Explore Oxford's secret history through a fascinating selection of stories, facts and photographs.

Why were Ben and Rosie hiding on the Moon? On Earth, people were watching live pictures from the Moon. They'd seen one astronaut return to the landing vehicle. But where was the second astronaut? Why did the pictures suddenly stop? What was the secret on the Moon? Read and Imagine provides great stories to read and enjoy, with language support, activities, and projects. Follow Rosie, Ben, and Grandpa on their exciting adventures . . .

The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640-1714 is the most wide-ranging overview available of prose writing in English during one of the most tumultuous periods in British and Irish history. Stretching from the outbreak of the English Civil Wars to the death of Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch, the volume is unprecedented in the breadth of its coverage of an age in which prose moved from the margins of cultural life in Britain to its centre. The volume also breaks new ground in the diversity of the prose writing it covers: its thirty-six chapters by an array of established literary critics and historians capture the excitingly multiple forms that prose took in what was a golden age for non-fictional writing, but which also saw the emergence of modes of prose fiction that became part of the origin story of the eighteenth-century novel. This Handbook reflects that multiplicity and diversity in its structure. Four longer introductory chapters map the changing contexts of the publication and reception of prose in the period, as well as the influence of the classical heritage and the role of relations with continental Europe. The subsequent thirty-two chapters are organized by different categories of prose writing. The contributors approach key authors and texts from various and often unconventional perspectives. The volume offers coverage of well-known writers and texts while also capturing the assortment of prose writing in a time of rapid political and social change: there are chapters on, for example, 'Bites and Shams'; 'Circulation Narratives'; 'Keys'; 'Pornography'; 'Recipe Books'; 'True Accounts', and even 'Handbooks'.

Written by top children's authors such as award-winning Gillian Cross, Malachy Doyle and Pippa Goodhart Snapdragons are fabulously illustrated with various writing styles and fonts to make reading enjoyable for all your infant readers. They provides a wide range of picture books for children aged 3-9. Easy-to-use reading notes for parents/carers are included on the inside cover of each book. This book is also available as part of a mixed pack of 6 different books or a class pack of 36 books of the same Oxford Reading Tree stage. Each book pack comes with a free copy of invaluable teaching notes.

The Secret History of Oxford offers the reader an off-the-beaten-track tour of the city’s landmarks and streets. Filled with hundreds of facts and anecdotes, it reveals the amusing, unlikely and downright wonderful stories hidden beneath the surface. Some, such as the fact that the founder of Oxford was eaten by wolves, will be known; many others, such as the fact that Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, stole a piece of New College’s unicorn horn, that one of the Fellows of Christ Church was a bear or that Oxford Castle has England’s most frequently sighted ghost, are much less widely known – and some of these stories have not appeared in print for hundreds of years. With rare photographs and intriguing information on the people, eras and events that defined the city’s history, this book lets the flying cats out of the bags, rattles the dragons’ cages and reveals all the skeletons in the city’s cupboards.

Martin Stevens explores the extraordinary variety of senses in the animal kingdom, and discusses the cutting-edge science that is shedding light on these secret worlds. Our senses of vision, smell, taste, hearing, and touch are essential for us to respond to threats, communicate and interact with the world around us. This is true for all animals - their sensory systems are key to survival, and without them animals would be completely helpless. However, the sensory systems of other animals work very differently from ours. For example, many animals from spiders to birds can detect and respond to ultraviolet light, to which we are blind. Other animals, including many insects, rodents, and bats can hear high-frequency ultrasonic sounds well beyond our own hearing range. Many other species have sensory systems that we lack completely, such as the magnetic sense of birds, turtles, and other animals, or the electric sense of many fish. These differences in sensory ability have a major bearing on the ways that animals behave and live in different environments, and also affect their evolution and ecology. In this book, Martin Stevens explores the remarkable sensory systems that exist in nature, and what they are used for. Discussing how different animal senses work, he also considers how they evolve, how they are shaped by the environment in which an animal lives, and the pioneering science that has uncovered how animals use their senses. Throughout, he celebrates the remarkable diversity of life, and shows how the study of sensory systems has shed light on some of the most important issues in animal behaviour, physiology, and evolution.

Predicated upon the principles of political freedom, cultural openness, religious tolerance, individual self-reliance, and ethnic diversity, the United States of America has been tempted recurrently by the lures of the secret. American Secrets explores this political, historical, and cultural phenomenon from many, often surprisingly, overlapping angles in these analyses of the literary and cultural uses and abuses of secrecy within a democratic culture. Through analyses of diverse literary works andcultural manifestations-from Mark Twain's anti-imperialist prophecies to 9/11 conspiracy theories, from the traumas of the Vietnam war to the homophobia of the American military establishment, from the unresolved dilemmas of nuclear politics to the secret ecologies shunted aside by the exploitation of the environment, from the questionings of national identity on the ethnic and (trans)sexual margins to the confessional modes of poetry and the poetics of the unspeakable and unrepresentable-these essays reveal the politics within the poetics and, indissociably, the poetics fueling the politics of secrecy in its ambivalent deployment. Secrecy often seems to be a question without an answer or an answer that either seems to beg the question or to be a question itself. These essays address this paradox with their own questioning explorations. In answering such questions, the volume as a whole provides an illuminating overview of the pervasiveness of the secret and its modalities in American culture while alsodealing specifically with the poetics of the secret in its various, historically recurrent literary manifestations.