<div><B>A helpful guidebook to growing herbs successfully and safely, with photos included.</B><BR />  <BR /> Herbs have been used since ancient times both to flavor food and as natural medicines. In this easy-access guide, gardener Gordon Thorburn reveals different types of herb gardens to suit your needs&mdash;from those that don&rsquo;t require a lot of attention (mint and rosemary don&rsquo;t need much watering, but basil and the beautiful Vietnamese coriander are very demanding), to classic herb gardens, culinary options, and medicinal herb gardens.<BR />  <BR /> Whether you suffer from migraines, insomnia, coughs and colds, or fatigue, there are herbs which can treat you without side effects. But some herbs can prove fatal&mdash;so you can also discover which herbs are safe to use as herbal teas, but not as salad leaves, in this guide to creating the perfect herb garden for your needs.<BR />  <BR /> Each herb is listed with growing instructions and its culinary and medicinal uses, plus the color of its flowers and any must-know information, from health warnings to nature-friendly herbs which attract butterflies and bees to help pollinate your garden.</div>

The Classic Herb Garden

<div>"In 1943, there was no thought of good times for two battalions of Scottish soldiers. For them, India meant a new and unimaginably arduous kind of training.  Some of the Black Watch boys had seen action in Somaliland, Crete and Tobruk. Some of the Cameronians had fought the Japs in the Burma retreat. Even for these, such training was trial by ordeal. Many more of the Jocks were new, just shipped out from Scotland, but all of them were ordinary men, men from the towns and villages whod taken the Kings shilling in their countrys peril.  These were first-class British infantry, but not the super-selected special forces types that we know today. Nevertheless, it was a special-forces job they were supposed to do and that is what they were called, Special Force.  The challenge in Madhya Pradesh was to turn themselves into jungle fighters as good as the Japanese. They had a few short months to become Chindits.  The two brigades they joined numbered 7,677 officers and men going into the jungle, of whom 531 were killed, captured or missing, and around 1,600 were wounded. By the end, some 3,800 were too sick to fight. Only 1,754 could be classified as 'effective' when they came out and, in truth, half of those were fit for no more than a hospital bed. It was a miracle anybody survived at all.  And that was just two of the five brigades that went in. Was this the greatest medical disaster of World War Two? Who caused it? This new book has the answers."</div>

Jocks in the Jungle

<div>Allotments are enjoying a renewed popularity because people want to know exactly what theyre eating, save money, eat seasonally and save on carbon footprints. As well as men, more and more women are taking up the challenge to create their own sustainable food source with allotments, as well as experiencing the enjoyment of seeing things grow, not just fruit and vegetables, but also flowers. As well as potatoes and sunflowers, exotic plants such as ginger and pak choi are being grown and people are running businesses from their allotment produce, tapping into the locally-sourced, seasonal food market. Gordon Thorburn shows how to make the best from your allotment or even a veg patch with tips on natural bug deterrents, companion planting (save your cabbages by planting marigolds amongst them) and a handy seasonal planner, as well as must-try recipes.</div>

The Classic Allotment

<div>In the country, holidaymakers were a rarity. The railways could take you almost anywhere, but it was only the middle classes who went. So there were no crowds, and many of our pictures show tourist hotspots before they were hot, before there was any such thing as a car park. The text provides local knowledge and background to the photographs and is an enjoyable read in itself, but the real pleasure is in seeing Brighton, Margate, Scarborough, Broadstairs, Clovelly, Ilfracombe, Minehead, before it all happened. See Exmoor, the White Peak, Somerset, when the loudest noise was the click of the camera shutter.</div>

Holidays in Victorian England

<div>A nostalgic trip down the British high street, remembering once famous names such as Woolworths, Athena and C&A and also featuring current favorites, including the ubiquitous Tesco and Marks &amp; Spencer which started life as a penny market stall to become a retail giant that has had to adapt to survive. Full of fact boxes and quirky facts about much-loved shops and the people behind them  just who was W.H. Smith and what did those famous initials stand for? A fascinating book which charts the rise and, in too many cases, fall of our favorite shops.There used to be butcher, baker, grocer, greengrocer, draper, Boots, ironmonger (hardware), pub, WH Smith, cafe, bank, Freeman Hardy and Willis, jeweler, Marks and Spencer, furniture shop, hotel, bookseller, off license, haberdasher, Woolworth's, confectioner, cobbler, tobacconist, electrical showroom, Burton's, gas showroom, ladies' fashions, gentlemen's outfitters, and more, and maybe a department store, and several versions of some. What do we have now? Pound shop, charity (thrift) shop, building society branch, betting shop, coffee shop, charity shop, shop boarded up, building society branch, sandwich shop, shop boarded up, kebab takeaway, charity shop, card shop, Indian takeaway, mobile phone shop - we exaggerate but make the point. So what has gone wrong - if it is wrong? The author discusses these and many other topics, and answers hundreds of burning questions. Whatever happened to the Home and Colonial, Timothy White's, Lipton's, the District Bank, the Fifty Shilling Tailor? Who were Jesse Boot, Montague Burton, W H Smith? How did the Co-op start? Whatever happened to all those things we used to buy in those shops in the high street - Balkan Sobranie, Caley Tray, Oxydol, Phillips Stick-a-soles, Icilma Cream, Mansion Polish, Mrs Peek's Puddings? Does any girl still dream of going to work in her Maidenform bra?</div>

Remembering the High Street

<div>In the earliest days of World War One, when IX Squadron was formed, we went to the fight in little 50mph machines that were barely capable of taking pilot and observer, a gun and a few small, hand-held bombs into the sky, especially on a windy day. When we took a wireless set, to spot for the artillery and report on troop movements, the extra load forced the defenceless pilot to leave his observer behind.A century later, IX (B) Squadron flies jets that can exceed the speed of sound, place laser-guided missiles within a few centimetres of the target, and transmit the most complex data in real time across the globe.In between, the tale is of ponderous beasts of biplanes, of Wellingtons and Lancasters in the bloody battles of World War Two, of Canberras and Vulcans in the nuclear age of the Cold War.Above all, it's the story of the men and women of the RAF's senior bomber squadron across a hundred years of war and peace, and their words fill this book. We go from those beginnings in wood, wire and fabric kites over France and a pilot armed with a service revolver, to the world's first Tornado squadron in the Gulf wars, over Kosovo and Afghanistan, and so to the present, a century on.It really is one hell of a story.</div>

A Century of Air Warfare With Nine (IX) Squadron, RAF

<div>For Bomber Command, the term 'Phoney War' never really meant much. Five Blenheims of 107 Squadron were among the blood and bullets the day after war was declared and only one came back.On 14 December 1939, in a disastrous raid on shipping, 99 Squadron lost six Wellingtons with only three survivors out of thirty-six crew. Even worse, in the biggest air battle so far, 18 December, Wilhelmshaven, five Wellingtons of 9 Squadron went down, four of 37 Squadron and two of 149 Squadron.Bomber Command lost sixty-eight aircraft and crews in action in the four war months of 1939, and a further seventy-eight in accidents. In the months up to the French surrender, losses rose spectacularly as the Germans triumphed wherever they went. In a few hours on 14 May, resisting the Blitzkrieg, forty-seven Fairey Battles and Bristol Blenheims were shot from the sky. Through the Scandinavian defence, in France and Belgium, at Dunkirk and, at last, over Germany, for Bomber Command there was no Phoney War. It was real war from the start.</div>

Bomber Command 1939–1940

<div>From 11 June 1943 (the date of Lancaster Mark III EE136 WS/R's first op) to her last with 9 Squadron (on 19 October 1944), eighty-six Lancasters were assigned to Number 9. Of these, fifty were lost to enemy action, another five crashed at home, three crashed in Russia on the first Tirpitz raid and four were transferred to other squadrons only to be lost by them, leaving just twenty-four still flying.As more came in, three of those twenty-four were transferred to a new squadron, the reforming No 189. These were EE136 (93 operations), PB146 (36 ops), and LM745 (four ops). All three saw the war out, unlike so many others. During 189 Squadron's operational period featuring EE136 (1 November 1944 to 3 February 1945) thirty-four Lancasters came on the strength of which nine were lost in that time. Over the operational lifetime of Lancaster EE136, forty-two different skippers took her on her grand total of 109 trips. Altogether, 315 men flew on ops in this machine, many of them more than once - the most 'capped' captain, F/O Roy Lake, twenty-two times - and of those men, 101 were killed in other aircraft.Those are the statistics. But this is the story of the men behind the numbers.</div>

More Luck of a Lancaster

<div>No 9 Squadron of Bomber Command converted from the Wellington to the Lancaster in August 1942. W4964 was the seventieth Lanc to arrive on squadron, in mid April 1943. She flew her first op on the 20th, by which time No 9 had lost forty-one of their Lancs to enemy action and another five had been transferred to other squadrons and lost by them. No 9 would soon lose a further thirteen of the seventy. All of the remaining eleven would be damaged, repaired, transferred to other squadrons or training units, and lost to enemy action or crashes except for three which, in some kind of retirement, would last long enough to be scrapped after the war.Only one of the seventy achieved a century of ops or anything like it: W4964 WS-J.Across all squadrons and all the war, the average life of a Lancaster was 22.75 sorties, but rather less for the front-line squadrons going to Germany three and four times a week in 1943 and '44, which was when W4964 was flying her 107 sorties, all with No 9 Squadron and all from RAF Bardney. The first was Stettin (Szczecin in modern Poland), and thereafter she went wherever 9 Squadron went, to Berlin, the Ruhr, and most of the big ops of the time such as Peenemnde and Hamburg. She was given a special character as J-Johnny Walker, still going strong and on September 15 1944, skippered by Flight Lieutenant James Douglas Melrose, her Tallboy special bomb was the only one to hit the battleship Tirpitz.During her career, well over two hundred airmen flew in J. None were killed while doing so, but ninety-six of them died in other aircraft. This is their story, and the story of one lucky Lancaster.</div>

Luck of a Lancaster

<div>Is there really a pub called The Toad Rock Retreat? Which one town has the pubs with both the longest and the shortest names? How many Lions, Crowns and Horses are there? How many pubs are called The Speculation, The Triple Plea, The Welcome Stranger? Why would you give your pub a name like The Geese Have Gone Over The Water? The author, in his valiant attempt to answer these and many other questions, has produced a book which is surely essential reading.What exactly is a pub? What should pubs be like? Why do we think that way? Is there a perfect pub? Can we imagine one that nobody would ever go in? Who does go in pubs, and why, and for what? Where is the straightest pub crawl? So, how did we get where we are, and where do we go from here? Whether it's to The King's Head, The Queen's Arms, The Three Legs or The Eel's Foot, be sure to take this book with you.</div>

Pocket Guide to Pubs and Their Histories

<div>As the globe warms, everything runs out and people become the willing slaves of small electronic machines, we have our response: the Golden Age of Sheds. We can look out from our sheds and see those unfortunates, the slaves in question, the ones who would rather be stripped naked and whipped through the market square than be separated, for one nanosecond, from their portable telephones and i-thingies, and we can smile.This book is where the smilers are. Here, you can find the man who reinvigorates the entente cordiale in wood, the woman who boils kettles, the woman who says 'I'm Nicola from In the Shed', the man who says 'What's yours?', the dooket that Jock built, the blockhouse that Noah built, a neoclassical stately home, and all manner of things musical, yogic, animalcular, roguish, ockerish and cloudy. Whether we see our shed as a place of work, a place of fun, a welcome refuge from normality, a shaded pool of tranquility, a realization of a secret yearning, a place to pot up the geraniums, or a little bit of all those things combined, we Sheddies, tribesfolk of the mighty Sheddici, hold one truth to be undeniable. We have our sheds, and the others haven't.</div>

The Pocket Guide to Sheds

<div>Read about the Berkshire restorer who saw a heap of old iron in the bushes and realized it used to be a 1926 bullnose Super Sports, and the seven year old boy in Norfolk, Virginia, who read a book called The Red Car and knew that, one day, he would have to have a TC, and the Dutch boy who saw an MGB on his way to school and knew something similar.There's the French boy aged nine whose nana gave him a model kit to assemble, and the USAF fighter pilot who saw his first MG in Britain during the war and was in love for ever. A Canadian took 32 years to restore his TA, while a Swiss professor installed spaceship electronics in his TD. An aeronautical engineer was left some money and bought a 1929 18/80 Tourer that he thought had been restored. An Australian 17-year old happened across a secondhand MGB, was done for speeding and lived happily ever after. A Swedish boy walked out one Sunday morning into the middle of an MG rally.Each of these, and many more, has a story. All the stories are different, but the story tellers have something in common. They would all rather love - and sometimes despair of - a wonderful vehicle with faults in its character, than have no feelings about one that has no character at all.</div>

Gordon Thorburn

Books By Gordon Thorburn (12 Books)

The Classic Herb Garden

Jocks in the Jungle

The Classic Allotment

Holidays in Victorian England

Remembering the High Street

A Century of Air Warfare With Nine (IX) Squadron, RAF

Bomber Command 1939–1940

More Luck of a Lancaster

Luck of a Lancaster

Pocket Guide to Pubs and Their Histories

The Pocket Guide to Sheds

Me and My MG

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