An arranged marriage, contracted when the groom was just a boy. A missing necklace, causing an innocent lass to be outcast by her family. And a love worthy of sacrifice. These elements begin the story of George Hempleman and Margarette Duffy, 'star-crossed lovers' fighting for their right to love in eighteenth-century Hessen-Cassel, a German state south of Prussia. But when George's intentions are questioned, and Margarette's honor is suspect, will they find the strength to uphold their Honorable Deception?

As the leader of elite private investigative firm the Imposters, Lord Yates Fairfax has made an art of concealing his identity. But when his newest client, the beautiful Lady Alethia Barremore, is shot while leaving their meeting, he throws caution to the wind and rushes to her aid. Though Lady Alethia thought she was only looking for her missing former nanny, she has clearly stumbled upon dangerous secrets. Lady Lavinia Hemming suspects there's more to her oldest friends than they're willing to admit, and when she stumbles upon the truth that they're the Imposters, she recruits herself into the firm. Happy as she is for the distraction of an investigation, Lavinia's own family secrets continue to haunt her. And the one thing to bring laughter back into her life--her friendship with Yates--lands her squarely on the bad side of her best friend, his sister. Tormented by a past that she doesn't dare to voice aloud, Lady Alethia does what she can to help her handsome host, her new friends, and the investigators. But as clues lead them deeper into the darkest of society's secrets, Alethia, Yates, and Lavinia soon learn anew that the gentry isn't always noble . . . and truth isn't always honorable.

This title provides an account of the Blair government from one of its most outspoken and interesting former members.

Business has a bad name for many people. It is easy to point to unethical and damaging behavior by companies. And it may seem straightforward to blame either indivuduals or, more generally, ruthless markets and amoral commercial society. In Honorable Business, James R. Otteson argues that business activity can be valuable in itself. The primary purpose of honorable businesses is to create value-for all parties. They look for mutually voluntary and mutually beneficial transactions, so that all sides of any exchange benefit, leading to increasing prosperity not just for one person or for one group at the expense of others but simultaneously for everyone involved. Done correctly, honorable business is a positive-sum activity that can enable flourishing for individuals and prosperity for society. Otteson connects honorable business with the political, economic, and cultural institutions that contribute to a just and humane society. He builds on Aristotle's conception of human beings as purposive creatures who are capable of constructing a plan for their lives that gives them a chance of achieving the highest good for humanity, focusing on autonomy and accountability, as well as good moral judgment. This good judgment can enable us to answer the why of what we do, not just the how. He also draws on Adam Smith's moral philosophy and political economy, and argues that Smithian institutions have played a significant role in the remarkable increase in worldwide prosperity we have seen over the last two hundred years. Otteson offers a pragmatic Code of Business Ethics, linked to a specific conception of professionalism, and defends this Code on the basis of a moral mandate to use one's limited resources of time, talent, and treasure to provide value for oneself only by simultaneously providing value to others. The result is well-articulated parameters within which business can be an acceptable-perhaps even praiseworthy-activity.

Writing The Blue Hippopotamus was great fun-sort of reliving my early life and making some incidents even better than they were the first time. What I wanted most of all was to write a page-turner, to give the reader a chance to actually live and feel what I had lived and felt. In a sense, my own life was a page-turner, from day to day, and a wonderful one that I enjoyed and loved-even the difficult and painful happenings. I think that I've been tremendously lucky to have had such a-almost a charmed life-and that's what I wanted to share with the reader. Yes, there were moments and incidents that were difficult and sometimes very painful, like when I said my final goodbye to Maidi, the love of my life, and what a remarkable love that was-several professional authors have called that good-bye "heartbreaking," and so it was. It was my heart that was breaking, and Maidi's, but we both knew that it had to be that way, and we accepted it. And then of course, many, many years later, we finally met again by chance, or by accident, in Paris, and the closure we had needed for so many years finally arrived. I wrote the book when I was ninety, and I was the last survivor of our group of five. We had all been made to swear that we would never tell. But after seventy years, I felt the story could, and should, be told.

"Mademoiselle de Maupin" is a historical romance based on the life of French opera star Mademoiselle Maupin, who was a first-rate swordswoman and often went about disguised as a man. Originally, the story was to be about the historical La Maupin, who set fire to a convent for the love of another woman, but later retired to a convent herself, shortly before dying in her thirties. Gautier instead turned the plot into a simple love triangle between a man, d'Albert, and his mistress, Rosette, who both fall in love with Madelaine de Maupin, who is disguised as a man named Théodore. The novel consists of seventeen chapters, most in the form of letters written by d'Albert or Madelaine. The message behind Gautier's version of the infamous legend is the fundamental pessimism about the human identity, and perhaps the entire Romantic age.