San Francisco lies under a cloud of radioactive dust. People live in half-deserted apartment buildings, and keep electric animals as pets because so many real animals have died. Most people emigrate to Mars - unless they have a job to do on Earth. Like Rick Deckard - android killer for the police and owner of an electric sheep. This week he has to find, identify, and kill six androids which have escaped from Mars. They're machines, but they look and sound and think like humans - clever, dangerous humans. They will be hard to kill. The film Blade Runner was based on this famous novel
The Tales from The Arabian Nights (level 2 penguin readers)+AUDIO
Sheherezade is beautiful and clever. She also knows many wonderful stories: a thousand and one! Some of them are in this collection. We meet many different people in these stories: a clever servant girl, a boy judge, a stupid barber and forty bad thieves.
Have you ever wished you could re-invent yourself, be popular, confident, cool? That’s exactly what Ginger does… or does she? When she falls for the weird, wonderful boy with the trilby hat and the saxophone, her best friend Shannon doesn’t approve — and, suddenly, Ginger is torn. Add quiet, clever Emily to the mix and it looks as if everything is changing — pretty soon Ginger might just find herself back on the outside looking in…
Simenon lived in a mist of rumour and legend. Of course, this was largely of his own making and he does little to correct matters in the book. Although known as something of a, to put it politely, lover of women's company, he does not go into this Paris Match side of things at all. Instead, he lets us see a bit of the inner man, or what a clever writer may be selling to us as such, and, all the criticism of him after his death notwithstanding, I for one felt that I got somewhat closer to the enigma. It was almost as if he was saying (in about 1963) that he wasn't such a bad fellow after all.
Creators - From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney
Paul Johnson now meets the charge with this companion volume of essays on outstanding and prolific creative spirits. He looks at writers from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Mark Twain and T. S. Eliot, artists like Dürer, and architects such as Pugin and Viollet-le-Duc. He explains the different ways in which Jane Austen, Madame de Stael, and George Eliot struggled to make their voices heard in the masculine hubbub.
