From its beginnings in Twilight fan-fiction to its record-breaking sales as an e-book and paperback, the story of the erotic romance novel Fifty Shades of Grey and its two sequels is both unusual and fascinating. Having sold over seventy million copies worldwide since 2011, E. L. James’s lurid series about a sexual ingénue and the powerful young entrepreneur who introduces her ...(展开全部)

As Katherine Verdery observes, "There's nothing like reading your secret police file to make you wonder who you really are." In 1973 Verdery began her doctoral fieldwork in the Transylvanian region of Romania, ruled at the time by communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. She returned several times over the next twenty-five years, during which time the secret police—the Securitate—...(展开全部)

Chepstow's location by a crossing of the River Wye, close to the Severn Estuary, has meant that the Monmouthshire town has always occupied a strategically important position. A Norman castle still sta

Cambridge has a world-famous university, but the town's long history predates the coming of the scholars, beginning with the Romans, who first identified this as a good spot for a settlement. It was a

The job was too good. There had to be a problem - and there was. John Duncan was an honest man, but he needed money. He had children to look after. He was ready to do anything, and his bosses knew it. They gave him the job because he couldn't say no; he couldn't afford to be honest. And the job was like a poison inside him. It changed him and blinded him, so that he couldn't se...(展开全部)

The sprawling urban conurbation that is Swindon began life as an Anglo-Saxon defensible settlement atop a limestone hill. Old Swindon would likely have remained a sleepy market town were it not for th

The 'A-side' of Cheltenham's history as a fashionable Regency spa and subsequent reinvention as a town of colleges, churches and festivals is well documented, but what about its 'flip-side'? Much of t