Special royal places in this royal year

Discover Britain’s amazing royal palaces, battlefields and secret retreats in new guidebook
A unique new guidebook to the palaces, battlefields, castles and hiding places of Britain’s royals – perfect for exploring in this Jubilee year

For more information, or requests for review copies or pictures, email susiehallam1@gmail.com

The Most Amazing Royal Places in Britain

The palaces, battlefields and secret retreats of Britain’s kings and queens

 

As The Queen and the Royal Family visit British regions this year as part of the Jubilee celebrations, this new guidebook acts as a reminder of the many places in Britain with royal associations. Walk in the footsteps of the kings and queens who have ruled over Britain’s landscape for over 1000 years, from Celtic warlords to our present-day monarch and her family. This fascinating, beautifully illustrated guidebook takes you on a round-Britain tour of the places that have made royal history, from famous royal castles to forests and caves, and from stately homes to secret hiding places.  Most of the places are open to the public for at least part of the year.

Discover, for example:

• In a Cornish roadside streambed, the 6^th-century stone where King Arthur met his nemesis;
• London’s many royal treasures, including the famous palaces and over 50 other locations with royal connections – among them the restaurant Maggie Jones, formerly frequented by Princess Margaret;
• Boscobel House in Shropshire, where the uncrowned Charles II hid from Cromwell’s men in a nearby oak tree;
• Plas Dinas in Gwynedd, a country-house hotel owned by the Armstrong-Jones family. Prince William recently dropped in for a lunchtime aperitif;
• The Cistercian abbey where Mary Queen of Scots spent her last night in Scotland in 1568, Dundrennan Abbey in Dumfries & Galloway;
• The Royal Yacht Britannia in Edinburgh, so much enjoyed by the Queen and her family for many years, and decommissioned in 1997.

If you would like to interview Rose Shepherd, the author of this book, please contact susiehallam1@gmail.com.

The Most Amazing Royal Places in Britain

The palaces, battlefields and secret retreats of Britain’s kings and queens

ISBN: 978-1-78020-102-3  RRP: £14.99

Paperback with flaps  100 colour photos, 10 maps  224 pages

Published by Reader’s Digest

For more information, requests for review copies or extracts, or to arrange an interview with the author of the book or a discounted reader offer, please contact:

Susie Hallam Marketing and PR

susiehallam1@gmail.com  T: 07761 836782

Reader’s Digest UK trade books are distributed by F&W Media International

How to Do Just About Anything…..

Here’s a book that aims to do the impossible – it tells you how to do just about anything. And it pretty well succeeds. There are 1,001 practical, quirky, essential (and not so essential) tips and solutions for almost any task you can think of.

• Stuck in quicksand? Find out how to get out.
• Got embroiled in an argument? Here’s the advice you need to win.
• Friends coming round for drinks? Make a perfect margarita.
• Your partner has just fainted? Here’s what to do.
• Not sure how to prune your shrubs? Now you can.
• Need to change your locks? Save money by doing it yourself.
• Want to launch a rocket? Discover how.

Your A-Z guide to 1,001 practical skills and household solutions

As it says on the cover, this book will show you how to do just about anything. Here are 1,001 things to look up in an emergency, ideas for improving your home and garden, things to cook, make or play, and surprising things you didn’t even realise you wanted to do. And, unlike advice you might find on the internet, these solutions are tried, tested and readily to hand when you need them. 

This fully illustrated A–Z book includes 1,001 practical skills and household solutions, with instructions on how to trim a beard, keep cacti alive, impress on a date, use eBay, face-paint a child, deal with a gas leak, cure a hangover, make jam, fly a kite, compose a limerick, win at Monopoly, paint your nails, open an oyster, reverse a caravan, read Roman numerals, understand teenagers, repair an umbrella, digitise old videos, store wine, try the xylophone, learn a yoga position, repair a zip and much, much more.

Published by Reader’s Digest

ISBN: 978-1-78020-123-8    Over 1,200 colour illustrations    224 pages

RRP: £14.99  Paperback with flaps

Available from Amazon and leading retailers

Alice Illustrated – a new wonderland of classic illustrations

Coming from Dover Publications in April is this fabulous new compilation of over 120 illustrations from artists who have illustrated Lewis Carroll’s Alice, dating from the first publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865.

Few books of the past 200 years have captured the imagination of illustrators as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has. The original edition of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 masterpiece featured 42 woodblock engravings by John Tenniel. Created in close collaboration with the author, Tenniel’s visions of the young heroine and her extraordinary encounters were but the first of many interpretations of Wonderland.

Alice Illustrated, an new compilation published by Dover Publications, explores a century and a half of exuberant, imaginative artistic conceptions of Alice’s world. More than 100 images include Tenniel’s engravings, together with colour and black-and-white illustrations by Arthur Rackham, Charles Robinson, Bessie Pease Gutmann, Margaret Tarrant, Millicent Sowerby, Milo Winter, Thomas Maybank, and many others.

Editor Jeff Menges offers commentary on the illustrators and their work, and noted collector Mark Burstein shares a bibliophile’s perspective.

Shown here are some examples of the captivating illustrations from the book.

A Mad Tea Party: illustration by Willy Pogany, from Alice Illustrated, published by Dover Publications

A major contribution to the history of modern book illustration, Alice Illustrated will delight lovers of English literature and children’s books, collectors of Lewis Carroll’s works, and fans of the great illustrators.

Alice Illustrated (ISBN 978 0 486 48204 0, RRP £20.99, published by Dover Publications), will be available in the UK in April 2012 from the Book Depository, Amazon and major online and bricks and mortar book retailers.

Reviewers please contact susiehallam1 [at] gmail [dot] com.

Lending rights

Hearing that Amazon has decided to allow US libraries to lend out Kindle editions made me think again about some of the effects that libraries lending out ebooks will have.  When I download a novel to my phone or iPad for free, courtesy of my local library and the Overdrive Media Console, I do wonder whom I am potentially putting out of a job.

Presumably the librarian, who may before long be sitting behind a desk with no customers because they will all be borrowing their ebooks without needing to visit the library.  Also the local high street bookshop and its staff for much the same reason.  Plus of course the books’ printer; and the book shipper and delivery truck driver who takes the books from the printer to the warehouse.  And the warehouse staff who could soon need to be thinking about to whom they can rent out their huge sheds and miles of racking. Possibly not the publisher, or at least not the editor at this stage.  Not the author, who will continue to get royalties on the e-book I have borrowed.

But then I guess I am saving paper, energy and carbon emissions (although I believe this can be up for debate). So how guilty should I feel for taking advantage of the new technologies?

What’s the alternative?

I called in on the Centre for Alternative Technology a couple of weeks ago during a mini-holiday in Wales.  I last visited with my family about ten years ago (I remember the weather being typically Welsh then too!).

CAT is built into the side of a hill in woodland in mid-Wales, on the edge of Snowdonia.  You have to be pulled up in a gravity-powered funicular railway to get up to the action. The centre demonstrates practical solutions for sustainability, covering all aspects of green living: environmental building, eco-sanitation, woodland management, renewable energy, energy efficiency and organic growing.

The water-balanced cliff railway, one of the steepest in the world

In spite of the rather inclement weather, it was fascinating to visit again.  The centre has working examples of environmentally responsible buildings, renewable energy generation, sustainability in the home, organic growing, composting and waste management.

The solar dome

The forest garden

The forest garden, one of many ecological gardens on display, contains only plants that are edible or useful in some way, and is structured so that the plants help each other to grow.

Several wind turbines around the centre

There are demonstrations showing how the wind, the sun and water can provide genuinely viable alternative forms of energy on a small scale as well as large.

Wood store

Beth Bennett from the CAT shop, with a display of titles from Green Books

The staff in the information centre were very helpful and took the trouble to email me with more information after my visit.  The bookshop has a huge range of practical and inspirational books on ecological and environmental subjects. It was great to see so many titles from Green Books on display, and it was very nice to meet Beth Bennett, who buys and markets the books.  There is also an excellent selection of unusual and innovative gifts for the environmentally-inclined.  The eco-store also sells by mail order.

Shopping for environmental gifts and books

CAT runs many talks, events and workshops throughout the year, and the whole site is a working example of sustainability in practice. There is also an enormous amount of useful information on the CAT website.