Aimed at visitors and Londoners alike, this fully updated new edition of Secret London unlocks the city's most fascinating secrets - both above and below ground. Celebrated historian Andrew Duncan strips away bricks, mortar and tarmac to uncover parts of the capital that even born and bred Londoners may never have seen.Below ground, he guides readers through an extraordinary honeycomb of structures - from the government's vast system of offices and tunnels under Whitehall and through abandoned Underground stations to Clerkenwell's amazing network of subterranean prison cells.Above ground, he leads the way through narrow alleyways and cobbled mews, revealing unexpected treasures and describing rarely seen interiors and special collections. Opening times and addresses, detailed route maps and evocative photographs complement a fascinating text that is sure to delight all urban explorers.

Wide eyed and breathless, he watched as the stone surfaces changed to flowing garments and unfurled to reveal six humanoid creatures of various sizes cloaked in hooded capes. Six pairs of ember eyes glowed yellow at him with the light from his flashlight. "Emberoks!" He whispered. "A man!" two astonished voices replied. "See, I told you!" said another. "Men are not just in stories." He reached out to touch Kristofer who instinctively drew back, "A real man." "A human, to be sure." The strange creature stood at Kristofer's height. He wore a dull cloak having the appearance of weathered rock. His probing, penetrating eyes glowing yellow from the flashlight seemed to search every dark corner of Kristofer's soul. Only the peace, the soothing calm of his voice made his gaze bearable. "A man? Perhaps." Kristofer's embarrassment frowned at the Emberok's judgment. He liked these creatures better in Grandpa's stories.

Walking London is the essential companion for any urban explorer-visitor or native-committed to discovering the true heart of one of the world's greatest capital cities. In 30 original walks, distinguished historian Andrew Duncan reveals miles of London's endlessly surprising landscape. From wild heathland to formal gardens, cobbled mews to elegant squares and arcades, bustling markets to tranquil villages-Duncan reveals the pick of the famous sights, but also steers walkers off the tourist track and into the city's hidden corners. Handsomely illustrated with specially commissioned color photographs and complete route maps, the book provides full details of addresses, opening times and the best bars and restaurants to visit en route.

A fast-unfolding, untold tale of deception, betrayal and romance leading to a tense life-or-death climax in occupied France. The strange brigadier who hardly speaks... Leo, his feisty pilot daughter... Labrador, the vengeful Pole... Henry Dunning-Green, Leo's boring suitor... Adrian Russell, the treacherous master spy... ... All linked by SOE Somerville, the top secret Second World War finishing school for spies on England's south coast, and its local community: A melting pot of intrigue and counter-intrigue. This is the first fictional treatment of life at the famous Special Operations Executive 'finishing school' for spies, SOE Beaulieu in the New Forest (renamed SOE Somerville). It's also the first fully realised fictional portrait of master spy and traitor Kim Philby (renamed Adrian Russell) who lectured at SOE Beaulieu. Many of the events actually took place.

Objective-C Pocket Reference provides a quick and concise introduction to Objective-C for programmers already familiar with either C or C++, and will continue to serve as a handy reference even after the language is mastered. In addition to covering the essentials of Objective-C syntax, it also covers important facets of the language such as memory management, the Objective-C runtime, dynamic loading, distributed objects, and exception handling.

This new poetry is saturated in folklore and myth. The glass paintings are a distribution of cultured art motifs to rural households, patterns copied onto glass with feathers or brushes made of marten-hair. They are an expression of humility towards the illiterate. The idea of cultural difference being the effect of distribution technology was illustrated by the pedlars who carried the glass panes around the villages of central Europe. The interest in shopping follows a previous and prolonged interest in manufacturing and production, completing the sequence. Reminiscences of childhood and the wreck of the great High Street department stores around 2020 combine in a personal mythology of grand motifs and elaborate ruins. This volume is a new start after a long period of silence and begins with an inventory of concrete facts around the poet, in his home in Nottingham, close to where he grew up. One theme is defeaturing, the recreation of court and metropolitan art forms in a simpler manner. Radiant messages broken up by distance. Comments on 'On the Margins of Great Empires' (2018): "For the last 30 years, Andrew Duncan has patiently traced alternative wavelengths, to and from the unevocable, irreconcilable and the impossible." (Kevin Nolan) "Andrew Duncan [is] a writer whose poetry, criticism and magazine editing must make him one of the most vital and questing of today's authors." (David Hackbridge Johnson, The High Window) "Andrew Duncan's selected poems from 1978 to 2003 [is] an excited, hugely wide-ranging poetry soaring from the star and jewel riches of the Asian margins down to the brick offices in which are fates are problematized. Quite cryptic but never shirking the open and articulate cry." (Peter Riley, Fortnightly Review)

"There are several reasons for writing about the Seventies at this point. One is a reading of a recent collection of memories of the decade by participants. My impression was that they couldn't remember the period - too much time had gone by. They had lost all sense of differentiation and were writing about 1975 as if it was 2015. It is also possible that any attitudes of the previous time which didn't chime with current positions were being written out, consciously or unconsciously. The extent of the mismatch is of great importance, I think. This suggested that there was a real problem with memory, justifying an account based on contemporary documents. The other problem with memory is that we are living in a splinter dictatorship, a cultural phase where the forces of convergence have stacked arms and opinions are split up into small groups. How can there be a collective memory when there is no single point on which all factions agree? so how can I record collective memory? in what sense is any statement about poetry true? But this argues even more for putting facts down and increasing the area free from malicious invention. We need to think about the divergence as a phenomenon in itself, a kind of cultural gravity that guides all the watercourses. The splintering allows local freedom at most locations - what it does not allow is unifying literary opinion." -Andrew Duncan

This pocket guide for the serious traveller or journalist covers the world's most dangerous travel destinations, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Each destination has a concise, but detailed, historical background to the causes of conflict, with information about what has happened, what is currently happening, attempts to resolve the situation and what the future may hold. The authors do not attempt to criticize or offer answers, concentrating instead on the advantages and disadvantages of possible options. They also assess the likelihood of violence spreading from the original outbreak. Advice on travel safety from organizations such as the Foreign Office and Commonwealth Office is supported with maps of the area and a comprehensive list of useful websites for further information. This book should also appeal to the general reader.

At this point in time Andrew Duncan is better known as a critic of contemporary poetry - and an entertaining, waspish, and unusual critic at that. His own poetic work has been under-recognised and several previous collections - barring those from Shearsman - are out of print. This Selected edition gives the poetry-reading pubic a valuable chance to re-engage with a very original voice. Certainly no experimentalist, but also not a mainstream writer by any stretch of the imagination, he engages with narrative and history in a way that has become unusual in contemporary British poetry.

Why “silent rules”? Poetry is made of sound, in the form of speech, but is governed by rules which are not stated explicitly. As a help to readers, we try to tease out and make plain these silent rules. You have to perceive the structure of a work in order to read it. The subtitle is “inside and out” and becoming an insider involves knowing what the silent rules are. So much of the staging of modern poetry has operated a kind of “stereo blindness”, in which whatever is visible to observer A is invisible to observer B, and vice versa. Annulling territoriality and blocks on visibility, we try to disengage a “cultural field”, a low-resolution set of gradients which on mapping displays the cultural space inside which every literary move takes place. If you populate all the squares, eventually you have the map. By setting things in their true relations, much that had been suppressed or denied emerges in the light of day. The “hero of the piece” is the entire landscape, the awe-inspiring span from one end of the poetry world to the other. This completes the “heptagonal vortex”, a set of seven volumes about British poetry in the period 1960 to 1997. The message is that poetic merit is scattered over the landscape and that loyalty to a faction is not compatible with full aesthetic principles and a thorough approach to collecting primary evidence.

Does what is true depend on where you are? or, can we speak of a British culture which varies gradually over the 600 miles from one end of the island to the other, with currents gradually mutating and turning into their opposites as they cross such a distance? Any account of the matter must rapidly disclose the fact that where group A proclaims idea X, group B swiftly proclaims X to be untrue. Assimilation and dissimilation are the exuberant flows which make the mill of culture turn. The unbalanced local energies which gave birth to the central horror of possessive individualism, the Empire, and the State as war-machine, do not sound their triumphalist self-praises without conjuring up a reaction in favour of collective values, pacifism, equity, and the languages of the periphery. Poetry has to offer more than the illusion of being in the few rooms where a metropolitan elite solemnly engages in the circularity of authentication. A polemic tour of Scotland, Wales, and the North of England exposes the possibility that the finest poets of the last 50 years have lived in the outlands, not networking and neglecting to acquire linguistic signs of status. We contemplate the sublime through the works of Sorley Maclean, Glyn Jones, Colin Simms, and Michael Haslam. But a second look at poetry in the South jettisons the shallow tricks favoured by High Street cultural managers to reveal a hidden stratum of intellectually sophisticated poets, even in Babylon.

This volume starts from the key misrepresentation of orthodox poetry criticism, that the conservative is also the new, and sets out to define the whole British complex of refusing to innovate. In the attempt to set up publicly accountable criteria for what counts as new, the book goes through the whole period from the 1950s to the mid-1990s, identifying what the stylistic innovations were at each point. Naturally, in such a culturally rich era, not every significant poet or work can be mentioned. We present the 1950s as an era of conservative reaction and occupation of the institutions by a new stratum, whose self-regard is locked up with verbal gestures as "status objects". We go on to the 1960s as a moment where a certain fear of the past brought immediacy, hedonism, simultaneity, immersion, spontaneity, montage, direct address. Then, in the late 60s, Utopian project: When the faint star does take/ us into the deeper parts of the night. The imaginary space engulfing all poetic space, between divination and navigation. In the 1970s, there is the classic era of modern poetry, as the innovations are made to work. Then in the 1980s we see how a restorative taste sealed off the penetration of the new. The next chapter attempts to define the whole phenomenon of poetic conservatism, the feeling that only old and familiar things offer wholeness, and that ideas utterly prevent pleasure. A final chapter stumbles into the field of what isn't clear yet, and what hasn't even happened yet, in order to flourish the names of poets to whom the future may belong.