Author: Nicholas Whittaker

Publisher: Icon Books Ltd

ISBN: 1848319908

Category: Transportation

Page: 320

View: 8146

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Nicholas Whittaker’s much-loved classic recollects the long sunny days of his childhood when, notepad in hand, jam sandwiches in the duffel bag, he happily spent his time jotting down train numbers during the Indian summer of steam and the heyday of diesel. Whittaker returns to his roots in this updated edition, casting a sceptical eye over recent developments, catching up with old acquaintances and considering the toll that half a century of ridicule and a couple of decades of privatisation have wrought upon his beloved pastime. As Andrew Martin notes in his Foreword, this is ‘one of the best books ever written about rail enthusiasm’. Equally it is a poetically written memoir of growing up in a more innocent age, a hymn to British eccentricity and to the virtues of observing the world around you: ‘Spotters – of trains, planes, buses or birds – are a last redoubt for something rapidly vanishing from our lives: looking outward, seeing, observing. People notice things less and less these days, while watching things more and more.’ Praise for the first edition: ‘An elegy: for the steam trains already vanishing when Whittaker’s hobby began in 1964; for the short-lived diesel age which followed; for an era of near innocence.’ Times Literary Supplement ‘Whittaker writes with humour and considerable evocative power ... For anyone who will admit to having a childhood brush with this now derided hobby, Platform Souls brings it all rushing back.’ Independent ‘Destined to become the Fever Pitch of the sidings and embankments’ Publishing News

Author: V. Ravi

Publisher: MANBLUNDER

ISBN: N.A

Category: Body, Mind & Spirit

Page: 244

View: 9363

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The story is about a rustic boy, Shankara transforming into a spiritual guru. God decides that spirituality is on the waning side in the earth. He acts through four great spiritual gurus. An emissary is sent to the village to bring the boy to Haridwar, for spiritual training, a holy town in India. The emissary himself is an enlightened soul and he shows the cosmic dance of Shiva and Shakti to the boy. The boy lives with his mother. He leaves his mother and reaches Haridwar with the emissary, whom he adores as his guruji. Guruji introduces him to spirituality during his short stay with him in the village. They reach Haridwar and Shankara gets trained by Shilagra Baba in pranayama as a prelude to practicing kundalini meditation. Baba further briefs the difference between Advaita and Trika philosophies. Baba advises Shankara and his guruji to proceed to Rishikesh to meet Mokshita Yogi Maharaj.Mokshita Yogi Maharaj teaches him kundalini meditation and the concept of karma. There Shankara meets a woman and gets intimate with her. After completing his training at Rishikesh, Shankara and guruji proceed to Rudraprayag to meet Bhagola Aghori Baba, who lives in a cave. He teaches Shankara the finer aspects of spirituality and initiates him into kundalini meditation. He then permits them to go back to Rishikesh and then to Haridwar. On reaching Haridwar, Shilagra Baba attained samadhi. Mother Ganges appeared in person and took Baba's body. Shankara takes over the reins of Shilagra Baba and becomes a spiritual master. Shankara's guruji stayed back at Rishikesh. When Shankara was meditating, during deep trance his guruji asked him rush to Rishikesh. When Shankara reached Rishikesh, his guruji attained samadhi. A rustic boy gets transformed into a spiritual guru in a matter of few days.

Author: Peter Hennessy

Publisher: Penguin UK

ISBN: 0141929316

Category: History

Page: 768

View: 2401

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Having It So Good evokes Britain emerging from the shadow of war and the privations of austerity and rationing into growing affluence. Peter Hennessy takes his readers into the front-rooms where the Coronation was watched on television, to the classrooms and now coffee bars of 1950s Britain – and also into the secret Cabinet rooms in which decisions about the British nuclear bomb were taken and plans made for the catastrophe of nuclear war. He brings to life the ageing Churchill, in his last faltering spell as Prime Minister, the highly-strung Anthony Eden taking his country to war in the teeth of American opposition and world opinion, and the rise of ‘Supermac’ Harold Macmillan, gliding over problems with his Edwardian insouciance. Above all, Having It So Good captures the smell and the flavour of an extraordinary decade in which affluence and anxiety combined to produce their own winds of change.

Author: Simon Bradley

Publisher: Profile Books

ISBN: 1847653529

Category: Transportation

Page: 516

View: 6252

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Sunday Times History Book of the Year 2015 Currently filming for BBC programme Full Steam Ahead Britain's railways have been a vital part of national life for nearly 200 years. Transforming lives and landscapes, they have left their mark on everything from timekeeping to tourism. As a self-contained world governed by distinctive rules and traditions, the network also exerts a fascination all its own. From the classical grandeur of Newcastle station to the ceaseless traffic of Clapham Junction, from the mysteries of Brunel's atmospheric railway to the lost routines of the great marshalling yards, Simon Bradley explores the world of Britain's railways, the evolution of the trains, and the changing experiences of passengers and workers. The Victorians' private compartments, railway rugs and footwarmers have made way for air-conditioned carriages with airline-type seating, but the railways remain a giant and diverse anthology of structures from every period, and parts of the system are the oldest in the world. Using fresh research, keen observation and a wealth of cultural references, Bradley weaves from this network a remarkable story of technological achievement, of architecture and engineering, of shifting social classes and gender relations, of safety and crime, of tourism and the changing world of work. The Railways shows us that to travel through Britain by train is to journey through time as well as space.

Author: G. B Hobson

Publisher: Dare Empire

ISBN: 0980870984

Category: Drama

Page: N.A

View: 406

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Powerful forces are at work in a group of country parishes undergoing renewal and charismatic revival, confusing reflections of reality. Emotions run riot. A supposed miracle birth during a previous revival haunts the present like a spectre at the feast. Weird happenings at midnight, desecration of the altar, accusations of rape, are just some of the challenges threatening the dedicated ministries of the handsome young incumbent and his secret rural dean lover. Can love continue to believe all things, overcome all things, in a judgmental world?A beautifully woven story of love, a story that will keep you turning page after page. Witness the accusations and heartache of this controversial work of art. This is a story that will touch your heart and keep you thinking long after you turn the final page. When a man believes he has to choose between the love of a man, and the love of God.

Author: Andrew Dow

Publisher: JHU Press

ISBN: 0801882923

Category: Reference

Page: 384

View: 9924

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Dow's Dictionary of Railway Quotations is an authoritative compendium of quotations about railways from 1608 to the present day. More than 3,400 entries are drawn from over 1,300 writers and speakers and a wide range of original sources both British and American—Acts of Parliament, poetry, songs, journals, advertisements, obituaries, novels, histories, plays, films, office memoranda, speeches, newspapers, television and radio broadcasts, and private documents and conversations. Here Andrew Dow records remarkable, memorable words—from the well-known to the abstruse, from the commonplace to the vital. The selected quotations are arranged by subject matter and searchable by speaker, subject, and keyword. Dow's Dictionary will inform and captivate railway enthusiasts along with readers interested in railway architecture, engineering, geography, and history.

Author: Robin Ince

Publisher: Atlantic Books

ISBN: 1838957707

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 294

View: 2831

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'A unique, funny picture of Britain... A love letter to bookshops and the vagaries of public transport.' Richard Osman Why play to 12,000 people when you can play to 12? In Autumn 2021, Robin Ince's stadium tour with Professor Brian Cox was postponed due to the pandemic. Rather than do nothing, he decided instead to go on a tour of over a hundred bookshops in the UK, from Wigtown to Penzance; from Swansea to Margate. Packed with witty anecdotes and tall tales, Bibliomaniac takes the reader on a journey across Britain as Robin explores his lifelong love of bookshops and books - and also tries to find out just why he can never have enough of them. It is the story of an addiction and a romance, and also of an occasional points failure just outside Oxenholme.

Author: Peter Hennessy

Publisher: Penguin UK

ISBN: 1846147247

Category: History

Page: 768

View: 1002

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Following Never Again and Having It So Good, the third part of Peter Hennessy's celebrated Post-War Trilogy 'By far the best study of early Sixties Britain ... so much fun, yet still shrewd and important' The Times, Books of the Year Harold Macmillan famously said in 1960 that the wind of change was blowing over Africa and the remaining British Empire. But it was blowing over Britain too - its society; its relationship with Europe; its nuclear and defence policy. And where it was not blowing hard enough - the United Kingdom's economy - great efforts were made to sweep away the cobwebs of old industrial practices and poor labour relations. Life was lived in the knowledge that it could end in a single afternoon of thermonuclear exchange if the uneasy, armed peace of the Cold War tipped into a Third World War. In Winds of Change we see Macmillan gradually working out his 'grand design' - how to be part of both a tight transatlantic alliance and Europe, dealing with his fellow geostrategists Kennedy and de Gaulle. The centre of the book is 1963 - the year of the Profumo Crisis, the Great Train Robbery, the satire boom, de Gaulle's veto of Britain's first application to join the EEC, the fall of Macmillan and the unexpected succession to the premiership of Alec Douglas-Home. Then, in 1964, the battle of what Hennessy calls the tweedy aristocrat and the tweedy meritocrat - Harold Wilson, who would end 13 years of Conservative rule and usher in a new era. As in his acclaimed histories of British life in the two previous decades, Never Again and Having it so Good, Peter Hennessy explains the political, economic, cultural and social aspects of a nation with inimitable wit and empathy. No historian knows the by-ways as well the highways of the archives so well, and no one conveys the flavour of the period so engagingly. The early sixties live again in these pages.

Author: Judith Siefring

Publisher: OUP Oxford

ISBN: 019157953X

Category: Reference

Page: 720

View: 6668

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Did you know that 'flavour of the month' originated in a marketing campaign in American ice-cream parlours in the 1940s, when a particular flavour would be specially promoted for a month at a time? And did you know that 'off the cuff' refers to the rather messy practice of writing impromptu notes on one's shirt cuff before speaking in public? These and many more idioms are explained and put into context in this second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms. This vastly entertaining dictionary takes a fresh look at the idiomatic phrases and sayings that make English such a rich and intriguing language. A major new edition, it contains entries for over 5000 idioms, including 350 new entries and over 500 new quotations. The text has been updated to include many new idioms using the findings of the Oxford English Reading Programme, the biggest language research programme in the world. The entries are supported by a wealth of illustrative quotations from a wide range of sources and periods. For example: 'Rowling has not been asleep at the wheel in the three years since the last Potter novel, and I am pleased to report that she has not confused sheer length with inspiration.' - Guardian, 2003. 'I made the speech of a lifetime. I had them tearing up the seats and rolling in the aisles.' - P.G. Woodhouse, 1940. Many entries include boxed features which give more detailed background on the idiom in question. For example, did you know that 'taken aback' was adopted from nautical terminology, and described a ship unable to move forward because of a strong headwind pressing its sails back against the mast? The text has been entirely redesigned so that it is both elegant and easy to use. Anyone interested in the quirky side of the English language will have hours of fun browsing through this fascinating and informative volume.

Author: Matthew Evanoff

Publisher: Matthew Evanoff

ISBN: N.A

Category: Foreign Language Study

Page: 341

View: 2026

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Learning English idioms can be difficult for ESL speakers. This book will help simplify some of the common words and expressions native English speakers use. Use it as a reference, or read it as a learning exercise, and you will improve your English in no time at all!