Double Duel

Team Hot Wheels races on the dangerous double loop track.

"An illustrated guide to the least-known period in Middle-earth's history, the Second Age. The lore and legends of this period are given life through hundreds of illustrations from artists who have studied Tolkien's work, and insightful commentary from David Day makes this a valuable addition to the shelf of anyone with a keen interest in exploring more of Tolkien's world"--

The story begins with the success of Rommel's Afrika Korps in the North African desert in 1941/42, having pushed the British army back to Alam El Halfa. Defeat for the British and Allied forces in North Africa looks inevitable. The text will then take the usual alternating chapter approach to take the action right up to the decisive Battle of Alamein in November 1942. We encounter Montgomery's appointment as leader of the now legendary Eighth Army, and Rommel's fight to press home his advantage by advancing at speed towards Cairo and the Nile. Then comes the battle at Alam El Halfa, with Rommel's army encountering unexpected opposition from British artillery and heavy RAF attacks. His forces are forced to withdraw. Rommel, and many of his men, fall ill at this point, and Rommel is sent back to Austria for treatment. Having met Mussolini, Hitler and Goering to discuss the North African situation, he then decides that it is vital to destroy the Allied supply base in Malta to prevent Montgomery and his men from receiving supplies. Montgomery's planned offensive at El Alamein begins and both sides hold their positions. Only at the start of November do Rommel's counter-attacks begin to fail, with heavy losses. A last stand fails and Montgomery launches a final onslaught, driving Rommel's forces west. Many of Rommel's men surrender.

Homonyms are pairs of words (sometimes three or four words) that sound alike, but have different spellings and meanings, such as “side-sighed,” “bare-bear,” and “seen-scene.” This book has been written not only because homonyms pose a problem for many native speakers of English, but because they are also particularly troublesome for learners of English as a second language. This collection does not contain every homonym, but it does contain many of the most common ones. Mostly Homonyms is a new treatment of a traditional topic that is easy to read and use without sacrificing academic relevance. It is intended not only for anyone who wishes to ascertain the correct spelling and usage of a homonym, whether non-native learners of English or native speakers of English, but also for people who just love words.

The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue - in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science - but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. The Arts of Disruption: Allegory and Piers Plowman offers a series of new readings of the allegorical poem Piers Plowman: but it is also a book about allegory. It argues not just that there are distinctively disruptive 'arts' that occur in allegory, but that allegory, because it is interested in the difficulty of making meaning, is itself a disruptive art. The book approaches this topic via the study of five medieval allegorical narrative structures that exploit diegetic conflict and disruption. Although very different, they all bring together contrasting descriptions of spiritual process, in order to develop new understanding and excite moral or devotional change. These five structures are: the paradiastolic 'hypocritical figure' (such as vices masked by being made to look like 'adjacent' virtues), personification debate, violent language and gestures of apophasis, narratives of bodily decline, and grail romance. Each appears in a range of texts, which the book explores, along with other connected materials in medieval rhetoric, logic, grammar, spiritual thought, ethics, medicine, and romance iconography. These allegorical narrative structures appear radically transformed in Piers Plowman, where the poem makes further meaning out of the friction between them. Much of the allegorical work of the poem occurs at the points of their intersection, and within the conceptual gaps that open up between them. Ranging across a wide variety of medieval allegorical texts, the book shows from many perspectives allegory's juxtaposition of the heterogeneous and its questioning of supposed continuities.