Wreckers sinks the old narratives of imperialism, revealing the violent, chaotic and improvised reality of empire-building from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.'Clever and compelling book. The storytelling and the scholarship fairly spark off each other. It could be a model for how academics should write history for a general audience' The Times‘A flowing, gripping narrative, Wreckers is distinguished by en...

Portugal was not always the best place for poets in the sixteenth century. Against the backdrop of an expanding empire, the country's annexation by Spain in 1580, and ongoing religious controversy, poets struggled to articulate their worth to rulers and patrons. This did not prevent them, however, from persisting in their craft. Indeed, many of their works reflected precisely on the question of what poetry could do and what, ultimately, its value was. The answers that poets like Luís de Ca...

‘Although seven clowns started the evening alive, only six still breathed by the evening’s end. And while everyone saw the murderer and knew the murderer, no one knew their name.’Henry House, an Elizabethan manor, is now occupied by Mind Gains, a new therapy centre in Stormhaven. But a Halloween party for staff and clients ends in gruesome and bloody murder. Once again, retired monk Abbot Peter and his niece Detective Inspector Tamsin Shah are called upon to solve the mystery....

‘Excellence by the Sea’ is the strap line in Stormhaven Towers school’s publicity, but when, at the end of the summer term, the hard-drinking, hard-smoking new Headmaster, Jamie King, is found dead at the bottom of the town’s famous white cliffs, this excellence comes under savage scrutiny. Suicide is assumed at first - King wouldn’t be the first tormented soul to hit those unforgiving rocks. But unanswered questions remain. Forensics find no phone by the body and the head always ...

Learn Korean through simple, engaging short stories designed to make the language feel natural and approachable. In this course, each story is presented three times to reinforce understanding and retention. First, you’ll hear the story entirely in Korean, allowing you to absorb the rhythm, sounds, and flow of the language. Next, you’ll hear a clear English translation, helping you connect meaning with what you just heard. Finally, the story is repeated again in Korean, giving you a second ...

The Stormhaven Etiquette Society, a secretive affair, unafraid to name and shame those who transgressModel Services, the town’s only brothel, a discreet but busy presence in Church StreetBybuckle Asylum, a desolate shell on the seafront that housed over seven hundred mental patients prior to ‘care in the community’What brings these three together is a cold-blooded execution that both shocks and confounds. For lying dead in the empty asylum, tied to an old metal bed ...

When the curtains of the Bell Theatre open for the second half of Mother’s Day, a new play commissioned for the venue’s thirtieth anniversary, the lifeless body of theatre director Hermione Bysshe-Urquhart MBE is revealed. Within the startled audience sit retired monk Abbot Peter and his guest for the evening, Detective Inspector Tamsin Shah. Tamsin and Peter undertake a new murder investigation among the cast and crew of the theatre, a struggling pro-am business operating from a converted...

The Enneagram is a time-honoured way of understanding personality types and human behavior. It is both ancient and modern. Developed over 1500 years by Sufi and Christian mystics, it was revised and extensively expanded in the 20th century by the disciplines and insights of Western psychology.It identifies nine types of personality, nine ways of being, describes how they interrelate and is widely used today as a perceptive guide to self-understanding. In this original and thought-provoking bo...

Abbot Peter has recently swapped his failing leadership of a remote monastery in the Sinai desert for retirement in the bleak and stormy English seaside town of Stormhaven. When the charismatic local vicar is discovered dead – crucified, naked, to a cross on the vestry wall – Abbot Peter is invited to act as a Special Witness investigator.He is assigned to work alongside Detective Inspector Tamsin Shah – young, pretty, brash, unsentimental and, by a peculiar quirk of fate, a niece ...

When most think of Tolstoy they think of the great author. War and Peace and Anna Karenina brought him worldwide fame and a good deal of money. Had he done nothing else in life these two novels would have ensured him status and respect. Few others had written both a national epic and a great love story; and some might have been content with that. For his last thirty years however Tolstoy walked a different track. After his spiritual crisis when he was 50 he exchanged his authors clothes fo...

Who was Jesus of Nazareth? Many admire his spiritual teachings; some go further and claim him as the messiah while a few deny he ever existed at all. But everyone has an opinion about this obscure preacher who lived his brief life in one of the less significant regions of the Roman Empire; and who in being crucified died the traditional death for criminals and trouble-makers. Jesus lived in turbulent times. Under Roman rule Judea was a hotbed of nationalist political and religious interest...

What does solitude mean to you? Albert Einstein once said: I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.In his latest book Simon Parke, author of The Beautiful Life and One-Minute Mindfulness describes solitude as the active path to inner silence and takes us on an enthralling journey there. In a world of haste and ...