Dan's got a new job. But he's moved out of town in order to start a family and has been commuting into London every day. After fourteen months of the trains either making him late for work or late getting home, he's had enough and decides it's high time that Martin Harbottle, the Managing Director of Premier Westward trains, heard about it. As it turns out, Dan has plenty of time to fill and a lot to say: his work for the troubled paper recently caught up in allegations of 'unethical practices', his rocky marriage and the struggle to adjust to new parenthood. Before long, his forthright opinions on just about everything find their way into his emails. But when Martin begins to respond, a hilarious - and extraordinary - correspondence begins.

In the final days of 2019, a new and deadly virus was quietly spreading through the city of Wuhan, China. Within six months it would kill half a million people worldwide, infect a further 10 million, and change the way all of us live, work and play forever. Now, for the first time, the real story of the greatest global crisis of the age can be told. Reporters Dylan Howard and Dominic Utton, collaborating from New York and London—infection hotspots in what would become two of the worst-hit nations on Earth—have together mapped the rise, spread and impact of the virus . . . and uncovered some explosive revelations. COVID-19: The Greatest Cover-Up in History—From Wuhan to the White House delivers the unfettered truth about what is undoubtedly the biggest political scandal of our time. It shows in unprecedented detail how governments in China, the UK, and the US not only failed to protect their citizens from the threat of the disease, but actively conspired to put their own political and economic ideologies above the lives of ordinary people. From early attempts by Beijing to silence any reports of the new virus to the inability of the WHO to act decisively; from warnings received and ignored by President Trump to decisions taken by the UK government that directly led to the loss of tens of thousands of lives; from whispers of military experiments to outlandish 5G conspiracy theories, Howard and Utton separate fact from fiction, science from hysteria, and expose a trail of dead bodies, wilful mismanagement, incompetence, arrogance, deliberate cover-ups, and outrageous lies that raise serious questions about who is really responsible for the hundreds of thousands killed by COVID-19. Through vigorous investigations, dedicated reporting, and exclusive first-person sourcing, COVID-19 unearths a more complex understanding of the rise, spread, and consequences of the first six months of the pandemic than has yet been seen, and exposes shocking revelations about the roles and motivations of the American and British governments in the crisis. The true story of COVID-19 is not just that of a silent killer that suddenly invaded the world . . . it’s the scandal of a global tragedy that could have—and should have—been prevented. The real number of deaths and infections from the virus will never be known. The figures have not only been underreported in China, but by supposedly transparent governments in the West for reasons less connected with public safety and more to do with their own mendacity, incompetence, and corruption. Written with the urgency and tension of a thriller novel but grounded in rigorously factual reporting, COVID-19 is the essential read on the most horrifying scandal of our age.

They slowed as they reached the gate; two stone columns, each with its own crumbling angel perched on top. The angels held up a rusty, wrought-iron arch that read, in curling, serpentine letters: SHIVERTON HALL. Arthur Bannister has been unexpectedly accepted into Shiverton Hall, which, as it turns out, is an incredibly spooky school, full of surprises. And it is just as well that Shiverton Hall has made its offer, because Arthur had a horrible time at his previous school, and was desperate to leave. Timely indeed . . . But Arthur has no time to worry about the strange coincidence. He is too busy trying to make head or tail of Shiverton Hall, dogged as it is by tales of curses and bad fortune. At least there are a few friendly faces: George, who shows him around; also Penny and Jake. But not all the faces are friendly. There are the bullying Forge triplets for starters. And then there is the acid tongue of the headmistress, Professor Long-Pitt, who seems to go out of her way to make Arthur's life a misery. Luckily Arthur has his new friends to cheer him up. Although there are some friends that you don't want to have at all, as Arthur is soon to find out.

This is a review of 190 years of literature on copper and its alloys. It integrates information on pigments, corrosion and minerals, and discusses environmental conditions, conservation methods, ancient and historical technologies.

The Lodger is the first known novelization of the Jack the Ripper story. It follows the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting, a maid and butler. An eccentric lodger, Mr. Sleuth, arrives at their lodging-house just as a wave of horrific murders begins to sweep London. The Buntings become engrossed in the newspaper sensationalism as well the detailed accounts of their young friend, a Scotland Yard detective. Lowndes first wrote The Lodger as a short story published in McClure’s Magazine, then later published the novelization in the Daily Telegraph as a serial. It was very successful, with over a million copies sold within a few decades. Writers like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein praised it, with one contemporary reviewer calling it “the best novel about murder written by any living author.” It has since been adapted to other media, notably as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s first movies. Today the novel is still considered the best fictional adaptation of the Jack the Ripper legend. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

“A probing biography of the enfant terrible of 1960s and 1970s film-making . . . exhaustive and endlessly intriguing.” —Booklist Written by the film critic and historian David Weddle, this fascinating account does critical justice to an important body of cinema as it spins the tale of David Samuel Peckinpah’s dramatic, overcharged life and the turbulent times through which he moved. Sam Peckinpah was born into a clan of lumberjacks, cattle ranchers, and frontier lawyers. After a hitch with the Marines, he made his way to Hollywood, where he worked on a string of low-budget features. In 1955 he began writing scripts for Gunsmoke; in less than a year he was one of the hottest writers in television, with two classic series, The Rifleman and The Westerner, to his credit. From there he went on to direct a phenomenal series of features, including Ride the High Country, Straw Dogs, The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah was both a hopeless romantic and a grim nihilist, a filmmaker who defined his era as much as he was shaped by it. Rising to prominence in the social and political upheaval of the late sixties and early seventies, Peckinpah and his generation of directors—Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, Robert Altman—broke with convention and turned the traditional genres of Western, science fiction, war, and detective movies inside out. No other era in Hollywood has matched it for sheer energy, audacity, and originality; no one cut a wider path through that time than Sam Peckinpah. “Groundbreaking.” —Michael Sragow, The Atlantic

Sinister schemes and deadly deeds are afoot in this second terrifying tale from Shiverton Hall.