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How to make speeches that seize the moment, advance your cause and lead the way. 'Exhilarating, illuminating, and absolutely captivating, this book made me want to rush out and give a thousand speeches!' Charlotte Wood, author of The Natural Way of Things For those who aim to be leaders, mastering the power of speechmaking -the art and craft of persuasion - is more important than ever. If you want to be heard, it's not enough to have something to say: you must know how to say it. In government, business or civil society, a leader's speech sets the tone: the wrong words can destroy a company, damage a reputation, or even start a war. But the right speech can build prosperity, drive peaceful s...
Meet the dazzling women of Paris; from Colette to Nancy Mitford; Marie Antoinette to Coco Chanel; Napoleon's Josephine to Edith Wharton. Rule-breakers and style-setters, these women were utterly diverse, yet they shared one common passion - Paris, the world's headquarters of femininity. At a turning point in her life, Lucinda Holdforth journeys to Paris and takes a very personal tour through the lives, loves and losses of its celebrated women. She evokes the incarnations of the city from Louis XIV through the French Revolution, two world wars and the Paris of the new millennium. And, as she walks in their footsteps, Lucinda draws inspiration from the fascinating women who created and nurtured the world's most civilised city. This enjoyable companion will seduce and delight - and inspire every woman in search of her own true pleasures...
Authenticity. Vulnerability. Humility. Transparency. These are some of the 21st-century virtues proselytised by mindset gurus, paraded (if not practised) by big corporations, and lauded by professionals on LinkedIn. The quest for authenticity, for example, is central to progressive campaigns for greater diversity and inclusion, while our political and business leaders are highest praised if they appear to be humble. But are Australia's newest virtues fit for purpose? In this provocative book, Lucinda Holdforth questions the new orthodoxy. She suggests that these virtues are not only unhelpfully subjective and self-referential but also, in the absence of broader civic values, fail to serve ou...
The case for civilized behaviour in a barbarous world. You know what it's like: whether it's the leafblower blaring at 7am or the queue-jumper cutting in at the cinema, there's nothing like an act of rudeness to spoil the day. But why do so many of us get worked up about these examples of incivility? Isn't that just life? Do manners really matter, anyway? Yes! says Lucinda Holdforth in this passionate and elegant essay, drawing on history's great writers and thinkers to argue, unashamedly, that manners are absolutely essential to civilisation. Holdforth wrests the case for good manners away from the knife-and-fork snobs, the exclusivist bores and the corporate fakers, to show how courtesy pr...
"Prime du Maurier. . . . She holds her characters close to reality; the past she creates is valid, and her skill in finessing the time shifts is enough to make one want to try a little of the brew."—New York Times
In this fantasy adventure, a young girl visits a land where birds carry off men, fish eat human flesh, and she must rescue a pilfered lake. Readers who have followed Dido Twite’s escapades in Black Hearts in Battersea and Nightbirds on Nantucket will welcome her return in her wildest escapade yet. Now back in print, The Cuckoo Tree and The Stolen Lake continue the Wolves Chronicles, the exhilarating and imaginative series that stemmed from Joan Aiken’s classic The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. A dazzling piece of dramatic, snowballing adventure, The Stolen Lake is full of fantastical details: revolving palaces, witches who are also court dressmakers, an apocalyptic volcanic eruption, and a...
Lizzie is concerned about her newly divorcée mother - thirty-one years old, with three young children and a Labrador in a hostile village in the English countryside. It isn't that having a husband is good, but in 1970s rural Leicestershire, not having one is bad. The women in the village think Lizzie's mother is after their husbands while no one will let the children into the Brownies. And so Lizzie and her sister embark on a misguided campaign to find a new 'Man at the Helm'
Nature creates viruses. But people and politics create pandemics. And pandemics create new politics. In the 1980s, the toxic politics of the response to HIV/AIDS turned a serious but manageable viral threat into a global pandemic that took the lives of 32 million people and brought illness and suffering to millions more. In 2020, COVID-19 emerged into a world where many governments had failed to heed the lessons of the past, and so they were unprepared and unable to stop its global spread. But some countries had learned the harsh lessons of HIV/AIDS, and had contained SARS1, Ebola, Zika and MERS. When coronavirus hit, they knew what to do to save their people from avoidable infections and de...
In Up from Zero, Paul Goldberger, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the inside story of the quest to rebuild one of the most important symbolic sites in the world, the sixteen acres where the towers of the former World Trade Center stood. A story of power, politics, architecture, community, and culture, Up from Zero takes us inside the controversial struggle to create and build one of the most challenging urban-design projects in history. What should replace the fallen towers? Who had the courage and vision to rise to the task of rebuilding? Who had the right, finally, to decide? The struggle began soon after September 11, 2001, as titanic egos took sides, made demands, and jockeyed for po...
Alexis Wright’s award-winning classic Carpentaria: “a swelling, heaving tsunami of a novel—stinging, sinuous, salted with outrageous humor, sweetened by spiraling lyricism” (The Australian) Carpentaria is an epic of the Gulf country of northwestern Queensland, Australia. Its portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centers on the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight’s renegade Eastend mob, on the one hand, and with the white officials of Uptown and the nearby rapacious, ecologically disastrous Gurfurrit mine on the other. Wright’s masterful novel teems with extraordinary characte...