Aeneid

Literature & Fiction

VIRGIL

Dramas & Plays

Impala Pr

Yesterday's Enemy: Freedom Fighters or Terrorists?

"As ye sow, so also shall ye reap. My father chastised you with rods, but I shall chastise you with scorpions. The Evil that men do lives after them, the good oft lies interred with their bones. In intelligence circles they have a name for it: BLOWBACK." 1980s Afghanistan, invaded by the Soviets, was an awkward place. An altruistic and intrepid team of volunteer surgeons from a British hospital need a trouble-shooter by their side on the ill-defined frontier with Pakistan. Part One - Foreign Bodies charts their manoeuvres through the diplomatic barriers. The mostly unflappable Chetwynd makes anecdotes rather than crises out of the drama. Part Two - The Enemy Within leads the team in shalwar kameez to the war-torn border regions, dodging local militia and fields of landmines, ever nearer the front-line casualties. But allied to the threat of largely invisible fighting is a growing awareness that their mission is being thwarted, not by military obstacles, but by an unseen third force - before accidentally stumbling on the revelation that the party-political cottage hospital where they are operating on war casualties is simultaneously a conduit for Saudi and Kuwaiti middle-class funding for 'illegal' fundamentalist political activities, investing long-term in the expectation of re-importing less autocratic Home Rule, either by osmosis or backlash. Part Three - Conspiracy of Silence takes Chetwynd out of the clear air of Aghanistan to the unlikely Chancelleries of Bonn where he unearths the documentary evidence he needs. He gets behind the smoke and mirrors which conceal an international fraud: Afghan drug-dealers and gun-runners are co-operating with a fund-raising charity which is defrauding the German Public, the EEC and the US State Department. Millions of dollars, raised for bogus hospital installations which will never be completed, are being siphoned off. Has Chetwynd detected the roots of the new funding of the new terrorism? YESTERDAY'S ENEMY discloses how this racket, together with another know as the "by-pass operations" was being facilitated by its very clandestine nature. It charts how a new breed of terrorism, aided and abetted, funded and equipped in the West, spawned in Afghanistan, was to result in bombings from Peshawar, Islamabad, Riyadh, Cairo, Algiers - all the way to the World Trade Centre in New York. "As sure as hell, one's man's freedom fighter turns out to be the next man's terrorist. It could hardly have been contrived but there was no denying it is what happened." On a more positive note, the book tells of the outstanding contribution made by some exceptional expatriate women in their war effort for a society not renowned for honouring their sex. Relentlessly detailed, the story is embellished with humorous anecdote, since, at the time, humour went hand-in-hand with survival.

Politics & Social Sciences

Chetwynd, Rupert

Politics & Government

Chinese Chess: An Introduction to the Openings

C. K. Lai is a well known Xiangqi player and enthusiast who has written and translated a dozen books on the subject, and is still writing, though less frequently nowadays. There was a time when he produced two books a year, among them his first book Chinese Chess, An Introduction To The Openings, Checkmate In Two, and Chess Of The Wuzhi Mountain (in collaboration with Mr. Shu Ming Li of San Francisco). Translations include Chinese Chess, The Endgame Technique, Victories All The Way, and Fifty Games Of GM Li Laiqun. With a few Xiangqi friends he promoted the game in Britain some two decades ago, helping to create the UK Chinese Chess Association. He is certainly at the forefront of promotion of the game in Britain. One of C. K. Lai's high achievements in Xiangqi competitions was in 1994 when he won the 11th European Xiangqi Championship held in Amsterdam. He also won on several occasions the UK Xiangqi Championship. He is Editor of Chinese Chess Cyber Newsletter, a simple web site based in London which attracts many Xiangqi followers.

Humor & Entertainment

Lai, C K

Puzzles & Games

Sportsman, doctor, historian and writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) created one of the most enduring - indeed, legendary - characters in English literature: Sherlock Holmes, the brilliantly observational denizen of 221B Baker Street. Conan Doyle was born of Irish parents in Edinburgh and educated partly in Great Britain and partly in Germany. He qualified as a medical doctor in Southsea, but the absence of both patients and revenue persuaded him, as he himself has related, to turn his daydreams into imaginative writings. The result was a true stroke of genius, the creation of the great detective and his honest, down-to-earth colleague and 'chronicler', Dr Watson. In addition to his works of fiction, Conan Doyle was also a superb physical specimen and an avid boxer. In 1894 at Davos, Switzerland, he invented and subsequently popularized the concept of skiing as a sport. He also served as an army doctor in the war between England and the Boers of South Africa at the beginning of the 20th century, wrote a history of that war and was appointed official War Historian of the 1914-18 World War. His keen sense of justice involved him in two notorious cases of mistaken identity, those of Edaljee in 1903 and Oscar Slater in 1909. Conan Doyle personally, at his own expense, fought the courts on behalf of these two men, both total strangers to him, because he felt that they had been wrongfully convicted. Conan Doyle was an idealist who believed in his country and 'fair play'. In his writings, women tend to be modest, charming, faithful, beautiful and in need of defence. Gentlemen are honest, altruistic, gallant and brilliant. But Conan Doyle's fertile brain also conjured up an opposing criminal class of extraordinary depravity and ingenuity, led by the diabolical and brilliant Professor Moriarty, Holmes's arch enemy. From Buzan's Book of Genius, by Tony Buzan and Raymond Keene.

Atlantis Discovering the Lost City

Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir

Contemporary

With the opening of the Great Exhibition on May Day 1851 the self- confidence of the Victorian had reached its zenith. While the Queen's loyal subjects carried the crusade to raise Victorian order throughout the world, a panel of 'eminent authorities' at home were writing a household encyclopaedia. It is from this three-volume, closely-printed tome that Peter Keene has culled the delightful entries which appear in 'Never Nonplussed'. The authors of the original 'Dictionary of Daily Wants' claimed: 'There can scarcely arise a domestic want upon which it will not be found to afford good advice, and sound practical information.' For instance, how does one set about the treatment of brain fever, resuscitating the apparently dead from hanging, or exposure to weather? Do you know how to behave at a Christmas party or when faced with carving the family joint? For wives there is a special entry - Hints for, and Work, best method of doing. 'Never Nonplussed' makes the ideal book to reach for in an emergency - it may not solve the crisis but it will certainly restore the sense of humour. Cartoonist John Jensen has wittily illustrated the text with some delightful line drawings. During the Second World War, Londoner Peter Keene commanded minesweepers in the North Sea, the Mediterranean and ports on the west coast of Italy. After the war he went straight into publishing and began contributing humorous articles to the national press, magazines and radio. The uncle of celebrated Chess Grandmaster Raymond Keene, he enjoyed listening to music, and was an enthusiastic Sunday painter. He died in 1990.

Never Nonplussed: The Gentleman's & Gentlewoman's Guide to Perfection

Keene, Peter

Humor

The Land of Mist: In the aftermath of the First World War, which had witnessed global carnage on an unprecedented scale, interest in spiritualism exploded across the entire western community. The intense desire to regain contact with loved ones, slaughtered on European battlefields from 1914-1918, drove otherwise sensible and hard-headed citizens into the hands of mystics, parapsychologists and cunning fraudsters, exploiting and trading in the marketplace of universal grief. They claimed, with varying degrees of plausibility, to be able to restore relationships with brothers, sons and fathers, otherwise lost forever. In that sense Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Land of Mist is a vital social document, exploring the hopes, fears and despair of a generation whose nearest and dearest had been blasted into oblivion by the guns of Ypres, Passchendaele and the Somme. The Land of Mist should be seen less as a novel and more as a chronicle of the very real sense of loss suffered by millions and their attempts, at all costs, to compensate and survive. The 'Baby Book' of Denis Stewart Percy Conan Doyle: Diaries vary, of course, in their content, and therefore their interest to other readers, but the genre as a whole should be valued as a unique form of human testament. Small scribbled pages will outlive their author in a way that few ever visualise, and with the passage of time they come to encapsulate, in some small measure, both an individual's lifetime, and the times in which he or she lived. Diarists write for themselves, and usually tell the truth as they see it. Private diaries must rank, therefore, among the most valuable of historical records. - from the Introduction by Dr Irving Finkel

The Land of Mist With the 'baby Book' of Denis Stewart Percy Conan Doyle

Religion & Spirituality

New Age & Spirituality

The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale

STEWART, Graham

Conrad/Joseph

Classics

Niki Collins-Queen holds her readers spellbound with her valiant struggles and poetic descriptions of her spiritual and outdoor adventures and misadventures while sailing in the Bahamas, backpacking alone in the Georgia mountains and canoeing in the Everglades and on the Suwannee River. Earth, the Forgotten Temple is an important book with fresh insights: God is not "out there" somewhere but in the soil, in the trees, in the sea and in ourselves; the earth is our extended body -- a living organism; nature is the ultimate healer and a powerful spiritual force. Her book is a feast for the spiritual seeker, the nature lover and the outdoor adventurer.

Earth, the Forgotten Temple: A Spirit Quest in the Wilderness

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Collins-Queen, Niki

Alternative Medicine

Iliad

HOMER

Poetry

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