The book opens with early 1950's life as viewed through the eyes of a child up until the age of seven, when out flow the memories of growing up in Ludlow, South Shropshire in the late1950's-early 1960's, capturing a mode of existence now lost in the mists of time. In the two main streets featured, only one house had a phone; prior to the late 50's only one had a TV set; laundry was done in sink or boiler, before being wrung through a mangle; most family vegetables were grown in the back ga...

A forsaken telephone is heard ringing in the woods and the fact our main character decides to answer it, leads to the question, 'What happens next?' He's of a rather nonconformist disposition and relates the ensuing adventure in a self-deprecating, conversational manner, weaving into his account many of the topics that people in Britain have to currently deal with. Some may find certain views contentious, especially regarding recent medical matters, while others could well applaud, that at...

The year is 401 BC, a new art form is burgeoning, what we now call La Tene, or Celtic, spreading north from the alpine regions. Three years earlier Athens had finally been defeated by Sparta and her allies; Rome is but a fledgling city state; the Etruscan confederation is in decline; hordes of Gallic warriors are rampaging south over the Alps and through all this, two from the far northern Tin Islands, blithely wander.It is a tale related by a contemporary storyteller, thankfully u...

The book describes how a character, starting with virtually no money and absolutely no knowledge of antiques, managed to learn and bit by bit, claw his way up the trade echelon to finally run a massive antique shop on the Welsh Marches. The tale includes door knocking escapades, the odd romantic dalliance, chanced successes, embarrassing failures, the antique ring, local gypsies, the Irish travellers, a court case and even a house clearance in Australia. It is related by a contemporary aut...

Sometime during the twentieth century, the self-mythology of the literary critic fused with that of the cowboy: lone outriders practising a defunct trade. In Holy Toledo! John Clegg tracks the critic's silhouette over the dangerous, sundrenched landscapes of New Mexico, California, Nashville, Utah, Oxford, Cambridge, and London. Here is Donald Davie listening to gospel radio in a Nashville taxi, and here is F.R. Leavis standing on a chair, 'unscrewing instead the world from round the light...

The chemist with a sample analyses an aliquot of that sample, a part of a part of a larger whole. The title of John Clegg's new collection speaks to the poems' sense of being parts of larger wholes, themselves parts of a larger whole... The scientific knowledge and the sometimes old-fashioned diction that abound in these poems are both part of worlds of reference in which sequencing (narrative, historical, scientific) is crucial and revelatory, as in the series of poems 'A Gene Sequence' w...

The Great Wasting is an investigative tale, that follows a slender thread back to the early 1900's in the West Sierran foothills, USA, where a story is unearthed that some may take as a parable, regarding a medical intervention that was recently rushed onto the market.Many will applaud the parody, but undoubtedly many more will feel somewhat affronted. Then when you consider a sprinkling of 'theys' and wokes has been stirred in, plus the fact many treated the 'safe and effective' n...

Invention and innovation are not the same. When we come up with an exciting and original new idea, by itself that idea is not an innovation. It is simply an invention, possibly a great invention, but at that point the hard work is still to be done. Innovation is that hard work. It is the process of turning that idea into something of value. In fact, innovation doesn’t necessarily need a great new idea to get it started. It is often nothing more than the recombination of existing ideas that...

Invention and innovation are not the same. When we come up with an exciting and original new idea, by itself that idea is not an innovation. It is simply an invention, possibly a great invention, but at that point the hard work is still to be done. Innovation is that hard work.It is the process of turning that idea into something of value. In fact, innovation doesn’t necessarily need a great new idea to get it started. It is often nothing more than the recombination of existing ide...

"His Last Bow" is one of 56 short stories about Sherlock Holmes by the renowned author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Set on the eve of the First World War, a German agent by the name of Bork is getting ready to leave England with a vast collection of intelligence...

24 Extremely Short Halloween Stories for your Briefest MomentsFrom a Hillary Clinton stripper to mythical beast-women in the harsh Scandinavian tundra and from an unusual band of steadfast teddy bears to the last man in zombie-occupied Chicago, fill your briefest moments with pulse-pounding frights and off-beat chuckles with this collection of 24 flash fiction stories.Commuting to work? Grabbing a quick coffee? Each story tells a complete t...

This edited volume provides the follow up to Erling et al.’s (2021) Multilingual Learning and Language Supportive Pedagogies in Sub-Saharan Africa. The strategies put forward in Volume 1 included multilingual pedagogies that allow students to draw on their full linguistic repertoires, translanguaging and other language-supportive pedagogies. While there is great traction in the pedagogical strategies proposed in Volume 1, limited progress has been made in terms of multilingual edu...