddenly, a gang of men in black masks appears and knocks the officers unconscious. Whips in hand, the Black Gang enters...
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London 1948: Eve Forrester is stuck in a loveless marriage, isolated in her gray and gloomy house when out of the blue, she receives a letter. A wealthy stranger has left her a mysterious inheritance but in order to find out more, she must travel to the glittering French Riviera.
London, 1948. Stuck in a loveless marriage, Eve Forrester receives a mysterious inheritance from a stranger. In order to find out more, she must travel to the glittering...
17) Conundrum
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This remarkable memoir is the classic account of the transgender journey. It is all the more extraordinary because it is the life story of a figure who, it seemed, seamlessly and publicly charted a course through the English establishment - James Morris, outstanding journalist, historian and travel writer, famed for a peerless writing style. But all the while he was concealing a very different inner world: from the age of four he felt that, despite...
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When he is hired as the personal piano tuner for a brilliant pianist, Brodie Moncur suddenly finds himself swept up into a life of luxury that he could never have imagined. But while accompanying his new employer on tours from Paris to St. Petersburg, Brodie falls madly in love with the Russian soprano Lika Blum: beautiful, worldly, seductive—and forbidden. Though seemingly doomed from the start, Brodie’s passion for Lika only grows as...
19) Vulcan 607
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THE THRILLING #1 BESTSELLING STORY OF ONE OF THE GREATEST COMBAT MISSIONS EVER FLOWN
Shoulder to shoulder with Strategic Air Command B-52s throughout the Cold War, the big delta-winged Vulcans of the Britain's V-bomber force faced down the Soviet threat to the West. In 1982 they were just months from retirement when they flew in anger for the first time.
It was to be a record-breaking mission of breathtaking audacity: a single bomber launched from...
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April 1982. Argentina invades the Falkland Islands.
In response, Britain dispatches a naval Task Force. Eight thousand miles from home, its fate hinges on just twenty Sea Harrier fighters against the two hundred-strong might of the Argentine Air Force.
The odds against them are overwhelming.
British Defense Chiefs' own estimates suggest that half the Harriers will be lost within a week. Against this background, 809 Naval Air Squadron is reformed,...