Sophie is unhappy when she loses her stuffed rabbit at the airport on the way home from summer vacation, but then she begins receiving letters from him as he visits various places before returning home for Christmas.

Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) ruled England for 45 turbulent years, and her reign has come to be seen as a golden age. She exercised supreme authority in a man's world, while remaining intensely feminine. She was Gloriana, the Virgin Queen, but is also held up as a role model for company executives in the twenty-first century. She is a near-legendary figure from a remote past who remains fascinatingly modern. This handsome volume has been published to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Elizabeth I's death in 1603. It illustrates in color and, where possible, in actual size, sixty manuscripts--either by Elizabeth or to her. Each one is accompanied by a running commentary, explaining the document and placing it in its historical context, and selected transcriptions or, where necessary, translations from the originals. Elizabeth was a girl of extraordinary precocity and a brilliant linguist. Her early letters, written in a beautiful italic, are to her forbidding father, Henry VIII, and to her brother and sister, Edward VI and "Bloody" Mary. The very first letter dates from when she was a child of eleven. The last, written nearly 60 years later, is a barely-legible scrawl addressed to her successor, the future James I. The letters from her in-tray are no less extraordinary. Tsar Ivan the Terrible rounds on her in a blind fury after she refuses to marry him. The Earl of Essex, young enough to be her son, pours out declarations of love: a few pages further on is to be found her signed warrant for his execution. There are letters from ministers and galley slaves, spies and traitors, coded letters, warrants for torture, speeches to parliament, and the original--only recently identified--of the most famous of all her utterances: "I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king."

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-47), pianist and composer, maintained a prolific and witty correspondence with her younger brother Felix over the course of approximately 25 years, which is here presented in English translation, with the original German for reference. As the leader of a vibrant salon, Hensel deploys her critical prowess to describe Berlin musical life, including its conservative institutions and personalities, as well as to evaluate Felix's works-in-progress in detail. We also learn about Hensel's own compositions, her attitudes toward herself as a composer, and the significance of Felix's views on the formation of those attitudes. Hensel's letters provide a fascinating glimpse into the problems and challenges facing gifted women musicians in the nineteenth century. The 150 letters are drawn from the Green Books collection of letters addressed to Felix Mendelssohn, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Reviews-These letters reveal Fanny Mendelssohn to be a thoroughly fascinating individual, one whose special relationship to Felix would be enough to guarantee the interest of the documents. But we soon become engrossed with Fanny herself, as composer, as critic, as musical commentator and figure in the musical life of Berlin. To watch this world through her eyes is to watch it come alive through the wisdom, wit, and grace of a remarkable person. Citron has a gift for rendering the substance and spirit of these letters into charming and effective English prose that preserves something of the formality of nineteenth-century discourse together with the passion and spirit of Fanny Mendelssohn. Philip Gossett ...reading this volume is a pleasure, not just a musicological duty. Clifford Bartlettthe volume contains penetrating and highly scholarly critical commentaries and is a valuable addition to mendelssohniana. J.R. Belanger, Choice, April 1988

While at the museum, Sophie's stuffed rabbit Felix suddenly disappears, but a few days later a letter from Felix from the Stone Age arrives. Felix is traveling in time and writing funny descriptions of the eras he visits.

Accessible treatise on moral philosophy cautions against irreligiousness, superstition and fanaticism. Written by a founding father of New York Catholicism who was also the father of Cuban nationalism.

After floating up into the sky in a balloon that Sophie built, Felix, Sophie's stuffed rabbit, is off on another fantastic voyage and sends back informative letters from all the interesting places he visits.

Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926) was a loyal associate of Lenin and Stalin. Dzerzhinsky was born into the family of a small landowner in Lithuania, of Polish nationality. At the age of 17 he participated in the socialist movement; a year later he became a member of the Lithuanian Social-Democratic Party and from then on devoted himself entirely to poltical work. For his revolutionary activity Dzerzhinsky was savagely persecuted by the tsarist authorities; he was repeatedly exiled and sentenced to penal servitude in Poland and Russia. He spent nearly eleven years in prison and in penal servitude. The February revolution of 1917 released Dzerzhinsky from a Moscow prison. Immediately upon his release he became extremely active in the Moscow Bolshevik Party organization. At the Sixth Congress of the Bolshevik Party in August 1917 Dzerzhinsky was elected to the Central Committee of the Party. Later, in the period when the actual preparations for the October Revolution were being made, he became a member of the Party Centre, headed by Stalin, which led the uprising. After the victory of the revolution, Dzerzhinsky, on the recommendation of Lenin, was appointed Chairman of the Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution, Sabotage, and Speculation (Cheka). In later years he was Peoples Commissar of Railways, and Chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy.