Vintage Digital imprint: 737 books

This study considers the institution of Freemasonry from the point of view of both masons and their critics, as well as from the author's own. In the first section, it gives an outline of masonic history, from the foundation of the Grand Lodge in Covent Garden in 1717 through its major role in Enlightenment...

' outwardly the unfilmable script of a would-be English cineste, one Richard Arthur Thornby currently lecturing in Texas on the cinema. He airs a hypothetical movie of both his own American present and his middle-class English families past. . ' John Fowles

After his first collection - SOFT KEYS - Michael Symmons Roberts was hailed by Les Murray as 'a poet for the new, chastened, unenforcing age of faith that has just dawned'. The metaphysical concerns of that first book are central to this new collection, written in a language at once philosophical,...

As a child, Luke’s mother often tells him the story of the Dumb House, an experiment on newborn babies raised in silence, designed to test the innateness of language. As Luke grows up, his interest in language and the delicate balance of life and death leads to amateur dissections of small animals...

As he sets out on his first adventure in life, a young man enters the dark realm of adult violence; a married suburbanite longs for the wide, mysterious world that seems to hover just beyond the next turn in the road; a pair of disturbed twins commit a pointless crime; and the boy of the title story,...

Lucid, complex, sensual and richly textured, the poems in The Invisible Mender are notable for the breadth of their subject matter and the precision of their detail. We travel on journeys through landscapes dense with historical and political meanings, from the post-industrial decline of frozen North...

In his most eloquent and formally satisfying collection to date, Alan Jenkins plays a series of powerful and haunting variations on love and loss. The themes that run through our lives are relatively few, for all that they sound subtly different to each of us, with their own rich freight of places...

At first, these extraordinary poems may unsettle and disturb, but the next reading could be one of rapture and astonishment; it all hinges on your point of view. Like the optical illusion of the maiden and the crone, you can only see one image at a time; the brain deciding which is the figure and...

From the late 1960s, Northern Ireland has been mired in violence. Yet it has had seen more than its fair share of sporting heroes - from footballer George Best, through snooker champion Alex Higgins, to boxer Barry McGuigan. Life was tough for these working-class lads, but they could shine on the...

'Stanley Matthews taught us the way football should be played' Pel� 'I couldn't believe he was just a man. He was the best player in the world' Bobby Charlton 'He told me that he used to play for just twenty pounds a week. Today he would be worth all the money in the Bank of England'...

Best of British is a celebration of the nation's greatest 100 sporting heroes, from Henry VIII to Red Rum, Roy of the Rovers to Torvill and Dean. Jon Henderson has combed through the annals of our glorious and not so glorious past to bring us the geniuses and the eccentrics, the national treasures...

In his previous volume in this series, Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle, G. E. R. Lloyd pointed out that although there is no exact equivalent to our term ‘science’ in Greek, Western science may still be said to originate with the Greeks. In this second volume, Greek Science after Aristotle,...

Colourless, tasteless, odourless, ageless: water is both the simplest thing on earth and the most complex. We cannot live without it yet it kills six thousand children a day. It is the ultimate renewable resource but we pollute it without thinking twice. Why, if water is so valuable does nobody want...

Alongside the names of James Hadley Chase and Erle Stanley Gardner we must now add that of John Hartley Williams - though Mystery in Spiderville is no run-of-the-mill hard-boiled thriller. The d�cor is by Dali, the plot is a mixture of Breton and Burroughs, and the main character - the protean and...