An Australian childrens' classic about life on a ranch around the same time of A Little Florida Lady, with a similarly plucky tomboy heroine. Also, like the latter story, expect some racial stereotyping of Asian and Aboriginal characters. This originally ran as a newspaper serial and it shows in the episodic nature of the chapters, such as a vivid trip to the circus sandwiched by talk of a mad killer and an unexpectedly sentimental ending.

This book is about Norah Linton, her brother Jim, her father David and Jim's chum Wally from Australia. They all move to England during WWI because Jim and Wally want to fight in the war.

When a Irish friend of the family dies, Norah inherits a big house in Surrey: Homewood. To keep up the Irishman's memory they want to use the house to help the war effort. They turn it into a home for "Tired People"--soldiers recovering from injuries, or soldiers on leave that have no family to go home to, can come here to have a good time and enjoy the country-side, so that they can go back to their regiments fully rested and restored.

Unfortunately Jim and Wally are soon called up...

Pippa Passes was a dramatic piece, as much play as poetry, by Robert Browning published in 1841 as the first volume of his Bells and Pomegranates series.

The author described the work as the first of a series of dramatic pieces. His original idea was of a young, innocent girl, moving unblemished through the crime-ridden neighbourhoods of Asolo. The work caused outrage when it was first published, due to the matter-of-fact portrayals of many of the area’s more disreputable characters – notably the adulterous Ottima – and for its frankness on sexual matters. Perhaps the most famous passage is below:

The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven...

Poetry lovers and lovers themselves would certainly know and remember these lines: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.....”

These and other sublime verses are contained in this collection of tender, mystical, philosophical poems Sonnets from the Portuguese, published originally in 1850. The poet herself was part of one of the most famous literary love-stories of all time – a saga filled with romance, danger and severe opposition from her family. Born into a prominent and extremely wealthy family in Durham, England, she began writing as a child and her father encouraged her talent by getting a collection of poems published when she was only twelve. Schoo...

In writing her ‘Drama of Exile’, Barrett’s subject was ‘the new and strange experience of the fallen humanity, as it went forth from Paradise into the wilderness’. The bizarre, lyrical scenes that follow powerfully describe the grief and guilt of Eve, the sorrowful pride of Lucifer, and the redeeming power of love.

The Battle of Marathon is a rhymed, dramatic, narrative-poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Written in 1820, it retells powerfully The Battle of Marathon: during which the Athenian state defeated the much larger invading force during the first Persian invasion of Greece.

When Darius the Great orders his immense army march west to annex additional territories; no-one in the Persian court predicted that some fractious, independent Greek city-states stood any chance against the Persian super-power. And yet at Marathon in 490BC, Darius' plans received a decisive check in the brilliant Athenian offensive overseen by the aged but hardy Miltiades: who over-ran the Persian army just ...

Edward Granville Browne (1862 – 1926), born in Stouts Hill, Uley, Gloucestershire, England, was a British orientalist who published numerous articles and books of academic value, mainly in the areas of history and literature. His works are respected for their scholarship, uniqueness, and style. He published in areas which few other Western scholars had explored to any sufficient degree. He used a language and style that showed high respect for everybody, even toward those he personally did not view in positive light. In A Year Amongst the Persians (1893) he wrote a sympathetic portrayal of a Persian society which few Westerners had ever seen, including a frank account of the effects of op...

Clotel; or, The President's Daughter is a novel by William Wells Brown (1815-84), a fugitive from slavery and abolitionist and was published in London, England in December 1853. It is often considered the first African-American novel. This novel focuses on the difficult lives of mulattoes in America and the "degraded and immoral condition of the relation of master and slave in the USA" (Brown). It is about the tragic lives of Currer, Althesea, and Clotel. In the novel, Currer is the former mulatto mistress of President Thomas Jefferson who together have two daughters, Althesea and Clotel. Because she was beautiful and the mistress of Jefferson, Currer and her daughters lived a confortable...

This recording was released to coincide with National Cheese Lovers’ Day 2010 in the United States.

Robert Carlton Brown (1886 – 1959), after living thirty years in as many foreign lands and enjoying countless national cheeses at the source, returned to New York and summed them all up in this book.

After majoring in beer and free lunch from Milwaukee to Munich, Bob celebrated the end of Prohibition with a book called Let There Be Beer! and then decided to write another about Beer’s best friend, Cheese. But first he collaborated with his mother Cora and wife Rose on The Wine Cookbook, still in print after nearly twenty-five years. This first manua...

Disagreeable old Miss Terry spends her Christmas Eve getting rid of toys from her childhood toy box. One by one she tosses them onto the sidewalk in front of her house, then secretly watches the little scenes that occur, which seem to confirm her belief that true Christmas spirit does not exist. Then the Angel from her childhood Christmas tree appears to show Miss Terry that she has not yet witnessed the final act of each of those little dramas...

Living Age magazine in 1910 observed of The Christmas Angel, "Not since Charles Dickens laid down his pen forever has there been a prettier Christmas story written, one more full of the real spirit of Christmas or conveyi...