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There Once Was A Man With Six Wives
by Mick Twister Hannah WarrenRoyal history as you’ve never seen it before – in limericks! Six times Henry Tudor got wed,Unhappy with how his wives bred,And when things turned sour,Exploiting his powerHe shouted out, ‘Off with her head!’
3000 Jokes, 2997 Laughs
by null Mike Haskins null Stephen ArnottThe ultimate joke book with over 3,000 side-splitting jokes for every occasion, ranging from one-liners and observations, to classic stories that will provide hours of fun. Mike Haskins and Stephen Arnott collate this wonderful comedy-fest full of quick-fire one-liners, timely observations and rambling yarns – from the classic to the modern. This book contains quips for every occasion: from the best man’s speech to a sales conference, or just for swapping around the dinner table. Arranged by subject matter, you’ll always be able to find just the right joke for any situation. (Unless you're a child, because this book is strictly for adults only!) This hilarious collection will appeal to those who want to find a specific rib-tickler for an upcoming occasion, and to those who wants to settle down in an armchair and have a good old laugh. Jokes include: Tom’s eyesight is getting very bad. He’s had to get a special new pair of glassesto help him find where he left his old glasses. What do you call a magic dog? A Labracadabrador. Today is the birthday of the inventor of the boomerang. I think we should all wish him Many Happy Returns. What’s the best thing about Switzerland? I don’t know, but their flag is a huge plus. Settle in, and prepare to laugh your socks off!
101 Amazing Dad Skills
by Edward DickensFrom how to improvise a bedtime story to the ins and outs of high-quality dad dancing, 101 Amazing Dad Skills is an essential read for all long-suffering dads and excited fathers-to-be.
Welcome to Bloody Difficult Britain: A Self-help Guide To Surviving The Uk's Identity Crisis, Divorce From The Eu, And Westminster's Total Political Breakdown
by Steven S. StevensWe have never had it so bloody difficult! The pound crashing at every turn, austerity measures bringing the NHS and the education system to its knees? Hard Brexit, soft Brexit, fried Brexit on toast? Crazy coalitions and divisive devolution. What next – a plague of locusts?
Crucifixion’s A Doddle: The Passion of Monty Python
by Julian DoyleAs Julian Doyle, the editor of Monty Python's film Life of Brian, watched the comedy teams attempt to be crucified, for the end of their film, he began to notice something was seriously wrong. Checking for images of the crucified Jesus, he found none. The first appearing nearly 400 years after the event. But, not only were there no images of Jesus but not one of anyone else being crucified. And it was not until the first image appeared in 420 AD that the vertical cross replaced the original symbol for Christianity, which was the X shaped Chi-Rho. Our well-known image was clearly an invention by commissioned artists well after the actual event. And that is what Doyle had spotted on the set of Life of Brian, that crucifixion could not, and does not, work, and in this book he describes why. With further research, he began to notice contradictions within the Biblical text about the death of Jesus, leading him to the shocking possibility that maybe Pontius Pilate did not crucify Jesus after all as all the evidence seemed to suggest that Jesus lived for a decade after Pilate left Judea. Now in this true life detective story Doyle astonishingly uncovers who was the real killer of Jesus Christ. Behind his jovial and playful style, Julian Doyle conceals a rapier wit with which he cuts and slashes his way through the whole of the crucifixion story with expert analysis, bringing clarity to the Gospel and revealing for the first time a way of understanding what may be the true story of Jesus. Leading Python Terry Jones has described Doyle as a polymath, and it is this extraordinary range of knowledge - coupled with a curious and accessible approach - that has helped lead him to his discoveries. Remarkable, challenging and possibly very naughty indeed, Crucifixion's a Doddle is a must-read for Python fans as well as anyone with an inquiring mind.In Crucifixion’s a Doddle, the irrepressible Doyle uses evidence to form his persuasive case; such as the fact that no image of Jesus on a cross appeared for 300 years after the event was alleged to have taken place, and that the images that did appear were likely an invention by commissioned artists at the time to explore the likelihood that the story told for centuries may not be as accurate as previously thought. Behind his jovial and playful style, Julian Doyle conceals a rapier wit with which he cuts and slashes his way through the whole of the crucifixion story with expert analysis, bringing clarity to the Gospel and revealing for the first time a way of understanding what may be the true story of Jesus. Leading Python Terry Jones has described Doyle as a polymath, and it is this extraordinary range of knowledge - coupled with a curious and accessible approach - that has helped lead him to his discoveries. Remarkable, challenging and possibly very naughty indeed, Crucifixion’s a Doddle is a must-read for Python fans as well as anyone with an inquiring mind."
The Horse’s Arse
by Laura GascoignePatrick Phelan is an ageing artist who has never made it big but who somehow manages to live on air in a North London suburb. When not running art classes for amateurs, Patrick wrestles in the shed at the bottom of his garden with his life’s work: a series of visionary canvases of The Seven Seals. When his wheeler-dealer son Marty turns up with a commission from a rich client for some copies of paintings by modern masters, Phelan reluctantly agrees; it means money for his ex-wife Moira. However the deal with Marty is, typically, not what it seems. What follows is a complex chain of events involving fakery, fraud, kidnapping, murder, the Russian Mafia and a cast of dubious art world characters. A contemporary spin on Joyce Cary’s classic satire The Horse’s Mouth, The Horse’s Arse by Laura Gascoigne is a crime thriller-cum-comic-fable that poses the serious question: where does art go from here?
Love for Love: A Comedy
by William CongreveValentine has fallen under the displeasure of his father by his extravagance, and is besieged by creditors. His father, Sir Sampson Legend, offers him enough to pay his debts if he will sign a bond engaging to make over his right to his inheritance to his younger brother Ben. Valentine, to escape from his embarrassment, signs the bond. He is in love with Angelica, who possesses a fortune of her own, but so far she has not yielded to his suit. Sir Sampson has arranged a match between Ben, who is at sea, and Miss Prue, an awkward country girl, the daughter of Foresight, a superstitious old fool who claims to be an astrologer.
Nudinits: Over 25 Knitting Patterns To Decorate Your Home At Christmas
by Sarah SimiOver 25 Christmas-themed knitting patterns based on the hit Nudinits animation.
Nasty Astrology: What Your Astrologer Won't Tell You!
by Richard MacDonaldExploring exactly what hidden demons lurk within other people’s psyches, Nasty Astrology reveals all the unspoken truths about people’s star signs.
The Strange Life of Horatio Evans: (Boxset Books 1-4) (The Strange Life of Horatio Evans #6)
by Ray NoyesBoxset of books 1-4 of The Strange Life of Horatio Evans. Follow Horatio’s exploits in Abertump and spare a thought for Gladys, his permanently-on-the-verge-of-death wife.
Venice in the Valleys (The Strange Life of Horatio Evans #4)
by Ray NoyesThe Fogle family, the rich landowners of Abertump has a strange son, Marmaduke Wellington Fogle, who has returned penniless from his grand tour of Europe. He spent most of his time and their money tobogganing in Austria and lazing around Venice, where he fell in love with gondolas. Horatio had already tried using the canal for boating, but failed. So here is another chance for him to try again, this time using Fogle money. That Marmaduke insists on having gondolas, which Horatio has never heard of (he also thinks Venice is near Wrexham), causes him genuine problems. Where will he get them? Since he always refuses help, he decides to make them - rather special, and very Welsh, ones. Luckily for Horatio, Marmaduke, like his father, always adopts the philosophy of never actually doing anything but ‘leaving it up to the chaps’ to sort out. This provides space and time for Horatio to manage the construction of the gondolas himself with disastrous and rather comic results. Venice is not in imminent danger of facing stiff competition from Abertump!
The Village Theme Park (The Strange Life of Horatio Evans #3)
by Ray NoyesNow in his middle years, Horatio Evans has been knocked back by the failure of his communist uprising. The atmosphere in the town is also depressed, because several of the mines are to close. He sees this not as a crisis, but as another opportunity for a revolution - of sorts. If the mines are closing why doesn’t the town buy them (for a song) and create visitors’ attractions? Horatio’s idea of setting up the theme park is beset by a major problem - he has no cash. Persuading the once-rich Fogle family, which owns one of the mines (and most of Abertump) to collaborate with him, sees a clash between his communist, working class values and their upper-class privileged ones. Then Gladys comes to the rescue with a plan, not only for getting some cash but also for earning some themselves from the theme park. But how could a communist become a capitalist? Such a fundamental clash of belief is just another challenge for our loveable hero.
The Great British Bucket List: Utterly Unmissable Britain
by Richard Madden National Trust Books60 achievable adventures that celebrate the best of Britain and Britishness – must-do things that are on your doorstep rather than the other side of the world.
Whose Reality Is This Anyway? (PDF)
by David LuddingtonRetired stage magician turned professional mystic debunker, John Barker, finds his sceptical beliefs under fire when he encounters a strange man who claims to be Merlin. After several unsuccessful attempts to rid himself of his increasingly unpredictable companion, John finally relents and agrees to assist in the man’s crazy mission, to find the true grave of the mythical King Arthur. Following a hidden code contained within the text of a soft porn novel, they gather a growing entourage of hippies, mystic seekers and alien hunters as they leave a trail of chaos across the south west of England. When the group comes to the attention of a TV Reality Show producer looking to make a fast profit out of harmless eccentrics and fading celebrities, John decides it’s time to take charge and prove one way or the other, the identity of this mysterious person who claims to be a fictional wizard. “Whose reality is this anyway?” is a warm-hearted tale of what it means to be an individual and to follow one’s dreams. With his trademark cast of oddball characters and absurd situations, David Luddington once more transports us into a world where who you are is more important than what you are.
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace: A Novel
by Patty Yumi CottrellHelen’s adoptive brother has killed himself. Helen’s adoptive family is estranged. Helen has decided that she alone is qualified to launch a serious investigation into her brother’s suicide and to ‘be a supportive beam of light' for her adoptive parents. Compulsive, unstable, likeable, and high energy, Helen is hard work for the people in her life, and she may not be as useful at home as she expects. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is a dark comedy about loss, grief, solitude, and ghosts.
Malacqua: Four days of Rain in the City of Naples, Waiting for the Occurrence of an Extraordinary Event
by Nicola PuglieseAfter a four-day deluge, Naples is flooded. Buildings collapse, sinkholes appear. Strange events spread across the city: ghostly voices emit from the Castel dell’Ovo and a neglected child finds a singing coin. A melancholy journalist searches for meaning, as the narrative takes us into the minds of those who have suffered in the floods. Mysteriously withdrawn from publication until Pugliese’s death in 2012, and only now appearing in English, Malacqua is a richly peopled portrait of a much-mythologised city.
Worlds from the Word's End
by Joanna WalshThis collection cements Joanna Walsh’s reputation as one of the sharpest writers of this century. Wearing her learning lightly, Walsh’s stories make us see the world afresh while showing us she has read the world. In ‘Like a Fish Needs a . . .’ – perhaps the funniest, most freewheeling story ever written about cycling (and Freud and and and . . .) you read shenanigans worthy of Flann O’Brien. Meanwhile, in ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’, Walsh conjures up a country in which words themselves fall out of fashion – something that will never happen wherever Walsh is read.
To Leave with the Reindeer
by Olivia RosenthalTo Leave with the Reindeer is the account of a woman who has been trained for a life she cannot live. She readies herself for freedom, and questions its limits, by exploring how humans relate to animals. Rosenthal weaves an intricate pattern, combining the central narrative with many other voices – vets, farmers, breeders, trainers, a butcher – to produce a polyphonic composition full of fascinating and disconcerting insights. Wise, precise, generous, To Leave with the Reindeer takes a clear-eyed look at the dilemmas of domestication, both human and animal, and the price we might pay to break free.
The Polyglot Lovers
by Lina Wolff‘Do you have to stare like that?’ I asked.‘Think about the actors in porn. They’ve got no problem showing themselves off.’‘Think about when I broke your nose,’ I replied.Ellinor is thirty-six. She wears soft black sweatpants and a Michelin Man jacket. She fights. Smart and unsentimental, she tries her hand at online dating, only to be stranded by a snowstorm with a literary critic. Cut to Max Lamas, an author who dreams of a polyglot lover, a woman who will understand him—in every tongue. His search takes him to Italy, where he befriends a marchesa whose old Roman family is on the brink of ruin. At the heart of this literary intrigue is a handwritten manuscript that leaves no one unaffected.The Polyglot Lovers is a fiercely witty and nuanced contribution to feminism in the #metoo era. Pleasure is an elusive thing, love even more so.
I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me
by Juan Pablo Villalobos‘I don’t expect anyone to believe me,’ warns the narrator of this novel, a Mexican student called Juan Pablo Villalobos. He is about to fly to Barcelona on a scholarship when he’s kidnapped in a bookshop and whisked away by thugs to a basement. The gangsters are threatening his cousin—a wannabe entrepreneur known to some as ‘Projects’ and to others as ‘dickhead’ – who is gagged and tied to a chair. The thugs say Juan Pablo must work for them. His mission? To make Laia, the daughter of a corrupt politician, fall in love with him. He accepts . . . though not before the crime boss has forced him at gunpoint into a discussion on the limits of humour in literature.Part campus novel, part gangster thriller, I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me is Villalobos at his best. Exuberantly foul-mouthed and intellectually agile, this hugely entertaining novel finds the light side of difficult subjects – immigration, corruption, family loyalty and love – in a world where the difference between comedy and tragedy depends entirely on who’s telling the joke.
Berg (British Literature Ser. #Vol. 38327)
by Ann Quin‘A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father. . . ’So begins Ann Quin’s first novel, a debut ‘so staggeringly superior to most you’ll never forget it’ (The Guardian). Alistair Berg, hair restorer, shares a mistress with his father. He will, he decides, eliminate his rival. After mutilating a ventriloquist’s dummy, he finds himself accidentally seduced by the man he needs to kill. Mordant, heady, dark, Berg is Quin’s masterpiece, a classic of post-war avant-garde British writing.
Many People Die Like You (G - Reference,information And Interdisciplinary Subjects Ser.)
by Lina WolffAn underemployed chef is pulled into the escalating violence of his neighbour’s makeshift porn channel. An elderly piano student is forced to flee her home village when word gets out that she’s fucked her thirty-something teacher. A hose pumping cava through the maquette of a giant penis becomes a murder weapon in the hands of a disaffected housewife.In this collection from the winner of Sweden’s August Prize, Lina Wolff gleefully wrenches unpredictability from the suffocations of day-to-day life, shatters balances of power without warning, and strips her characters down to their strangest and most unstable selves. Wicked, discomfiting, delightful and wry, delivered with the deadly wit for which Wolff is known, Many People Die Like You presents the uneasy spectacle of people in solitude, and probes, with savage honesty, the choices we make when we believe no one is watching … or when we no longer care.
What You Could Have Won (G - Reference,information And Interdisciplinary Subjects Ser.)
by Rachel Genn'Fame is the only thing worth having. Love is temporary brain damage. Or so thinks Henry Sinclair, a failing psychiatrist, whose career-breaking discovery has been pinched by a supervisor smelling of nipple grease and hot-dog brine. An emotional miser and manipulator par excellence, desperate for the recognition he’s certain his genius deserves, Henry claws his way into the limelight by transforming his girlfriend—a singer-in-ascendance, beloved for her cathartically raw performances—into a drug experiment. As he systematically works to reinforce feelings of worthlessness while at the same time feeding off Astrid’s fame, and as Astrid collapses deeper into dependence, what emerges is a two-sided toxic relationship: the bullying instincts of a man shrunk by an industry where bullying is currency, and the peculiar strength of a star more comfortable offloading her talent than owning her brilliance. Pinging between their apartment in New York (where they watch endless episodes of The Sopranos), a nudist campsite in Greece (where the tantalizingly handsome Gigi thwacks octopi into the sand), and a celebrity rehab facility in Paris (founded by the cassock-wearing and sex-scandal plagued ‘artist’ Hypno Ray), What You Could Have Won is a relationship born of regrettable events, and a novel about female resilience in the face of social control.
Barn 8: A Novel (G - Reference,information And Interdisciplinary Subjects Ser.)
by Deb Olin UnferthOne disaffected administrator, one disenchanted teenager, four hundred and twenty-one vegan extremists, sixty trucks, and nine hundred thousand grumpy layer hens awaiting liberation. In barns. Six barns. No, wait, seven. No, wait ... Two auditors for the US egg industry conceive a plot to liberate an entire egg farm’s worth of animals, with catastrophic results. This wildly inventive but utterly plausible novel about a heist of a very unusual kind swirls with a rich array of voices: a farmer’s daughter, hundreds of activists, a forest ranger who stumbles upon forty thousand hens, and a security guard abandoned for years on a farm. We glimpse the evolution of chickens twenty thousand years from now. We hear what hens think happens when they die.And at the heart of this more-than-plucky novel lies the question: what constitutes meaningful action in a world so in need of change? With towering ingenuity, eviscerating wit, and unflappable passion, Barn 8 is a true rare breed, a comic-political drama, and a tour de force for our time.
The Cubit Quest
by Trevor LeckTwelve-year-old Charlie Watkins could have inherited his dad’s massive intellect. He got his massive feet instead. Perhaps if Charlie had that intellect he might have been able to figure out why so many men in suits were suddenly following him or where his dad hid the Cubit - a mythical object that men have sworn to protect and even more have died trying to possess - before his so-called accident. If starting yet another new school wasn’t bad enough, Charlie meets Mr Leopold, a disfigured, mind-reading lunatic and discovers that he alone must find the Cubit if he is to save his dad. The Brotherhood, however, have other ideas. Led by the ruthless Draganovic, they will stop at nothing to get their hands on it. With the help of Mr Leopold and fellow new boy Elvis, Charlie sets out on The Cubit Quest. Hunting for the Cubit, playing football, lessons with the dreaded Funeral Face and unsuccessfully avoiding school bully Grimshaw by day, Charlie finds his nights no less complicated. Stalked in his dreams, he’s soon immersed in a world of power struggles, battling dragons and duels to the death. With the Brotherhood hot on his heels and as the bullets begin to y, there are no guarantees that Charlie, or anyone else, will make it to the end in one piece.