The poet, John Clare, who lived from 1793-1864, was the son of a Northamptonshire labourer and himself at various times a herd boy, militiaman, vagrant and unsuccessful farmer. He writes of the countryside and of village life with the special intensity of one who knows the land and its people intimately. "The Shepherd's Claendar", his most ambitious single poem, is both a classic of English poetry and a piece of social history, representing a statement about English country life from the point of view of its most silent representative - the agricultural labourer. To the modern reader "The Shepherd's Calendar" should be of interest because of the accuracy of its portrayal of natural life inthe different months of the year. It evokes natural life, using popular language, often derived from folk-songs and ballads. The book provides a sort of almanack of country life, detailing the tasks to be performed in each month of the year: ploughing in February, lambing in March, weeding in May, hay-making in June and so on. It also describes the flowers, the birds and the beasts to be found in hedgerow and field. It celebrates the festivals of the year - May Day games, shee-shearing feasts, Harvest Home and Christmas. As such, it will appeal to anyone who knows anything about nature in Britain or about farming life. This new edition of the text corrects numerous earlier misreadings as well as supplying substantial changes to "July" and "October". there is also a new introduction detailing the continuing importance of the poem to modern readers.

Product Description: Dreams have a way of becoming influenced by the obsessions of the waking world. This holds true for Seth Reardon as well, the top professional dreamer in the new and dominant dream industry. Seth finds his entire way of life in jeopardy because of emotions too powerful to ignore, yet too dark to satisfy...read more

Product Description: David Powell's fascinating biography traces Tony Benn's extraordinary fifty-year political career from the day he first entered the House of Commons in 1950. Benn has always been a controversial figure. Nonetheless many of the policies he championed, including some for which he was widely belittled, have since entered the statute books...read more

These volumes represent the third and fourth of five volumes devoted to Clare's "middle period," between 1822 and 1837, arguably the years of his finest creativity. They range from examples of Clare's satirical and political verse, in "The Summons" and "The Hue and Cry," to a telling expression of his philosophy of nature, in "The Eternity of Nature," and probably the most important statement of Clare's poetic objectives in "To the Rural Muse."

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Product Description: Book by Powell, David (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The design of computer systems to be embedded in critical real-time applications is a complex task. Such systems must not only guarantee to meet hard real-time deadlines imposed by their physical environment, they must guarantee to do so dependably, despite both physical faults (in hardware) and design faults (in hardware or software). A fault-tolerance approach is mandatory for these guarantees to be commensurate with the safety and reliability requirements of many life- and mission-critical applications. This book explains the motivations and the results of a collaborative project', whose objective was to significantly decrease the lifecycle costs of such fault­ tolerant systems. The end-user companies participating in this project already deploy fault-tolerant systems in critical railway, space and nuclear-propulsion applications. However, these are proprietary systems whose architectures have been tailored to meet domain-specific requirements. This has led to very costly, inflexible, and often hardware-intensive solutions that, by the time they are developed, validated and certified for use in the field, can already be out-of-date in terms of their underlying hardware and software technology. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Set against the tumultuous history of the freeborn Englishman's right to dissent, What's Left traces the emergence of the Labour Party in Britain and the conflicts that have continued to divide it, whether or not it is in government. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: These volumes represent the third and fourth of five volumes devoted to Clare's "middle period," between 1822 and 1837, arguably the years of his finest creativity. They range from examples of Clare's satirical and political verse, in "The Summons" and "The Hue and Cry," to a telling expression of his philosophy of nature, in "The Eternity of Nature," and probably the most important statement of Clare's poetic objectives in "To the Rural Muse...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: This volume brings together, in definitive form, all of John Clare's important autobiographical writings. His Autobiographical Fragments, Journal, and Sketches are set alongside his famous Journey out of Essex. Maps of Clare's countryside, his will, and extracts from his asylum letters are also included, presenting the author in all his guises—ploughboy, gardener, and militiaman; lover and husband; acquaintance of Hazlitt, Lamb, and Coleridge; and finally, inmate in an asylum...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)