There have been many changes since the first edition of this publication appeared in 1984. In addition to the closure of many more local cinemas, there has been the growth of the multiplexes so the picture is not entirely black. It is written by Alan Eyles, a fulltime specialist researcher and writer on the history of cinema. The new edition has twice the number of pages as the first and nearly 200 photographs including many which have been uncovered by the author in the last 20 years. It includes every cinema which has opened in Hertfordshire since 1908 (when the first opened its doors) and is arranged by town for ease of reference.

In Being Oscar,one of America’s most celebrated criminal defense attorneys recounts the stories and cases of his epic life. The Mafia’s go-to defender, he has tried an estimated 300 criminal cases, and won most of them. His roster of clients reads like a history of organized crime: Meyer Lansky, Nicky Scarfo, and “Lefty” Rosenthal, as well as Mike Tyson and boxing promoter Don King, along with a midget, a dentist, and a federal judge. After thirty-five years as a defender, he ran for mayor of Las Vegas, and America’s greatest Mob lawyer became the mayor of its sexiest city. He was so popular his image appeared on the 5, 25, and 100 chips. While mayor of Vegas, he starred on the screen in Rush Hour 2 and CSI. He is as large a character in the history of organized crime as any of his clients and as legendary a figure in the history of Las Vegas as the entrepreneurs (his friends and clients) who built the city. This is his astonishing story—the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

On his seventeenth birthday, New South Wales farm boy, Callan McAlister joins the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and is swept away to war. His first taste of blood comes from an unexpected enemy in the Sinai Desert, before being shipped to Gallipoli. Callan receives a shock while convalescing in peaceful, idyllic Ireland during the Easter of 1916. But the Western Front awaits — all before his nineteenth birthday. Callan falls in love with a lovely English beauty, Ivy Brown, but their path to happiness is neither easy nor pre-ordained. A lowly Australian private soldier is viewed with doubt and disapproval by Ivy’s aristocratic family — not to mention Callan’s chances of surviving the brutality of the Great War. An offer to join the fledgling Royal Flying Corps (RFC) may be Callan’s chance to escape the endless mud-filled trenches, infested with rats, lice, trench fever and foot-rot, and tormented by German machine-gunners and artillery bombardments. But, with minimal training, an RFC pilot’s life expectancy is tenuous at best. Ivy also experiences her baptism of fire as an ambulance driver for the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY). Callan and Ivy’s struggle reaches its startling climax in an air race to the far reaches of the British Empire where law and justice are the domain of the most powerful and those ruthless enough to go to any lengths to achieve their desires. If you read only one book set against WWI during its centenary anniversary, make it McAlister and the Great War. This novel, ranging across a truly global canvas, explores many fascinating and thrilling historical incidents that occurred during the tragic conflict.

Did industry and commerce affect the concepts, values and epistemic foundations of different sciences? If so, how and to what extent? This book suggests that the most significant influence of industry on science in the two case studies treated here had to do with the issue of realism. Using wave propagation as the common thread, this is the first book to simultaneously analyse the emergence of realist attitudes towards the entities of the ionosphere and of the earth's crust. However, what led physicists and engineers to adopt realist attitudes? This book suggests that a new kind of realism —a realism of social and cultural origins- is the answer: a preliminary, entity realism responding to specific commercial and engineering interests, and a realism that was neither strictly instrumental nor exclusively operational. The book has two parts: while Part I focuses on the study of the ionosphere and how the British radio industry affected ionospheric physics, Part II focuses on the study of the Earth's crust and how the American oil industry affected crustal seismology.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1866.