'The NME mattered to all those generations who grew up with music at the centre of their universe. The NME never had a truer chronicler than Pat Long.' Tony Parsons Since it was founded in 1952, the New Musical Express has played a central part in the British love affair with pop music. Snotty, confrontational, enthusiastic, sarcastic: the NME landing on the doormat every Wednesday was the high point of any music fan’s week, whether they were listening to The Beatles, Bowie or Blur. The Sex Pistols sang about it, Nick Hornby claims he regrets not working for it and a whole host of household names – Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, Nick Kent and Mick Farren, Steve Lamacq and Stuart Maconie – started their career writing for it. This authoritative history, written by former assistant editor, Pat Long, is an insider's account of the high times and low lives of the world's most famous, and most influential, music magazine. The fights, the bands, the brawls, the haircuts, the egos and much more. This is the definitive – and first – book about the infamous NME.

The God of ancient Israel—universally referred to in the masculine today—was understood by its earliest worshipers to be a dual-gendered, male-female deity. So argues Mark Sameth in The Name. Needless to say, this is no small claim. Half the people on the planet are followers of one of the three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—each of which has roots in the ancient cult that worshiped this deity. The author’s evidence, however, is compelling and his case meticulously constructed. The Hebrew name of God—YHWH—has not been uttered in public for over two thousand years. Some thought the lost pronunciation was “Jehovah” or “Yahweh.” But Sameth traces the name to the late Bronze Age and argues that it was expressed Hu-Hi—Hebrew for “He-She.” Among Jewish mystics, we learn, this has long been an open secret. What are the implications for us today if “he” was not God?

According to the official version, the name of the State of Texas comes from the word tasha, which in the Caddo indigenous language, spoken by the Indians of the Hasinai nation, means "friendship." This conclusion was reached by the American historian Herbert Eugene Bolton in 1907 based on the claim that, during the 1689 expedition led by Alonso de Leon, there was a meeting between Fray Damian Massanet and some Indians who said techas to them, as a sign of friendship. From the study of the bibliography, we find that in 1606 this territory was already called Tejas, fact that, by itself, invalidates the official version.Probably the name of the State of Texas has its origin in the word texa, or texo, as it was written in old Spanish. These were the names given to a very familiar, sacred tree in Spain. The Neches River was baptized at first with the name of River of the Texas because of the abundance of trees of this species that populated the river.

Read the series that's sold more than 2 million copies--if you dare! Warning: this description has not been authorized by Pseudonymous Bosch. As much as he'd love to sing the praises of his book (he is very vain), he wouldn't want you to hear about his brave 11-year old heroes, Cass and Max-Ernest. Or about how a mysterious box of vials, the Symphony of Smells, sends them on the trail of a magician who has vanished under strange (and stinky) circumstances. And he certainly wouldn't want you to know about the hair-raising adventures that follow and the nefarious villains they face. You see, not only is the name of this book secret, the story inside is, too. For it concerns a secret. A Big Secret.

BANCROFF PRIZE WINNER • King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war—colonists against Indigenous peoples—that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war." The war's brutality compelled the colonists to defend themselves against accusations that they had become savages. But Jill Lepore makes clear that it was after the war—and because of it—that the boundaries between cultures, hitherto blurred, turned into rigid ones. King Philip's War became one of the most written-about wars in our history, and Lepore argues that the words strengthened and hardened feelings that, in turn, strengthened and hardened the enmity between Indigenous peoples and Anglos. Telling the story of what may have been the bitterest of American conflicts, and its reverberations over the centuries, Lepore has enabled us to see how the ways in which we remember past events are as important in their effect on our history as were the events themselves.

In 1327, finding his sensitive mission at an Italian abbey further complicated by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William of Baskerville turns detective.