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  The Invisible Weapon - From...

  Nicholas Olde

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  The bookshelves of British literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors.  From these Isles their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure.  Among them is Nicholas Olde.

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  A Capitalist - From their pens...

  George Gissing

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  George Robert Gissing was born on November 22nd, 1857 in Wakefield, Yorkshire.  
  He was educated at Back Lane School in Wakefield. Gissing loved school. He was enthusiastic with a thirst for learning and always diligent.  By the age of ten he was reading Dickens, a lifelong hero. 
  In 1872 Gissing won a scholarship to Owens College. Whilst there Gissing worked hard but remained solitary. Unfortunately, he had run short of funds and stole from his fellow students. He was arrested, prosecuted, found guilty, expelled and sentenced to a month's hard labour in 1876. 
  On release he decided to start over.  In September 1876 he travelled to the United States. Here he wrote short stories for the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers. On his return home he was ready for novels. 
  Gissing self-published his first novel but it failed to sell.  His second was acquired but never published. His writing career was static.  Something had to change.  And it did. 
  By 1884 The Unclassed was published.  Now everything he wrote was published. Both Isabel Clarendon and Demos appeared in 1886. He mined the lives of the working class as diligently as any capitalist. 
  In 1889 Gissing used the proceeds from the sale of The Nether World to go to Italy. This trip formed the basis for his 1890 work The Emancipated. 
  Gissing's works began to command higher payments. New Grub Street (1891) brought a fee of £250.  
  Short stories followed and in 1895, three novellas were published; Eve's Ransom, The Paying Guest and Sleeping Fires. Gissing was careful to keep up with the changing attitudes of his audience.  
  Unfortunately, he was also diagnosed as suffering from emphysema. The last years of his life were spent as a semi-invalid in France but he continued to write. 1899; The Crown of Life. Our Friend the Charlatan appeared in 1901, followed two years later by The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. 
  George Robert Gissing died aged 46 on December 28th, 1903 after catching a chill on a winter walk.

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  Political Ideals

  Bertrand Russell

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  “Liberty demands self-government, but not the right to interfere with others.” 
   
  “The object of education ought not to be to make all men think alike, but to make each think in the way which is the fullest expression of his own.” 
   
  “You may kill an artist or a thinker, but you cannot acquire his art or his thought. You may put a man do death because he loves his fellow men, but you will not by so doing acquire the love which made his happiness.” 
   ― Bertrand Russell, Political Ideals 
   
  'Political Ideals' was written during the upheaval of World War One. It is, in many ways, a statement, of Russell's beliefs, a declaration of the ideas that influenced his thinking on the major events of the 20th century. In this sense, it is essential reading for every student of this great philosopher.

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  Ben Hur A Tale Of The Christ

  Lew Wallace

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  Ben-Hur is a story of two very different heroes. Judah Ben-Hur, a prince of Jerusalem, is involved in an accident to the Roman procurator which is taken to be intentional. He is seized and sent to the fleet as a galley-slave, while his family is imprisoned and the family goods confiscated. When Ben-Hur saves the fleet captain from drowning after his ship is sunk in a fight with pirates, that officer adopts him as son and heir. With Roman training, Ben-Hur distinguishes himself in the arena and the palistrae and appears to be on the way to high military command. With the help of a faithful family retainer and a generous Arab sheik, Ben-Hur is enabled to take part in a widely touted chariot race, where one of the other charioteers is the boyhood friend who connived to punish him for the accident and split his estate. That rival is crippled, financially and bodily, in a no-holds-barred race (memorable from the 1959 movie with Charlton Heston). Ben-Hur turns his attention to the prophesied King of the Jews, when through the sheik he meets Balthasar, one of the Three Wise Men, and hears of the child born years ago. Will Ben-Hur be the general who brings victories to the King, and finally liberates Israel from the oppressive Roman yoke? In his quest for the answer, Ben-Hur seeks out the Nazarene, now rumored to be The Messiah. THAT hero needs no introduction. Curious about the lack of kingly trappings and ambitions about this man, Ben-Hur begins to suspect that his kingdom is not of this world. And with him, we receive a gut-wrenching eye-witness view of Jesus’ arrest, humiliation, and crucifixion. Lewis Wallace was an American lawyer, Union general in the American Civil War, governor of the New Mexico Territory, politician, diplomat, and author from Indiana.

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  The Lame Priest - Settlers and...

  Susan Morrow writing as S Carleton

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  Susan Morrow was born in Halifax in Nova Scotia in 1864.   
   
  Little is known of her life although she preferred to write under pseudonyms, one of which she shared with her sister, or as S Carleton, an abbreviated version of her name which gave the illusion of a male identity presumably to give her books a more rugged and male personality given their content. 
   
  Her books only seem to have been published from 1900 onwards when she was in her mid-30’s by which time she had married and became Susan Carleton Jones. 
   
  She died in 1926.   
   
  In ‘The Lame Priest, a story of life on harsh terrain is amplified by the possibility that a werewolf lurks nearby.

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  The Bottle Neck

  Hans Christian Andersen

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  In The Bottle Neck, Hans Christian Andersen tells a quietly extraordinary story through the long life of a simple object—a glass bottle that passes from celebration to ruin, from usefulness to neglect, and back again. 
  Once filled with fine wine at a joyful betrothal, the bottle is later broken, discarded, carried across oceans, forgotten in darkness, and finally reborn as something humbler but necessary: a water vessel for a bird’s cage in a poor attic room. Along the way, it bears witness to love and loss, time and chance, human hopes and human absence—without ever fully understanding them. 
  This is not a children’s fairy tale, nor a tragedy. It is a reflective, gently ironic meditation on endurance, memory, and purpose: how objects outlast people, how meaning changes shape, and how usefulness itself can be a form of quiet dignity. 
  Narrated with calm clarity by Mike Polischuk, The Bottle Neck is a contemplative classic—an intimate reminder that life does not always move forward in grand arcs, but often returns, reshaped, to where it began.

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