Dr Ragab's Universal Language

Charlatan. Guru. Master of disguise. Ahead of his time, wise beyond his years, a simple opportunist or the great pretender; however you choose to see him, one fact is certain: Dr Ragab is a mysterious man. Talked about by pretty much everyone in 1920s Cairo, only a few get the chance to make his acquaintance, and fewer still -- one person, in fact -- get to study his life lessons. Hertwig is that lucky soul. Or not so lucky, perhaps: not when he finds himself, at the very end of the second world war, imprisoned in a bunker in Germany by a gang of thugs. To make matters worse, it`s not just any bunker; it`s Hertwig`s own bunker, and he`s built it to be 100% escape-proof. And yet... there is a possible way out. Not in the conventional sense, it`s true, but when you`re holed up several feet underground, unsure of how long your captors plan to keep you alive, convention isn`t necessarily a good thing, as Dr Ragab would be the first to proclaim -- and it`s his universal language that may just provide Hertwig with the escape route he needs. 
As unconventional as the eponymous Ragab, Robert Twigger`s novel takes the reader on a surreal journey, exploring such diverse topics as far right ideologies, middle east mysticism and the art of communicating via food preparation and presentation. Clever, funny and thought-provoking, Dr Ragab`s Universal Language is, in every sense, beyond belief: part tall tale and part self-help manual, it is, like Dr R himself, impossible to pin down -- or, indeed, to put down.

Twigger, Robert

Literature & Fiction

Picador Hardbacks

Untitled Mccarthy 14 Mme

Au,Cormac McCarthy

Literary

'Editing Answering Back, in which living poets replied to poems from the past, I was astonished to see how many of the poems, old and new, referred to the moon. I then started to keep a record of such references, and from my notebook, I see that in one morning alone I came across no fewer than nine poems, from the likes of Coleridge, Graves, Rosetti and Rowe and it was this selection that initially inspired To the Moon. There's something incredibly moving, and electrifying, to read a poem from the Chinese Book of Odes, written around 500 BC, and to feel both our distance from and our closeness to the past, and the Moon itself: I climbed the hill just as the new moon showed, I saw him coming on the southern road. My heart lays down its load. In collecting together poems such as these poems that span continents and centuries To the Moon shows what it is to be human; to love, to lose, to dream and to hope. The poems it contains give us a real and profound sense of our time on this planet, and the pleasures they offer are like space itself infinite.'

To the Moon: An Anthology of Lunar Poems

Carol Ann Duffy

Poetry

Blending history, science and eye-witness accounts, and arranged in chapters that correspond to the four ancient elements (earth, air, fire and water), Terra is a book about life, death and natural disasters. Through four case studies - the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, the European weather panics of 1783, the eruption of Krakatau in 1883 and the Hilo tsunami of 1946 - Richard Hamblyn paints a vivid picture of these turbulent events; their drama and scale; their inevitability and indiscriminate destruction.

Terra; Tales of the Earth: Four Events That Changed the World

Science & Math

Richard Hamblyn

History & Philosophy

The Skating Rink

ROBERTO BOLAÑO

Chris Andrews (Translator)

Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. Very Good, 1st Edition, Picador 2009. Very Thick Royal 8vo. xx + 412pp. Very good clean tight sound square, no bookpalte, inscriptions or marks of any kind. In bright white lettered pubple cloth boards, together with original unclipped portrait pictorial dustwrapper, featuring Thompson with gun, one very short closed chip to head of spine not detracting, now housed and protected in removeable transparent Mylar wrapper. 'He introduced a halucinatory element into nonfiction writing, his own kind of magic realism. He took the American realist tradition and ran it through a wood chipper.' New York Times

Ancient Gonzo Wisdom

HUNTER S. THOMPSON

Misadventure won the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize, and is Richard Meier's first collection. Misadventure is a book about what we learn, and what we refuse to learn: although Meier's poems are often deceptively quiet in their address, the reader will soon discover a poet capable of illuminating the darkest corners of our lives by the very lightest of touches, and an ear simultaneously attuned to the lyric poem and the cadence of real speech. The collection also contains some disarmingly tender poetry on the experience of fatherhood. Misadventure is about all the hope and hopelessness lurking just below the surface of things, in our rooms, tables, coats and gardens - and leaves them enriched and strange, under the transforming eye of a fine new talent.

Misadventure

Richard Meier

Ten Things I've Learnt About Love

Sarah Butler

Will Storr was in the tropical north of Australia, excavating fossils with a celebrity creationist, when he asked himself a simple question. Why don't facts work? Why, that is, did the obviously intelligent man beside him sincerely believe in Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden and a six-thousand-year-old Earth, in spite of the evidence against them? It was the start of a journey that would lead Storr all over the world - from Texas to Warsaw to the Outer Hebrides - meeting an extraordinary cast of modern heretics whom he tries his best to understand. He goes on a tour of Holocaust sites with David Irving and a band of neo-Nazis, experiences his own murder during "past life regression" hypnosis, discusses the looming One World Government with iconic climate sceptic Lord Monckton and investigates the tragic life and death of a woman who believed her parents were high priests in a baby-eating cult. Using a unique mix of highly personal memoir, investigative journalism and the latest research from neuroscience and experimental psychology, Storr reveals how the stories we tell ourselves about the world invisibly shape our beliefs, and how the neurological "hero maker" inside us all can so easily lead to self-deception, toxic partisanship and science denial.

The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

Politics & Social Sciences

WILL STORR

Social Sciences

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