The New York City of the not-too-distant future is a surveillance state. Thousands of video cameras are mounted on street corners and in subways, and a special corps of elite NYPD officers roam the city undercover with high-tech tranq-guns. It's the era of "PEACE," an acronym for "Police Enforced Anti-Crime Environment," and it's turned New York into a city where no crime -- from petty vandalism to first-degree murder -- goes undetected.Enter Mac Wells, a cop whose legendary cool re...

Nothing has been the same in The Prince's household since he traded one of his fine hunting dogs for a strange, green-jacketed monkey, and now his Kingdom, in Medieval Gwynedd, is starting to suffer. One thousand years later, in modern day Beddgelert, Martyn Llewellyn is struggling to recover from a traumatic childhood and has been offered the chance to make a name for himself at Bangor University through conducting an experiment on dogs. The lives of Martyn, The Prince, and The Prince's s...

Neoliberalism, with its worldview of competition, choice and calculation, its economisation of everything, and its will to govern has ‘sunk its roots deep’ into Early Childhood Education and Care. This book considers its deeply detrimental impacts upon young children, families, settings and the workforce. Through an exploration of possibilities for resistance and refusal, and reflection on the significance of the coronavirus pandemic, Roberts-Holmes and Moss provide hope that neoliberalism...

This best-selling guide to undertaking your Early Years research project takes you on a practical step-by-step journey. Breaking down each section into accessible and digestible topics, and accompanied by a multitude of practical examples, case studies, research summaries and key points, the author brings this process to life.The updated and revised edition includes:All chapters have been updated with new content on working in an online environmentCompletely...

The Datafication of Primary and Early Years Education explores and critically analyses the growing dominance of data in schools and early childhood education settings. Recognising the shift in practice and priorities towards the production and analysis of attainment data that are compared locally, nationally and internationally, this important book explores the role and impact of digital data in the ‘data-obsessed’ school. Through insightful case studies the book critiques policy ...

From a young age Carly Holmes has been in thrall to the creatures that live around us. Her childhood companion was a blind gander called Beep Beep who thought she was his wife. She nearly postponed her wedding when a pair of wrens nested in a hole by her back door and cut it very fine to fledge their chicks into an assorted audience of cats and magpies. This collection of essays, beautifully illustrated throughout, are each of them love letters to the Teifi valley and to the river that win...

Six has always been a number we group things around – Six of the best, six of one half a dozen of another, six feet under, six pack, six degrees of separation and a sixth sense are but a few of the ways we use this number.Such is its popularity that we thought it is also a very good way of challenging and investigating an author’s work to give width, brevity, humour and depth across six of their very best.In this series we gather together authors whose short stories both ri...

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5th, 1850 near Dieppe in France.Maupassant’s early life was badly torn when at age 11 (his younger brother Hervé was then five) his mother, Laure, a headstrong and independent-minded woman, risked social disgrace in order to obtain a legal separation from her husband.After the separation, Laure kept custody of her two boys. With the father now forcibly absent, Laure became the most influential and important figure in th...

Deep beneath the many-hued, volcanic sands of the Manalava Plains is an eerie world. And in this world, in a gem-encrusted cavern, is a pool of shimmering, iridescent matter, guarded by creatures from outer space. Into this unexplored region go two men following the shadowy trail of a vanished girl; searching down the corridors of time for a fragment of a departed age. Intent upon their quest they do not heed the silent voice that warns them of the great peril in the secret recesses of the...

The diary is that most intimate of journals, of records.Within its pages the writer records and gives expression to their thoughts, their feelings, their emotional state on all the things that make up and surround them in this world.For most people the diary is a way to record the milestones of life; a birthday, a new love, the passing of someone as well as the minutiae of everyday life that seems worth passing into written memory.It may be a daily task, or an occas...

An author’s talents may seem obvious and indisputable as they move words and ideas into gathered phrases and stories.But where do these ideas and stories come from? A lonely thought that suddenly gathers form? An inspiration from a Muse? A suggestion from an everyday event?Perhaps in the case of their darker, more malevolent stories, other forces are at work. They help to nourish single words into sentences and paragraphs that ease themselves from the shadows and are sudden...

The Top 10 – The French – An IntroductionAmong the glories of French culture are the abundance of its literary talents. Within its rich historical legacy are authors who take the landscape of life and create very telling stories. This conflict between history and life summons ideas of strength, beauty, brutality, elegance and all manner of feelings and emotions in these miniature gems.Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul...