Henry Carter Hull

Bill Bryson's bestselling biography of William Shakespeare takes the reader on an enthralling tour through Elizabethan England and the eccentricities of Shakespearean scholarship -- updated with a new introduction by the author to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild...

From 1919 to 1986, Grossinger's Catskill Resort Hotel provided a summer retreat from the city heat for New York's Jews, and entertained the great, the near-great, and the not so great, Jews and Gentiles alike. A melting pot of the Borscht Belt, sports, and show-biz worlds, loyal visitors included Red Buttons, Rocky Marciano, Eddie Fisher, and Jackie Robinson. Tania Grossinger grew up there. In her fascinating insider's account of life in the hospitality...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, monarchy was by far the most common form of government: emperors sat on the thrones of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Persia, China, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, while there were kings of Bulgaria, Serbia, Italy, Romania, Greece, Korea and Cambodia. After he lost his throne in 1952, King Farouk of Egypt predicted that by the end of the century there would be only five kings: the kings of hearts, aces, clubs...

"An off-color guide that reveals the contemporary colloquial language Greeks actually speak. Nothing is censored in Dirty Greek. This book presents cool things to say for all casual situations: shopping, parties, nightclubs, sporting events, and even romance and sex. There are sweet words to entice a local beauty to watch the sunset on Santorini and less-than-businesslike rebuffs for overly persistent street vendors. It contains casual expressions...

Published in 1937, Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not is that rare example of a novel whose cultural impact far outweighs its critical reputation. Long criticized for its fragmented form, its ham-fisted approach to politics, and its hard-boiled obsession with cojones, this blistering tale of a Florida Straits boat captain named Harry Morgan desperately trying to survive the economic ravages of the Great Depression by running rum and revolutionaries...

Pirates and Privateers tells the fascinating story of the buccaneers who were the scourge of merchants in the 18th Century. It examines their lifestyle, looking at how the sinking of the Spanish treasure fleet in a storm off the coast of Florida led to a pirates gold rush; how the Kings Pardon was a desperate gamble which paid off and considers the role of individual island governors, such as Woodes Rogers in the Bahamas, in bringing piracy under...

"This book is a compendium of phrases from Shakespeare that have been used for hundreds of years. Sections of the book include epigrams, invectives, poems of philosophy, and beautiful literary expressions, all of which make Shakespeare such an enduring and timeless writer"--

"How the repeated social tropes and paradigms of the City comedies give us an in-depth look into everyday London society in the early 17th-century. Although literature is often assumed to belong to the sphere of representation rather than constituting an accurate reflection of social reality, early-modern English drama can tell us much about social attitudes in the early seventeenth century. The City comedies were, in particular, composed by authors...

Sieges determined the course of the English Civil Wars, yet they receive scant attention. In contrast, the major set-piece battles are repeatedly analyzed and reassessed. As a result our understanding of the conflict, and of its outcome, is incomplete. John Barratt, in this lucid and perceptive account, makes the siege the focal point of his study. As well as looking at the theory and practice of siege warfare and fortification, he considers the often-devastating...

A study of nuclear warfare's key role in triggering the post-World War II confrontation between the US and the USSR After a devastating world war, culminating in the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was clear that the United States and the Soviet Union had to establish a cooperative order if the planet was to escape an atomic World War III. In this provocative study, Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko show how the atomic bomb pushed the...