Beyond Holy Russia

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Pat Rogers

This is the first full-length analysis of A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), long recognized as a key book for understanding the eighteenth century and as one of Daniel Defoe's most characteristic works. A principle aim of this book is to describe the elements that went into the making of the Tour. A substantial introduction sets out a conceptual framework for the chapters that follow, putting the Tour into the historical context of travel writing and the development of a literature of tourism. This work also reflects the concerns and methods of Defoe's oeuvre as a whole. Other aspects of the Tour's ideology are reviewed, notably its political bearings and its treatment of the South Sea Bubble of 1720, a national disaster that has strong personal overtones for Defoe. Finally, an attempt is made to illuminate the design of the work and the ways in which its formal structure supports Defoe's intellectual attitudes.

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Mary Davies Parnell

Plateaux, Gateaux, Chateaux is the final volume in Mary Davies Parnell's popular trilogy of childhood memoirs. Having overcome the hurdle of O levels, Mary is now in the sixth form, a period when her horizons are widened in many directions. A new interest in dramatics and a dramatic, clandestine night out while at Ranger camp help relieve the burden of A levels, and are among a number of episodes in which her education is extended beyond the academic. And after success at A level Mary once again becomes a small fish in a big pool as she reads French at Aberystwyth. Student life in the fifties seems innocent now, and this distant time is charmingly explored, from Principal Goronwy Rees's white socks to the kidnapping of Miss Fresher. Mary's account ends with her impending return after her year abroad at a school for girls in Tours. Outside school she has visited chateaux, heard Piaf sing, received marriage proposals from two GIs and become a convinced Francophile.

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Ed Glinert

The streets of London resonate with secret stories, from East End lore to Cold War espionage, from tales of riots, rakes, brothers, anarchy and grisly murders, to Rolling Stones gigs, gangland drinking dens, Orwell's Fitzrovia and Lenin's haunts. Ed Glinert has walked the city from Limehouse to Lambeth, Whitehall to Whitechapel, unravelling its mysteries along the way. This is London as you have never seen it before.

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Grant Naylor

When Lister got drunk, he really got drunk. After celebrating his birthday with a Monopoly-board pub crawl around London, he came to in a burger bar on one of Saturn's moons, wearing a lady's pink crimplene hat and a pair of yellow fishing waders, with no money and a passport in the name of 'Emily Berkenstein'. Joining the Space Corps seemed a good idea. *Red Dwarf*, a clapped-out spaceship, was bound for Earth. It never made it, leaving Lister as the last remaining member of the human race, three million years from Earth, with only a dead man, a senile computer and a highly evolved cat for company. They begin their journey home. On the way they'll break the Light Barrier. They'll meet Einstein, Archimedes, God and Norman Wisdom...and discover an alternative plane of reality.