Poems to grab, tickle and tease the imagination about the cook who made a submarine from prunes, leeks and eggs, and one about a cloud who wanted to rain. 'Loving words clutch crimson roses, rude words sniff and pick their noses, sly words come dressed up as foxes, short words stand on cardboard boxes, common words tell jokes and gabble, complicated words play Scrabble...' Popular with 7-11 year olds, we are delighted to have this Puffin 1987 £4.95 priced first edition, 64 pages with delightful line drawings by John Lawrence, one of our finest illustrators. A rarity.

A number one bestseller in Ireland, the author lives on his family farm Birchview in County Longford, Ireland. He writes about the connection between people and land in a way that goes beyond mere affection. For him, farming is hard graft and yet a spiritual process too that binds him to family, nationhood, language and myth. Farming has been in John Connell's family for generations, but he never intended to follow in his father's footsteps. One winter, after more than a decade away, John finds himself back on the farm. He records the hypnotic rhythm of the farming day - cleaning the barns, caring for the herd, tending to sickly lambs, helping the cows give birth. Alongside the routine events there are the unforeseen moments when things go wrong - a calf fails to thrive, a sheep goes missing, illness breaks out, an argument between father and son erupts and things are said that cannot be unsaid. It is also the story of a man who emerges from depression to find hope in the place he least expected to find it. In this new hidden Ireland, the book is also a fascinating portrait of a born noticer, someone on whom nothing is lost, observing birth and death, the landscape and his own heritage with intelligent reflection on the state of modern farming and the cycles of life and death that mark our days. With US desirable roughcut edges, 242pp, US first edition.

Sub-titled 'A New History of the People's Republic and Hong Kong', the rise of China and the fall of Hong Kong to authoritarian rule is told with unique insight in this new history, drawing on eyewitness reporting over three decades, interviews with key figures, and documents from archives in China and the West. We are swept from the earliest days of trade through the Opium Wars to the 19th century, the age of globalisation and the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China. The story ends with the battle for democracy on the city's streets and the ultimate victory of the Chinese Communist Party. How did it come to this? We learn from private papers that Margaret Thatcher anguished over the fate of Hong Kong, sought secret American briefings on how to handle China, and put her trust in an adviser who was torn between duty and pride. The deal they made with Beijing did not last. The Chinese side of this history, so often unheard, emerges from memoirs and documents, many new to the foreign reader, revealing how the party's iron will and negotiating tactics crushed its opponents. Yet the voices of Hong Kong people - eloquent, smart and bold -speak out here for ideals that refuse to die. The book tells how the People's Republic reformed its economy and changed the world, emerging to challenge the West with a new order that raises fundamental questions about progress, identity and freedom. Hong Kong continues to compete with rivals and retain advantages - its banks, finance houses and traders grease the wheels of business and invest its profits with unique freedom, its courts arbitrate commercial disputes impartially and its administrators by and large do not have their hand held out. And we are taken back to the colonial days when the thwack of cricket balls could be heard on the green and at the Royal Yacht Club the noonday gun as immortalised in Noel Coward's song 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen' sounds. It is a hive of commerce - vendors of ivory, dried fish, abalone and sharks' fins, fragrant mushrooms and chests of aromatic tea, ginseng roots and the calls of porters and the babel of dialects. A delightful piece of writing and research which depicts the motives, fears and internal struggles of negotiating tactics, this is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the world in which we live. 456pp, colour photos, portraits and black and white images, maps, 2021 first edition.

100 mesmerising photographs of pop stars to movie stars, TV personalities to socialites, Andy Warhol's protégé presents a virtual 'who's who' of 1980s celebrity. The Beverly Hills California Hollywood photographer led the way and for everyone interested in the nostalgia for the Golden Age of the Silver Screen in full swing and you will adore this vintage Hollywood glamorous tome of 14" x 18", golden clothbound and with tipped in huge illustration of Prince on the front cover. Befitting the subject, there is even a stunning gatefold double page image of Wendy and Lisa in top hat and tails 1985 showgirls ready for action, one looking transgender in her male tuxedo and the other wearing top hat, fishnets, long black satin gloves over the elbow and a strapless cancan style Basque. Marvel at a portrait for Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight 1933, with her dewy skin, arched eyebrows, perfect make-up and tresses of platinum blonde hair spread out in curls, rosebud lips and silky skin and white satin dress. We see Matthew Rolston's portrait of Michael Jackson posing as a King complete with crown and furs in 1985, his rather grotesque studies of mummies in the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo, and Talking Heads, colour photographs of ventriloquists' dummies. But it is the glamour of the uninterrupted full page plates, all in striking mono: George Michael, Cybill Shepherd sunbathing, a young Jodie Foster, Isabella Rossellini with a daisy in front of one eye, a double page gatefold of Joseph Culp from a The Bad and the Beautiful series of early Hollywood style poses by each of the actors including Robert Downey Jr. again; Christy Turlington appearing to eat a bowl of cigarette ends or as a Tudor beneath a beaded Manta Ray, Shirley MacLaine wearing a chain, a gatefold page of Lisa Bonet floating semi-naked, nipples erect, her leather jacket behind her; Bono with a guitar in Dublin 1987, Brian Wilson 1992, Joni Mitchell 1991, Terence Trent D'Arby on a motorcycle, two more double gatefold pages all featuring Kelly LeBrock in The Seven Deadly Sins series, all spectacularly glamorous and witty; Sylvester Stallone, David Byrne and the beautiful Anjelica Houston without make-up 1987 and Warren Beatty, ruggedly good looking in 1991. Rolston has been ranked among such luminaries as Herb Ritts and Greg Gorman and Annie Leibovitz as one of the most influential photographers with his celebrity image making, gender bending and much more. A quality teNeues publication, 278 heavyweight pages
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Additional product information

ISBN	9783961710249