Author: Anne Whitehead
Publisher: Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1925267695
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 645
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Book Description
After Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo, he was sent into exile on St Helena, arriving in October 1815. For the six years until his death, he was an 'eagle in a cage', reduced from the most powerful figure in Europe to a prisoner on a rock in the South Atlantic. But the fallen emperor was charmed and entertained by Betsy Balcombe, the pretty teenage daughter of a local merchant. Anne Whitehead brings to life Napoleon's time on St Helena and the web of connections around the globe which framed his last years. Betsy's father, William Balcombe, was well-connected in London, and he smuggled letters and undertook a clandestine mission to Paris for Napoleon. Betsy's friendship with Napoleon cast a shadow over the rest of her colourful life. She married a Regency cad, who soon left her and their daughter, and she travelled to Australia in 1823 with her father, who was appointed the first Colonial Treasurer of New South Wales. After her father was exposed for fraud and the family lost their fortune, she returned to London and published a memoir which turned her into a celebrity. With her extraordinary connections to royalty in London and to the Bonaparte family and their courtiers, Betsy Balcombe led a life worthy of a Regency romance. This new account reveals Napoleon at his most vulnerable, human and reflective, and a woman caught in some of the most dramatic events of her time.
Author: Michael Staton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781597055338
Category : Talismans
Languages : en
Pages : 426
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Book Description
Teenaged Stealth is an artful thief with an attitude. Hired to burgle an exiled mage's villa, she tangles with Derrius, an apprentice mage of revoltingly noble birth. Trapped by political upheaval and their own antipathy, Stealth and Derrius undertake a mission to avert civil war. The two must learn to work together and dovetail her thieving skills and his magic. Long ago, Larenia's Sword protected their nation from evil, but the blade has been lost for a hundred years. Now, evil arises anew in the sultry form of the emperor's mistress, Illisandra Zayla. If Stealth and Derrius fail to find and recover the Sword, the sorceress will enthrall the emperor and seize the power her tormented soul lost long ago.
Author: Roger Penrose
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195106466
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 484
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Book Description
Presents the author's thesis that consciousness, in its manifestation in the human quality of understanding, is doing something that mere computation cannot; and attempts to understand how such non-computational action might arise within scientifically comprehensive physical laws.
Author: Nimrod Baranovitch
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520234502
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
A study of popular music in contemporary China that focuses on how popular music has become a staging area for battles over politics and ethnic differences in China.
Author: Dominic Lieven
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141984465
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
From the acclaimed Wolfson Prize-winning author, a dazzling history of the world's emperors For millennia much of the world was ruled by emperors: a handful of individuals claimed no limit to the lands they could rule over and no limit to their authority. They operated beyond normal human constraint and indeed often claimed a superhuman or divine authority. In practice they ran the gamut from being some of the most remarkable men who ever lived, to being some of the worst and least remarkable. Dominic Lieven's marvellous new book, In the Shadow of the Gods, is the first to grapple seriously with this extraordinary phenomenon. Across the world peoples, willingly or unwillingly, fell into orbit around figures who reshaped or destroyed entire societies, imposed religions and invaded rivals. Lieven describes the anatomy of imperial monarchy and the principles by which it functioned. He compares the great emperors of antiquity, the caliphs and the warrior-emperors of the steppe before he turns to the Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman, Mughal and Chinese emperors, packing the book with extraordinary stories, astute observations and a sense of both delight and horror at these individuals' antics. The entire breadth of extreme human behaviour is here - from warlords to patrons of the arts, from political genius to feeble incapacity and pathological violence. As one of the great experts both on empires and on Russian history, Lieven is brilliantly qualified to write a book that brings to life a system of rule that dominated most of human history, as well as some of history's grandest and most dismaying figures.
Author: Roger Penrose
Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks
ISBN: 0192861980
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 634
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Book Description
Winner of the Wolf Prize for his contribution to our understanding of the universe, Penrose takes on the question of whether artificial intelligence will ever approach the intricacy of the human mind. 144 illustrations.
Author: Yi Zhu
Publisher: Thatyiguy
ISBN: 9780996531122
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 468
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Book Description
Two orphans cried out in defiance, against the world that had long forgotten their plight. In the Glorious Empire, those who graduate from the Academy ascend to Highborn. Though theoretically possible, class mobility is but a dream. The rebellion of Zone S1 ended in a massacre, but the real war has just begun.
Author: Michelle Sagara
Publisher: MIRA
ISBN: 148805648X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 489
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Book Description
“Enjoyable, entertaining, engaging fantasy.” —Tor.com AT THE EMPEROR’S COMMAND Multiple races carefully navigate the City of Elantra under the Dragon Emperor’s wing. His Imperial Wolves are executioners, the smallest group to serve in the Halls of Law. The populace calls them assassins. Every wolf candidate must consent to a full examination by the Tha’alani, one of the most feared and distrusted races in Elantra for their ability to read minds. Most candidates don’t finish their job interviews. Severn Handred, the newest potential recruit, is determined to face and pass this final test—even if by doing so he’s exposing secrets he has never shared. When an interrogation uncovers the connections to a two-decade-old series of murders of the Tha’alani, the Wolves are commanded to hunt. Severn’s first job will be joining the chase. From the High Halls to the Tha’alani quarter, from the Oracles to the Emperor, secrets are uncovered, tensions are raised and justice just might be done…if Severn can survive. The Wolves of Elantra Book 1: The Emperor’s Wolves
Author: Philip P. Pan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416537058
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
An inside analysis of modern cultural and political upheavals in China by a fluent Beijing correspondent describes the power struggles currently taking place between the party elite and supporters of democracy, the outcome of which the author predicts will significantly affect China's rise to a world super-power. 125,000 first printing.
Author: Colin Thubron
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061809624
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 404
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Book Description
Shadow of the Silk Road records a journey along the greatest land route on earth. Out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran and into Kurdish Turkey, Colin Thubron covers some seven thousand miles in eight months. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart and camel, he travels from the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, the mythic progenitor of the Chinese people, to the ancient port of Antioch—in perhaps the most difficult and ambitious journey he has undertaken in forty years of travel. The Silk Road is a huge network of arteries splitting and converging across the breadth of Asia. To travel it is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions and inventions. But alongside this rich and astonishing past, Shadow of the Silk Road is also about Asia today: a continent of upheaval. One of the trademarks of Colin Thubron's travel writing is the beauty of his prose; another is his gift for talking to people and getting them to talk to him. Shadow of the Silk Road encounters Islamic countries in many forms. It is about changes in China, transformed since the Cultural Revolution. It is about false nationalisms and the world's discontented margins, where the true boundaries are not political borders but the frontiers of tribe, ethnicity, language and religion. It is a magnificent and important account of an ancient world in modern ferment.
