Dear Granny Smith

This title is a letter to you, me, all of us, from a British postie. It is an eye-opening, heartfelt letter which goes behind the scenes, through the ages, in the sorting room and out on the daily round, to tell the other side of the story.

Since 2000, there has been an ideologically driven experiment carried out in the UK to change the postal service provided by Royal Mail, to one beholden to the mantra of competition, profit and privatisation. This is the story of those in the frontline of change.

Pia Jo Borg, a part-time theatre instructor, is trying to solve a jewel heist in a bid to win a $10,000 reward. Maxima Roshnikov, a famous diva and the rightful owner of a lavish emerald and diamond necklace, had the heirloom stolen right from her neck during a gala celebrating her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. She considers the necklace a symbol of her husband's love, and she desperately wants it back. But there are so many suspects! The guest list to the party included an odd cast of characters: the Andersons live in a shabby home amid mansions, and they might want to move up; the Alligrettis seem to be rich, but maybe their wealth is just a sham; and the Constantas are elderly Gypsies who perhaps shouldn't have been at the party at all. And the list goes on and on. Pia's mission to solve the case brings her down unexpected paths and eventually leads her right into the middle of a murder investigation. Finding the thief means finding a killer in the Wild Swans of Innisfree.

The General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit sat at the creative epicentre of Britain in the 1930s. It nurtured a vital crop of artistic talent, built a forum for a new kind of cinematic address and created Britain's first self-consciously national cinema. In 2011, UNESCO added its work to the UK Memory of the World Register, recognising its status as part of Britain's cultural heritage. Elements of the GPO Film Unit's story are well known: John Grierson's development of documentary cinema; the influence of Mass Observation and Surrealism on its cinematic vision; the Watt–Auden–Britten collaboration Night Mail. The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit brings together primary materials and critical appraisals to revisit, re-contextualise and revitalise these seminal moments in British cinema. Here, the insights of an archivist, a musicologist, a design historian, a sports historian, a geographer and a postman – among others – have been edited into a rich critical archaeology of a compelling moment in cinematic history. Interspersed with these essays are primary materials – memoirs, magazine articles, posters and government documents – that detail everything from Alberto Cavalcanti's vision for the documentary movement to a claim for the clothes Humphrey Jennings lost while shooting on location. In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the GPO Film Unit and its work, on the big screen, in DVD boxsets and on the web. The Projection of Britain ties together the Unit's diverse artistic, historical and cultural threads into an essential one-stop resource. Provocative, imaginative and ambitious, this expansive study is the definitive companion to an extraordinary episode in cinematic history.

A philosophical manual of media power for the network age. Evil Media develops a philosophy of media power that extends the concept of media beyond its tried and trusted use in the games of meaning, symbolism, and truth. It addresses the gray zones in which media exist as corporate work systems, algorithms and data structures, twenty-first century self-improvement manuals, and pharmaceutical techniques. Evil Media invites the reader to explore and understand the abstract infrastructure of the present day. From search engines to flirting strategies, from the value of institutional stupidity to the malicious minutiae of databases, this book shows how the devil is in the details. The title takes the imperative “Don't be evil” and asks, what would be done any differently in contemporary computational and networked media were that maxim reversed. Media here are about much more and much less than symbols, stories, information, or communication: media do things. They incite and provoke, twist and bend, leak and manage. In a series of provocative stratagems designed to be used, Evil Media sets its reader an ethical challenge: either remain a transparent intermediary in the networks and chains of communicative power or become oneself an active, transformative medium.

Steve is proud to present his third and final collection of 12 original short plays. The characters portrayed present a range of human behaviours and interactions, feelings and emotions; some are funny, while others are emotional and serious. Ideal for aspiring and new actors as well as established players, these plays are entertaining to read and perform.

Pamela Colman Smith’s illustrations for the Rider Waite tarot deck are known to millions worldwide, but her work took her from art galleries in New York and Europe to salons with luminaries of the English suffrage movement, the Irish literary revival, and friendships with Bram Stoker, W. B. Yeats, and G. K. Chesterton. A feminist artist, poet, folklorist, editor, publisher, and stage designer who was active from 1896 through the 1920s, Colman Smith became popular for her live performances of Jamaican folktales in both England and the U.S., using the creole of the island to capture the dramatic power of these tales while driving speculation about her purposefully indeterminate racial and sexual identity. She also travelled in - and was expelled from – occult circles, and her ability to take on and cast aside a wide range of identities was central to her life’s work. Colman Smith illustrated more than 20 books and well over a hundred magazine articles, wrote two collections of Jamaican folktales, and edited two magazines. Her paintings were exhibited in galleries in the U.S. and Europe.