DescriptionJack and Annie set off to find an original copy of an ancient Chinese myth. Armed only with their magic library cards, they must take on a book-burning emperor. But with the help of a scholar and a silk weaver, they triumph again.
DescriptionFive brothers, each of whom has an amazing physical gift, join forces to outwit the evil Emperor who has forced thousands into slavery to build the Great Wall of China. The older brothers are put to the test but the youngest proves to be the most gifted of all. Original music by Bill Douglass and David Austin.
DescriptionTo rescue her family from poverty and avoid marrying her cousin, 17-year-old Orchid competes to be one of the Emperor's wives. When she is chosen as a lower-ranking concubine, she enters the ritualised Forbidden City and is exposed to all the chaos, corruption, and treachery of the final days of the Chinese empire, including the thousands of concubines who will stoop to any lengths to bear the Emperor's son. Orchid succeeds in bribing her way into the royal bed and seduces the monarch, drawing the attention of dangerous foes. She does not know, however, that China will collapse around her and that she will be its last Empress. Chinese schoolchildren are taught that Empress Orchid destroyed China's 2, 000-year-old imperial culture. This imaginative account peers beyond the notoriety to the real woman and is wonderfully read by Pik-sen Lim.
DescriptionAlistair Horne is a leading scholar of French history. Here he trains his sights on one of the most compelling figures of the 19th century, Napoleon Bonaparte. Far from a mere dictator, Napoleon was a military, political and social visionary whose legacy can still be felt in France and all over the world. Horne examines the one-time emperor at his most human, from his greatest triumphs to his disastrous failures.
DescriptionSuetonius wrote his Lives of the Twelve Caesars in the reign of Vespasian around 70AD. He chronicled the extraordinary careers of Julius, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Vespasian, and Domitian and the rest in technicolour terms. They presented some high and low times at the heart of the Roman Empire. The accounts provide us with perspicacious insights into the men as much as their reigns, and it was from Suetoniaus that subsequent writers such as Robert Graves drew so much of their material.
