Ricky France-Lynch was moody, macho, and magnificent. He had a large crumbling estate, a nine-goal polo handicap, and a beautiful wife who was fair game for anyone with a chequebook. He also had the adoration of fourteen-year-old Perdita MacLeod. Perdita couldnt wait to leave her dreary school and become a polo player. The polo set […]
Second Lieutenants Deepa Shekhar and Anjali Sharma have an important task at hand: convince their male counterparts that they too are assets to the Indian Army??rather than merely those with assets. When the 23-year-olds are transferred to a remote army unit, several hilarious situations follow, thanks to the stark novelty of a feminine presence in […]
Virgils great epic transforms the Homeric tradition into a triumphal statement of the Roman civilizing mission. The Aeneid is Virgils masterpiece. His epic poem recounts the story of Romes legendary origins from the ashes of Troy and proclaims her destiny of world dominion. This optimistic vision is accompanied by and undertow of sadness at the […]
It would take a deeply cynical heart not to fall in love with Rainer Maria Rilkes Letters to a Young Poet. At the end of this millennium, his slender book holds everything a student of the century could want: the unedited thoughts of (arguably) the most important European poet of the modern age. Rilke wrote […]
Ovids sensuous and witty poem brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation – often as a result of love or lust – where men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings. Beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the […]
I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death, John Keats soberly prophesied in 1818 as he started writing the blankverse epic Hyperion. Today he endures as the archetypal Romantic genius who explored the limits of the imagination and celebrated the pleasures of the senses but suffered a tragic early death. Edmund […]
Here is a delightful look at childhood, written by master poet and storyteller Robert Louis Stevenson. In this collection of sixty-six poems, Stevenson recalls the joys of his childhood, from sailing boats down a river, to waiting for the lamplighter, to sailing off to foreign lands in his imagination. Tasha Tudors watercolor paintings evoke a […]
Frederick Forsyth returns, after seven years, with a sensational new action thriller A young American aid volunteer, Ricky Colenso, is brutally murdered in former Yugoslavia. His grandfather, the Canadian billionaire Steven Edmond, is bent on revenge. The quest to find Ricky s murderer leads Edmond to Cal Dexter, ex-Vietnam Special Forces, the one man who […]
Allys not normally superstitious,but something freakys happening in Crouch End. She knows her home is usually a complete madhouse, but lately its even madder-paintings upside down,milk turning green, Winslet appearing as a ghostly apparition, covered in kitchen towel(?)..Then there are the noises at night-so spooky even Linn was scared enough to jump in Dads bed […]
Shirin-Gol was just a young girl when her village was leveled by the Russians bombs in 1979. After the men in her family joined the resistance, she fled with the women and children to the capital, Kabul, and so began a life of day-to-day struggle in her war-torn country. A life that included a period […]
The murder of a stranger in a Calcutta hotel leads Feluda and his friends to Kathmandu, straight into the den of Maganlal Meghraj, their old adversary. With an incident at Swayambhunath, an ambush in a prayer wheel factory, a thrilling night at the casino, and a prolonged LSD-induced delusion for Jatayu, the case soon turns […]