Christopher Matthew Boeken

The book presents a modern English edition of Aelian's influential ancient military tactics, updating the last English translation from 1814. Based on the 1616 edition, it includes contemporary language and fresh illustrations of the tactics discussed, making it the most current version available for readers interested in military history and strategy.

Delights on every page . . . the man knows what he's barking at Lady

In partnership with Little League Baseball (R), here comes the final and exciting conclusion to the original Matt Christopher baseball series!

Reexamines the literary, pictorial and archaeological evidence for hoplite warfare minutely, and combines this with the insights of experimental archaeology using replica weapons and equipment.

Sheds new light and detail upon the weapon system that dominated the ancient battlefield for 200 years.

The bestselling author of Now We Are 60 returns to the subject of aging as he poetically explores the pitfalls of romance for the grey of hair but young of heart.

This book brings together experts on the classical period from Australia, New Zealand and the United States to take a fresh look at various aspects of the Battle of Thermopylae. For the classical scholar or the general reader whose interest has been piqued, this book is sure to shed refreshing new light on the most famous last stand in history.

'I did not intend to write a funny book, at first' wrote Jerome J. Jerome of Three Men in a Boat, which has since become a comic classic. When J. the narrator, George, Harris and Montmorency the dog set off on their hilarious misadventures, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather-forecasts, imaginary illnesses, butter pats and tins of pineapple chunks. Denounced as vulgar by the literary establishment, Three Men in a Boat nevertheless caught the spirit of the times. The expansion of education and the increase in office workers created a new mass readership, and Jerome's book was especially popular among the 'clerking classes' who longed to be 'free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth-century life.' So popular did it prove that Jerome reunited his heroes for a bicycle tour of Germany. Despite some sharp, and with hindsight, prophetic observations of the country, Three Men on the Bummel describes an equally picaresque journey constrained only 'by the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started'.

For those turning sixty, this new edition of Christopher Matthew's tribute to A. A. Milne's classic poems contains fresh material as well as the old favourites.'A wonderful present to sixty-year-olds' Auberon Waugh, Daily Telegraph When Christopher was six, the poems of Milne were always on hand to reassure him that other children were just as puzzled and naughty and silly as he was, and that grown-ups could be even sillier. When he turned sixty, he decided it was high time there was an equally reassuring volume for those of his generation who were not only more confused than ever, but were losing their teeth, their hair and, all too often, their car keys. What he did twenty years ago was to take some of Milne's best-loved poems from Now We Are Six for an older audience, with results that are often hilarious, sometimes rueful and always thought-provoking. Some verses are about realising one is not as young as one once thought, and not feeling quite as chipper as one once did; while others address some of the more disconcerting problems of modern life such as mobile telephones on trains, unsocial behaviour, traffic jams and the internet.