Andrew Martin

For potters, mold making is invaluable because it allows them to slip-cast identical multiples of their work-and this newly revised, now in color edition of Andrew Martin's classic is the definitive guide to the craft. No other volume has shown the processes in such how-to detail. It's overflowing with hundreds of photos, key techniques, projects, master artist profiles, and troubleshooting tips. A thorough introduction addresses materials and tools, and presents Martin's simple, unique template method for making clay prototypes. Create easy one-piece molds to make tiles, bowls, and platters, or multi-piece molds for more complex forms. An extensive overview covers slip formulation, while offering highly desired slip recipes for low-, mid-, and high-fire clay bodies. This will be the standard reference in every ceramist's library.

Bright and ambitious, young Jim Stringer moves from the English countryside to London deter- mined to become a railway man. It is 1903, the dawn of the Edwardian age, when steam runs the nation and the railways drive progress. Jim can't believe his luck to have gotten his foot in the door at South East Railway, run out of Waterloo Station. He finds, however, that his duties involve a graveyard shift, literally--a railway line that takes coffins from London morgues to the gigantic new cemeteries being dug in the city's outskirts. He also learns that his predecessor had disappeared and that his coworkers seem to have formed an instant loathing for him. Forced to live by his wits and to arrive at his own deductions--assisted by his landlady, for whom he falls-- he tries to figure out what is going on before he is issued a one-way ticket on the Necropolis Railway.

When railwayman Jim Stringer moves to the garish and tawdry London of 1903, he finds his duties are confined to a mysterious graveyard line. Perplexingly, the men he works alongside have formed an instant loathing for him. And his predecessor has disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Can Jim work out what is going on before he too is travelling on a one-way coffin ticket aboard the Necropolis Railway? A gripping detective story, fabulously rich in atmosphere and period detail, The Necropolis Railway steams toward an unexpected conclusion.

'Genuinely gripping ... A brilliant evocation of Edwardian working-class life - the sort of thing DH Lawrence might have written had he been less verbose or been blessed with a sense of humour.' Peter Parker, Evening StandardThe second Jim Stringer adventure, The Blackpool Highflyer is a superbly atmospheric thriller of sabotage, suspicion and steam. 'Unique and important ... There is no one else who is writing like Andrew Martin today.' Ian Marchant, Guardian'Evokes Edwardian Yorkshire and Lancashire, their great industrial prosperity and singular ways of living, quite brilliantly in a historical whodunnit which for its fresh and stealthy approach to past times deserves the adjective Bainbridgean.' Ian Jack, Guardian (Books of the Year)'A steamy whodunnit ... This may well be the best fiction about the railways since Dickens.' Michael Williams, Independent on Sunday

Alekhine's Defence is a sharp and often underrated counter to 1 e4. Black immediately challenges the white e-pawn and tries to lure White into constructing a big central position. Black's hope is that White's central installations will become unweildy and vulnerable to a middlegame counter-attack. However, Alekhine enthusiasts must always be careful - get it wrong and White will come crashing through! Whether you want to play the Alekhine, or want to know what to do against it as White, this book will be an essential addition to your armoury. * Up-to-date coverage of a dynamic counter-attacking opening * Written by one of England's leading chess coaches * An ideal battle manual for club and tournament players

Such novels as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days have made Jules Verne the most widely translated of all French authors. But he has typically been categorized as the father of science fiction or a writer of harmless fantasies for children. Now, in this brilliantly original new book, Andrew Martin relocates Verne squarely at the centre of the literary map. Dr Martin shows that a recurrent narrative (exemplified in short stories by Napoleon Bonaparte and Jorge Luis Borges), relating the strange destiny of a masked prophet who revolts against an empire, runs through Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires. This approach illuminates the paradoxical coalition in Verne of realism and invention, repression and transgression, imperialism and anarchy. In this book Verne emerges not just as a key to the political and literary imagination of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but as a model for reading fiction in general.

This highly original study is concerned with the theory of knowledge. It approaches the subject in a new way by exploring the recurrent paradox which equates pure ignorance with perfect knowledge, twin ideals free from the impurities and imperfections of discourse. The author combines the techniques of literary criticism and intellectual history in order to examine the literary, philosophical, theological, and political ramifications of this anxiety about, and ambition to transcend, the limits of the text. Dr Martin begins by tracing a network of interlocking motifs and images - beginning and end, nescience and omniscience, genesis and renascence, savagery and civilization - across a broad spectrum of texts from the Book of Genesis through the Renaissance (in particular the works of Nicholas of Cusa and Erasmus) to Rousseau. The central section of the book translates these temporal oppositions into the spatial antithesis of East and West in the Orientalism of Hugo, Napoleon and Chateaubriand. A final chapter draws together these apparently disparate themes in a consideration of the dichotomy of science and literature in Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires.