A mesmerizing new biography of explorer Ernest Shackleton, lavishly illustrated with over a hundred photographs, maps and engravings, some of them appearing in print for the first time. Eighty years after his death, the extraordinary story of Endurance South Pole expedition still holds a compelling grip on the public imagination. Trapped in drifting polar pack ice for ten months, Ernest Shackleton and his crew fought for survival against all the odds. When the Endurance was finally crushed...

We Seldom Talk About the Past is John MacKenna's first selected collection of short stories, from a career spanning over three decades. The stories selected come from four collections of short fiction, and represent a culmination of MacKenna's work in a form of writing he has made uniquely his own. Often compared to John McGahern, and Raymond Carver, and deeply influenced by masters of the form like Chekov, MacKenna's stories focus on the quotidian truths of our lives, of the mome...

'I Knew This Place' by John MacKenna is a collection of twenty-eight of his radio essays from RTE's radio programme 'Sunday Miscellany.'John MacKenna is the author of twenty-seven books both fiction and non-fiction. A skilled actor and narrator, he won a Jacob's Radio Award for his documentary about Leonard Cohen. The radio essays in this collection were described by The Irish Times as 'enchantments woven with rich and intimate language, snapshots of lives lived, and days passed, d...

'I'm not an impulsive person. Twice in my life I've done impulsive things. The first time was when I packed a bag, walked out on my wife and kids, left my job and hit the road to follow the Captain. Goodbye was all she wrote.' These wide-ranging stories follow the disparate disciples of the Captain – a mysterious, powerful and magnetic figure whose violent and chaotic death at the hands of the army radically alters their lives in myriad ways. From rural North American farms and dive bars t...

EIGHTY YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH, the legend of Ernest Shackleton and the extraordinary story of the Endurance South Pole expedition still hold a compelling grip on the public imagination. Trapped in drifting polar pack ice, Ernest Shackleton and his crew fought for survival against all the odds. When the Endurance was finally crushed, they were stranded on ice-floes for more than a year before reaching Elephant Island in April 1916. From there Shackleton and his five men emb...

Julie McDermot has just been released from 'The Mental', the psychiatric institution where her husband committed her after the devastating loss of their two infant children. Returning to her narrow, lonely life along the canal, Julie is haunted by grief and the aching absence of what might have been.As she struggles to piece herself back together, an unexpected encounter with a stranger along the canal offers a glimmer of connection and the fragile possibility of hope. Their encoun...

Regarded as the founder of Neo-Platonism, Plotinus (AD 204-70) was the last great philosopher of antiquity, producing 0works that proved in many ways a precursor to Renaissance thought. Plotinus was convinced of the existence of a state of supreme perfection and argued powerfully that it was necessary to guide the human soul towards this state. Here he outlines his compelling belief in three increasingly perfect levels of existence - the Soul, the Intellect, and the One - and explains his ...

The Girondins of Chile tells of the strong influence that the European revolutions of 1848 had in Chile, and how they motivated a young Santiago society with high cultural aspirations but little political knowledge or direction. Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna, a Chilean writer and historian who lived during those days in Santiago, relates the events of the time, events in which he was a participant. He pays special attention to how the 1848 revolutions influenced a group of young libera...

The Girondins of Chile tells of the strong influence that the European revolutions of 1848 had in Chile, and how they motivated a young Santiago society with high cultural aspirations but little political knowledge or direction. Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna, a Chilean writer and historian who lived during those days in Santiago, relates the events of the time, events in which he was a participant. He pays special attention to how the 1848 revolutions influenced a group of young libera...

Boethius was an eminent public figure under the Gothic emperor Theodoric, and an exceptional Greek scholar. When he became involved in a conspiracy and was imprisoned in Pavia, it was to the Greek philosophers that he turned. THE CONSOLATION was written in the period leading up to his brutal execution. It is a dialogue of alternating prose and verse between the ailing prisoner and his 'nurse' Philosophy. Her instruction on the nature of fortune and happiness, good and evil, fate and free w...

City of God is an enduringly significant work in the history of Christian thought, by one of its central figuresWritten as an eloquent defence of the faith at a time when the Roman Empire was on the brink of collapse, this great theological and philosophical work by St Augustine, bishop of Hippo, examines the ancient pagan religions of Rome, the arguments of the Greek philosophers and the revelations of the Bible. Pointing the way forward to a citizenship that transcends w...

Euthyphro/Apology/Crito/Phaedo'Nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death'The trial and condemnation of Socrates on charges of heresy and corrupting young minds is a defining moment in the history of classical Athens. In tracing these events through four dialogues, Plato also developed his own philosophy of a life guided by self-responsibility. Euthyphro finds Socrates outside the court-house, debating the nature of piety, while the ...