Westminster Abbey has held a hugely important role in Britain's History over the last 800 years. This fascinating book describes the inside of the Abbey, giving the reader an amazing insight into the architecture, history and feel of the building. Many full colour illustrations are included to give the reader a complete picture of this historic abbey where Kings and Queens are crowned. This version has been specially formatted for today's e-readers.

In 1996 Trainspotting was the biggest thing in British culture. Brilliantly and aggressively marketed, it crossed into the mainstream despite being a black comedy set against the backdrop of heroin addiction in Edinburgh. Produced by Andrew Macdonald, scripted by John Hodge and directed by Danny Boyle, the team behind Shallow Grave (1994), Trainspotting was an adaptation of Irvine Welsh's barbed novel of the same title. The film is crucial for understanding Briti...

A deliciously wicked comedy that proves that the female of the species is not only deadlier, but funnier than the male. From the author of the West End-hit, Honour.Thirty years ago Margot Mason, pioneer of the 1970's Women's Liberation movement and fearless academic, wrote her groundbreaking work, The Cerebral Vagina. Numerous best-sellers and international adulation followed, but now she has writer's block.As she sits in her country house struggling with ...

'Love is what interests me. It's just that love is indivisible from murder.'It's 1995 in the Swiss Alps and the ailing reclusive crime writer Patricia Highsmith is visited by a genial young man from her New York publisher, sent to convince her to write the final instalment of her best-selling Mr Ripley series. What first appears to be a standard cat-and-mouse game of wit and wiles, soon becomes a dance to the death. Who is the cat and who is the mouse? And … who w...

A spine-tingling romantic thriller.Charlotte is a Berliner through and through. Tom is a foreigner, travelling around Europe. After meeting in a bar, sparks fly between them and she invites him to spend the night at her place. As they navigate the ritual of seduction, their desire gives way to secrets that cannot be ignored and questions neither of them can answer. Does young love stand a chance against the suffocating reach of the past?Joanna Murray-Smith is one o...

'I'm ignited by three small words. I will not.'It's 9 October, 2012. She's been PM for two years and four months and she's worn down. She's been hounded, slurred, dissected, libelled. She's been violated over and over again by words. Julia Gillard's prime ministership was marred by the Australian media monopoly's inability to step over one thing: that she was a woman. A woman who, as a young aspiring lawyer, was told, 'When you are on your way up, don't forget the flowers ...

Kings are thy nursing fathers and their queens thy nursing mothers. From the reign of Edward the Confessor, the last sovereign of the royal Saxon race, till the death of Elizabeth, the last Tudor queen, these words of the old Hebrew prophet were literally applicable to the great West Minster. When Edward knelt within the Benedictine chapel on Thorneye, which had so miraculously withstood the ravages of the Danes, and vowed to dedicate a new church on the same spot to the glory of God and i...

When seemingly happily married couple Tess and Curtis announce that they're calling time on their 20-year relationship, Bonnie and Annie are devastated. Who will they have cosy foursome dinners with? What will happen to their carefully planned couples trip to Bhutan? And what will become of all their shared history?Joanna Murray-Smith's Three Little Words will have anyone who feels settled in matters of the heart shaking in their boots. The power of social connection and t...

In the mid-1950s C.P. Snow began his campaign against the 'two cultures' - the debilitating divide, as he saw it, between traditional 'literary intellectual' culture, and the culture of the sciences, urging in its place a 'third culture' which would draw upon and integrate the resources of disciplines spanning the natural and social sciences, the arts and the humanities. Murray Smith argues that, with the ever-increasing influence of evolutionary theory and neuroscience, and the pervasive ...

An unsettling play about infidelity seen from the perspective of the three women involved: the wife, the lover and the daughter.George and Honor have been happily married for thirty-two years. She is a successful writer, he is a revered columnist. They have a perfect understanding of each other. Until a pushy young female journalist - on an assignment to 'profile' George - quite deliberately seeks to undermine that understanding. The fallout is dreadful - but beautifully and convin...

Characters - those fictional agents populating the fictional worlds we spend so much time absorbed in - are ubiquitous in our lives. We track their fortunes, judge their actions, and respond to them with anger, amusement, and affection - indeed the whole palette of human emotions. Powerfully drawn characters transcend their stories, entering into our imaginations and deliberations about the actual world, acting as analogies and points of reference. And yet there has been remarkably little ...

Unparalleled in its coverage of concepts and themes, this textbook uses insights from across sociology, psychology, criminology and other areas of expertise to show how children and young people negotiate crucial challenges and transitions in their lives.It considers a wide range of theories, issues and practice dimensions and clearly shows how they connect, with fresh insights on topics including mental health, bereavement and disability in children. Foregrounding cultural diversi...