Dozens of short essays provide a panoramic view of British life during the nineteenth century, including information on social niceties, definitions of British phrases, and details about sex, government, law, money, and social institutions.

In No Place to Hide, award-winning Washington Post reporter Robert O'Harrow, Jr., pulls back the curtain on an unsettling trend: the emergence of a data-driven surveillance society intent on giving us the conveniences and services we crave, like cell phones, discount cards, and electronic toll passes, while watching us more closely than ever before. He shows that since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, the information industry giants have been enlisted as private intelligence services for homeland security. And at a time when companies routinely collect billions of details about nearly every American adult, No Place to Hide shines a bright light on the sorry state of information security, revealing how people can lose control of their privacy and identities at any moment.

This collection by the much-loved and lauded science-fiction writer Thomas Disch spans twenty-five years of his career... Disch entertains and provokes with essays on UFOs, Science Fiction as a Church, and Newt Gingrich's Futurist Brain Trust. Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Madame Blavatsky also get the Disch treatment. Throughout, the writing is lively, agile, and irreverent, exhibiting an incisive honesty that is undiluted by Disch's own attachments as a sci-fi practitioner. On SF will appeal equally to lovers of science fiction and connoisseurs of the finest critical prose.

An award winner by an expert on ancient Greek culture! Gods and goddesses, personalities and places, history and archeology: this fascinating and superbly authoritative work taps into the richest veins of the classical world--its mythology. It covers all the principal stories, characters (divine, human, and animal), sacred sites, and important events that shaped past civilizations...and our own. Extensive quotations from the original sources and over 100 illustrations enliven more than 400 articles.