Academy Award-nominated animated feature following the attempts of a pirate captain to outdo his rivals, featuring the vocal talents of Hugh Grant, David Tennant and Salma Hayek. Pirate Captain (voice of Grant) is determined to win the coveted 'Pirate of the Year' award. He is aware, however, that he will face stiff competition from other buccaneers including Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven) and Cutlass Liz (Hayek). But the Captain has other issues as well. Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) is determined to capture him and hold him to account for his pirating, while the weight of history hangs over his encounter with a young man named Charles Darwin (Tennant).

Prisoners of Geography meets Bill Bryson: a funny, fascinating, beautifully illustrated - and timely - history of countries that, for myriad and often ludicrous reasons, no longer exist. 'Countries are just daft stories we tell each other. They're all equally implausible once you get up close' Countries die. Sometimes it's murder, sometimes it's by accident, and sometimes it's because they were so ludicrous they didn't deserve to exist in the first place. Occasionally they explode violently. A few slip away almost unnoticed. Often the cause of death is either 'got too greedy' or 'Napoleon turned up'. Now and then they just hold a referendum and vote themselves out of existence. This is an atlas of nations that fell off the map. The polite way of writing an obituary is: dwell on the good bits, gloss over the embarrassing stuff. This book fails to do that. And that is mainly because most of these dead nations (and a lot of the ones that are still alive) are so weird or borderline nonsensical that it's impossible to skip the embarrassing stuff. The life stories of the sadly deceased involve a catalogue of chancers, racists, racist chancers, conmen, madmen, people trying to get out of paying tax, mistakes, lies, stupid schemes and General Idiocy. Because of this - and because treating nation states with too much respect is the entire problem with pretty much everything - these accounts are not fussed about adding to all the earnest flag saluting in the world, however nice some of the flags are.

London, 1840: Wagner's latest opera plays to packed houses while disgruntled workers gather in crowded pubs to eat ice cream and plan the downfall of the bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the Pirate Captain finds himself incarcerated at Scotland Yard, in a case of mistaken identity.
Discovering that his doppelganger is none other than Karl Marx, the Captain and his crew are unwittingly caught up in a sinister plot that involves intellectual giants, enormous beards, and a quest to discover whether ham might really be the opium of the people.
Includes, at no additional charge, "The Wit and Wisdom of the Pirate Captain"--"a Major Philosophical Work,"
On the Matter of Love:
If you're off to fight in a battle, snap a ship's biscuit in half and give your girlfriend the other half. When you meet again, they will match--like two halves of a single soul! Hopefully, this will stop her sleeping with other men.
On Life in General:
Life is like a big shanty. Everything will be fine so long as everyone sings in harmony. But if someone plays a duff note on the accordion or tries to break-dance at a sensitive bit, then there will be all sorts of trouble, mark my words.