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A compilation of tales of the Thames Estuary.
A compilation of tales of the Thames Estuary.
When Nick Ardley asked for a prostate specific antigen (PSA) test, the aftershocks of a prostate cancer diagnosis were momentous. Frightened, he said he was too young to die. Petrified, he understandably broke down. But all was not lost: his family and the boat shared with his wife were soon at work repairing his life. A life-long sailor, the salt marsh fringed waters of the greater Thames estuary had always enthralled, and it was to them he went for healing. It’s a place where in the free flow of a saline breeze his mind cleared, and he began treating it all as just another little illness. Like a cold, he said, knowing full well it wasn’t! Sailing up the River Thames, he announced to his wife his choice of the medical directions offered. Later, after mooring off Gravesend, both cried together. Ardley’s treatment overlapped the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately, the serious stuff was done and dusted. The pandemic brought new trials. The couple were frighteningly threatened by a fellow yachtsman who disliked an Ardley web blog ... the horror of that summer has remained fresh. Throughout the telling of Ardley’s tales, his story, sailing with family and friends, country walking and living life, he has maintained a normality. Perhaps a familiar story, but it comes with a warning: Men, get yourselves tested before it’s too late! So, onwards he goes, sailing through life...
Stanley James, as a young man in the Canadian West, was by turns a cowboy, shepherd, navvy, hobo and newspaper reporter, soldier in the Spanish-American war, poet, playwright and actor. Returning to his native England, he married and became a Nonconformist minister who both charmed and alienated his Walthamstow congregation with his socialism and pacifism and support for women's emancipation. In 1923 he converted and reinvented himself as one of the best-known Catholic writers of the English-speaking world, with nine books to his name. Widely respected for his knowledge, passion and insight, he worked alongside Bertrand Russell and counted G.K. Chesterton among his friends. Yet the chance discovery of hundreds of secret letters and diaries of three women - many quoted in this account - shattered the image. These documents show in intriguing and often explicit detail that, as a husband and father of seven, he had an affair and liaisons with members of his congregation. Just how much did his family and friends know?
Active for over 40 years with the Communist Party of Canada, Bert Whyte was a journalist, an underground party organizer and soldier during World War II, and a press correspondent in Beijing and Moscow. But any notion of him as a Communist Party hack would be mistaken. Whyte never let leftist ideology get in the way of a great yarn. In Champagne and Meatballs--a memoir written not long before his death in Moscow in 1984--we meet a cigar-smoking rogue who was at least as happy at a pool hall as at a political meeting. His stories of bumming across Canada in the 1930s, of combat and comaraderie at the front lines in World War II, and of surviving as a dissident in troubled times make for compelling reading. The manuscript of Champagne and Meatballs was brought to light and edited by historian Larry Hannant, who has written a fascinating and thought-provoking introduction to the text. Brash, irreverent, informative, and entertaining, Whyte's tale is history and biography accompanied by a wink of his eye--the left one, of course.
Spring was late in 1913 and Edward Thomas decided to go and search for winter's grave and the tell-tale signs of season's turn - he set out to cycle westwards from London to the Quantocks. Edward Thomas 1878-1917 turned from writing prose to poetry in 1914. His work as a poet has been widely celebrated and admired - Ted Hughes described Thomas as "the father of us all". The Pursuit of Spring, originally published in 1914, bridges the divide between Thomas the journalist/critic and Thomas the highly regarded poet.
With an introduction by award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce the population by half. . While he did all this, he carefully constructed an image of himself as a deeply feeling humanitarian. Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize in 1999, King Leopold’s Ghost is the true and haunting account of this man’s brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. It is also the inspiring and deeply moving account of a handful of missionaries and other idealists who travelled to Africa and unwittingly found themselves in the middle of a gruesome holocaust. Instead of turning away, these brave few chose to stand up against Leopold. Adam Hochschild brings life to this largely untold story and, crucially, casts blame on those responsible for this atrocity.
"The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service is a 1903 novel by Erskine Childers. The book, which enjoyed immense popularity in the years before World War I, is an early example of the espionage novel and was extremely influential in the genre of spy fiction. It has been made into feature-length films for both cinema and television.The novel ""owes a lot to the wonderful adventure novels of writers like Rider Haggard, that were a staple of Victorian Britain"".[1] It was a spy novel that ""established a formula that included a mass of verifiable detail, which gave authenticity to the story - the same ploy that would be used so well by John Buchan, Ian Fleming, John le Carré and many others.""[1] All of the physical background is completely authentic - the various Frisian islands and towns named in the book actually exist and the descriptions of them accurate (often, from the author's own experience). The same is true for the various ""sands"" of the title - vast areas which are flooded at high tide but become mudflats at ebb. Navigating a small boat under these conditions requires a specialized kind of skilled seamanship - of which the character Davies is an unsurpassed master, and the descriptions of his feats are of abiding interest to yachting enthusiasts, quite apart from their role in the book's espionage plot."
Presents a complete reference to the life and works of Walt Whitman.