Bücher von Richard Thomas

Ups and Downs by cover artist M St James offers us a feathered familiar to guide our way through this issue, starting with 'The Caged Bird Sings in a Darkness of Its Own Creation' by feature author Richard Thomas.Winged creatures fly to the rescue in 'Olympian' by FJ Bergmann, 'Andouille' by Mike Carson, and 'Dragon's Greed' by Sherilyn Moreton and Anat Rabkin. But human rescues miss the mark in 'All our Swains Commend Her' by Mitchell J Toews and 'The Least of Myself' by Sylvia Leong.The winner and runner-up of the Raven Short Story Contest alight, carrying memories and regrets in 'Revolutions' by Catriona Sandilands and 'Foam' by Alison Stevenson, while 'Waffles and Strawberries' by Susan Alexander shows us a present that fails to live up to the past.Finally, leave the known world behind and take charge of your adventure into the unknown with Melanie Martilla's 'Psychopomps Are Us', Mel Anastasiou's 'Stella Ryman vs the Board', and 'The Shepherdess: The Trail of Yellow Roses' by JM Landels.

After an improbable beginning, Richard Thomas's diplomatic career took him to some unlikely places, like Bhutan where his motor-scooter spawned an aid programme, or twenty thousand feet up in Robert Maxwell's private jet buying up post-communist Bulgaria, or a NATO base in the North Atlantic to await the arrival of Satan, or to tea round the fire in Downing Street with a government minister and a mounted policeman, or to a wooden hut in West Africa where he, now persona non grata, and his Australian girlfriend, Catherine, managed to get married on the fringes of a dictator's last-gasp political rally.But it was not all beer and skittles. There were run-ins with secret policemen in communist Eastern Europe, encounters with horrific conditions in post-communist so-called orphanages where Catherine kick-started a new, humane approach to physical and cognitive disability in children and adults, deliberate cultivation of the dissidents who would supplant a communist dictatorship and a close-up view of Europe's biggest displacement of people since the Second World War, the result of Bulgaria's ethnic cleansing of a tenth of its own population in 1989 barely noticed by western governments or media.All this, and much more, is recounted by someone who reckons that he struck lucky in the diplomatic dip.

A young soldier injured on the battlefield of modern-day Afghanistan awakens to a nightmarish world of cannon smoke and gunfire and the realisation that he has somehow been transported back to 1880 on the eve of one of the British army¿s worst defeats, the battle of Maiwand.

A little mountain spends the days and nights looking up to a bigger mountain. One night, the earth begins to shake. When the sun rises the next day, the bigger mountain is gone. From its shadow, a tiny mountain now looks up to the little mountain. If a mountain could see, where would it look? If a mountain could talk, what would it say? If a mountain could learn, how would it teach? Now that the little mountain has become the big mountain, what will it do? A picture book for children, Mountains tells the story about the desert days and nights and the mountains that live there.

This volume charts the changing human-animal relationship at one particular location, Dudley Castle, West Midlands, over several centuries. The temporal span considered (the 11th-18th centuries) is, arguably, one of the most formative in the evolving relationship between humans and animals. The period was one of profound economic, social and demographic change, witnessing not only the evolution of modern breeds of domestic animals, but also a change in the way animals were perceived and treated. In this study, the animal bones recovered from archaeological excavations at Dudley Castle have been integrated with historical documentation to provide a basis from which to explore these issues. The size of the faunal assemblage, its chronology and location, combine to make the results of this analysis invaluable in enhancing our current state of knowledge. Just as human-animal relationships in the period reflected a combination of economic, social and cultural values, so the questions addressed in this volume reflect this diversity and inter-connectivity at a number of different scales. Thus, site-specific questions, as well as broader trends within the social and economic landscape of the medieval and post-medieval periods in England are considered. This study also attempts to explore dietary patterns on site, and the way in which the acquisition and consumption of food was used in the negotiation of social relationships.