Ever since man first cultivated plants and grew crops, insects, mites and other creatures have risen to prominence as pests, but it is only throughout the last two centuries that we have come to study them in any detail.[...]

In 1963, Mimi Beardsley was a naive young American girl, very much a product of her class and time - she had attended the same exclusive girls' school as Jackie Bouvier, now installed in the White House as the president's wife. Which is also where Mimi found herself, as an 18-year-old intern. The JF[...]

The acclaimed and enthralling story of the dark side of Elizabethan rule, from Stephen Alford Elizabeth I's reign is known as a golden age, yet to much of Europe she was a 'Jezebel' and heretic who had to be destroyed. The Watchers is a thrilling portrayal of the secret state that sought to protect [...]

With a single shot from a pistol small enough to conceal in his hand, John Wilkes Booth catapulted into history on the night of April 14, 1865, just as he hoped. But his murder of President Abraham Lincoln - one of the most familiar events in American history - brought Booth infamy, not the acclaim[...]

Public services are increasingly delivered through a range of forms of 'external' service-provision such as contracting, partnering and regulation. This new text assesses when and how public sector organizations might better draw on the work of these external parties and examines the wider implicati[...]

Stories of the looting of Europe's great treasures during World War II--and their still-unknown hideaways. World War II was the most devastating conflict in human history, but the tragedy did not end on the battlefields. During the war, Germany--and, later, the Allies--plundered Europe's historic tr[...]

Buried in many people and operating largely outside the realm of conscious thought are forces inclining us toward liberal or conservative political convictions. Our biology predisposes us to see and understand the world in different ways, not always reason and the careful consideration of facts. The[...]

Armed with recent medical evidence that supports the cliche that older people are, indeed, wiser, Alford sets off to interview people over 70 - some famous (Phyllis Diller, Harold Bloom, Edward Albee), some accomplished (the world's most-quoted author, a woman who walked across the country at age 89[...]

This book offers a reappraisal of the kingship and politics of the reign of Edward VI, the third Tudor king of England who reigned from the age of nine in 1547 until his death in 1553. The reign has often been interpreted as a period of political instability, mainly because of Edward's age, but this[...]