"London 1909: The British Empire seems invulnerable. But Captain Vernon Kell, head of counter-intelligence at the War Office, knows better. In Russia, revolution; in Germany, an arms race; in London, the streets are alive with foreign terrorists. Kell wants to set up a Secret Service, but to convince his political masters he needs proof of a threat - and to find that, he needs an agent he can trust. The playing fields of Eton may produce good officers, but not men who can work undercover in a munitions factory that appears to be leaking secrets to the Germans. Kell needs Wiggins. Trained as a child by Kell's old friend Sherlock Holmes - he led a gang of urchin investigators known as the Baker Street Irregulars - Wiggins is an ex-soldier with an expert line in deduction and the cunning of a born street fighter. 'The best', says Holmes"--Publisher's description.

'Irresistible' Guardian 'Impressive' Daily Mail 'Captivating' Mick Herron Nominated for the 2018 Best First Novel, Barry Award London 1909 Captain Kell of the War Office knows the Empire is under threat - from Russia and Germany, from terrorists and anarchists, spies and infiltrators. But he can't prove it to his superiors. He needs an agent he can trust, someone who knows the street, not the playing fields of Eton. Kell needs Wiggins. Trained as a child by Kell's old friend Sherlock Holmes, who used to call his little band of urchins the Baker Street Irregulars, Wiggins is now an ex soldier with an expert line in deduction and the cunning of a bare-knuckle fighter. But he has no wish to be recruited - until he sees a route to taking his sworn revenge on the killer of his best friend.

Maybe you've been speaking English all your life, or maybe you learned it later on. But whether you use it just well enough to get your daily business done, or you're an expert with a red pen who never omits a comma or misplaces a modifier, you must have noticed that there are some things about this language that are just weird. Perhaps you're reading a book and stop to puzzle over absurd spelling rules (Why are there so many ways to say '-gh'?), or you hear someone talking and get stuck on an expression (Why do we say "How dare you" but not "How try you"?), or your kid quizzes you on homework (Why is it "eleven and twelve" instead of "oneteen and twoteen"?). Suddenly you ask yourself, "Wait, why do we do it this way?" You think about it, try to explain it, and keep running into walls. It doesn't conform to logic. It doesn't work the way you'd expect it to. There doesn't seem to be any rule at all. There might not be a logical explanation, but there will be an explanation, and this book is here to help. In Highly Irregular, Arika Okrent answers these questions and many more. Along the way she tells the story of the many influences--from invading French armies to stubborn Flemish printers--that made our language the way it is today. Both an entertaining send-up of linguistic oddities and a deeply researched history of English, Highly Irregular is essential reading for anyone who has paused to wonder about our marvelous mess of a language.

A mysterious, broken-nosed cabby, a beautiful actress, and a villainous art heist have one thing in common—but the only one man who knows what it is has methods that are a little, shall we say . . . irregular Late Victorian London: home to gas streetlights, bands of ragged urchins, and now, young Andrew Craigie, who recently arrived from a tiny Cornwall village with his stern guardian, Mr. Dennison. At first the city feels dark and unwelcoming, but just around the corner is bustling Baker Street, where Andrew meets his first friend, Sara. Before long, London becomes downright interesting. But things get a little too exciting one night when Mr. Dennison doesn’t come home, and suddenly Andrew is on his own. Whom can he turn to in a strange city? Frantic, he goes to the tall, pipe-smoking, hat-wearing man at 221B, a man who Sara says is a famous detective—a man named Mr. Holmes.

Since the launch of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars—now the longest wars in American history—the US military has struggled to recruit troops. It has responded, as Matt Kennard’s explosive investigative report makes clear, by opening its doors to neo-Nazis, white supremacists, gang members, criminals of all stripes, the overweight, and the mentally ill. Based on several years of reporting, Irregular Army includes extensive interviews with extremist veterans and leaders of far-right hate groups—who spoke openly of their eagerness to have their followers acquire military training for a coming domestic race war. As a report commissioned by the Department of Defense itself put it, “Effectively, the military has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy pertaining to extremism.” Irregular Army connects some of the War on Terror’s worst crimes to this opening-up of the US military. With millions of veterans now back in the US and domestic extremism on the rise, Kennard’s book is a stark warning about potential dangers facing Americans—from their own soldiers.

Katharine Cleland's Irregular Unions provides the first sustained literary history of clandestine marriage in early modern England and reveals its controversial nature in the wake of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, which standardized the marriage ritual for the first time. Cleland examines many examples of clandestine marriage across genres. Discussing such classic works as The Faerie Queene, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, she argues that early modern authors used clandestine marriage to explore the intersection between the self and the marriage ritual in post-Reformation England. The ways in which authors grappled with the political and social complexities of clandestine marriage, Cleland finds, suggest that these narratives were far more than interesting plot devices or scandalous stories ripped from the headlines. Instead, after the Reformation, fictions of clandestine marriage allowed early modern authors to explore topics of identity formation in new and different ways. Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

All Yesterdays is a book about the way we see dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. Lavishly illustrated with over sixty original artworks, All Yesterdays aims to challenge our notions of how prehistoric animals looked and behaved. As a criticalexploration of palaeontological art, All Yesterdays asks questions about what is probable, what is possible, and what iscommonly ignored.Written by palaeozoologist Darren Naish, and palaeontological artists John Conway and C.M. Kosemen, All Yesterdays isscientifically rigorous and artistically imaginative in its approach to fossils of the past - and those of the future.