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  In Bayswater - One family is...

  Mary Butts

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  Mary Frances Butts was born on 13th December 1890 in Poole, Dorset. 
   
  Her early years were spent at Salterns, an 18th-century house overlooking Poole Harbour.  Sadly in 1905 her father died, and she was sent for boarding at St Leonard's school for girls in St Andrews. 
   
  Her mother remarried and, from 1909, Mary studied at Westfield College in London, and here, first became aware of her bisexual feelings.  She was sent down for organising a trip to Epsom races and only completed her degree in 1914 when she graduated from the London School of Economics.  By then Mary had become an admirer of the occultist Aleister Crowley and she was given a co-authorship credit on his ‘Magick (Book 4)’. 
   
  In 1916, she began the diary which would now detail her future life and be a constant reference point for her observations and her absorbing experiences. 
   
  During World War I, she was doing social work for the London County Council in Hackney Wick, and involved in a lesbian relationship.  Life changed after meeting the modernist poet, John Rodker and they married in 1918. 
   
  In 1921 she spent 3 months at Aleister Crowley's Abbey of Thelema in Sicily; she found the practices dreadful and also acquired a drug habit.  Mary now spent time writing in Dorset, including her celebrated book of short stories ‘Speed the Plough’ which saw fully develop her unique Modernist prose style. 
   
  Europe now beckoned and several years were spent in Paris befriending many artists and writing further extraordinary stories.   
   
  She was continually sought after by literary magazines and also published several short story collections as books. Although a Modernist writer she worked in other genres but is essentially only known for her short stories.  Mary was deeply committed to nature conservation and wrote several pamphlets attacking the growing pollution of the countryside. 
   
  In 1927, she divorced and the following year her novel ‘Armed with Madness’ was published.  A further marriage followed in 1930 and time was spent attempting to settle in London and Newcastle before setting up home on the western tip of Cornwall.  By 1934 the marriage had failed. 
   
  Mary Butts died on 5th March 1937, at the West Cornwall Hospital, Penzance, after an operation for a perforated gastric ulcer. She was 46. 
   
  Her story ‘In Bayswater’ grippingly describes a man’s friendship with a dysfunctional family he rents a room from.  As each facet reveals itself his opinion and decisions change, back and forth, this way and that….

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  Scaramouche - A Romance of the...

  Rafael Sabatini

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  The passionate Andre-Louis Moreau makes an unexpected entrance into the French Revolution when he vows to avenge his best friend's death. His target: Monsieur de La Tour d'Azyr, the aristocratic villain who killed his friend. Andre-Louis rallies the underclass to join him in his mission against the supreme power of the nobility. Soon the rebel leader must go underground, disguising himself as "Scaramouche" in a traveling group of actors. In the midst of his swashbuckling adventures and his country's revolution, he discovers the secret of his own identity.

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  The Happy Prince and Other Tales

  Oscar Wilde

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  The Happy Prince and Other Tales (sometimes called The Happy Prince and Other Stories) is a collection of stories for children by Oscar Wilde first published in May 1888. It contains five stories: "The Happy Prince", "The Nightingale and the Rose", "The Selfish Giant", "The Devoted Friend", and "The Remarkable Rocket". Welcome to a special edition of a renowned classic. This classic, difficult-to-find text has been reprinted using a print-on-demand service to provide you with an updated version of the text, at the best value possible! Several edits have been

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  Bethink Yourselves!

  Leo Tolstoy

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  As Russia goes to war against Japan, Tolstoy urges those at all levels of society, from the Tsar down to the common soldier, to consider their actions in the light of Christ's teaching. "However strange this may appear, the most effective and certain deliverance of men from all the calamities which they inflict upon themselves and from the most dreadful of all—war—is attainable, not by any external general measures, but merely by that simple appeal to the consciousness of each separate man which, nineteen hundred years ago, was proposed by Jesus—that every man bethink himself, and ask himself, who is he, why he lives, and what he should and should not do."

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  The Nightingale & the Rose

  Oscar Wilde

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  The Nightingale & The Rose is one of Oscar Wilde's most poignant short stories. A nightingale overhears a student lamenting that he hasn't a red rose to give to his true love, so she sets out to find a rose, but must sacrifice a great deal to get it. The Nightingale & The Rose was first published in The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888.

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  The Last Adventure

  Richard Middleton

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  Richard Barham Middleton (1882-1911) was an English poet and author who is remembered mostly for his supernatural tales and ghost stories, in particular The Ghost Ship, The Coffin Merchant and On the Brighton Road.The Last Adventure is the bizarre tale of a young rake who regularly suffers from amnesia while out having adventures. He wakes up with no memory of how he got into his current predicament, nor of what went before it. In this story, he discovers himself in the company of an attractive woman and gradually becomes aware that something very terrible has happened...something that shocks him to the very core....

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