Bøger af Richard Sugg

Katie and Dan Chatham start off having an ordinary bad day, and end up having one very good, very crazy week. What should be the first day back at school turns into a sudden trip to their Uncle Jake, out on the wild seal-splashed coast. Meanwhile, Mum is on a work mission she didn't exactly choose, which sends her... WHOOOSH! up to the North Pole. Go huskies! Go walrus! Go penguin and polar bear suits, and... FAR too much snow! Mum's company is Jumping Jackets. Once the Top Jacket Company in the Universe, it is suddenly being whupped real hard by the mysterious new Juffle Jackets - whose clothes are just spooky warm. How do they do it? Do they REALLY steal rare birds for their super-heated feathers?And... more importantly, who can save Mum? Well - soon enough, it starts to look like Mum's problem is also Katie and Dan's problem. As Uncle Jake explains, the juffles are some strange unlikely birds - but they DO actually exist. And someone is poaching them from this very coast. You may have heard, these days, about how Nature is a very sensitive thing. A thing being messed up pretty bad by human carelessness. Well, on the Juffmadoc coast, this is equally true. So, when the juffles are taken, the weather goes weird, the fish disappear, and the sunny fun holiday tumbles into one wild helter-skelter mission. Can Jake, Katie and Dan find the magical Seal Island? Do purnapples taste as good as they look? Can they stop the mean and nasty juffle hunters? Read on, if you dare. As Mum's arctic guide Joseph tells her at their darkest Arctic Hour: 'Nature always finds a way.'

John Donne is now a strong candidate for the most popular Renaissance writer after Shakespeare. Paying tribute to the living vitality of Donne's literary voice, and the kaleidoscope of social detail embedded in his writings, Richard Sugg offers a vibrant engagement with the author's work, life and times. He shows how Donne's fiercely original mind produced remarkable and challenging new images of selfhood, love, friendship, and of a natural world marked by the unstable movement from religion to early science. To fully appreciate Donne's life and writing it is necessary to comprehend the strangeness of his social and intellectual milieu: the peculiar mixture of splendour, violence and suffering which spilled across his path in the streets, theatres and churches of seventeenth-century London, and the attitudes and ideologies expressed within them. This book offers readers not just Donne, but his world.Richard Sugg is the author of ten books, including The Smoke of the Soul (Palgrave, 2013), Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (2nd edn 2015), A Singing Mouse at Buckingham Palace (2017), Fairies: A Dangerous History (Reaktion, 2018), and The Real Vampires (Amberley, 2019). He is currently completing Talking Dirty: The History of Disgust. A 3rd updated edition of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires will be appearing shortly. His work has appeared widely in international press, radio and television. He has previously lectured in English and Cultural History at the universities of Cardiff and Durham.

"Dare you enter the Labyrinth of Fear?" A man cutting his own mother as a witch; parents murdering their children as fairy changelings; villagers staking the living as vampires... Ghosts in towns, on farms, on ships; poltergeists that baffle all investigators; spectral cats, owls, dogs and sheep; a man shot dead as a ghost; an apparition which the witness falls right through; magical candles made from human fat and human hands... Not that long ago, the world was haunted: by superstitions, imaginary terrors, and even seemingly crude hoaxes which might cause their victims to quite literally die of fear. Strange as all this is, one thing is even stranger. Some of it was probably true. Given in the original voices of nineteenth century newspaper accounts, this Century of Supernatural Stories offers us a shadowy labyrinth of terrors real and imagined. Drawing on years of research into the supernatural, Richard Sugg offers to guide readers through this Labyrinth of Fear. But be warned: those who make it through may find that the world never looks quite the same again.

This book presents one hundred real-life stories from the nineteenth century press. Along with accounts of ghosts, poltergeists, and haunted houses, we meet extraordinary reports of the dying appearing hundreds or thousands of miles from the sight of their death, and living people who quite literally appear in two places at once. Analysing and interpreting these stories in the light of modern paranormal events and scientific findings, Century aims to show that ghosts and poltergeists certainly do exist. It offers a range of persuasive theories about what they really are and what they mean, and screws the microscope down on the details of ghost sightings and poltergeist incidents. Why are some ghosts grey or vague, and others able to pass as living people? Can ghosts speak? How do ghosts or poltergeists use human energy, and particularly the energy of the young or the traumatised? How do such phenomena relate to light, to electromagnetism, and even the body's circadian rhythms? This is a book about ghosts and poltergeists by someone who never expected to take them seriously. It is a book inspired by the strange experience of continually hearing such stories from people who kept them hidden until they were prompted to speak. It aims to help those who have suffered from the trauma of poltergeists, and to bring back into the open experiences which, in the developed world, have become a new kind of taboo. It is a book for anyone interested in the extraordinary effects of human emotion; the fringes of biology and physics; and the possible survival of human consciousness after death.

We lost our father, Frank Sugg, to a heart attack in early 1989. He left us a talent for living, and the poems published here. Although I have written a good deal, our father was always the real poet in our family. It has been good to hear his unmistakable voice in these pieces. His work was broadcast by the BBC, and in time I hope to issue these poems with the full story of his courageous life, as told in his own words.My brother and I lost our mother to the covid virus on 10 January 2021. As so many people in the world will now know, we have had to adapt rapidly not just to sudden premature deaths, but to new conditions at End of Life and in funerals. Partly for that reason, Chris and I are printing our memories of our mother here, as a preface to the poems. I would add that many great writers down the ages have taken the hardest parts of life and transformed them into something beautiful. In his own way, our father did this. And we hope to do something similar, in leaving this memorial to our mother, which will bring pleasure to people, now that she is gone. It has been good to speak for our mother. I think the poems will speak for themselves.

Yes: mice really can sing; and in 1843 one captured in a London slum was summoned to give a command performance for Queen Victoria's children. Meanwhile, the humbler sort could see elephants, dogs and camels upon the popular stage; monkeys parachuted out of balloons; and now and then bears, baboons, lions, tigers, kangaroos and Tasmanian devils racing about British streets, fields and rooftops. Parrots, dogs and monkeys solve crimes and settle legal disputes; a Kentish woman suckles orphaned fox cubs; and a group of American dogs hold a funeral for their dead friend. Railway Jack, perhaps Britain's biggest canine celebrity, travels on trains from Edinburgh to Paris and is presented to royalty. Dogs and cats achieve feats of homing which continue to bewilder modern scientists, or take themselves to hospital for treatment. Parrots act as railway announcers; and an elephant is tried for manslaughter. Alligators are sent by post; an actor rides a rhino into Covent Garden; and a bull attempts to join an old lady in bed. These and many other stories from the nineteenth century press raise intriguing questions: can chimps and monkeys talk? what are the nature of animal ethics and grief? how many animals have friends, pets, or foster children? How human are certain animals, and what do these stories say about human nature itself?

Fairies: A Dangerous History tells the story of the many fairy terrors which lay behind Titania or Tinkerbell.

Just as museum exhibits of plastinated corpses, television dramas about forensics, and books about the eventual fate of human remains provoke interest and generate ethical debates today, anatomy was a topic of fascination-and autopsies a spectator...