"[Hearts of Oak packs in] the sort of profound and lacerating laughter that Robson's countrymen Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett perfected." –NPR Hearts of Oak is a delightful science fiction adventure from Eddie Robson, the creator of the acclaimed Welcome to Our Village, Please Invade Carefully. The buildings grow. And the city expands. And the people of the land are starting to behave abnormally. Or perhaps they’ve always behaved that way, and it’s normality that’s at fault. And the king of the land confers with his best friend, who happens to be his closest advisor, who also happens to be a talking cat. But that’s all perfectly natural and not at all weird. Iona, close to retirement, finds that the world she has always known is nothing like she always believed it to be. There are dark forces . . . not dark. There are uncanny forces . . . no, not uncanny. There are forces, anyway, mostly slightly odd ones, and they appear to be acting in mysterious ways. It’s about town planning, it’s about cats and it’s about the nature of reality. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

'This book ... provides a completely new and unique perspective on the tragedy ... [of] the Royal Oak story.--the author has ... traced the families of various souls lost with the battleship that fateful night in 1939. Their photographs and stories are representative of all their shipmates. Interviews with survivors bring the dramatic events vivdly to life, emphasizing the human tragedy and experience of war.' (Back cover)

James Thomson: Essays for the Tercentenary is the first collection of essays devoted exclusively to the works of the eighteenth-century Scottish poet James Thomson. The volume is divided into two sections, the first addressing Thomson’s writings themselves, and the second the reception of his works after his death and their influence on later writers. The first section contains essays analyzing the politics and aesthetics of Thomson’s major poems and also a reevaluation of Thomson as a heroic dramatist. The second section capitalizes on the certainty felt by many in Thomson’s own century that the poet, especially through his most successful poem The Seasons, had won for himself an indelible fame. This volume provides a definitive reappraisal of his achievement for our own times.

Beginning in 6000 BC, this comprehensive history of Ireland spans the ages and takes the reader up to the present day. It covers the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages, the arrival of Christianity, the Viking period, the takeover of Ireland by Henry II in 1171 AD and the struggle for independence.

France, early summer 1794. The French Revolution has been hijacked by the extreme Jacobins and is in the grip of The Terror. While the guillotine relentlessly takes the heads of innocents, two vast French and British fleets meet in the mid-Atlantic following a week of skirmishing. After fierce fighting, both sides claim victory. In The Glorious First of June Sam Willis not only tells, with thrilling immediacy and masterly clarity, the story of an epic and complex battle, he also places it within the context of The Terror, the survival of the French Revolution and the growth of British sea-power.