A fun, illustrated history of the umbrella's surprising place in life and literature Humans have been making, using, perfecting, and decorating umbrellas for millennia--holding them over the heads of rulers, signalling class distinctions, and exploring their full imaginative potential in folk tales and novels. In the spirit of the best literary gift books, Brolliology is a beautifully designed and illustrated tour through literature and history. It surprises us with the crucial role that the oft-overlooked umbrella has played over centuries--and not just in keeping us dry. Marion Rankine elevates umbrellas to their rightful place as an object worthy of philosophical inquiry. As Rankine points out, many others have tried. Derrida sought to find the meaning (or lack thereof) behind an umbrella mentioned in Nietzsche's notes, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote essays on the handy object, and Dickens used umbrellas as a narrative device for just about everything. She tackles the gender, class, and social connotations of carrying an umbrella and helps us realize our deep connection to this most forgettable everyday object--which we only think of when we don't have one.

A fun, illustrated history of the umbrella's surprising place in life and literature Humans have been making, using, perfecting, and decorating umbrellas for millennia--holding them over the heads of rulers, signalling class distinctions, and exploring their full imaginative potential in folk tales and novels. In the spirit of the best literary gift books, Brolliology is a beautifully designed and illustrated tour through literature and history. It surprises us with the crucial role that the oft-overlooked umbrella has played over centuries--and not just in keeping us dry. Marion Rankine elevates umbrellas to their rightful place as an object worthy of philosophical inquiry. As Rankine points out, many others have tried. Derrida sought to find the meaning (or lack thereof) behind an umbrella mentioned in Nietzsche's notes, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote essays on the handy object, and Dickens used umbrellas as a narrative device for just about everything. She tackles the gender, class, and social connotations of carrying an umbrella and helps us realize our deep connection to this most forgettable everyday object--which we only think of when we don't have one.

The magical art of mehndi, or henna painting, has been practiced for centuries in India, Africa, and the Middle East, and now it has finally arrived in the West. Packed with inspirational photographs of traditional and contemporary mehndi, this complete resource offers everything you need to create your own beautiful henna designs, including: • dozens of practice exercises and sample illustrations • a foolproof recipe for mixing the henna paste • step-by-step instructions on how to apply your mehndi design • insider's tips from professional mehndi artists and more!

Nicky Marlow needs a job. He’s engaged to be married and the employment market is pretty slim in Britain in 1937. So when his fiancé points out the Spartacus Machine Tool notice, he jumps at the chance. After all, he speaks Italian and he figures he’ll be able to endure Milan for a year, long enough to save some money. Soon after he arrives, however, he learns the sinister truth of his predecessor’s death and finds himself courted by two agents with dangerously different agendas. In the process, Marlow realizes it’s not so simple to just do the job he’s paid to do in fascist Italy on the eve of a world war.

A thrillingly elegant yet raw evocation of a woman clawing her way to a creative life, inspired by the story of surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. We grant men a right to solitude. Why can’t we do the same for women? Born into a wealthy family in northern England and sent to boarding school to be educated by nuns, Ivory Frame rebels. She escapes to inter-war Paris, where she finds herself through art, and falls in with the most brilliantly bohemian set: the surrealists. Torn between an intense love affair with a married Russian painter and her soaring ambition to create, Ivory’s life is violently interrupted by the Second World War. She flees from Europe, leaving behind her friends, her art, and her love. Now over ninety, Ivory labours defiantly in the frozen north on her last, greatest work — a vast account of animal languages — alone except for her sharp research assistant, Skeet. And then unexpected news from the past arrives: this magnificently fervent, complex woman is told that she has a grandchild, despite never having had a child of her own …

The definitive history of the Vikings -- from arts and culture to politics and cosmology -- by a distinguished archaeologist with decades of expertise The Viking Age -- from 750 to 1050 -- saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more. None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness and sophistication of their culture. Based on the latest archaeological and textual evidence, Children of Ash and Elm tells the story of the Vikings on their own terms: their politics, their cosmology and religion, their material world. Known today for a stereotype of maritime violence, the Vikings exported new ideas, technologies, beliefs, and practices to the lands they discovered and the peoples they encountered, and in the process were themselves changed. From Eirík Bloodaxe, who fought his way to a kingdom, to Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, the most traveled woman in the world, Children of Ash and Elm is the definitive history of the Vikings and their time.

The tiger moved restlessly around the narrow space into which it was penned. There was light and air beyond the long thick stick things that kept it back but no sign of grass. Just a bare stretch of flat stone. Leaf shadows moved across the empty clearing in front with the gusts of wind. Apart from the rustle of the leaves there was no other sound. Nor were there smells of anything on the air. All the tiger could scent were a few stale smells of people and those died when the wind dropped. No scent of monkeys or deer or any of the other jungle creatures he was used to. It was a young tiger barely old enough to hunt for itself. It was still very confused as to how it had got itself into this narrow space. A tiger is kidnapped and so is a girl - though not at the same time. They find themselves sharing isolation in a hunting lodge that is rumoured to be haunted, at the mercy of an unknown enemy. Who has locked them in and why? What happens when a young tiger is terrified out of its wits and a girl finds herself locked in and forced to fend for herself? Perhaps call for a ghost to come to the rescue? Anjana really does get into the tiger’s skin to bring us never seen before insights into the big cat’s world. - Paro Anand