The main character, adult male author named Jim, finds himself unknowingly learning what it takes to be successful in life with Saint Nicholas as his mentor. Of Success We will speak in rhyme Our message deep For you to reap Christmas has grown Well tell you how To you we endow Nicholas and James

Gifts are always with us: we use them positively to display affection and show gratitude for favours; we suspect that others give and accept them as douceurs and bribes. The gift also performed these roles in early modern English culture: and assumed a more significant role because networks of informal support and patronage were central to social and political behaviour. Favours, and their proper acknowledgement, were preoccupations of the age of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Hobbes. As in modern society, giving and receiving was complex and full of the potential for social damage. 'Almost nothing', men of the Renaissance learned from that great classical guide to morality, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 'is more disgraceful than the fact that we do not know how either to give or receive benefits'. The Power of Gifts is about those gifts and benefits - what they were, and how they were offered and received in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It shows that the mode of giving, as well as what was given, was crucial to social bonding and political success. The volume moves from a general consideration of the nature of the gift to an exploration of the politics of giving. In the latter chapters some of the well-known rituals of English court life - the New Year ceremony, royal progresses, diplomatic missions - are viewed through the prism of gift-exchange. Gifts to monarchs or their ministers could focus attention on the donor, those from the crown could offer some assurance of favour. These fundamentals remained the same throughout the century and a half before the Civil War, but the attitude of individual monarchs altered specific behaviour. Elizabeth expected to be wooed with gifts and dispensed benefits largely for service rendered, James I modelled giving as the largesse of the Renaissance prince, Charles I's gift-exchanges focused on the art collecting of his coterie. And always in both politics and the law courts there was the danger that gifts would be corroded, morphing from acceptable behaviour into bribes and corruption. The Power of Gifts explores prescriptive literature, pamphlets, correspondence, legal cases and financial records, to illuminate social attitudes and behaviour through a rich series of examples and case-studies.

A noble individuals rise from humble beginnings and the struggle between brothers for dominance form two of the basic stories that attract people to literature and history, both personal and global. In How Nicholas Became Santa Claus, Sandra Jo and Darrell R. Troupe, a husband-and-wife writing team, invite readers to enter the world of Nicholas, a boy whose simple life on the farm takes a turn for the adventurous when he makes a discovery. As the only one who can prevent an evil prince from turning against his two brothers and seizing the crown in the wake of their fathers death, Nicholas discovers he has greater depths within himself and more potent connections to the magical Orphic Forest than he knew at the outset. Tapping these wellsprings of strength, Nicholas becomes the champion both of human and oddlings in his daring fight to restore balance and peace to his suffering world. If you find yourself drawn to tales of good vanquishing evil, of the lowly discovering unknown nobility within themselves, and of life in lands where the mundane and magical commingle, then How Nicholas Became Santa Claus will become for you a book that invites you to turn to the next page and the next.

‘A pioneer who brought out the poetry in art’—Mint Lounge B.N. Goswamy (1933–2023), one of the most eminent art historians of our times, put India’s art on the global map. His lucid interpretation of art made the subject accessible to a wider audience. He was a master chronicler who offered ‘slight sketches of large subjects’. Ruminations, Goswamy’s last work of, rues the vanishing traces of artisans’ guilds in Europe, celebrates the illustrations to La Fontaine’s fables produced in Lahore, opens a window to the Jain legend of Ilaputra who was driven to the edge of renunciation, explores the pioneering map of the world drawn by the Turkish admiral, Piri Reis, admires the dazzling range of embroideries in the Calico Museum, chronicles the ensigns of royalty that belong to the Mughal period, brings to light Timurid kitab-khanas, the Tibetan sand-mandalas and much more. Lucid, comprehensive and engaging, Ruminations is a the most definitive primer on art in India and South Asia.