The leadership of a country under an immense pressure from the world community to reform its atrocious political system, decided to send a spaceship loaded with world-renowned scientists to undertake a make believe research programme on the moon for a period of one year. This decoy did not go as planned and the spaceship, which was largely controlled by computers from Earth, could not land on the moon. Unfortunately, an attempt to bring it back to Earth failed when it bounced off the Earth’s atmosphere and proceeded to fly away at an ever-increasing speed. The marooned scientists developed various means of passing the time while they awaited the inevitable death. However, after nearly a year of wandering through the universe the spaceship landed on a planet, which turned out to be Mars but with conditions completely at variance with what is known on Earth about this planet. What the Martians learnt about the socio-political conditions on Earth displeased them enormously. They therefore sent the scientists back with an ultimatum for the world’s leadership, asking Earth to change its ways so that an acceptable interplanetary discourse could be established. The leadership of the world threw down the gauntlet and embarked upon a secret mission to bomb Mars out of existence. This was detected by the Martians and set the two planets on a collision course, with the winner of the encounter not much in doubt.

The culmination of ten years study and poetic toil, these collected poems span an uncertain decade finding the author torn between a rural coastal nature and the spirit of Western cultural progress. It contains a manifold of voices united in a uniquely philosophical and poetic perspective, emanating and sometimes indeed hailing from the hinterland of a coastal town in Western Wales. As is the poets' way many musings reflect on values, romance and its relationship to chaos and the decline of youth into the flush of maturity. These are powerful and wide-ranging poems from the turn of the 21st century.

This Festschrift in honour of the classical scholar Stephen Heyworth brings together eleven experts on the genre of Latin elegy. All chapters focus on the close reading of elegiac texts primarily by Ovid and Propertius.

Goldstein shows how the connection between Vaux and Versailles is at the heart of classical style. She retraces the roots of Versailles in Fouquet's short-lived experiment, and destabilises any easy understanding of the court of the Sun King as the origin of French national style.

An animal that had been killed appears before the creator, seething with a sense of injustice and rage; the creator has the power to grant the animal a return to the cycle of life in a form of its choice. Humans had killed it so that an insignificant part of its anatomy could be used as an aphrodisiac, and now it wants revenge. The animal asks to be returned to earth in the form of a virus with the extraordinary power to humiliate men. The creator agrees, but only on the condition that the agreement should be transcribed into the genetic code of the virusthus giving humanity a fighting chance. As the virus engulfs the world and wreaks havoc on humanity, scientists must work to determine the source of the calamity and protect people from its effects. The world teeters on the brink of war, and only the efforts of researchers stand between humankind and its complete destruction. In this fiction novel, a destructive virus threatens the world, and only a heroic team of scientists can save humanity from itself.