Young Countess Meliara swears to her dying father that she and her brother will defend their people from the growing greed of the king. That promise leads them into a war for which they are ill-prepared, which threatens the very people they are trying to protect. But war is simple compared to what follows, in peacetime. Meliara is summoned to live at the royal palace, where friends and enemies look alike, and intrigue fills the dance halls and the drawing rooms. If she is to survive, Meliara must learn a whole new way of fighting-with wits and words and secret alliances.
The feds want Miami bookmaker Harry Arno to squeal on his wiseguy boss. So they''re putting word out on the street that Arno''s skimming profits from "Jimmy Cap" Capotorto—which he is, but everybody does it. He was planning to retire to Italy someday anyway, so Harry figures now''s a good time to get lost.
'We have needed a one-volume history of Scotland for a long time, but it was worth waiting for Mrs Mitcheson's. Hers is a brilliant feat of compression, and into her 488 pages she has crammed more than anyone would have though possible, yet without any sense of strain. Nor does a single one of these pages, form the brilliant demographic description of Scotland with which she begins, to the stimulating discussion of Scottish nationalism with which she ends, give the impression of being taken from stock; on every subject and through every century she is fresh incisive, informative and enlightening. She has produced that rare thing, an original textbook...
The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by "The Economist Newspaper Ltd" and edited in London. It has been in continuous publication since James Wilson established it in September 1843. As of summer 2007, its average circulation topped 1.2 million copies a week, about half of which are sold in North America. Consequently it is often seen as a transatlantic (as opposed to solely British) news source.
The Dynamics of Delight - Architecture and Aesthetics
This book rounds off decades of exploration into the various ways that buildings and urban sequences make an impact on the mind. The emphasis is on the qualitative aspects of form and space and provides designers with an analytical framework in which to evaluate projects especially on the aesthetic level. In laying the foundations for an appreciation of the aesthetic component in architecture the book considers the psychological mechanisms, which are involved in the aesthetic response. It goes on to consider how human perception may be influenced by natural phenomena and draws on chaos theory and biomathematics to illustrate the argument.
