With a foreword by Miles Redd, this luxurious decorating resource trains the eye to recognize enduring, quality home goods and to use them to dazzling design effect. Quality matters. Just as a home’s foundation should be built to stand the test of time, so, too, should the furniture, objects, and elements of our rooms speak to an enduring sense of beauty and comfort. They should outlast trends and our loving day-to-day use. But how does one recognize quality and judge whether something is well made? Christiane Lemieux set out to answer this question by interviewing the world’s greatest experts. Weaving together the insights and guidance of dozens of wallpaper and paint specialists, textile fabricators, accessories artisans, and interior designers, Lemieux has curated an unparalleled education in recognizing the hallmarks of timeless, heirloom-quality pieces. Hundreds of elegant home interiors—both iconic examples from the past and stunning residences today--represent the range of luxurious and customized environments that can be created with fine décor.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Smart, likable Bernie Fine was the wonder boy of Wolff’s, New York’s most glamorous department store. A senior VP on the way up, he arrives in San Francisco to open a West Coast store. His career is skyrocketing, but his life lacks a center. When he looks into the wide, innocent eyes of five-year-old Jane O’Reilly, and then into the equally enchanting eyes of her mother, Liz, Bernie knows he has found what he has been looking for. Bernie thought he had found love to last a lifetime, but when Liz is stricken with cancer, time becomes painfully short. Alone with two children, Bernie must face the loss and learn that life has other fine things to offer.

An engaging and enlightening account of taxation told through lively, dramatic, and sometimes ludicrous stories drawn from around the world and across the ages Governments have always struggled to tax in ways that are effective and tolerably fair. Sometimes they fail grotesquely, as when, in 1898, the British ignited a rebellion in Sierra Leone by imposing a tax on huts—and, in repressing it, ended up burning the very huts they intended to tax. Sometimes they succeed astonishingly, as when, in eighteenth-century Britain, a cut in the tax on tea massively increased revenue. In this entertaining book, two leading authorities on taxation, Michael Keen and Joel Slemrod, provide a fascinating and informative tour through these and many other episodes in tax history, both preposterous and dramatic—from the plundering described by Herodotus and an Incan tax payable in lice to the (misremembered) Boston Tea Party and the scandals of the Panama Papers. Along the way, readers meet a colorful cast of tax rascals, and even a few tax heroes. While it is hard to fathom the inspiration behind such taxes as one on ships that tended to make them sink, Keen and Slemrod show that yesterday’s tax systems have more in common with ours than we may think. Georgian England’s window tax now seems quaint, but was an ingenious way of judging wealth unobtrusively. And Tsar Peter the Great’s tax on beards aimed to induce the nobility to shave, much like today’s carbon taxes aim to slow global warming. Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue is a surprising and one-of-a-kind account of how history illuminates the perennial challenges and timeless principles of taxation—and how the past holds clues to solving the tax problems of today.

The Power...The Passion...The Incomparable Romance of Brenda Joyce The Pretender An orphan from London's East End, a fugitive from the poorhouse, Violet Cooper was tired of sleeping on stoops and being hungry and cold. But she dared to enter a world forbidden to her and her kind. Even marriage to a gentle elderly knight and the title Lady Goodwin could not open closed doors, stop the cold stares, or hush the shadowy rumors of murder... The Aristocrat He was a man of the world. The rules of Victorian society did not interest him, nor could a gauche pretender with a Cockney acent possibly turn his head. Yet Thodore Blake, second son fo the Earl of Harding, was immediately compelled by Violet--and soon found himself defending the investigation. But wedding vows were the only way to save her from a certain hanging... The Finer Things Two people from different worlds brought together by passion, bound together by whispered accusations, and torn apart by scandal and misfortune. The world claimed they should never love each other. Their hearts claimed otherwise.