This edition of some five hundred recently-discovered poems by Mildmay Fane, second Earl of Westmorland presents the largest collection of 'new' seventeenth-century poetry since Traherne's poems were published almost a century ago. Until the rediscovery of these manuscripts, written between 1625 and 1665, Fane was known only as a patron of Robert Herrick, and as the author of a slim volume of poems, Otia Sacra (1648). This important body of manuscript poetry establishes him as a significant early modern poet. Fane's agonised and changing representation of an England turned upside-down and back again, and of its everyday social as well as political life, is meticulously annotated in this first edition. It uses Fane's surviving account books and letters, as well as a wealth of other contemporary information, to contextualise his poems in a way rarely possible with other early modern writers. The resulting text provides fascinating and revealing insights for cultural and political historians, as well as for all readers of English poetry. -- .

Set in Ancient Rome, "Poetaster" offers one of the first and most subtle statements in English of the Augustan cultural ideal. Jonson contrasts Augustus' wise rule with an English polity dominated (like the stage) by malice, intrigue and envy. This text examines these different strands so skilfully interwoven by Jonson, and argues for a reassessment of "Poetaster" as one of the most ideologically interesting of all early modern plays. The accompanying explanatory notes guide the reader through the personal and political illusions which gave the play its immediate satirical impact. -- .

This substantial collection of new includes contributions from leading international Shakespeare scholars such as Tom Craik, Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank, R.A. Foakes, G.K. Hunter, Kenneth Muir, A.D. Nuttall, Brian Vickers and Stanley Wells. The book's twenty five essays range over the whole field of Shakespeare studies and deal especially with Shakespeare and his predecessors, Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Shakespeare in performance (including film) and Shakespeare in relation to later literature. Shakespearean Continuities is published in honour of the distinguished Shakespeare scholar E.A.J. Honigmann, FBA, Joseph Cowen Professor of English Literature at the University of Newcastle, 1970-1989.

The first and only edition of Jonson's poetry aimed at a student reader Each poem is introduced, historical and manuscript information is provided, it is contextualised and annotated throughout so easily accessible to the modern reader Modern spelling and punctuation is used throughout, bridging the gap with the modern reader Detailed and sensitive treatment of textual authority and manuscript is given, opening up broader issues surrounding the poetry

LET THE HUNT BEGIN. HECTOR CROSS, ex-SAS officer, private security expert, widower. His wife was taken much too soon, by a cruel man with evil intentions. JOHNNY CONGO, psychopath, extortionist, terrorist, the man who murdered Hector's wife. Cross wants him dead. So does the US government. Congo is locked up on Death Row in the most secure prison in the free world, counting down the days until his execution. He's got two weeks. He wants out. He's escaped before and knows he can again. Cross, still licking his wounds from his last bruising encounter with Congo, is back and ready for work. In the middle of the rough Atlantic stands oil supertanker Bannock A. Terrorist activity in the area has triggered panic and there's only one person they can trust to protect her. What is promised as a cakewalk turns out to be much more, a mission that will test Cross to his emotional and physical limits. But a life spent in the SAS and private security has left Cross hard-wired for pain and as he is thrown into the fire once more, he will not stop until he has snared his prey. Hector Cross is Predator.

Samuel Carver makes bad accidents happen to worse people. He's very good at his job. But nobody's perfect. And one of Carver's targets has got away. Now the world faces a new age of conflict driven by religious fanaticism. In Russia, the government have admitted they no longer know the whereabouts of one hundred small-scale 'suitcase nukes'. In Afghanistan and Kosovo, ruthless terrorists plot the downfall of their hated enemies. In Texas, a dying billionaire plots his own personal Armageddon. And Carver can do nothing to stop them. He was beaten and tortured and left to die, but Samuel Carver is a hard man to kill. When he awakes in a Swiss sanatorium from weeks of torment, he discovers that the woman he loves has vanished. Somehow he must find the strength to track her down. Carver's hunt will take him deep into the heart of a conspiracy in which the lives of millions are at stake. He must confront an agonizing choice between his duty and his heart, and face the ultimate sacrifice. As the clock ticks down to doomsday, who will survive the final, explosive conflagration? In The Survivor the worlds of fact and fiction collide in a thriller that grips from the first page to the last.

This substantial collection includes contributions from leading international Shakespeare scholars such as Tom Craik, Philip Edwards, IngA-Stina Ewbank, R.A. Foakes, G.K. Hunter, Kenneth Muir, A.D. Nuttall, Brian Vickers and Stanley Wells. The book's twenty five essays range over the whole field of Shakespeare studies and deal especially with Shakespeare and his predecessors, Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Shakespeare in performance (including film) and Shakespeare in relation to later literature. Shakespearean Continuities is published in honour of the distinguished Shakespeare scholar E.A.J. Honigmann, FBA, Joseph Cowen Professor of English Literature at the University of Newcastle, 1970-1989.

Robert Herrick has long been one of the best loved of English lyric poets. Known through the centuries as the author of 'Gather ye rosebuds', he also wrote, as this new edition shows, hundreds of songs, epigrams and longer poems equally worthy of attention. Volume I of this new edition of Herrick's work contains Hesperides, Herrick's only published collection. As well as the commentary on Hesperides, volume II contains the fifty-nine surviving manuscript poems which can be firmly attributed to Herrick, and on which his reputation was based before 1648. It is an ambitious and original attempt to recover for the first time the history of Herrick's corpus of manuscript poetry, and to identify how his poems circulated, and who his copyists and readers were. By establishing the type of sources to which they had access and the nature and quality of the poems these sources contained, and through the histories of transmission that accompany every poem, this volume offers a significant body of evidence that deepens our critical understanding not only of Herrick's poetry, but of the mechanics of scribal publication and the culture of reading, writing and performing poetry and music in early modern England. Where, as is often the case, a musical setting survives this is also printed, along with a commentary on the setting, in a form which is designed to encourage the performance of the lyrics.

This is the first edition for fifty years of one of the greatest of English lyric poets. Volume I concentrates on Herrick's large printed collection, Hesperides, published in 1648, and the product of nearly four decades of writing. The text is based on a collation of all fifty-seven known surviving copies of Hesperides. In addition it includes a much needed new biography, covering the suicide of his father, his apprenticeship as a goldsmith-banker, and his subsequent career in Cambridge, London, and Devon. It provides a survey of Herrick's fluctuating critical reputation-from 'the first in rank and station of English song-writers' to 'trivially charming'-and a detailed reconstruction of the original printing and publishing, just after the first Civil War, of a book which was the first 'Complete Works' to be published by an English poet. There is also a newly ordered sequence of Herrick's letters from Cambridge, his only surviving prose. An extensive commentary on Hesperides is placed in Volume II so that readers can use it side by side with the poems if they wish. The commentary gives new translations of Herrick's hundreds of classical allusions, and quotes his equally numerous Biblical ones, both of them far more extensive, and frequently far more playful, than has hitherto been realised. It also notes many parallels between Herrick's work and that of contemporaries, especially Jonson, Shakespeare, Burton, and John Fletcher, and his habit of echoing or quoting himself, a tendency which reinforces the strong sense of Herrick's persona dominating the collection. Full explanations are given of contemporary personal, political, and cultural references.

'Lords of Wine and Oile' provides a long overdue book-length appraisal of the major seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick. The collection reads his poetry in the context of his literary, musical, political, and religious affiliations and looks at how he both presents and constructs ideals of community through his work. Herrick is best known for his poetry's grace, good humour, and tolerant inclusiveness, characteristics at odds with the publication of his work close to the end of the Civil Wars. This collection places Herrick's poetry in a much wider chronological context beginning with his early career as a manuscript poet in Jacobean London. Contributors present original research to situate Herrick within the coteries of Ben Jonson and Thomas Stanley, uncover the Royalism of Herrick's publishers, and identify the printer of Hesperides. Others examine how the context of publication in 1648 gives a political colouring to Herrick's imitations of Ovid and Anacreon and how Herrick, like Katherine Philips, uses the theme of friendship and the mode of print to construct an idea of the autonomous author. Two essays explore Herrick's musical collaborations with Henry Lawes, the first such work since 1976, and analyse the influence of musical settings and group performance on the interpretation of Herrick's lyrics. The collection also showcases an important debate on the challenges posed by Herrick's work, which consciously rejects competitive anxiety and narrative momentum, for historicist and postmodernist literary criticism. Contributors include Stella Achilleos, Line Cottegnies, John Creaser, Achsah Guibbory, Stacey Jocoy, Leah Marcus, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Nicholas McDowell, Michelle O'Callaghan, Graham Parry, Syrithe Pugh, and Richard Wistreich.

'To proceed & beginne wth ye Coullers, Whitt ffor its Virgin puritie is the most Excellent To proceed and begin with the colours: white for its virgin purity is the most excellent, viz. ceruse and white lead; both are subject to inconveniences, and are thus prevented: the ceruse, after you have wrought it, will tarnish, and many times look of a reddish or yellowish shine; the white lead, if too much ground, wiull glister or shine, and if you grind it too coarse will be unfit to work, and so unserviceable. There is but one way to remedy, which is to lay them in the sun two or three days before you grind them, which will exhale and draw away those salt and greasy mixtures that starve and poison the colours. ' Treatise on the Arte of Limning is one of the most important documents in the history of English art. Published in paperback for the first time, this edition provides a transcript of the original manuscript copy facing a modernised version, extensively annotated. The substantial introduction explores the history of the Treatise, the life of its author, its historical and artistic context, and the technique of limning.The Treatise combines elegance, information, personal forthrightness and spirited observation.

"The Accident Man" returns in a heart-stopping race to prevent a global holy war
Tom Cain's "The Accident Man" introduced Samuel Carver-a man hired to make bad things happen-to rave reviews from critics and readers alike. Now, Carver is back in a new adventure that takes him from the war rooms of Washington, D.C., and the palaces of the French Riviera to the Arctic peaks of Norway and the war-torn Serbian countryside.
Carver finds himself lying broken and damaged in a Swiss sanitarium after rescuing his lover, Alix Petrova, from her Russian spymaster. But when Alix's former employers force her to leave him and seduce an American military official, Carver emerges, shockingly and violently, as his former self-just in time to discover a Texas billionaire's messianic plot to destroy the world.

Breathlessly paced, international in scope, and featuring one of the most intriguing heroes in recent fiction, Tom Cain's smashing debut surprises the reader at every turn. A thriller that explores the secret of Princess Diana's death, The Accident Man imagines the man who may have killed her. For a certain sum of money, Samuel Carver can arrange a death. A ruptured gas line, an automobile crash, a fall from a window-anything can be made to look like an accident. But when Carver is set up, betrayed, and pursued by the very forces that hired him, he must execute his most daring feat yet.

Ex-marine Samuel Carver makes bad things happen to worse people. He is used to being in complete control. So when he finds himself caught in the middle of a riot in South London, he must fall back on his instincts and years' of training as the riot turns into a battleground. Someone planned this riot for political gain and now Carver - in the wrong place at the wrong time - looks like the perfect scapegoat. Wanted by the police for murder, if he is to clear his name he is going to have to find out who is really behind these events. The truth will shock even Carver - and find him pitted against a deadly enemy who knows all of Carver's secrets and in a fight that will bring him face to face with a killer without conscience. Set in a Britain in turmoil, with riots on the nation's streets, the euro in crisis, and a political system in disarray, Revenger is a classic Tom Cain thriller that once again rips its story from the headlines of tomorrow's newspapers.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 sent shockwaves around the financial world. Never before had such a large and prestigious organisation been allowed to fail, and to fail so quickly. It began a domino effect, hitting banks and economies around the world. Theories abound as to the cause of the collapse - the sub-prime bubble, bad management, even good old fashioned greed. But what if it was none of the above. What if Lehman Brothers had been brought to its knees by the deliberate and wilful act of one man bent on a course of financial terrorism? Moreover, what if it was only a dry run for a bigger and even bolder attack on the financial capital of the world, the City of London? Samuel Carver is about to find himself on the biggest mission of his life.

Meet the Accident Man, Samuel Carver Carver is a good guy who makes bad things happen to bad people. Drug-baron's helicopter develops mechanical failure mid-flight: Samuel Carver. Terrorist blown-up in his own bomb factory: Samuel Carver. Ex-SAS, now freelance mercenary he is the frontline weapon of the 'Consortium', a black-ops British government outfit, or is it? Carver is called to do a hit at very short notice. Do this job for us and be paid very well. Refuse and you better run and hide. He believes the target to be a high-ranking Pakistani terrorist. The job is to organise a car crash in a Paris underpass. But Carver is being set up. When he discovers the real identity of his target, and more importantly the identity of the target's female companion, he knows one thing - his life is over. This is a secret too big to let him live, unless he can track down the real villains before they get to him. Combining the plotting of Robert Ludlum, with the pace and tension of Frederick Forsyth, Tom Cain is a major new thriller writer and The Accident Man is a classic in the making and launches Samuel Carver straight into the top rank of action heroes.