Wanda McCaddon

There was only one mystery Agatha Christie could not solve: her own. Dame Agatha Christie is best known for her detective novels and short stories. She is one of the most popular authors of all time, her novels having sold over four billion copies and having been translated into 103 languages. On the evening of December 8, 1926, Agatha Christie disappeared from her home in Sunningdale, Berkshire, leaving only a note for her secretary indicating that...

“We work,” Aristotle wrote, “in order to have leisure.” Today, this is still true. But is the leisure that Aristotle spoke of—the freedom to do nothing—the same as the leisure we look forward to each weekend? There have always been breaks from the routine of work—taboo days, market days, public festivals, holy days—we couldn't survive without them. In Waiting for the Weekend, Witold Rybczynski unfolds the history and evolution of leisure...

In the gentle world of one of England's beautiful old cathedral towns, crisis looms: funds are short, and the cathedral is in need of major repair. One faction of the community argues that the obvious solution is to abolish the expensive, and nowadays rather irrelevant, boys' choir. But of course, there are those who disagree: the choir school's headmaster, a conscientious scholar somewhat out of his depth with his elusive, poetical wife; the cathedral...

For nearly two centuries, the authorship of William Shakespeare's plays has been challenged by writers and artists as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Henry James, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, Malcolm X, and Sir Derek Jacobi. How could a young man from rural Warwickshire, lacking a university education, write some of the greatest works in the English language? How do we explain the seemingly unbridgeable gap between Shakespeare's life and works?Contested...

"I think people marry far too much; it is such a lottery, and for a poor woman-bodily and morally the husband's slave-a very doubtful happiness." -Queen Victoria to her recently married daughter VickyHeadstrong, high-spirited, and already widowed, Isabella Walker became Mrs. Henry Robinson at age thirty-one in 1844. Her first husband had died suddenly, leaving his estate to a son from a previous marriage, so she inherited nothing. A successful civil...

Milton Friedman demonstrates through historical events the mischief that can result from misunderstanding the monetary system; how, for example, the work of two obscure Scottish chemists destroyed the presidential prospects of William Jennings Bryan, and how Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to appease a few senators from the American West helped communism triumph in China. He discusses the creation of value, from stones to feathers to gold. He outlines...

For years, it has been what is called a "deteriorating situation." Now it is war. All over South Africa, cities are battlegrounds, and radio and television stations are under siege. Bam and Maureen Smales take up their servant July's suggestion and drive with their children to his remote home village. For fifteen years, July has been the decently treated black servant, totally dependent on them. Now, he becomes their host, their savior, and their...

This magnificent story of one thousand years of English history is told through the lives and deeds of Kings and Queens, from the Normans to the Windsors. Understand how the power of the crown has changed as a result of both the character and ability of each monarch and evolving historical circumstances. Eight specialist contributors depict the whole spectrum of royal life in a succinct and fascinating way. Newly revised in 1998, this edition offers...

In The Roman Way, Edith Hamilton shows us Rome through the eyes of the Romans. Plautus and Terence, Cicero and Caesar, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, and Augustus come to life in their ambitions, their work, their loves and hates. In them we see reflected a picture of Roman life very different form that fixed in our minds through schoolroom days-and far livelier. Here, Hamilton makes vividly interesting the contrast between Roman and Greek culture. Moreover,...

In a period of twenty-one years, Susanna Wesley (1669–1742) bore nineteen children. Ten survived infancy. Two grew up to be influential church leaders whose legacies live on almost three centuries later. This is the story of one of Church history's most revered women, the godly mother of John and Charles Wesley. This biography recounts the story of a woman who used her strong leadership and faith to raise well educated and spiritually disciplined...