Bøger af Sean Gabb

Not many novels have Margaret Thatcher as a hero. Here is one of them.Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Tory-Boy Satanists, insane anti-American scientists, an army of hungry Lizards-from-beyond-the-Void. An asteroid impact.Yes, it's the University of York in 1981 - though not as anyone now alive remembers it!Edward Parker is a right-wing hypochondriac with a weight problem. Falling asleep one night as an ageing and ever-so-slightly failed barrister, he wakes in his youthful body, back in those moderately golden days of yore.It's a dream. It's surely a dream. In great things and in little, everything seems at first exactly as it had been.Only it isn't.As the dream unfolds, and shows no appearance of ending, deviation after deviation from the remembered past accumulate, and settle into the appearance of a coherent narrative.But where is this taking young Edward Parker? What is his old "friend" Michael Clarvin up to? Where have all his real friends gone? Who is "The Undertaker"? What horror lurks beneath the Temple of Isis being uncovered near the Main Library? Why is Professor Fairburn so desperate to lay hands on its power? What does he eat?And can Margaret Thatcher become all-powerful?If you were there, take this as the ultimate Walk Down Memory Lane. If you weren't, probably be grateful....Praise for Other Novels by Sean Gabb, (writing as Richard Blake): "Fascinating to read, very well written, an intriguing plot and I enjoyed it very much." (Derek Jacobi, star of I Claudius and Gladiator)"Vivid characters, devious plotting and buckets of gore are enhanced by his unfamiliar choice of period.... Nasty, fun and educational." (The Daily Telegraph) "He knows how to deliver a fast-paced story and his grasp of the period is impressively detailed." (The Mail on Sunday) "A rollicking and raunchy read . . . Anyone who enjoys their history with large dollops of action, sex, intrigue and, above all, fun will absolutely love this novel." (Historical Novels) "It would be hard to over-praise this extraordinary series, a near-perfect blend of historical detail and atmosphere with the plot of a conspiracy thriller, vivid characters, high philosophy and vulgar comedy." (The Morning Star) Sean Gabb is an historian, broadcaster and university lecturer. His other novels, written under the pen-name "Richard Blake," have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Greek, Slovak, Hungarian, Chinese and Indonesian. He lives in Kent with his wife and daughter.

The purpose of this book is to give a set of readings that are in genuine but fairly simple Latin, that are interesting in themselves, and that are accompanied by a Vocabulary in which nearly every word used in the text is fully explained. There is also a comprehensive Biographical Dictionary of the persons mentioned in the texts. The book is directed at intermediate students of Latin-that is, those who have made some progress in the language, but who still find the Roman Classics too difficult to read with any fluency. It will help: A-Level students in England;Advanced school students anywhere in the English-speaking world;University students;Students in home education;Self-learners.Saint Jerome (347-420 AD) was a writer of genius, and this is evident to anyone able to appreciate the difficulties he faced in producing his translation of The Bible. He was writing for a wider audience than the authors of the Roman classics had in consideration. This audience was those as well-educated as he was, but also countless millions of the uneducated. The result is a clear and flowing narrative that mirrors as exactly as Latin allows the style of the original Greek. The sentences are generally short, the grammar simple. Above all, even in our present age, when The Bible is not studied so commonly as it was, there can be few readers who will come to these extracts without some knowledge of the material. And this knowledge will often save readers the trouble of looking up words.The principle of selection has been to provide a set of readings that are both varied in tone and content, and that are likely to be enjoyed for their own sake. The focus mainly on the narrative or exhortatory passages in Matthew and Luke. If, in all of the Gospels excluding Mark, much space is given to the Trial of Jesus Christ before Pilate, this is because it is an event of compelling interest. The texts have been punctuated, and all speech has been put in quotation marks. Avoiding division into verses-though these are given at the foot of each-the texts are laid out as reading extracts, the paragraphs divided as if in a modern novel.Contents include: The Annunciation;The Birth of Christ in BethlehemThe Slaughter of the Innocents;The Temptation of Satan;The Story of John the Baptist;The Parable of the Good Samaritan;The Parable of the Prodigal Son;The Sermon on the Mount;The Story of the Loaves and Fishes;The Trial before Pilate;The Crucifixion;The Resurrection.Review of the first book in this series (Stories from Paul the Deacon): When I was learning Latin I remember getting old (some Victorian!) Latin texts. There was another problem, going from Latin lessons to real Latin texts is a huge jump. Here the author has chosen later texts written by Paul the Deacon (about 8th century). The Latin is simpler as a result and it makes the book a very useful stepping stone from Latin lessons to classical Latin authors. I went from lessons to Caesar, and this book would have made that transition a lot easier. I'm now in the stage of my Latin having gone rusty, and this book looks an ideal way for me to recapture some of that lost prowess. Also it has a vocabulary at the back. Yes I have a Latin dictionary, but experience with other books has shown me the value of having a vocabulary or dictionary at the back.

This is a book of short readings that are in genuine but fairly simple Latin, that are interesting in themselves, and that are accompanied by a Vocabulary containing nearly every word used in the text. It also has an Introduction that explains the historical background. The book is directed at intermediate students of Latin-that is, those who have made some progress in the language, but who still find the Roman classics too difficult to read with any fluency. It will help: A-Level students in England; Advanced school students elsewhere; University students; Students in home education; Self-learners; Classicists who want to know more about post-Imperial Latin; Paul the Deacon (c.725-799) is a primary source for many of the most important and dramatic events of the early middle ages in both Italy and the wider Mediterranean World. Though simpler than that of the Roman classics, his Latin is lucid and often graceful. He knows how to tell a story, and how to weave his stories into an extended narrative. For his History of the Lombards, he is justly called the Herodotus of the Middle Ages. Contents include:

This trilingual text of the Acts of the Apostles gives the original Greek, plus the Latin translation revised by St Jerome and the English of the Authorised Version. They are placed side by side, so that any passage in one language can be directly compared with one or both of the other two.The book is intended in part to assist students of The Bible. It is mainly intended, though, to help students who wish to learn Latin or Greek or both.If you want to learn Latin, you should first get hold of the shortest Latin grammar you can find. You must read through this, to get an overview. Do not try memorise the declensions and conjugations. The most you need is a vague awareness of how things like accusative cases and present participles look, and enough of an overview to know where to look if the English is not clear enough as a key to the grammar of the Latin. It is only when you start looking up particular issues that you should pay attention to things like ablative absolutes and subjunctives. Do not try in advance to learn the grammar. It is to be consulted not committed to memory.You now begin with 1:1-"primum quidem sermonem feci de omnibus o Theophile quae coepit Iesus facere et docere."Read it aloud so that you can familiarise yourself with the sound of the language. You then turn to the English-"The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach."You puzzle out the Latin. "Primum" and "sermonem" you can guess from their English derivatives mean "former treatise." You may recall from your skimming of the grammar that nouns ending in m are likely to be direct objects. "Feci" seems to correspond with "have I made." "Omnibus" is used in English to mean the whole of something, and so probably means "all." "O Theophile" explains itself, though you may look in your grammar to confirm that it is a vocative case-that is, a form showing that someone is being spoken to. And so you continue, corresponding Latin to English by guesswork or by looking for English derivatives.Once you have finished with the first three verses, you commit them in both Latin and English to memory. This is not as hard as it sounds. What you have here is a text with an overall meaning. It is easier to memorise than the meanings of individual words. You could look up "doceo" (I teach), and try to remember its various forms. You will do better to recognise "docere" (present infinitive) as a word in its context that means "to teach." Equally, you should avoid digging round to find that "feci" is the perfect form of "facio," and keep reciting "facio, feci, facere, factum." Trying to remember the meanings of words is harder than remembering the sentences in which they occur.Long before you get to Chapter 28, you will have become moderately competent in Latin.If you want to learn Greek, and already know some Latin, you will use the Latin text as your key to the Greek. Also, you will benefit from a more comprehensive grammar. Again, you should skim this, not trying to memorise what you read. The purpose is to know where to look for the answers to specific questions that may arise. You will see at once, that while it is a more complex language, with more exceptions to its general rules, Greek is structurally similar to Latin. There is no dead easy way to learn any language. But this is easier than most, and is the method used before the 17th century. Try it for yourself!