Small Britain

In the first of three essays included in this audiobook, Bill Bryson decides to move his wife and kids back to his homeland, the United States, after nearly two decades in Britain. But not before taking one last trip around Britain, a sort of valedictory tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home. The result is a hilarious social commentary.

It wasn't long-ago that Britons could have been as at home in Varanasi as they could have been in Wolverhampton—why?—because the shape and location of Britain's land-mass has not always been the same, and with large parts of Britain scattered across the globe, British borders and its identity has always been on the move. But, by knowing more about the twelve pivotal moments that occurred over a 2,000-year period, we can not only gain a full sense of our British history, but we can also understand where we are heading.

After nearly two decades in Britain, Bill Bryson, the acclaimed author of such best sellers as The Mother Tongue and Made in America, decided it was time to move back to the United States for a while. This was partly to let his wife and kids experience life in Bryson's homeland, and partly because he had read that 3.7 million Americans believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another. It was thus clear to him that his people needed him.

A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history.

A visit to the local village fete for a spot of fun and relaxation turns into a nightmare for Agatha Raisin when she discovers the body of the local landowner in the woods with an arrow in his chest and trousers round his ankles. Agatha’s old adversary, Detective Chief Inspector Wilkes, declares the death a tragic accident, believing the victim has been hit by a stray arrow from an archery demonstration. Agatha is convinced of foul play, however, and is shocked when Wilkes eventually agrees … with her as his prime murder suspect.

Francis J. Bremer focuses on the role of religion in the settlement of the Plymouth Colony and how those values influenced political, intellectual, and cultural aspects of New England life 150 years before the American Revolution. He traces the Puritans' persecution in early 17th-century England for challenging the established national church and the difficulties they faced as refugees in the Netherlands in the 1610s.

Warm Springs is not the only place people find themselves dead. James Wilder tends to his bookstore, garden, and life, all under the supervision of his cat. Warm Springs has been quiet lately, so he thinks he will get on with the business of solving the local eighty-year-old murders. But fate laughs and throws him in another direction. A distress call from a past he had forgotten has him rambling the English countryside looking for clues to a murder. Not just any murder, but that of the man that replaced him, killed perhaps by the woman they both married. The Lake District never felt so ...

The story of how one small nation responded to global climate issues by radically rethinking public policy for future generations.

Merri Melde has spent over two cumulative years of her life traveling, answering to an inexplicable need to see the world, to experience different adventures, cultures, people and places. Taken from her travel journals, Somewhere Else features some of her backpack travels in Nepal, where she trekked the Annapurna Circuit; India, where exceptional highs and vexing lows included visiting the most incredible Taj Mahal, riding camels in the Rajasthan desert, and enduring a most entertaining 889-mile second class unreserved train ride from Bombay to Cochin; Zimbabwe, where she survived a day of ...

Ann Cleeves Classic Crime - engaging mysteries to savour, beloved characters to meet again Murder in Paradise is the third mystery novel featuring George and Molly Palmer-Jones by Ann Cleeves, author of the Shetland and Vera Stanhope crime series. Cheerful festivities take a dark turn when the...

Llyfr o gyfres Amdani, i ddysgwyr Lefel Sylfaen yn cynnwys straeon byrion yn ymwneud â rhyw hanesyn o bentre penodol yng nghymoedd y Rhondda. Mae cymoedd y Rhondda Fach a’r Rhondda Fawr wedi bod yn rhan o fywyd Siôn Tomos Owen o’r dechrau. Mae’r straeon yma’n dangos sut mae pentrefi a phobl Cwm Rhondda wedi effeithio arno.