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A retelling of the medieval poem about a group of travelers on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and the tales they tell each other. With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature. Translated here into modern English, these tales of a motley crowd of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life-from knight to nun, miller to monk-reveal a picture of English life in the fourteenth...

France, May 1940. As the German army blitzes Europe and Parisians flee their city, the chief curator of the Musee de l'Armee is ordered to take a mysterious piece of cargo out of the country. But when he learns his intended ship has been sunk, the fate of his cargo must rest on a decrepit steamer, sailing out under German fire. . . Decades later, a diving expedition in the English Channel leads Director Dirk Pitt to a cache of uncut diamonds on a...

"An entertaining and illuminating collection of weird, wonderful, and downright baffling words from the origins of English--and what they reveal about the lives of the earliest English speakers. Old English is the language you think you know until you actually hear or see it. Unlike Shakespearean English or even Chaucer's Middle English, Old English--the language of Beowulf--defies comprehension by untrained modern readers. Used throughout much of...

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkeness bind them. In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, The Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell into the hands of Bilbo Baggins,...

This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From George Orwell shunning the semicolon, to New Yorker editor Harold Ross's epic arguments with James Thurber over commas, this ... history makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to the mucked about with.-Dust jacket.

Concise definitions of words and phrases in common use are supplemented with brief etymologies.

Labeled drawings provide a wide range of everyday terms from the telephone to human anatomy in English and Spanish.

Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was "just" an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern." She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness. So why--despite all the evidence to the...