The Strange Man

DIV Dras Weldon is a twenty-two-year-old unemployed washout. He lives in a world populated by horror movies and comic books, content to hide in the shadow of adolescence. /div

Mensa endures his Ghanaian childhood under the shadow of successive tyrannical headmasters. In his maturity he struggles with the trials that village jealousies and his own family lie upon him.

'A monumental achievement - one of the great scientific biographies.' Michael Frayn The Strangest Man is the Costa Biography Award-winning account of Paul Dirac, the famous physicist sometimes called the British Einstein. He was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in twentieth-century science: quantum mechanics. The youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and legendarily unable to communicate or empathize. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather.Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac's massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and work. Farmelo shows a man who, while hopelessly socially inept, could manage to love and sustain close friendship.The Strangest Man is an extraordinary and moving human story, as well as a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history. 'A wonderful book . . . Moving, sometimes comic, sometimes infinitely sad, and goes to the roots of what we mean by truth in science.' Lord Waldegrave, Daily Telegraph

Originally published: Berkeley, Calif; London: University of California Press, 1969.

A lonely man stumbles into a dangerous game in this twisting novel of psychological suspense by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Crocodile Bird. In a desolate alley on the bank of the Thames, a spy slips through the shadows. Mungo is the Director General of English intelligence, and he knows Moscow Centre has been watching him for weeks, but there is no spy in London better at losing a tail. Satisfied he hasn’t been followed, he drops off his message and disappears into the night. It’s a classic scene of Cold War espionage, save for one detail: Mungo isn’t a spy at all. He’s a teenager, playing an epic game of make-believe. John Creevey, still reeling from the implosion of his marriage, is dreaming of taking revenge against his wife’s lover when he discovers one of Mungo’s coded signals. Unaware that the message is simply part of a child’s game, he becomes obsessed with uncovering the rest of the spy network—a tragic misunderstanding that threatens to turn this imaginary war into something very real—and very deadly. “Rendell has brilliantly interwoven these compelling strands into one masterful tale of suspense,” writes Library Journal. Three-time Edgar Award winner Ruth Rendell was a master of psychological suspense, and Talking to Strange Men is one of the most unusual espionage stories in the history of the Cold War.

This is a love story, set in the Irish literary world between 1986 and 2015. When they were first introduced by the poet Derek Mahon, Alannah Hopkin was an arts journalist turned full-time writer and Aidan Higgins, twenty-three years her senior, was a literary stylist, often cited as the heir to Ireland's great Modernist tradition. They wrote steadily during their twenty-nine years together, but their careers could not have been more different: while Aidan focused on fiction and memoirs, Alannah prioritised work that paid the bills. This gave Aidan the most stable and productive years of his life. But as his eyesight failed and his memory began to fade, Alannah became his carer and had to fight to keep her own writing career alive. Drawing from diaries and notebooks, and correspondence with writers such as Samuel Beckett, Alice Munro and Harold Pinter, this is a unique record of a major Irish writer. From the joyful honeymoon years - filled with launches, festivals and visits to their Kinsale home by Richard Ford, Edna O'Brien and other literary legends - to the increasingly difficult years of Aidan's decline, Hopkin tells their story candidly and without commentary. She shows us how, in spite of all, they remained the best of friends, in love until Aidan's very last breath.

This is a book of short stories of various types: including mystery, fantasy, humor, and romance.

Strap in for a terrifying look into the life and times of the original strange man: Edgar Allan Poe. Poe is viewed as the ultimate doomed romantic whose last days are shrouded in sordid mystery. His life was a disaster, but his achievements in writing are amazing. He is widely recognized as father of the modern short story, inventor of the detective story and the master of horror. A Boston born writer, editor, and literary critic, he's best known for his creepy and macabre tales as well as being one of the central figures in the Romanticism movement in the United States. Accurately being dubbed as the ultimate doomed romantic, Poe was a drunk, his last days are shrouded in mystery akin to that of his short stories. During his lifetime, Edgar Allan Poe didn't make a dime out of writing, but his legacy to the world is one of never-ending riches. He left behind seventy-three wonderfully gruesome stories and a novel filled with suspense and brilliantly twisted plots. Hist stories and poems are now read and revered globally. As another master of horror, Stephen King, has said, we are all "the children of Poe." Abraham Lincoln, Josef Stalin, Michael Jackson, and Bart Simpson all have one thing in common; they are fans of the nineteenth century American writer and poet, Edgar Allan Poe. The writer of "The Raven" has legions of such devotees across the globe. The list of authors inspired by Poe is long and varied, but his profound influence reaches much further-into music, film, and art just as much as modern day literature. There have been more than a dozen film adaptations of his story "The Fall of the House of Usher," and his works have inspired composers ranging from Claude Debussy to Lou Reed. More than 160 years after his death, Charlotte Montague has written a fascinating account of Poe's life and times, in which she uncovers a strange man, standing deep in the shadows, who's unique imagination and macabre writing have changed popular culture forevermore. n the process, she uncovers a strange man, standing deep in the shadows, whose macabre stories and twisted plots changed literature forever.