The words are those of a working class Red Army veteran and they are in stark contrast to the opinion of a 34-year-old Russian entrepreneur: Lenin and Trotsky were totally evil men - they turned my country into a nightmare... What was it like to be a worker in Petrograd or Moscow before the Revolution? How much did a tram driver's family know about Bolshevism? What was the price of a loaf of bread or a pair of boots? Who kept the power stations running, the telephone exchanges, bakeries, farms and hospitals? How did it feel to be a stockbroker one day, then a forced labourer the next? The Great War tore at the nation's heart, and Russia's autocracy dined and danced while the people starved. The Revolution of 1917 has remained a controversial political and academic battleground - much has been written about Lenin, Trotsky and Kerensky, their politics relentlessly analysed. Yet there is also a compelling human side, and Roy Bainton tells it, not only through the staggering bravado of revolutionary politicians, but through the poignant stories recounted to him by ordinary families whose hopes and aspirations were soon turned to fear.

Rather than providing a dictionary of superstitions, of which there are already numerous excellent, exhaustive and, in many cases, academic works which list superstitions from A to Z, Bainton gives us an entertaining flight over the terrain, landing from time to time in more thought-provoking areas. He offers an overview of humanity's often illogical and irrational persistence in seeking good luck and avoiding misfortune. While Steve Roud's two excellent books - The Penguin Dictionary of Superstitions and his Pocket Guide - and Philippa Waring's 1970 Dictionary concentrate on the British Isles, Bainton casts his net much wider. There are many origins which warrant the full back story, such as Friday the thirteenth and the Knights Templar, or the demonisation of the domestic cat resulting in 'cat holocausts' throughout Europe led by the Popes and the Inquisition. The whole is presented as a comprehensive, entertaining narrative flow, though it is, of course, a book that could be dipped into, and includes a thorough bibliography. Schoenberg, who developed the twelve-tone technique in music, was a notorious triskaidekaphobe. When the title of his opera Moses und Aaron resulted in a title with thirteen letters, he renamed it Moses und Aron. He believed he would die in his seventy-sixth year (7 + 6 = 13) and he was correct; he also died on Friday the thirteenth at thirteen minutes before midnight. As Sigmund Freud wrote, 'Superstition is in large part the expectation of trouble; and a person who has harboured frequent evil wishes against others, but has been brought up to be good and has therefore repressed such wishes into the unconscious, will be especially ready to expect punishment for his unconscious wickedness in the form of trouble threatening him from without.'

In April 1945, Himmler's SS robbed Germany's National Depository, the Reichsbank. As well as the tons of gold bullion, millions in currency, jewels and other valuables, the Nazis already had billions of dollars' worth of art, stolen from doomed Jewish families, hidden away in the mountains of Bavaria and Austria. 70 years later, Kurt Kohler,art hunter and researcher, travels the world looking for works to retrieve and return to their owners' descendants. But when an old farmer tries to sell a batch of ancient gold coins, Kohler is called in and the hidden history of one of the most feared organisations of the 20th century is revealed. Kohler's investigations raise a question: what if Reichsfuhrer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, who supposedly committed suicide with a cyanide capsule at Luneberg, Germany in May 1945 was not Himmler at all, but his terrified double? The official Himmler file at the UK's National Archives is embargoed until 2045. But Kurt Kohler unearths the truth ...and much more besides.

The elderly, like the poor, are always with us, and there's more of us each year. The world we grew up in has long gone, and with all the progress comes frustration and exasperation. There seems to be a move to demonize old folk; it's a kind of odd envy for the fact that we don't seem to have to face the challenges younger people have to face in a consumer society which is ruled by greed and bereft of old fashioned morality. Yet getting old isn't the walk in the park most people think. These few verses are written by a man facing his 70th birthday. 'Wrinklies' often get hold of the wrong end of the stick, and some of us admit it. Here, then, in 'Over The Hill' are all the misinterpreted 'facts' of life as we see it, blended with longing, nostalgia and anger. This is also a reminder to any younger reader that they, too, will one day feel the same.

New mysteries, as well as variations on recurring ones, continue to surface on a weekly basis around the globe, from showers of frogs over Hungary to birds falling to earth in Arkansas. This compendious round-up of unexplained phenomena examines everything from the experiments being done with the Large Hadron Collider to classic maritime mysteries involving inexplicably missing crews, via UFOs, mediums, cryptozoology, panics, paranoia and a universe proving stranger in fact than we'd imagined.

This fascinating compilation of some of the world's most baffling, still-unexplained wonders is sure to keep you thoroughly mystified page after page. Includes mysteries concerning the Titanic, UFOs, inexplicable astronomy, and much more bizarre phenomena that twenty-first century science can't explain.