Penguin A Certain Idea of France. The Life of Charles de Gaulle Jackson Julian

McPherson recounts the momentous episodes that preceded the Civil War including the Dred Scott decision, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. From there it moves into a masterful chronicle of the war itself--the battles, the strategic maneuvering by each side, the politics, and the personalities

« Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France. » • « Paris, Paris outragé, Paris brisé, Paris martyrisé mais Paris libéré ! » • « Je vous ai compris. » • Chef de la France libre, fondateur de la Ve République, héraut de l’indépendance de l’Algérie, Charles de Gaulle fait désormais partie du panthéon des grands hommes qui ont fait la France. Ce Petit Livre nous fait revivre les plus grands moments de la vie du Général en plus de 70 citations expliquées!

The Irish do death differently • Funeral attendance is a solemn duty - but it can also be a big day out, requiring sophisticated crowd control, creative parking solutions and a high-end sound system. Despite having the same basic end-of-life infrastructure as other Western countries, Irish culture handles death with a unique blend of dignified ritual and warm sociability • In Sorry for Your Trouble, Ann Marie Hourihane holds up a mirror to the Irish way of death: the funny bits, the sad bits, and the hard-to-explain bits that tell us so much about who we are. She follows the last weeks of a woman's life in hospice; she witnesses an embalming; she attends inquests; she talks to people working to prevent suicide; she follows the team of specialists working to locate the remains of people 'disappeared' by the IRA; and she visits some of Ireland's most contested graves

The last time anyone saw Lucia Bernardi, she was driving at top speed away from a Swiss villa - leaving the body of her murdered Iraqi lover behind. Now she has vanished, along with a potentially explosive set of papers, and disgraced journalist Piet Maas has been sent to follow her trail to the South of France. But finding her is just the start of his problems. Soon, amid a cast of con men, secret agents and revolutionaries, he must decide whether to land the scoop of his lifetime - or follow Lucia into ever more dangerous waters

The writings of one of the great woman adventurers of the twentieth century - the 'female Lawrence of Arabia' - and the subject of a new film starring Nicole Kidman • In the last century, few people lived more astounding - or influential - lives than Gertrude Bell. During World War I, she worked her way up from spy to army major to become one of the most powerful woman in the British Empire. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, she was instrumental in drawing the borders that define the region today, including creating an independent Iraq. This is the epic story of Bell's life, told through her letters, military dispatches, diary entries, and other writings. It offers a unique and intimate look behind the public mask of a woman who shaped nations

The second volume of Steven Runciman's classic, hugely influential trilogy on the history of the Crusades • 'There was magic about. Saladin himself was troubled by terrible dreams...' • Steven Runciman's unrivalled history of the Crusades is a classic of learning and vivid, compelling storytelling, which brilliantly brings to life the personalities, battles, massacres, triumphs and follies of these epochal events. In this second volume of his trilogy Runciman tells the story of the foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the disastrous, bloody Second Crusade and the inexorable rise of the crusaders' nemesis, Saladin

'The best thing is to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! So, long live the underground!' • Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of hose own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevsky's groundbreaking Notes from Underground tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter irony, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the 'anthill' of society and his gradual withdrawal to an existence 'underground'. The seemingly ordinary world of St Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in the The Double when a government clerk encounters a man who looks exactly like him - his double perhaps, or possibly the darker side of his own personality. Like Notes from Underground, this is a masterly tragi-comic study of human consciousousness

The sixth heartwarming, feel-good instalment in the much-loved Railway Girls series! • Manchester, 1942. There are surprises in store for the railway girls this festive season • When Cordelia's daughter Emily falls for a young chap who doesn't meet the approval of her father, Cordelia is reminded of her own first love - a love that she has never forgotten • Mabel is determined to get to the bottom of a spate of local burglaries. Her heart is in the right place as she sets out on a quest to clear her friend's name, but there will be unforeseen consequences • It's nothing short of a miracle when Colette returns to Manchester. But it's not going to be easy for her to keep living the life she once knew, and an impossible situation lies ahead • There will be more than one storm for the railway girls to weather but with the friendship and support of one another, there's hope that all will be well by Christmas

The Ladies' Delight is the glittering Paris department store run by Octave Mouret. He has used charm and drive to become director of this mighty emporium, unscrupulously exploiting his young female staff and seducing his lady customers with luxurious displays of shimmering silks, satins, velvets and lace. Then Denise Baudu, a naive provincial girl, becomes an assistant at the store - and Mouret discovers that he in turn can also be enchanted. With its greedy customers, gossiping staff and vibrant sense of theatre, The Ladies' Delight (Au Bonheur des Dames in the original French) is one of the most richly exciting novels in Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart cycle • This edition also contains a bibliography, introduction, chronology and explanatory notes

In A Rough Ride to the Future, James Lovelock - the great scientific visionary of our age - presents a radical vision of humanity's future as the thinking brain of our Earth-system • James Lovelock, who has been hailed as 'the man who conceived the first wholly new way of looking at life on earth since Charles Darwin' (Independent) and 'the most profound scientific thinker of our time' (Literary Review) continues, in his 95th year, to be the great scientific visionary of our age. This book introduces two new Lovelockian ideas. The first is that three hundred years ago, when Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine, he was unknowingly beginning what Lovelock calls 'accelerated evolution', a process which is bringing about change on our planet roughly a million times faster than Darwinian evolution

Bringing into harsh focus the daily struggle for existence in a Soviet gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is translated by Ralph Parker in Penguin Modern Classics • This brutal, shattering glimpse of the fate of millions of Russians under Stalin shook Russia and shocked the world when it first appeared. Discover the importance of a piece of bread or an extra bowl of soup, the incredible luxury of a book, the ingenious possibilities of a nail, a piece of string or a single match in a world where survival is all. Here safety, warmth and food are the first objectives. Reading it, you enter a world of incarceration, brutality, hard manual labour and freezing cold - and participate in the struggle of men to survive both the terrible rigours of nature and the inhumanity of the system that defines their conditions of life

From Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice is a refreshing alternative approach to mainstream theories of justice • Is justice an ideal, for ever beyond our grasp, or something that may actually guide our practical decisions and enhance our lives? • At the heart of Sen's argument is his insistence on the role of public reason in establishing what can make societies less unjust. But there are always choices to be made between alternative assessments of what is reasonable, and competing positions can each be well defended. Rather than rejecting these pluralities, we should use them to construct a theory of justice that can accommodate divergent points of view. Sen also inspiringly shows how the principles of justice in the modern world must avoid parochialism and address vital questions of global injustice