On the morning of 21 November 1920, Jane Boyle walked to Sunday Mass in the church where she would be married five days later. That afternoon she went with her fiancé to watch Tipperary and Dublin play a Gaelic football match at Croke Park. Across the city fourteen men lay dead in their beds after a synchronised IRA attack designed to cripple British intelligence services in Ireland. Trucks of police and military rumbled through the city streets as hundreds of people clamoured at the metal gates of Dublin Castle seeking refuge. Some of them were headed for Croke Park. Award-winning journalist and author Michael Foley recounts the extraordinary story of Bloody Sunday in Croke Park and the 90 seconds of shooting that changed Ireland forever. In a deeply intimate portrait he tells for the first time the stories of those killed, the police and military personnel who were in Croke Park that day, and the families left shattered in its aftermath, all against the backdrop of a fierce conflict that stretched from the streets of Dublin and the hedgerows of Tipperary to the halls of Westminster. Updated with new information and photographs.

An old man. A dead body. A conspiracy to burn a country. Alvis always serves his Empress. Regardless of the trouble he finds. Discovering a dead body is normal for Alvis. Especially on a diplomatic mission for his Empress. Yet the Bloodied Rose on the body is weird. Can Alvis unravel the conspiracy before war is declared and innocent people die? If you love action-packed urban fantasy adventures. You will love this fantasy short story. BUY IT NOW!

The New Yorker critic examines the books that reveal and record our world in a new essay collection. Joan Acocella, “one of our finest cultural critics” (Edward Hirsch), has the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it—its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it has sprung. In her hands, arts criticism becomes a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have?” The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays gathers twenty-four essays from the past decade and a half of Acocella’s career, as well as an introduction that frames her simple preoccupations: “life and art.” In agile, inspired prose, the New Yorker staff writer moves from J. R. R. Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf to the life of Richard Pryor, from surveying profanity to untangling the book of Job. Her appetite (and reading list) knows no bounds. This collection is a joy and a revelation, a library in itself, and Acocella is our dream companion among its shelves. Includes 25 black-and-white images

It was a dark and stormy night as the carriage rattled along the narrow, winding road leading to Blackwater Castle. The driver held the reins tightly, trying to steer the horses through the driving rain and the howling wind. Inside the carriage, the young bride-to-be, Evelyn, clutched her diamond necklace, thoughts racing through her mind. Was she making a terrible mistake? Marrying Lord Blackwater, a man she barely knew, in a remote, foreboding castle? The carriage finally pulled up to the entrance of Blackwater Castle, the imposing gate creaking open to reveal the dark, looming structure. Evelyn shivered, her breath catching in her throat as she stepped out and hurried up the stone steps to the front doors. The heavy wooden doors swung open, revealing the dimly lit interior of the castle. A group of servants, their faces haggard and tired, ushered Evelyn inside. "Welcome to Blackwater Castle, my lady," one of the servants said, her voice soft and barely audible over the howling wind outside. Evelyn forced a smile, trying to mask her unease. "Thank you," she replied, her voice trembling. "Is Lord Blackwater here to greet me?" The servants exchanged glances, their eyes clouded with an unspoken fear. "Lord Blackwater will join you at dinner, my lady," another servant said, bowing slightly. "In the meantime, please make yourself comfortable in your chambers."

When a great thinker takes a nasty tumble, Wolfe goes back to school A conservative academic, so far to the right that he thought Ronald Reagan was a pinko, Hale Markham rules Prescott University like an intellectual tyrant—right up until the morning he is found dead at the bottom of one of Prescott’s famously beautiful ravines. Every liberal on campus hated the crotchety old crank, but which one is responsible for giving Markham his final push to the right? The case so intrigues the incomparable, reclusive master detective Nero Wolfe that he takes the unusual step of leaving the confines of his home. With man of action Archie Goodwin at his side, Wolfe examines jealous professors, a fanatical assistant, and a university president with an ego that—like the school itself—will not stop growing. Though they are far from the city, Wolfe and Goodwin will find that no back alley is as dangerous as the shadowy corridors of the Ivy League.

Groundbreaking reassessment of the role played by armour, weapons and heraldry in medieval warfare, showing their cultural as well as military significance. `A penetrating investigation of medieval martial display... The reader is struck by its originality, and by its sophisticated and critical interpretative engagement with historical and literary sources. Particularly notable is the author's subtle exploration of the function of armour: not only its practical role, but as a form of display... A refreshingly different approach to the world of the medieval combatant and his place within that "host of many colours" that was a medieval army, it adds a new dimension to our understanding of medieval warfare.' Dr ANDREW AYTON, Senior Lecturer in History, University of Hull The medieval battlefield was a place of spectacle and splendour. The fully-armed knight, bedecked in his vivid heraldic colours, mounted on his great charger, riding out beneath his brightly-painted banner, is a stock image of war and the warrior in the middle ages. Yet too often the significance of such display has been ignored or dismissed as the empty preening of a militaristic social elite. Drawing on a broad range of source material and using innovative historical approaches, this book completely re-evaluates the way that such men and their weapons were viewed, showing that martial display was a vital part of the way in which war was waged in the middle ages. It maintains that heraldry and livery served not only to advertise a warrior's family and social ties, but also announced his presence on the battlefield and right to wage war. It also considers the physiological and psychological effect of wearing armour, both on the wearer and those facing him in combat, arguing that the need for display in battle was deeper than any medieval cultural construct and was based in the fundamental biological drives of threat and warning. ROBERT W. JONES gained his PhD from Cardiff University.