The story of the Renaissance city and palace of Urbino, and the life of the extraordinary man who created it: Federico da Montefeltro.'Painstakingly researched and yet unfailingly readable' Ross King'An insight into one of Renaissance Italy's most glamorous courts' Catherine Fletcher'The perfect tour guide to the past' Literary Review'A fabulous merging of seductive design with bravura scholarship'

An authoritative, richly illustrated history, and affectionate celebration, of Siena, one of the best-loved and most-visited cities in Italy.Occupying a hilltop site in the midst of a vast, undulating landscape, Siena is as much a magnet for contemporary tourism as Florence. However, its proud republican past presents an intriguing contrast with its Medici-dominated northern Tuscan rival, with which it tussled for local supremacy for much of the High Middle Ages. F...

The blueprint for achieving growth and driving shareholder value by embedding support for innovation into every facet of your businessBreaking Away is one of the first books to bridge the gap between leadership and innovation by revealing what it takes to create both breakthrough ideas and the leaders who make them happen.Written by the chief innovation officer for Coca-Cola and a leading recruiter of innovation leaders, Breaking Away pr...

Old Mortality (1816), which many consider the finest of Scott's Waverley novels, is a swift-moving historical romance that places an anachronistically liberal hero against the forces of fanaticism in seventeenth-century Scotland, in the period infamous as the `killing time'. Its central character, Henry Morton, joins the rebels in order to fight Scotland's royalist oppressors, little as he shares the Covenanters' extreme religious beliefs. He is torn between his love for ...

June Austen is one of the most well-known and widely-read English novelists of all times. Her other published works are-'sense and sensibility', 'Mansfield Park', and 'Emma'. Austen's transformation into one of the greatest writers in English history began only after her death. Her works started attracting scholarly attention in the 1920s. Today, Austen's works have become an important part of popular culture. They are not only a part of the English curriculum in school and collages but th...

When Mrs Dashwood is forced by an avaricious daughter-in-law to leave the family home in Sussex, she takes her three daughters to live in a modest cottage in Devon. For Elinor, the eldest daughter, the move means a painful separation from the man she loves, but her sister Marianne finds in Devon the romance and excitement which she longs for. The contrasting fortunes and temperaments of the two girls as they struggle to cope in their different ways with the cruel events which fate has in s...

Anne Elliot has grieved for seven years over the loss of her first and only love, Captain Frederick Wentworth. When their paths finally cross again, Anne finds herself slighted and all traces of their former intimacy gone. As the pair continue to share the same social circle, dramatic events in Lyme Regis, and later in Bath, conspire to unravel the knots of deceit and misunderstanding in this beguiling and gently comic story of love and fidelity. Juliet Stevenson reads this unabridged reco...

When timid, ten-year-old Fanny Price is plucked from her large, raucous and somewhat impoverished family in Portsmouth to live with wealthy relatives in Mansfield Park her life is changed for ever. Immediately forming a strong attraction for her cousin Edmund, she develops into a genteel and mature young woman, whose love for him remains undimmed despite the diversion brought into both their lives by the attractive but morally bankrupt Crawfords. With its suggestion of adultery, and writte...

When Catherine Morland, a country clergyman’s daughter, is invited to spend a season in Bath with the fashionable high society, little does she imagine the delights and perils that await her. Captivated and disconcerted by what she finds, and introduced to the joys of ‘Gothic novels’ by her new friend, Isabella, Catherine longs for mystery and romance. When she is invited to stay with the beguiling Henry Tilney and his family at Northanger Abbey, she expects mystery and intrigue at every t...

Arrogant, self-willed and egotistical, Emma is Jane Austen’s most unusual heroine. Her interfering ways and inveterate matchmaking are at once shocking and comic. She is ‘handsome, clever and rich’ and has ‘a disposition to think too well of herself’. When she decides to introduce the humble Harriet Smith to the delights of genteel society and to find her a suitable husband, she precipitates herself and her immediate circle into a web of misunderstanding and intrigue, from which no-one eme...

Jane Austen’s most popular novel, originally published in 1813, some 17 years after it was first written, presents the Bennet family of Longbourn. Against the background of gossipy Mrs Bennet and the detached Mr Bennet, the quest is on for husbands for the five daughters. The spotlight falls on Elizabeth, second eldest, who is courted by Mr Darcy though initially she is more concerned with the fate of her other sisters. This marvellous account of family life in Regency England is read with...

At the tender age of ten, Fanny Price is ‘adopted’ by her rich relations and is removed from the poverty of her home in Portsmouth to the opulence of Mansfield Park. The transplantation is not a happy one. Dependent, neglected and forgotten, Fanny struggles to come to terms with her new life until, tested almost to the limits of endurance, she assumes her rightful role.