National Bestseller. Featuring the famous Commander Adam Dalgliesh, Devices and Desires is a thrilling and insightfully crafted novel of fallible people caught in a net of secrets, ambitions, and schemes on a lonely stretch of Norfolk coastline. Commander Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard has just published a new book of poems and has taken a brief respite from publicity on the remote Larksoken headland on the Norfolk coast in a converted windmill left to him by his aunt. But he cannot so easily escape murder. A psychotic strangler of young women is at large in Norfolk, and getting nearer to Larksoken with every killing. And when Dalgliesh discovers the murdered body of the Acting Administrative Officer on the beach, he finds himself caught up in the passions and dangerous secrets of the headland community and in one of the most baffling murder cases of his career.

The author traces the relationship between nursing and technology from the 1870s to the present. She argues that while technology has helped shape and intensify persistent dilemmas in nursing, it has also both advanced and impeded the development of the nursing profession.

When an engineer is sentenced to death for a petty transgression of guild law, he flees the city, leaving behind his wife and daughter. Forced into exile, he seeks a terrible vengeance -- one that will leave a trail of death and destruction in its wake. But he will not be able to achieve this by himself. He must draw up his plans using the blood of others. . . In a compelling tale of intrigue and injustice, K. J. Parker's embittered hero takes up arms against his enemies, using the only weapons he has left to him: his ingenuity and his passion -- his devices and desires.

From thriving black market to big business, the commercialization of birth control in the United States In Devices and Desires, Andrea Tone breaks new ground by showing what it was really like to buy, produce, and use contraceptives during a century of profound social and technological change. A down-and-out sausage-casing worker by day who turned surplus animal intestines into a million-dollar condom enterprise at night; inventors who fashioned cervical caps out of watch springs; and a mother of six who kissed photographs of the inventor of the Pill -- these are just a few of the individuals who make up this riveting story.

Aided by a quartet of judicious marriages and a shrewd head for business, Bess of Hardwick rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most respected and feared countesses in Elizabethan England—an entrepreneur who built a family fortune; created glorious houses (the last and greatest built when she was a widow in her 70s); and was deeply involved in matters of the court, including the custody of Mary, Queen of Scots. While Bess cultivated many influential cour-tiers, she also collected numerous enemies. Her embittered fourth husband once called her a woman of “devices and desires,” while male historians of the nineteenth century portrayed her as a monster—“a woman of masculine understanding and conduct, proud, furious, selfish, and unfeeling.” In the twenty-first century, she has been neutered by female historians, who recast her as a softhearted sort, much maligned and misunderstood. As Kate Hubbard reveals, the truth of this highly accomplished woman lies somewhere in between: ruthless and scheming, Bess was sentimental and affectionate as well. Hubbard draws on more than 230 of Bess’s letters, including correspondence with the queen and her councilors, fond (and furious) missives to her husbands and children, and notes sharing titillating court gossip. The result is a rich, compelling portrait of a true feminist icon centuries ahead of her time—a complex, formidable, and decidedly modern woman captured in full as never before.

This book offers a novel account of key features of modern representative democracy. Working from the rational actor tradition, it builds a middle ground between orthodox political theory and the economic analysis of politics. Standard economic models of politics emphasise the design of the institutional devices of democracy as operated by essentially self-interested individuals. This book departs from that model by focusing on democratic desires alongside democratic devices, stressing that important aspects of democracy depend on the motivation of democrats and the interplay between devices and desires. Individuals are taken to be not only rational, but also somewhat moral. The authors argue that this approach provides access to aspects of the debate on democratic institutions that are beyond the narrowly economic model. They apply their analysis to voting, elections, representation, political departments and the separation and division of powers, providing a wide-ranging discussion of the design of democratic institutions.

This book develops new perspectives on the cultural politics of climate change and its implications for responding to this challenge.