The travel guide to the history of sex, love, and romance

Follow in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson with J. Maarten Troost, the bestselling author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals.Readers and critics alike adore J. Maarten Troost for his signature wry and witty take on the adventure memoir. Headhunters on My Doorstep chronicles Troost’s return to the South Pacific after his struggle with alcoholism left him numb to life. Deciding to retrace the path once traveled by the author of Treasure Island...

The laugh-out-loud true story of a harrowing and hilarious two-year odyssey in the distant South Pacific island nation of Kiribati—possibly The Worst Place on Earth.At the age of twenty-six, Maarten Troost—who had been pushing the snooze button on the alarm clock of life by racking up useless graduate degrees and muddling through a series of temp jobs—decided to pack up his flip-flops and move to Tarawa, a remote South Pacific island in the Republic of Kiribati. He...

Beginning with an atmospheric account of Tyburn, we are set up for a grisly excursion through London as a city of ne'er do wells, taking in beheadings and brutality at the Tower, Elizabethan street crime, cutpurses and con-men, through to the Gordon Riots and Highway robbery of the 18thcentury and the rise of prisons, the police and the Victorian era of incarceration. As well as the crimes, Arnold also looks at the grotesque punishments meted out to those who transgressed the law throughou...

Indonesian Ferry Sinks. Peruvian Bus Plunges Off Cliff. African Train Attacked by Mobs.Whenever he picked up the newspaper, Carl Hoffman noticed those short news bulletins, which seemed about as far from the idea of tourism, travel as the pursuit of pleasure, as it was possible to get. So off he went, spending six months circumnavigating the globe on the world's worst conveyances: the statistically most dangerous airlines, the most crowded and dangerous ferries, th...

Little is known and much less has been written about the Malayan theatre of operations of SOE from 1942-45. In this, his second book, Ian Trenowden, working closely with the wartime commander of Force 136, Group B, has built up a surprisingly complete picture of those operations and traces the evolution of the local SOE headquarters from a single desk in London’s Baker Street to the independent Ceylon HQ which, by the end of the war had put a total of 400 British officers and other ranks i...

The modern image of the pirate is derived from Captain Charles Johnson's accounts of the cut-throats who sailed under the Jolly Roger. It was he who gave mythical status to the likes of Blackbeard and Captain Kidd. Using contemporary sources, Nigel Cawthorne now turns the spotlight on the reality of pirate life, revealing the truth behind the legends. It gives us an insight into the men - and women - their weapons, their ships, their unhappy victims and their hide-outs, including the capit...

Lost London is the story of the city as told through the buildings, parks and palaces that are no longer with us. Places like the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, the leading venue for public entertainment in the city for over 200 years, or the Palace of Whitehall whose 1500 rooms made it the largest royal residence in Europe until it was destroyed by fire at the end of the 17th century. From bull rings to ice fairs, plague pits to molly houses, this is a fascinating journey through London's for...

Shirley MacLaine’s only child shares shocking stories from her out-of-this-world childhood with the famously eccentric actressShirley MacLaine is an Academy Award winning actress who has graced Hollywood with her talent for decades, known for her roles in The Apartment, Terms of Endearment, and recently the BBC/PBS smash Downton Abbey. Yet—as her daughter Sachi Parker can attest—growing up with the movie star was far from picture perfect....

**From the author of American Princess: The Love Story of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry comes a funny and delightful history of the royal weddings and marriages of Europe’s most famous—and infamous—monarchs. This edition includes bonus chapters!“An irresistible combination of People magazine and the History Channel.”—Chicago Tribune**Since time immemorial, royal marriages have had little to do with love—and almost everything to do with diplomacy ...

The Lives of the Twelve Caesars is a biographical work by the Roman historian, Suetonius. It is a collection of twelve biographies of the Roman emperors, from Julius Caesar to Domitian, covering the period from 49 BC to AD 96. The book is divided into chapters, with each chapter focusing on the life and reign of one of the twelve emperors.Suetonius was a secretary and adviser to the emperor Hadrian and had access to imperial archives and other official documents, which allowed him to provi...

What was it really like to be at sea in the Navy with Nelson? Were the sailors excited about the Battle of Trafalgar, or suffering scurvy? How did life compare between those of a high range, and those who served them? What were conditions like below the decks, living among the rats and the filth? How did you cope if you suffered from sea sickness? This book takes you back in time to see, hear, smell and taste what life was really like for these brave sailors at sea.