In the traditional folk tale "Sleeping Beauty," the spell cast upon the lovely young princess and everyone in her castle can only be broken by the kiss of a Prince. Anne Rice's retelling of the Beauty story probes the unspoken implications of this lush, suggestive tale by exploring its undeniable connection to sexual desire.
The First Emperor In 1974, Chinese peasants made the discovery of the century... Thousands of terracotta soldiers guarding the tomb of a tyrant. Ying Zheng was born to rule the world, claiming descent from gods, crowned king while still a child.
Settlement of Australia by Europeans began on 26 January 1788. On that day Captain Arthur Phillip of the Royal Navy stepped ashore at Sydney Cove, accompanied by his officers and a detachment of Marines. Beside the steadily flowing Tank Stream they erected a flagpole and raised Britain’s Union flag. A proclamation by the King was read, claiming just over half the continent as a possession of Great Britain for the penal colony of New South Wales.
In 1711, the imperious Virginia patriarch William Byrd II spitefully refused his wife Lucy's plea for a book; a century later, Lady Jean Skipwith placed an order that sent the Virginia bookseller Joseph Swan scurrying to please. These vignettes bracket a century of change in white southern women's lives. Claiming the Pen offers the first intellectual history of early southern women. It situates their reading and writing within the literary culture of the wider Anglo-Atlantic world, thus far understood to be a masculine province, even as they inhabited the limited, provincial social circles of the plantation South.
The intrepid Miss Marple is getting on and now has a full-time nurse, but the little grey cells are still working overtime. When celebrity Marina Gregg moves to St. Mary Mead, it's amazing how many people turn up at her first house party, claiming to be old friends. When one of them ends up dead, it looks like the lethal cocktail might have been meant for Marina herself.
