Mostrando resultados por autor "Brian Taylor" en Todas las categorías

This Very Short Introduction provides a guide to understanding Russian Politics that goes beyond the headlines, offering a vivid account of the key forces driving Russian politics. It places Russia in a global context while explaining its internal political development. Several major themes run through the book, including the primacy of the state over society, the role of the so-called "West," which has represented a source of inspiration, of threat, and of competition for generations of Russians, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

What is Vladimir Putin up to? This book examines how the mentality of Putin and his team - the code of Putinism - has shaped Russian politics over the past two decades. It explains not only the thoughts and ideas that motivate Putin's decisions, but also the set of emotions and habits that influence how Putin and his close allies view the world. While some observers portray Putin as either a cold-blooded pragmatist or a strident Russian nationalist, Taylor provides a more nuanced and compelling interpretation of Putin's motives and actions.

From October 1944 to April 1945 the Red Army fought a bloody campaign to destroy the German Army in East Prussia, and capture the capital of the province, Königsberg. This book follows the course of one of history’s forgotten battles, the fall of the city of Königsberg. It covers in detail the desperate battles the Germans fought to hold off the Red Army, from the Soviet Memel and Gumbinnen Offensives of October 1944, which saw Russian soldiers break into the frontier districts of East Prussia, to the final stand of the German defenders of Königsberg in April 1945. The German generals,...

American cities are distinct from almost all others in the degree to which freeways and freeway travel dominate urban landscapes. In The Drive for Dollars, Brian D. Taylor, Eric A. Morris, and Jeffrey R. Brown tell the largely misunderstood story of how freeways became the centerpiece of US urban transportation systems, and the crucial, though usually overlooked, role of fiscal politics in bringing freeways about.

The final tumultuous century of the Roman Republic began with a war against the tribes of the Spanish interior and the struggle in Rome between the newly emerging Optimates and Populares factions, embodied int he rivalry between the Gracchi and the Senate. Bloodshed between these factions increased the pace of decline and led to the civil war which erupted between Sulla and Marius. This cycle of civil war, which was continued years later by Pompeius and Caesar, would ensure the eventual rise to power of the ruthless political genius Octavian, the originator of the Principate and Imperial ...

A chronological account of the formation, battles and campaigns of the Roman state and democracy, from the foundation and growth of the city, to the epic struggles with Carthage during the Punic Wars and the resultant expansion throughout the Mediterranean. Each year is detailed in turn, showing how events unfolded throughout this fascinating period of history: the development of the Empire, its external struggles and outstanding generals and politicians who shaped it. Each conflict is dealt with as a separate entry, be it the Punic Wars, Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants, or a ...

The Shropshire Hills, summer 1990. The gardens of an old house, Moorecroft House, which had stood there amongst the hills for so long, it seemed to almost be a part of them. If the man in Elizabethan costume who had appeared out of the mist that lay across the gardens that morning was a ghost, how come no one had ever heard of any ghosts and hauntings connected to them before? And if he wasn't a ghost, why did no one who worked in the gardens seem ever to have heard of him, or the horrific double murder he said had happened back in the 1960s,involving a man and a woman who'd worked in the ...

When local councillor Warren Hescott reluctantly agreed to a tree planting ceremony he didn't want, in order to celebrate his twenty five years of service to the community, he said he'd only take part in the event if the tree planted in his honour was the special cedar he knew his old enemy, Hereward Gordon, the former Director of Parks had, out of pure bloody mindedness after being forced to take early retirement, secreted away in his garden in one of the lodges in the grounds of the Hall before he went, rather than using the tree to complete the main avenue of the Hall as he should have ...

The Shropshire Hills, summer 1990. The gardens of an old house, Moorecroft House, which had stood there amongst the hills for so long, it seemed to almost be a part of them. If the man in Elizabethan costume who had appeared out of the mist that lay across the gardens that morning was a ghost, how come no one had ever heard of any ghosts and hauntings connected to them before? And if he wasn't a ghost, why did no one who worked in the gardens seem ever to have heard of him, or the horrific double murder he said had happened back in the 1960s,involving a man and a woman who'd worked in the ...

TV reporter Booker Johnson doesn't know when to back down. Fresh off his fourth Emmy win and back in the classroom, he teaches the primacy of truth in journalism. But there is danger in pursuing the truth at all costs. And despite being told by his superiors to move on from the scene of a suspicious accident, Booker just can't leave well enough alone. Booker's investigation soon plunges him into the gritty world of crime boss Parson Manor, where corruption reigns supreme and where Gibby Manor is being trained to follow in his father's criminal footsteps.

A secret way into another world in another dimension. A land called Madragora by those who lived there, where elves, sprites and fairies live alongside mortals. And where a war between two sorcerers battling for control of the fire ice jewels mined in the depths of the mountains there, jewels which can control the minds of anyone who comes into contact with them, simmered for centuries. It went on for more than five hundred years, always involving that same stretch of road with a cottage at the end of it where three sisters, local people believe to be witches, lived. The latest of these ...

Look out for the wind the old man said for it may be changing and pointing towards Madragora again. And where is Madragora the young man asked I don’t believe you ever explained that to me fully. A land of dragons sorcerers, elves and pixies is where it is, the old man said and if you watch the movements of the weather vane we fashioned out of dragons gold for the purpose carefully enough it will guide you there because it doesn’t ever point an any other direction than towards Madragora and then only monetarily. Loose that moment as the wind changes and you might never find your way to it.

"From the land beyond the Endless Sea, from the land beyond eternity, in a dream there came to me, strangers one and two and three. I saw a stone before my eyes, hot as fire, yet cold as ice, it promised me a paradise, beware the stone, beware it lies! But in my dreams I then perceived, fools and wise men all deceived, and of their senses taken leave. Then the sound of fighting filled my head, my stomach rose at the stench of the dead, armies rose and armies bled, because of the words that the stone had said. Beware the strangers when they come, beware the mother who seeks her son, Beware ...

The writer, still working as a parish clerk has moved to a different village where a previous clerk has left him looking for missing gravestones

Grumbolt is majoring in action! He's finally getting to follow his dreams at Toy Academy, from learning daring maneuvers, to getting paired up with a sidekick! Grumbolt can't wait to find out who his sidekick is...until it turns out that he's the sidekick. And to school bully Rex Everything, no less. This duo will never work. But when a toy named Tempest Boomcloud kidnaps a classmate and steals Rex's van, it looks like Grumbolt and Rex will have to work together to stop Tempest's evildoing and figure out why she's terrorizing them.

Booker Johnson, an Emmy-winning TV reporter on the brink of losing everything, stumbles upon a horrific crime scene in South Florida. Teaming up with no-nonsense police detective Brielle Jensen, they dive into the case, unraveling a web of deception, manipulation, and murder that reaches the highest echelons of power. As Booker uncovers the sinister truth behind a mysterious group pulling the strings, he finds his own life in jeopardy. With personal troubles brewing and powerful forces trying to silence him, he must risk it all to expose the truth.

Being used to a diet of organised crime, drug manufacturing, smuggling, and dealing in all its many forms, and attacks on them by assassins working for the Russian, and the Chinese, governments, all as a result of their association with Chief Inspector Macdonald, Sinead Grogan and Christopher Caine had been afraid they might find life boring when they gave up working for Macdonald and became private detectives, instead but they were wrong. Fresh from their first success as private eyes Grogan and Caine found themselves surrounded by crooks aplenty when employed by the owner of a hotel in ...

A secret way into another world in another dimension. A world where elves, sprites and fairies live alongside mortals. And where a war between the sorceress who controls the fire ice jewels mined in the depths of the mountains there, jewels which can control the minds of anyone who comes into contact with them, and those trying to free themselves from her subjugation, has flared up again. It was hard enough for Aurora Bradley, known as Rory to her friends, to escape from that world the first time she stumbled into it accidently through the time portal at the end of her great aunt’s garden...

Local gossip said the burned out cottage at the edge of the marshes, and the stretch of beach that lay in front of it, was haunted. By the ghost of a girl who used to live there, but who set fire to it one day, then deliberately walked into the sea to drown herself, when someone let it be known that the lover she had lived there with had betrayed her with another woman, before abandoning her completely, by going off to fight on the battlefields of First World War France. Dying there as well, so local gossip said. Local gossip didn’t say who the woman had been, or the name of the soldier ...

Being used to a diet of organised crime, drug manufacturing, smuggling, and dealing in all its many forms, and attacks on them by assassins working for the Russian, and the Chinese, governments, all as a result of their association with Chief Inspector Macdonald, Sinead Grogan and Christopher Caine had been afraid they might find life boring when they gave up working for Macdonald and became private detectives, instead but they were wrong. In their youth they had been into banning the bomb, not making them, but when a group of determined former CND women were faced with the prospect of an ...