The fourteen short stories in To Cut a Long Story Short show Jeffrey Archer's great skills with a wide variety of character, of subject and of setting, but all with that trademark twist in the tale. Every reader will have their own favourites: the choices run from love at first sight across the train tracks to the cleverest of confidence tricks, from the quirks of the legal profession – and those who are able to manipulate both sides of the Bar – to the creative financial talents of a member of Her Majesty's diplomatic service – but for a good cause. The last story, The Grass is Always Greener, is possibly the best piece Archer has written, and will haunt you for the rest of your life.

Brevity is the soul of wit. It is definitely the soul of these four and twenty pieces written as flash fiction, short story and a few that are prose-poems. In most of these pieces the idea is to attempt a sketch, to flash an image, to evoke a quick ‘Ah!’ rather than to tell an elaborate story. It is hoped that these tiny literary experiences lead to larger thoughts, memories and images in the reader's mind. The abused child, the undermined mother, the naughty old man, the bewildered artist, the lost transgender – they all find themselves captured in these pages. The revenge of a battered wife, the disgust of a domestic pet, the dreams of a struggling mother, the state of sexual politics a hundred years from now, the horror of war, the reality of a writer’s vocation and many more aspects of life as we see it – and don’t – are portrayed in these vignettes.

This work of fiction is a tale of pirates and villains, maps, treasure and shipwreck. When young Jim Hawkins finds a package in Captain Flint's sea chest, he could not know that the map inside it would lead him to unimaginable treasure. Mutiny and mayhem ensue.

Since the 1980s, Yoruba popular theatre has virtually disappeared due to radio, TV and other mass media in Nigeria. This is the personal account of a theatre worker on tour with the Oyin Adejobi Company. Drawing on archives, interviews and transcribed plays, she describes a successful Yoruba drama.

Idioms are expressions that cannot be understood from their individual words alone, and the English language is full of them—and so is this dictionary: 4,800+ English idioms and phrases with example sentences included for you so as to understand them all. This is the essential idioms dictionary if you want to talk like a native speaker—or just find out more about the colorful phrases you hear and say every day.

This book is a user-friendly guide to English literature from 1960 to the present. From Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney to Caryl Churchill, Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett, the book is essential reading for all readers of contemporary writing.

A classic spiritual journey through the heart of Christendom. Considered by Belloc himself, and by most critics, his greatest work, this classic book is the delightful story of the pilgrimage Belloc made on foot to Rome in order to fulfill a vow he had made ...and see all Europe which the Christian Faith has saved... In The Life of Hilaire Belloc, Robert Speaight states: More than any other book he ever wrote, The Path to Rome made Belloc's name; more than any other, it has been lovingly thumbed and pondered.... The book is a classic, born of something far deeper than the physical experience it records.

Have you ever been cut off in traffic? Or stepped in something that a dog owner has neglected to pick up? Or held a door open for someone, only to have them to breeze by you without so much as a nod of thanks? What if you could vaporise those responsible so that it was as if they had never existed? Human Cull imagines just that. People from all over the planet have sent in their cull suggestions for a little green alien to remove the really annoying people and leave the world a better place for the rest of us. Don't get mad - cull them!