When Anna is kissed by a mysterious stranger at a NYE masquerade ball , a dance of seduction begins. 'So original and refreshing.' Hilary Mantel 'Brilliantly seductive ... A witty, sexy, sophisticated treat.' Sarah Waters 'Superb ... Sheer artistic insolence.' Iris Murdoch 'A great novel ... A swirling, sumptuous, sensual feast.' Guardian London, New Year's Eve. Snow falls on a Georgian mansion, vibrating with the festivities of a masquerade ball within. Middle-aged divorcee Anna stands alone - until the clock chimes midnight and a mysterious figure kisses her on the mouth. Thus begins a dance of seduction charged by clandestine romances swirling around them, whipping the ball into an frenzy of operatic proportions - until the night climaxes, revealing unease beneath the glitter ... A scandalous sensation in 1964, Brigid Brophy's The Snow Ball is ripe to seduce a new generation of readers. 'I read it in one sitting ... Wonderful!' Claire-Louise Bennett 'A feminist remodelling of libertine fervour and passion. ' Eley Williams 'One of the wittiest British writers of the past half century ... A comet in her day.' Terry Castle What Readers Are Saying: An ornate masterpiece. Sensual, wicked, clever; its dark heart glittering. So pleasurable and original and weird. Takes the heady, lusty, excitement that comes with new love and mingles it with the exuberance, decadence, and hedonism of NYE ... A short swirling treat. A perfect little masterpiece, an opera in paperback ... I was seduced and I hoped and I flinched and I laughed and I admired. The lovechild of Angela Carter and Virginia Woolf: trippy and fluid, existential and erotic, funny and witty: a hedonistic comedy of manners. I think I love this crazy little book .. Super sexy ... Made me hoot out loud with glee for the language and audacity. Oh man, this was a lot of fun. Such a strong sense of intelligence and wit behind every sentence.

Remembering the Dead in the Ancient Near East is among the first comprehensive treatments to present the diverse ways in which ancient Near Eastern civilizations memorialized and honored their dead, using mortuary rituals, human skeletal remains, and embodied identities as a window into the memory work of past societies. In six case studies teams of researchers with different skillsets—osteological analysis, faunal analysis, culture history and the analysis of written texts, and artifact analysis—integrate mortuary analysis with bioarchaeological techniques. Drawing upon different kinds of data, including human remains, ceramics, jewelry, spatial analysis, and faunal remains found in burial sites from across the region’s societies, the authors paint a robust and complex picture of death in the ancient Near East. Demonstrating the still underexplored potential of bioarchaeological analysis in ancient societies, Remembering the Dead in the Ancient Near East serves as a model for using multiple lines of evidence to reconstruct commemoration practices. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian societies, the archaeology of death and burial, bioarchaeology, and human skeletal biology.

Covers receipts and expenditures of appropriations and other funds.

In the context of globalization, this book explores female-themed art films from China and Germany, in order to seek and illustrate how the cultural difference between the ways of representing women and narrating women's themes is shown in the films of both countries.

Does power sharing bring peace? Policymakers around the world seem to think so. Yet, while there are many successful examples of power sharing in multi-ethnic states, such as Switzerland, South Africa and Indonesia, other instances show that such arrangements offer no guarantee against violent conflict, including Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe and South Sudan. Given this mixed record, it is not surprising that scholars disagree as to whether power sharing actually reduces conflict. Based on systematic data and innovative methods, this book comes to a mostly positive conclusion by focusing on practices rather than merely formal institutions, studying power sharing's preventive effect, analyzing how power sharing is invoked in anticipation of conflict, and by showing that territorial power sharing can be effective if combined with inclusion at the center. The authors' findings demonstrate that power sharing is usually the best option to reduce and prevent civil conflict in divided states.