There were six of them — three Katherines, two Annes, and a Jane. One of them was the King's wife for twenty-four years, another for only a year and a half. One died, two were divorced, and two were beheaded. It was a dangerous, uncertain life. After the King's death in 1547, his sixth wife finds a box of old letters — one from each of the first five wives. They are sad, angry, frightened letters. They tell the story of what it was like to be the wife of Henry VIII of England.

Dartmoor. A wild, wet place in the south-west of England. A place where it is easy to get lost, and to fall into the soft green earth which can pull the strongest man down to his death. A man is running for his life. Behind him comes an enormous dog — a dog from his worst dreams, a dog from hell. Between him and a terrible death stands only one person — the greatest detective of all time, Sherlock Holmes.

Suddenly, there was a high voice screaming in the darkness: Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! It was Long John Silver's parrot, Captain Flint! I turned to run... But young Jim Hawkins does not escape from the pirates this time. Will he and his friends find the treasure before the pirates do? Will they escape from the island, and sail back to England with a ship full of gold?

Bathsheba Everdene is young, proud, and beautiful. She is an independent woman and can marry any man she chooses — if she chooses. In fact, she likes her independence, and she likes fighting her own battles in a man's world. But it is never wise to ignore the power of love. There are three men who would very much like to marry Bathsheba. When she falls in love with one of them, she soon wishes she had kept her independence. She learns that love brings misery, pain, and violent passions that can destroy lives...

After dinner we turned the lights out and played hide-and-seek. In the dark, I touched a hand, a very cold hand. Now, because of the game, I had to hide in the dark with... with this cold person — not speaking, not knowing who it was. Slowly the others found us, hid with us, until we were all there — all thirteen. Thirteen? But there were only twelve people in the house! We touched each other in the dark, counting. Thirteen. Quickly, nervously, I lit a match to see...

A complete intermediate course which develops essential language skills and introduces students to a wide range of exam tasks. Especially written and designed for young teenagers.

A complete intermediate course which develops essential language skills and introduces students to a wide range of exam tasks. Especially written and designed for young teenagers.

It is the year 2030, and an e-mail message arrives at New York Cafe: I want to help people and make them happy! But not everybody is happy about the e-mail, and soon the police and the President are very interested in the New York Cafe.

Every day someone steals money from people near the shops. We must stop this, says Dan, a police officer. The police use TV cameras but it is not easy because there are so many suspects — who is the robber?

At the start of this play, the court room is full for today's trial. Two young men, Simon Clark and Dan Smith, stand up. The clerk asks, Are you guilty of the murder of Mary Jones? Not guilty! they reply. But perhaps they are guilty. The police found the murder weapon in their stolen car, and there was blood on Simon's face. If the court finds them guilty, they will go to prison for a very long time. Can the lawyers find out the truth, by asking the right questions? Everyone in court wants to know who murdered Mary Jones, especially her mother, and her boyfriend, Jim. You can help to find the answer, too!

Sally is always running — and she has her phone with her all the time: at home, on the train, at work, at lunchtime, and at the shops. But then one afternoon suddenly she has a different phone... and it changes her life.

It's an interesting job, says Sally about her work at Happy Hills. And today is a very exciting day because Zapp the famous singer is coming. Everybody is having a wonderful time. But suddenly something goes wrong — very wrong.

The empty centre of Australia. The sun is hot and there are not many people. And when Bill meets a man, alone, standing on an empty road a long way from anywhere, he is surprised and worried. And Bill is right to be worried. Because there is something strange about the man he meets. Very strange...

A new edition of the dictionary that explains more than 10,000 of the most frequently used idioms in English today. This new edition has hundreds of new idioms and examples taken from our corpus. It also has more notes on the origins of idioms, notes to help with difficult vocabulary, study pages, exercises and cartoons to aid learning and add interest.

While Europe is certainly one of the richest and most educated areas of the world, some of the challenges faced by the old continent are staggering: low economic growth, structural difficulties in the labour market, and increasing international competition. Politicians and policymakers may advocate different means of overcoming the potential economic decline of Europe, but most agree that Europe needs to strengthen human capital, its ultimate competitive advantage in the world economy. This book looks at the accumulation of human capital from two perspectives, first through formal education and then professional training. It provides a useful summary of the key characteristics of education and training in Europe and also asks key questions about the fundamental problems with the current educational and training systems. More importantly, the book goes on to discuss which policies are necessary to make existing education and training systems more efficient, while also making higher skills available to a wider range of people.

Rachel Riley is the offspring of a depressingly unbroken home. Her mum and dad refuse to let her have a mobile phone, and have banned Ribena (too purple) and Eastenders (too common); her seven-year-old brother buys giant Des Lynam cut-outs and Will Young dolls from ebay and talks in Elvish; and the adopted dog eats her Pride and Prejudice boxed collection. It is time to change things. Rachel resolves that this year she will become tragic, literary and interesting — and will win the heart of Justin, the lead guitarist from Certain Death, along the way. Laugh-out-loud funny from beginning to end, this is a fresh new voice which will speak directly to teenagers everywhere. If Bridget Jones had kept a diary when she was a teenager, it is unlikely to have been this funny!

I rejoice, said Doctor Johnson, to concur with the Common Reader. For the last century, the tastes and preferences of the common reader have been reflected in the American and British bestseller lists, and this Very Short Introduction takes an engaging look through the lists to reveal what we have been reading — and why. John Sutherland shows that bestseller lists monitor one of the strongest pulses in modern literature and are therefore worthy of serious study. Along the way, he lifts the lid on the bestseller industry, examines what makes a book into a bestseller, and asks what separates bestsellers from canonical fiction. Exploring the relationship between bestsellers and the fashions, ideologies, and cultural concerns of the day, the book includes short case-studies and lively summaries of bestsellers through the years: from In His Steps — now almost totally forgotten, but the biggest all-time bestseller between 1895 and 1945, to Gone with the Wind and The Andromeda Strain, and The Da Vinci Code.

The expansion of executive powers amid the war on terrorism has brought the presidency to the center of heated public debate. Now, in The American Presidency, presidential authority Charles O. Jones provides invaluable background to the current controversy, in a compact, reliable guide to the office of the chief executive. This marvelously concise survey is packed with information about the presidency, some of it quite surprising. We learn, for example, that the Founders adopted the word president over governor and other alternatives because it suggested a light hand, as in one who presides, rather than rules. Indeed, the Constitutional Convention first agreed to a weak chief executive elected by congress for one seven-year term, later calling for independent election and separation of powers.Jones sheds much light on how assertive leaders, such as Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, and FDR enhanced the power of the presidency, and illuminating how such factors as philosophy (Reagan's anti-Communist conservatism), the legacy of previous presidencies (Jimmy Carter following Watergate), relations with Congress, and the impact of outside events have all influenced presidential authority. He also explores the rise of federal power and the dramatic expansion of federal agencies, showing how the president takes a direct hand in this vast bureaucracy, and he examines the political process of selecting presidents, from the days of deadlocked conventions to the rise of the primary after World War II. In 200 years, he writes, the presidency had changed from that of a person — Washington followed by Adams, then Jefferson — to a presidential enterprise with a cast of thousands. Jones explains how this remarkable expansion has occurred and where it may lead in the future.

Is today's language at an all-time low? Edwin Battistella argues that it is wrong to think of slang, regional dialects and nonstandard grammar as simply breaking the rules of good English. Reexamining debates over relativism in language, Battistella argues that we should view language as made up of alternative forms of regularity and orderliness, which require informed engagement with usage.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. This schoolyard rhyme projects an invulnerability to verbal insults that sounds good but rings false. Indeed, the need for such a verse belies its own claims. For most of us, feeling insulted is a distressing-and distressingly common-experience. In Sticks and Stones, philosopher Jerome Neu probes the nature, purpose, and effects of insults, exploring how and why they humiliate, embarrass, infuriate, and wound us so deeply. What kind of injury is an insult? Is it determined by the insulter or the insulted? What does it reveal about the character of both parties as well as the character of society and its conventions? What role does insult play in social and legal life? When is telling the truth an insult? Neu draws upon a wealth of examples and anecdotes-as well as a range of views from Aristotle and Oliver Wendell Holmes to Oscar Wilde, John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn, and many others-to provide surprising answers to these questions. He shows that what we find insulting can reveal much about our ideas of character, honor, gender, the nature of speech acts, and social and legal conventions. He considers how insults, both intentional and unintentional, make themselves felt-in play, Freudian slips, insult humor, rituals, blasphemy, libel, slander, and hate speech. And he investigates the insult's extraordinary power, why it can so quickly destabilize our sense of self and threaten our moral identity, the very center of our self-respect and self-esteem. Entertaining, humorous, and deeply insightful, Sticks and Stones unpacks the fascinating dynamics of a phenomenon more often painfully experienced than clearly understood.