Philip Gooden Ordre des livres

History meets mystery with a new twist in this raucous, colourful novel set in the bustling theatrical world of Shakespeare and Marlowe during the reign of the formidable Elizabeth I.

The sixth novel in the Nick Revill series. History meets mystery with a new twist in this raucous, colourful novel set in the bustling theatrical world of Shakespeare and Marlowe during the reign of the formidable Elizabeth I.

Snowflake, elite, expert . . . What are today's 'bad words' and what do they say about us, both as individuals and as a society?

A richly entertaining exploration of the origins of the words that English has borrowed from other languages over its 1500-year history.

History meets mystery with a new twist in this raucous, colourful novel set in the bustling theatrical world of Shakespeare and Marlowe during the reign of the formidable Elizabeth I.

War words have embedded themselves in our collective psyche; British politicians are fond of invoking the 'Dunkirk spirit' whenever the country is faced with major crisis or even minor adversity, and Roosevelt's famous description of Pearl Harbor as 'a date which will live in infamy' was echoed by many US commentators after the 9/11 attacks. So far, so familiar. Or is it? How many of us know, for instance, that 'Keep Calm and Carry On', far from achieving its morale-boosting aim, was considered at the time to be deeply patronizing by the people it was directed at, and so had only limited distribution? The Word at War explores 100 phrases spawned and popularized in the lead-up and during the conflict of World War Two. Substantial essays explore and explain the derivations of, and the stories behind, popular terms and phraseology of the period, including wartime speeches (and the words of Churchill, Hitler and FDR); service slang; national stereotypes; food and drink; and codewords.

"What is the shade of difference between Sod's Law and Murphy's Law? What is the Helsinki Bus Station Theory? What part do the McNaughton Rules and the Miranda Law play in criminal justice? There are plenty of books that can tell you how to succeed in life, love or business by giving infallible sets of guidelines and self-help principles to follow. This is an anthology of the many quirky, useful or entertaining rules and laws which, if they are well known, crop up without explanation or, if confined to specialist circles, deserve to be more widely understood and appreciated. Skyscrapers, Hemlines and Eddie Murphy focuses on the most diverting, useful and intriguing of these laws, old and new, grouping principles under areas of interest, describing how they work, who invented them and how useful or otherwise they are. This is a deliberately diverse scrapbook of the attempt to provide a system - serious, humorous, eccentric or plain mischievous - for human activity across politics, science, sport, economics, the Internet, work, and life itself"--

History meets mystery with a new twist in this raucous, colourful novel set in the bustling theatrical world of Shakespeare and Marlowe during the reign of the formidable Elizabeth I.

The latest witty, colourful Shakespearean murder mystery in the Nick Revill series

Idiomantics is a unique exploration of the world of idiomatic phrases. To cite three examples - from American English, Dutch and Italian - what on Earth are a snow job, a monkey sandwich story, and Mr Punch's secret? Idiomantics explains all...