A glittering twelve story collection from Britain's best loved Sci-Fi writer.

For more than 50 years John Clute has been reviewing science fiction and fantasy. As Scores demonstrates, his devotion to the task of understanding the central literatures of our era has not slackened. There are jokes in Scores, and curses, and tirades, and apologies, and riffs; but every word of every review, in the end, is about how we understand the stories we tell about the world. Following on from his two previous books of collected reviews (Strokes and Look at the Evidence) this book collects reviews from a wide variety of sources, but mostly from Interzone, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Weekly. Where it has seemed possible to do so without distorting contemporary responses to books, these reviews have been revised, sometimes extensively. 125 review articles, over 200 books reviewed in more than 214,000 words.

Allen’s Dictionary of English Phrases is the most comprehensive survey of this area of the English language ever undertaken. Taking over 6000 phrases, it explains their meaning, explores their development and gives citations that range from the Venerable Bede to Will Self. Crisply and wittily written, the book is packed with memorable and surprising detail, whether showing that 'salad days' comes from Antony and Cleopatra, that 'flavour of the month' originates in 1940s American ice cream marketing, or even that we’ve been 'calling a spade a spade' since the sixteenth century. Allen’s Dictionary of English Phrases is part of the Penguin Reference Library and draws on over 70 years of experience in bringing reliable, useful and clear information to millions of readers around the world – making knowledge everybody’s property.

Nineteen-ninety-nine looms near and yet the stars are still far away . . . but this anthology brings them closer with more than a dozen of the best SF adventure stories ever written. Among the gems collected here are "The New Prime," by Jack Vance, " Fritz Leiber's "Moon Duel," and "The Sky People," by Poul Anderson, along with masterpieces by less-familiar names such as Murray Leinster and James H. Schmitz. With more than a dozen stories (written between 1940 and 1970) from greats such as Brian W. Aldiss, Leigh Brackett, L. Sprague de Camp, and A. E. van Vogt, this anthology ranges throughout our galaxy and into the stars. Whether you're revisiting past adventures or discovering these stories for the first time, you're sure to thrill to these wonderful adventures across the vast expanse of space.

This historic Russian aircraft was first delivered to the Soviet Air Force at the height of the Cold War in 1961. It remained in service until replaced by the much modified Tu-22M Backfire which was introduced in the early 1970s and still remains in service. It was the first Soviet supersonic bomber and was used for reconnaissance and bombing, in the latter role carrying either conventional or nuclear bombs. The early aircraft had a range of 1,800 miles but later models had a much increased radius of action through the introduction of in-flight refuelling. This book looks at the design and development of the aircraft up to the introduction of the type M Backfire. Details of construction, weapon systems, photo-reconnaissance and jamming equipment are included to cover the several variant models. Operational use is explained and the text includes many first-hand accounts from Russian aircrew of the period. The book will be superbly illustrated by unique official photographs and manuals.

This book deals with the notion of reformulation and more specifically with a group of lexico-grammatical units which help codify and signal the activity of reformulation in English. While discourse markers in English have been described in detail, the area of reformulation is a relatively unexplored area in comparison with languages such as French or Spanish. In this respect, this book has been conceived as a contribution to the field of Discourse Markers and in particular to the markers that help display the function of reformulation in English. First of all, a definition of the notion of reformulation is provided as a necessary precondition for the elaboration of a taxonomy of English reformulators. These are grouped into different classes and sub-classes on the basis of the type of reformulation effected. Thus, four main types are identified: Expansion, Modification, Reassessment and Compression. After an inductive and interpretive analysis of examples taken from the British National Corpus (BNC), the syntactic and distributional properties of these units, as well as their environments of use are described and discussed.