Captain Pugwash is delighted at the prospect of earning five hundred golden crowns for smuggling barrels of brandy across the English Channel. But little does he suspect what is really inside the barrels! Luckily Tom the quick-witted cabin-boy uncovers Cut-throat Jake's dastardly plot and not only saves the day, but secures the Captain's reward as well!

In AD 79, the volcano Vesuvius erupted, burying the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum under ash and rock, and leaving them remarkably well preserved for centuries. While Pompeii has been extensively written about and popularized, the remains of its sister city, a smaller yet wealthier community close to the sea, are less widely known, but they have yielded spectacular archaeological evidence. This is the first major study of Herculaneum since Joseph Jay Deiss's book, published in 1966 and last revised in 1993. And in any language there have only ever been a handful of books available, mostly guidebooks and exhibition catalogues. It is based on the latest excavation work and incorporates much new material that has revolutionized our understanding of the site. Illustrated with more then 300 newly taken colour photographs and archive illustrations, it is the definitive overview for the general public of what we know and understand about Herculaneum, of what is still unknown and mysterious, and of the potential for future discoveries in both archaeological and political contexts.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti is the most intriguing and flamboyant figure in nineteenth-century British art. He inspired the first Pre-Raphaelite generation of 1849 and the second generation ten years later and both brought about significant changes in British art. His poetry, too, acted as a stimulus to many writers at the end of the century, who saw in his subtle manipulation of the sonnet and the ballad forms ways of giving expression to issues that were peculiar to the that century. Dominant among those issues was that of sexual desire, for Rossetti, more than any other artist in this period, struggled with the contradictions of sexuality. When he died in 1882 people knew of him as the painter of alluring women with exotic names — Lilith, Monna Vanna, Fiammetta — and the writer of subtly erotic verse. He projected onto women his anxieties, his pleasures and his needs. He also mythologized them, so that Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, Jane Morris and others became for him Beatrice, Guenevere, and Isolde. In doing so he shaped them, he changed the direction of their lives, and in some cases he both made and destroyed them. This richly illustrated book, by tracing the development of Rossetti's painting and poetry in the context of the drama of his life, follows this powerful thread. Sometimes sensual, at others spiritual, Rossetti's mission was to transcend the Manichean division that separated body and soul and, through the visionary power of art, reconcile what he saw as elements fundamental to human experience.

'No other city has the variety of hairstyles male and female that parade the streets of London. The bouffant, the duck arse, the white wings of power swept over the ears, the coxcomb punk, the flat top, the social outrider's bowl cut. They're all there to make a place. In respect of the hair of the 80s, the rest of the world was dead from the neck up.' Buy a 35 mm camera at the beginning of 1980 and spend the next 10 years walking around London taking half a roll of black and white a day and photograph whatever happens in front of you. You get Mick Jagger, New Romantics, ra-ra skirts, Boy George, Sloane Rangers. The beginning of Covent Garden, yuppies, the IRA bombings, the Iranian Embassy siege. Hundreds of headlines — John Lennon Shot Dead, Royal Romance: Andrew To Wed. Margaret Thatcher's London, fashions that came and went. Here are 160 unique street photographs of London when it was the style, musical, political and fashion capital of the world.

This entertaining collection of rhymes explores counting backwards, counting in twos, and counting numbers beyond 10. From 'Five Little Monkeys' and 'Ten in a Bed' to 'One, two, buckle my shoe' and 'One hundred bees round a hive', these rhymes provide a rich range of enjoyable opportunities to familiarise children with ways of manipulating numbers. An introduction, 'Cracking the Code', discusses ways of learning to count and use numbers beyond 10 — tens and teens — thus providing a useful help for adults. Collected by a highly reputable early years educationalist with the clear aim of developing early number skills, these rhymes are vividly illustrated by an exciting new talent in children's picture books. This is a book that no foundation stage class should be with out.

Find out about all things British in this unusual alphabet picture book. A is for Arthur, B is for Beatles… this innovative new picture book delight looks at some of the things that give the UK its vibrant and unique cultural identity.

In Japanese gardens, visitors find nature consdensed and brought to perfection: trees are trained and sculpted; the finest natural landscapes are reproduced in miniature; and the seasons are celebrated with spring blossom and the fiery leaves of autumn. In this introduction to Japanese gardens Helena Attlee captures the essence of Japanese garden style and gives an outline of its history. She then explores in detail 28 of the great Japanese gardens, explaining their character and nature. Alex Ramsay's superb photographs, specially taken for the book, illustrate every aspect of the gardens.

Since the mid-1990s an exciting building project has been underway, new cancer caring centres that offer a fresh approach in architecture and health. Named after Maggie Keswick and co-founded with her husband, the writer and landscape designer Charles Jencks, these centres aim to be at all the major British hospitals that treat cancer. Already six have been completed and six more are in the pipeline. Starting in Scotland, where the first were built, they have implications well beyond their modest size and origins. Complementary to the large hospital, and huge National Health Service, they present a face that is welcoming, risk-taking, aesthetic and spiritual; and with their commitment to the other arts, including landscape, they bring in the full panoply of constructive means. Basically they are a new mixed building type for healing that has several roots in the past. As Jencks and Heathcote show this hybrid quality is a response to the condition of cancer, its myriad causes and bewildering number of possible therapies. The architecture of hope is this new hybrid genre emerging with Maggie Centres, and a multiple metaphor that corresponds in kind to the many different types of cancer and their various treatments. Such caring centres, offering psychological, social and informational guidance, will inevitably grow in the future with an aging population, and cover the myriad of chronic problems such as heart disease. Because the genome project increases choice of treatment, cancer caring centres are a model for what may soon become a standard building type. The Centres have been designed by well known architects Richard Murphy, Page and Park, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers. Further projects underway include buildings by Richard MacCormac, the late Kisho Kurokawa, Piers Gough, Foreign Office Architects, Wilkenson & Eyre and Rem Koolhaas. Almost all of these architects were close friends of the architectural critic Charles Jencks and his late wife Maggie, whose vision was the initial inspiration. This close friendship and commitment helps explain the somewhat unusual choice of designers. But the Centres are committed first to helping cancer sufferers help themselves, to inspiring carers to care more, and secondly to architecture. The allegiance of arts and building in the perennial struggle with cancer leads to the architecture of hope. As patients walk into a Centre after a diagnosis, or an enervating treatment, often disoriented and losing self-confidence, they enter another world which acknowledges their importance and operates on a basic condition that may become prevalent: living with cancer and not losing hope.

For anyone who wants their children to understand and love the art of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, this guide has questions and answers about thirty amazing objects. Anticipating how children will react to artifacts ranging from a Congolese mask or a Sioux warrior's tunic to a Javanese puppet or an Easter Island Moai, each section begins with very simple observations — 'This face doesn't look very African!' — and moves on to more complex questions such as 'What do the decorations on the forehead and temples represent?', 'Does white mean something special in Africa?'. Written in everyday language for people with no art expertise or teaching experience, the book includes maps, colour coding and thumbnail images to help you see where each featured work of art comes from. The explanations also include guidance on what's most appropriate for what age, from four to fourteen. There are invaluable tips for planning a visit to a museum and a thorough discussion of modern western perceptions of world art and the tricky terminology associated with the subject.

London now ranks alongside Paris, New York and Milan as a global fashion capital, and it has produced such outstanding designers as John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan and Stella McCartney. Style City tells, for the first time, the story of how that came about, describing how fashion developed in Britain from the early 1970s, when designer fashion scarcely existed, to the present day. The story is told largely through interviews with the designers and opinion-shapers of the time, among them Paul Smith, Philip Treacy, Jasper Conran, Bruce Oldfield, Betty Jackson, Wendy Dagworthy and Antonio Berardi. Ravishingly illustrated, the book includes photographs by David Bailey, Barry Lategan, Chris Moore and other leading fashion photographers, as well as many from the designers' own archives.

Sandra Lousada grew up amidst a circle of actors, writers and artists living alongside the River Thames at Hammersmith. Through her grandfather, A.P. Herbert, her mother, the stage designer Jocelyn Herbert, and Jocelyn Herbert's lover, George Devine, founder of the Royal Court, she had privileged access to the worlds of literature, the arts, and the theatre. By the late 1950s she had begun to forge a language of her own, using the camera as her medium. This book is a rare compilation of photographs, culled from a career spanning over half a century, capturing Lousada's insider view of figures such as Lawrence Olivier and Joan Plowright, Vanessa Redgrave, Julie Christie, Helen Mirren, Joanna Lumley and David Hockney as well as images from her glittering career as a fashion and beauty photographer working for magazines including Queen, Vogue, Tatler, and Harpers.

Brian May's painstaking excavation of exquisite stereo photographs from the dawn of photography transports the reader back in time to the lost world of an Oxfordshire village of the 1850s. At the book's heart is a reproduction of T R Williams' 1856 series of stereo photographs Scenes In Our Village. Using the viewer supplied with this book, the reader is absorbed profoundly into a village idyll of the early Victorian era: the subjects seem to be on the point of suddenly bursting back into life and continuing with their daily rounds. The book is also something of a detective story, as the village itself was only identified in 2003 as Hinton Waldrist in Oxfordshire, and the authors' research constantly reveals further clues about the society of those distant times, historic photographic techniques, and the life of the enigmatic Williams himself, who appears, Hitchcock-like, from time to time in his own photographs. The product of more than 30 years research, the mixture of social, photographic and biographical detail is handled with admirable lightness of touch, belying the depths of scholarship which underpin this ambitious enterprise.

Old Macdonald's farm is full of surprises. What's that in the pram? Who's flying a plane? What's got four arms and goes beep? Lift the flaps and see for yourself.

This book takes the reader on a guided tour of London's public squares, community and allotment gardens, front gardens and window boxes – and the myriad and monumental public parks, from the grand formality of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens to the wild heathland of Hampstead and the commons. Illustrated with photographs that capture all the diversity of London's green spaces, presenting a unique and fresh viewpoint on the familiar, crammed with intriguing information as well as practical details, this book is for Londoners, gardeners and environmentalists, and for all visitors to the city.

Van Gogh was inspired by the beauty and colours of nature. He brought this passion to life in some of the most vibrant depictions of the natural world ever put to canvas. This book takes a look at this side of the artist's life and work. It offers insight into the artist's unique vision with the help of his most beautiful paintings and excerpts from his own writings. We see that flowers such as the iris and the sunflower served as emblems of self-identity and that the fields were a testament to the cycle of life and a warning of the inevitability of death. The book offers a portrait of the joy and pleasure that Van Gogh experienced in his life and expressed with his brush.

Part of the Sticker Art Shapes series, this book offers children a chance to get to know six of Arcimboldo’s paintings on a truly interactive level. Young readers see a finished painting on one page, and on the opposite page, they recreate it with reusable stickers. Arcimboldo’s lively portraits, made of painted fruits, vegetables, and flowers, provide children with a unique understanding of composition, color, and style.

What is a Treevipus? A fantastic creature with the head of a trunkfish, the body of a weevil and the tail of a platypus, of course! Here, a host of creatures presented in humorous pictures and informative captions take on new names, and a hilarious new identity when their heads, bodies and legs are swapped around as the pages are flipped. Tony Meeuwissen's witty interchangeable text and beautifully detailed artwork combine to make an exceptional novelty book.

The British Library Diary 2008 is illustrated with works from the Topographical Collection of George III, now held by the British Library. The collection of some 50,000 items, dating back from 1824 to around 1588, includes printed maps and topographical drawings, watercolours and prints. There are works by leading 18th-century watercolourists, among them Paul Sandby, William Pars, Samuel Hieronymus Grimm and Michelangelo Rooker. This evocative collection is far more than a mere accumulation of maps and views, it is an expression of British patriotism and it breathes the interests, activities and attitudes of the British people.

The harder gardeners work, the more problems seem to multiply. But if we let them, plants can do much of the hard work for us. This remarkable book, first published in 1997 and now revised and reillustrated, shows how plants can be combined into self-governing communities to create naturalistic low maintenance gardens. The universal principles of 'matrix' gardens are explained, and illustrated with case studies showing detailed applications. Further chapters explore soil health, biological controls in the garden, pools and wetlands, shrubs and perennials, and how to pull it all together in a string self-sustaining design.

In this fully revised edition of a classic design and style sourcebook, Robin Williams shows you how to make beautiful gardens in which every element fits harmoniously into a whole. With a wealth of examples and plans, including three-dimensional sketches, he sets out the general principles of garden design and guides you through the process of assessing the plot, finding a style and choosing every garden element, from paths to planting. The book shows a full range of types, materials and styles for every garden detail and advises on suitability for different garden situations, how to design and construct them and how best to place them. Straightforward explanation, professional experience and outstanding illustrations combine to make this a handbook on which anyone making a garden can completely depend.