Böcker av David Blair

Pedalling Tales is a collection of stories from bike adventures across Scotland and northern England. Included are multi-day off-road rides, races, bike-packing, and bothy visits. Travel with the author along secret ways hidden in the hills and well known routes, through struggles and exhilaration, meeting some strange characters along the way.

"Daddy, where does lightning come from?" An epic adventure that takes place during a time period when Dragons were alive and freely roamed the land. The people during this time were getting eaten by a vicious species of Dragons. The ruling King finally orders the total annihilation of all living dragons. A powerful wizard, named Merlinius, who is a friend to the king, does not agree with the King's order, for Merlinius knows that all Dragons are not what they seem. So he does what he must to protect a family of Dragons that he had befriended. And to protect his Dragon friends, Merlinius performs the spell of weightlessness and tells the Dragons to fly up and hide in the cover of the Clouds. He then gives the Dragons strict instructions to live within the clouds and to only come down at night to eat. An apprentice to the wizard who has grandeur of his own has a plan for Dragons that he has hidden deep within a mountain cavern. Now enters a young boy, who had also befriended a dragon, though a very young one, suddenly finds themselves caught between the King's order and a battle that has begun between two species of Dragons. A battle that would determine control of the skies above the Kingdom of Albion. This Apprentice's plan has consequences that may bring the Kingdom and perhaps the very world we live in today to a devastating end.

Selected and Edited with an Introduction and Notes by David Blair, University of Kent at Canterbury.Late in the eighteenth century authors began to write 'Gothic' stories as a way of putting literature back in touch with the irrational, the supernatural and the bizarre, which had been neglected in the 'Age of Reason'.This superb new collection brings together stories from the earliest decades of Gothic writing with later 19th and early 20th century tales from the period in which Gothic diversified into the familiar forms of the ghost- and-horror-story. Work by writers such as Poe, Dickens, Hawthorne, Gaskell and M. R. James appears alongside that of anonymous writers from the start of the period and many lesser-known authors from Britain and America. Some of these stories, like the haunting 'The Lame Priest' are 'lost masterpieces' and several have never been anthologised before. Together they cover the spectrum of Gothic story-telling - tales of madness and violence, of shape-shifters and spectres, that express some of the deepest fears of the human mind - insanity, sexuality, death and the often terrible power of the past to catch up with the present.In a lively, authoritative introduction David Blair provides fresh insights and a detailed commentary on the stories' place in the complex traditions of Gothic writing in British and American literature.