Rural Affairs Drayton Beauchamp Series Hardback

Whoever said life in the country was boring... Alicia's a smart sassy lawyer who won't stand for any nonsense. She lives for payday, Prada and becoming a Partner of the firm. Having shaken the proverbial rural dust of Drayton Beauchamp off her Jimmy Choos, she knows exactly what she wants out of life. At least, until one disastrous summer, she thinks she does. Then, stuck back in the village she grew up in things start to get complicated as she rediscovers old friends, Matty the farmer's wife with a passion for fashion and Chloe, the eternal romantic. As she clashes with her mother's favourite gardener, deals with aggressive clients and sees her friend's marriage fall apart, she finds that she becomes inexplicably bound to the village. However much she tries to leave it appears fate has other plans. Whoever said life in the countryside was boring couldn't have been more wrong; there's always a rural affair.

Life is never dull in Drayton Beauchamp but for Zoe it feels as though her world has been turned upside down. As her elderly employer is rushed off to hospital and the dog rescue centre is set to close, she doesn't think it can get much worse... Until a city developer and his girlfriend turn up and threaten to build a new housing estate on the beloved allotments. With the village up in arms and the tensions rising, Zoe finds herself plunged into the centre of the controversy with some dramatic unforeseen consequences. Everything falls apart but, luckily, it turns out a dog really is a girl's best friend.

How ordinary Americans, frustrated by the legal and political wrangling over the Second Amendment, can fight for reforms that will both respect gun owners’ rights and reduce gun violence. Efforts to reduce gun violence in the United States face formidable political and constitutional barriers. Legislation that would ban or broadly restrict firearms runs afoul of the Supreme Court’s current interpretation of the Second Amendment. And gun rights advocates have joined a politically savvy firearm industry in a powerful coalition that stymies reform. Ian Ayres and Fredrick Vars suggest a new way forward. We can decrease the number of gun deaths, they argue, by empowering individual citizens to choose common-sense gun reforms for themselves. Rather than ask politicians to impose one-size-fits-all rules, we can harness a libertarian approach—one that respects and expands individual freedom and personal choice—to combat the scourge of gun violence. Ayres and Vars identify ten policies that can be immediately adopted at the state level to reduce the number of gun-related deaths without affecting the rights of gun owners. For example, Donna’s Law, a voluntary program whereby individuals can choose to restrict their ability to purchase or possess firearms, can significantly decrease suicide rates. Amending Red Flag statutes, which allow judges to restrict access to guns when an individual has shown evidence of dangerousness, can give police flexible and effective tools to keep people safe. Encouraging the use of unlawful possession petitions can help communities remove guns from more than a million Americans who are legally disqualified from owning them. By embracing these and other new forms of decentralized gun control, the United States can move past partisan gridlock and save lives now.

Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize A radical rethinking of the Anglo-Saxon world that draws on the latest archaeological discoveries This beautifully illustrated book draws on the latest archaeological discoveries to present a radical reappraisal of the Anglo-Saxon built environment and its inhabitants. John Blair, one of the world's leading experts on this transformative era in England's early history, explains the origins of towns, manor houses, and castles in a completely new way, and sheds new light on the important functions of buildings and settlements in shaping people's lives during the age of the Venerable Bede and King Alfred. Building Anglo-Saxon England demonstrates how hundreds of recent excavations enable us to grasp for the first time how regionally diverse the built environment of the Anglo-Saxons truly was. Blair identifies a zone of eastern England with access to the North Sea whose economy, prosperity, and timber buildings had more in common with the Low Countries and Scandinavia than the rest of England. The origins of villages and their field systems emerge with a new clarity, as does the royal administrative organization of the kingdom of Mercia, which dominated central England for two centuries. Featuring a wealth of color illustrations throughout, Building Anglo-Saxon England explores how the natural landscape was modified to accommodate human activity, and how many settlements--secular and religious—were laid out with geometrical precision by specialist surveyors. The book also shows how the Anglo-Saxon love of elegant and intricate decoration is reflected in the construction of the living environment, which in some ways was more sophisticated than it would become after the Norman Conquest.

What history records as the Hundred Years War was in fact a succession of destructive conflicts, separated by tense intervals of truce and dishonest and impermanent peace treaties, and one of the central events in the history of England and France. It laid the foundations of France's national consciousness, even while destroying the prosperity and political preeminence which France had once enjoyed. It formed the nation's institutions, creating the germ of the absolute state of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In England, it brought intense effort and suffering, a powerful tide of patriotism, great fortune succeeded by bankruptcy, disintegration, and utter defeat. The war also brought turmoil and ruin to neighboring Scotland, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

A synthesis of tropical freshwater systems which illustrates the basic theory of freshwater biology.

The epic and acclaimed history series reaches its third volume in paperback.

When a group of friends formed 'Ferguson's Gang' they had no idea of the notoriety their antics would produce. Society was astounded by the daring tricks the Gang used to raise money but these were no common robbers. They presented the booty in the carcass of a goose or wrapped round a cigar; pledging undying support to the National Trust. Their greatest feat was preserving their anonymity; now almost a century later the fascinating story of Ferguson's Gang is finally revealed in this book. It is a world now forgotten; of genteel tea parties, debutantes' balls and stately homes with armies of servants. Yet amongst this wealth and splendour lurked a group of rebels. The personal stories of the masked maidens are startling; mixing with Royalty, they belonged to the leading political dynasties and rubbed shoulders with the literary elite. It is no wonder these women kept their identities so heavily concealed.