From the Northern Lights to whirling coastal birds, and sunken villages to the annual deer rut, the UK is home to some of the world's finest natural spectacles. With this guide and a little luck, you too can experience the magic of seeing something truly extraordinary. Start planning your spectacular year with the help of this practical guide to the UK's most magical natural phenomena. This guide shows you when and where to go, and how to maximise your chances of a sighting, as well as explaining why these amazing spectacles occur in the first place. Sections cover: - Space: meteor showers, eclipses and supermoons, Northern Lights - Weather: hidden currents, mountain waves, named winds - Tides: tidal bores, tidal races, low tide walks - Land: autumn colours, wildflower displays, rutting deer - Rivers and lakes: salmon runs, sunken villages, waterfall wonders - Coast: wheeling waterbirds, seabird cities, seal pups Each spectacle is graded according to how easy it is to spot, and the author gives expert tips on achieving the best sighting. Scientific insights describe the astronomical, meteorological and ecological causes of events, which are brought to life through the stories of the people who know them best, from the glider pilots who ride mountain waves to the King's Guides who help people navigate the dangerous sands of Morecombe Bay. This is your starting point for some truly phenomenal adventures.

Spectacular Suffering focuses on commodification and discipline, two key dimensions of Atlantic slavery through which black bodies were turned into things in the marketplace and persons into property on plantations. Mallipeddi approaches the problem of slavery as a problem of embodiment in this nuanced account of how melancholy sentiment mediated colonial relations between English citizens and Caribbean slaves. The book’s first chapters consider how slave distress emerged as a topic of emotional concern and political intervention in the writings of Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Laurence Sterne. As Mallipeddi shows, sentimentalism allowed metropolitan authors to fashion themselves as melancholy witnesses to racial slavery by counterposing the singular body to the abstract commodity and by taking affective property in slaves against the legal proprietorship of slaveholders. Spectacular Suffering then turns to the practices of the enslaved, tracing how they contended with the effects of chattel slavery. The author attends not only to the work of African British writers and archival textual materials but also to economic and social activities, including slaves’ petty production, recreational forms, and commemorative rituals. In examining the slaves’ embodied agency, the book moves away from spectacular images of suffering to concentrate on slow, incremental acts of regeneration by the enslaved. One of the foremost contributions of this study is its exploration of the ways in which the ostensible objects of sentimental compassion—African slaves—negotiated the forces of capitalist abstraction and produced a melancholic counterdiscourse on slavery. Throughout, Mallipeddi’s keen reading of primary texts alongside historical and critical work produce fresh and persuasive insights. Spectacular Suffering is an important book that will alter conceptions of slave agency and of sentimentalism across the long eighteenth century.

The best guide to Great Britain is even better--revised and expanded to give more detail and more information.

This is the twentieth in a series of occasional volumes devoted to studies in British art, published by the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and distributed by Yale University Press. --Book Jacket.

Treasures of Britain is a valuable guide, written by experts, to the country's very best architecture, art and natural beauty. In over 2,000 alphabetical entries, a prestigious team of contributors describes the rich heritage of mediaeval churches and cathedrals, historic houses and castles, outstanding museums and galleries, stunning gardens and superb scenery.