Böcker utgivna av Merlin Unwin Books

Why should we eat our weeds? Because they are delicious, they're nutritious, they're too good to waste. And they're free!This is more than just a recipe book, more than a foraging book. Professional herbalist and best-selling author Julie Bruton-Seal and Matthew Seal have both shared their expertise in Eat your Weeds! to give us the fascinating background to these overlooked wild plants, their historic uses, their medicinal benefits today and their culinary delights.Weeds are amazing beings that we have failed to see and failed to eat. But with these 90 delicious plant-based recipes, that is about to end.

This book explores in practical detail many of the ways, old and new, in which man can shoot missiles by means of his own force, without the aid of explosives.David slew Goliath with a stone from a sling, but it was a large stone and Man has long been shooting small stones and carefully rounded bullets of clay, glass - and latterly steel and lead - from a variety of weapons without recourse to gunpowder. The bow and arrow has been Man's choice for the last 10,000 years, when modern firearms have been unavailable or unsuitable.There is currently an explosion of interest in making primitive archery equipment. The author has been building bows and shooting flint-tipped arrows since adolescence. But the addiction has led to stronger stuff: to experiments with making and shooting pump-up airguns, stonebows and home-made lead musketballs.Middleton's narrative is lively, humorous and full of exciting information and experimentation.In this quirky and clever book, he invites you to share the thrills of his garden shed experiments with him.

When Laurence Catlow, a classics master at a Cumbrian boarding school, sees a beautiful pheasant in flight, he wants to reach for his gun.In this diary of his sporting year, he asks himself, between days on the local rivers and shoots, why this is so.His answers are surprising, controversial and convincing. They provide an articulate response to the anti-fieldsports arguments, and he presents them in an entertaining, frank and amusing manner.Throughout 1995, Laurence's diary records his hopes of buying some precipitous shooting ground in the Pennines, his fishing days on the Eden, Wharfe and other rivers, the arrival of a second gundog and days spent together on shoots. All this activity is interspersed with Laurence's quest for his true motives in killing what he most loves. He looks at foxhunting, vegetarianism, man as a hunter, man as created in God's image and man as a creature doomed, himself, to die.Nearly 25 years later, this diaryremains highly topical, thought-provoking and original. yet its tone is also very human and it comes from the pen of a true nature-lover.

In a pet dog you have your own personal trainer, your most loyal companion, your friendliest welcome, your uncritical friend. Yes, there are the muddy paws, the walks in the rain, the wet fur and the chewed footwear ... but let's look at the big picture! In a tribute to Man's Best Friend, Anna Levin's delightful short poem is a homage to our pet dogs, each line illustrated with a moving photograph of someone's mutt: funny, heart-wrenching, loving, exasperating and paying back their owners a hundred times over.

I hardly remember life without a rod in my hand, writes James Batty in the opening sentence of his autobiography in fishing. When his American wife moved with him to Cornwall, she saw his family photo album and commented that there was hardly a single picture of him in which he wasn't fishing. This witty, wacky account is James' tale of his obsession with his hobby of fishing, wherever his work took him around the world, seeking out lemon sharks in the Gambia, Striped Bass in New York and salmon in British Columbia. James' genre of writing is a mixture of John Gierach and Bill Bryson: his style is wry, witty and incisive.The end result is an entertaining insight into the mind of a dedicated angler, full of fishing anecdotes, tips and thought-provoking ideas.Extracts from the bookThe great thing about anglers - especially when we meet fellow anglers - is that we don't try to hide our nuttiness. Pointless, I'm holding a rod, so are you, game over. We both know we're talking to a person who's a few bananas short of a bunch.When you reckon you're going to catch something, you make more effort. If you think the session's a lost cause, 'one last cast' translates into, well, one last cast. Unthinkable. If you feel you're in with a chance it reverts to its normal meaning: half a dozen chucks with the diving plug, then a few with the slider just in case, and ten minutes on the sandeel shad because you really never know.Guiding is not a job I'd do again, not as long as there's alternative employment cleaning out the grease traps at fast food restaurants or hand sorting the output of sewage farms.They'll take jelly-fry under an inch long when the water's full of plump sandeels, and I don't know why. But it's the mysteries that keep us fishing.The fish can't see my modest reel or my battered rod until it's too late to say, 'I have my pride, I refuse to be landed on that old shite'.My financial situation was as tight as a toreador's Y-fronts.Wave and weather are a mystery, like who's going to win next year's Grand National, where the stock market's going, or why people watch television shows about forgotten minor celebrities eating baboons' foreskins. Long range forecasts are as reliable as horoscopes, just less entertaining. Maybe the Met Office should juice them up, 'The month will be marked by deep Atlantic lows, even deeper discounts at your local supermarket. Don't be too proud to pick up some sausages.' Or they could tell the truth: 'Expect a combination of sunshine, rain, freezing fog, calm days, violent storms, blizzards, and perhaps a plague of frogs. Dress warmly but don't forget to pack a swimsuit.'

You are going on the trip of a lifetime and hope to photograph some of the world's most iconic animals. Richard Barrett, one of Britain's top wildlife photographers, shows you how to achieve this. He tells you about the type of camera that will be best suited to particular work, the issues of exposure and of depth of field. How to get close to your subjects safely, steadily and always without disturbing them. Richard Barrett's extraordinary journeys in search of tigers, jaguars, polar bears, grizzlies, orcas and many other rare apex predators have taken him to all corners of the globe. They are recorded in this collection of his stunning photos - each one telling the story of how it was taken, the circumstances, the weather, the discomfort, the patience and ultimately the reward of an extraordinary image.

A dark net tightens on the tiny fishing Scottish fishing community of Kildrumna as conflicting forces loom. Tensions mount between owner of an expanding salmon farming enterprise in the pristine bay, local conservationists and the owners of a sporting lodge. When renowned millionaire environmentalist and keen diver Gunnar Larsen arrives on the scene with his beautiful new wife Ravenna, a deadly chain of events unfolds. Detective Chief Inspector Robb, on holiday there with his troubled teenage daughter Marina, have their trout, salmon, sea fishing and diving idyll interrupted in a way they could never have imagined.Twisting and turning like a foul-hooked fish, D.P.Hart-Davis's latest sporting thriller highlights the tension between conservation and exploitation in Scotland's fastest-growing food industry

Jim Corbett became the hero of thousands of impoverished local families in the remote Indian region of Kumaon when, throughout the 1920s and 30s, he answered their pleas to rid them of the man-eating tigers and leopards which were ravaging their populations. Man-eaters roamed a region of hundreds of square miles over several years, killing the defenceless villagers at will: for example the Champawat man-eater had killed over 434 people in six years, the Panar maneater over 400.Jim, one of 15 children, was born in 1875 to the local post-master in Nainital, and taught himself as a barefoot boy in his local jungle to become, in his spare time one, of the most skilled trackers of his day, fluent in the local dialects, patient beyond endurance and an excellent shot.Duff Hart Davis' biography threads together the life of this very private, unassuming Indian railway clerk. Often through Jim's own written words, Duff sets out the highlights of Jim's adventures in sequence and in context, thus thowing light on Jim's remarkable character.

Enjoy your woodland walks even more. Season by season, this colourful book shows you which wild flowers appear in Britain's woodlands throughout the year. Fascinating facts about each species are covered. Learn the names and habits of each wild woodland flower as they appear, from early Spring to the year's end, how to identify different woodland habitats and to spot the clues about the woodland's history.

After three years working as a young vet in rural Aberdeenshire, Hugh Cran decided that it was time for a change. He got it. He took a post in Kenya and, forty years later, he's still there, still working, still loving every exasperating, challenging, unexpected moment.This is a page-turning account of working as a vet at the sharp end.Cattle owned by the Maasai herdsmen or the white settlers might take up most of Hugh's time, but these cattle are assailed by lightning strike, snake bites, disease passed on by zebra and wildebeest. He's up against sun cancer, witch doctors - who knows what to expect next?Travelling miles on rough roads, Hugh never knows if he will be performing surgery on dirty sacks, besieged by every species of Kenyan insect, by the light of a failing car-headlamp!But the colourful people who frequent Hugh's Nukuru practice, the sheer vitality of the Kenyan scene and the rewarding nature of the grinding task in hand, keep him answering that persistent phone, day and night, and heading off into the unknown.

Tom Fort, former angling correspondent for the Financial Times, is one of the most incisive and funny fishing writers in Britain today.This sparkling collection of his writings finds Tom at Ceausescu's bear-hunting lodge in Romania, at a fishing auction in the Home Counties, being thwarted by a bunch of hard-mouthed Brazilian dourado, on a press freebie in Scotland and in a terrible state on the Kennet - not to mention conducting a fantasy celebrity interview with Isaak Walton himself.Whether fishing in some exotic far-flung location, or simply leaning over the parapet of an English bridge gazing at the stream below, Tom Fort always manages in his stylish and witty way to pinpoint something important with which all anglers can identify.

Man has been fishing for trout and salmon with the fly since the time of the Ancient Greeks. Devising ever more ingenious methods of doing so, his rods, reels, lines and flies have evolved in fascinating ways.With a delightful blend of wit and erudition, Conrad Voss Bark tells the story of flyfishing, from the Macedonian 'plumes' of old to the hairwing streamers of today.He spotlights the sport's formative protagonists - Juliana Berners, Robert Venables, Isaak Walton, Charles Cotton, Alfred Ronalds, George Kelson, J.C. Mottram, Dr Bell, and many others, using his journalist's skills to appraise the prevailing dogmas, the breakthroughs in tackle and to re-live the great debates and controversies, including the famous Skues-Halford dispute.Throughout, flyfishing is seen against the broader canvas of changing times in Britain, Ireland and North America.Today there are new forces which are shaping flyfishing history: water pollution, drift netting, over-kill, timeshare, catch-and-release and the explosion of new materials from which tackle and flies are made.Not since Waller Hills' classic History of Flyfishing for Trout of 1921, has a broad survey of this fascinating sport been tackled with such individual style and verve.

In December 2002, Meryl Harrison moved a large audience to tears at the BBC Animal Awards Ceremony, having been flown over from her native Zimbabwe to receive their Special Award. There she told her tale of the rescue of countless animals caught up in five years of the Zimbabwean land invasions, as farmers and families were forced from their homes to make way for Mugabe's 'war veterans'. Many had to leave their animals behind, and it was Meryl's mission on behalf of the under-funded ZNSPCA to go into these destroyed farmsteads to rescue countless domestic animals and wounded livestock.Nandi, pictured on the book-jacket of this heart-warming account of her animal rescues, is just one of the many ordinary pet dogs she managed to save.The bravery of Meryl and her small team, as they overcame huge obstacles to find and return these traumatised pets to their loving owners, has earned her world-renown. But she didn't do it for any human praise - she did it for the animals, the innocent victims of human folly.

The dry fly has long presented a design challenge to the angler. In the early 1900s, the best fishing minds, most prominently Halford, applied themselves to creating perfect replicas of the natural insect which would sit high on the water surface. Then came Colonel Harding and his watertank. This lead to the theory that trout do not see flies as we do: therefore dry flies should be tied to create the right impression, as seen from a trout's underwater perspective. At different times in history, the arguments have raged: colour and shape have gone in and out of fashion, the importance of outlines and silhouettes have waxed and waned. New ideas have embraced attempts to hide the hook, to turn the fly upside-down, to make it always land the right way up, to suggest 'ghost wings', to make it unsinkable, and so on. Men like Halford, Harding, Skues, Lunn, Marinaro, Wulff - and more recently Goddard, Clarke, Patterson, Jorgensen - these men and many others have introduced significant changes to the way we tie flies and to our understanding of how trout perceive them.They have been responsible for such flies as the Adams, the Funneldun, the Bi-Visible and the Upside-Down fly, which have had a lasting influence on the sport. In this book, Conrad Voss Bark reveals the turbulent development of the dry fly throughout the twentieth century. In his usual lively and incisive style, he brings an important aspect of angling history to life.

From famous poets such as Wordsworth and Ian McEwan to modern thriller writers such as Reginald Hill and Val McDermid, the awe-inspiring Fells, crashing waterfalls and dramatic still waters of the Lake District have inspired writers for centuries. In this illustrated anthology, Margaret Wilson has selected the best Lake District literary extracts, each of which photographer Helen Shaw has paired with a stunning local landscape.

Set against the dramatic backdrop of the Pennines, Catlow's shooting diary records his year as an amateur pheasant rearer, gamekeeper, forester, dog-handler and all-round shooting enthusiast. But he also records his thoughts as he goes around his small shoot: his views on the right to roam, on why he loves the birds he shoots, his wine cellar, his other sporting interests. He airs his opinions on subjects as diverse as sport and the nanny state, game cookery, friendship, disobedient dogs and beloved hats.Interspersed with pheasant shooting are magical evenings duck flighting and expeditions rabbit shooting. He controls vermin such as mink, crows and foxes - all familiar activities to those who run small shoots.Catlow is shooting's most articulate exponent and this is an intelligent, funny and thought-provoking book.

In spring 1973, Michael Brown, a young freelance travel writer, took a phone call from a friend: 'Why don't you come down to Somerset and see these things called elvers - they migrate up river at night on the high tides and the local's fish for them. It's called elvering.'And so began a lifetime's career, full of ups and downs, as a self- employed eel fisherman: from the enchantment of catching them by moonlight, to driving them in battered vans across Europe, to smoking mature eels, to selling them - Michael and his long-suffering wife Utta have never looked back.A heart-warming tale of running a small business on a shoe-string; and a passion for eels which never faded.

It Happened in Gloucestershire is a vibrant and compelling account of the county's diverse heritage; its heroes, its battles, its inventors, its outlandish sports. Phyllida Barstow's lively prose transports the reader across the county: from its stunning cathedral to its swan lake at Slimbridge, taking us surfing the Severn Bore, tumbling down Cooper Hill on the notorious Cheese Race, round the challenging course at Badminton and to Imjin Hill, site of the tragic stand of the Glorious Glosters. The book celebrates those who have helped to put Gloucestershire on the map: Eddie the Eagle, William Morris, Vaughan Williams, Desert Orchid, William Tyndale, Richard III - as well as the varied claims to fame of Concorde, GCHQ, the Cotswold Lions, the conqueror of small-pox, the Gloucester Old Spot and the hardy miners of the Forest of Dean.

Fishing with Emma is for all who already enjoy or would like to take up coarse fishing.It will also appeal to those who fish for certain species but want to branch out to try some new ones.Emma knows her stuff and she's prepared to share her knowledge in a clear, no-nonsense way. Completely up-to-date with 21st century techniques ataffordable prices Includes waggler, stick and controller float fishing,legering techniques, feeders, spinning, dead baiting, groundbaiting, responsible fish-handling, and muchmore An inspirational and enjoyable cartoon strip which willhave you rushing for your local river, gravel pit, commercial fishery or canal bank to get fishingAnd for any members of the angling fraternity who might ask: why are we fishing with Emma and not a man? the simple answer is, 'Why shouldn't a woman be an all-round expert at coarse fishing?'Shehasn't got a problem with that

The traditional market town of Ludlow in Shropshire has entertained and amused itself over the last 150 years with events for both rich and poor, from cockfighting to cycling clubs, from genteel balls to rowdy tugs of war across the local river. A lively social history and snapshot of the changing tastes in leisure, captured in fascinating original photographs and words.

Shropshire dairy farmer Roger Evans continues to delight his fans with his daily highlights from the farm and his views on everything from how to manage a happy milking herd to the state of the local wildlife and the views of the rural community in his local bar. Funny, topical and informative farmer's diary.

Author and illustrator Steve Palin presents images and explanations conveying which materials and symbols relate to which marital anniversary.

Father and son professional photographers John and Mike Hayward have worked together to share their enthusiasm for the county they live in and love. Their joy in the Shropshire landscapes, towns and villages shines through on every page. The dedication needed to catch that shot of hot air balloons hovering over Old Oswestry hill fort in early morning, or sunset at Pole Bank pond, the highest point on the Long Mynd, cannot be over-estimated. And the pleasure they take in capturing the people of this county - from the Severn Valley Railway steam enthusiasts at Highley, to cricketers at the idyllic village ground at Burwarton, to the priest blessing his congregation in the dodgem cars at Ludlow's May Fair - is clear from every shot. Fans of the Haywards' first book A Year in Shropshire will find over 160 new images of the county here, each one reminding them why Shropshire is one of England's most glorious counties.

""I need to start thinking like a shooter, for shooters and fishers, even though they are often the same person, think very differently." So writes author Laurence Catlow as his fishing season on the lonely northern rivers comes to an end, and he prepares for his next shooting season on his own small shoot on the edge of the Pennines. Many sportsmen enjoy both shooting and fishing, and in That Strange Alchemy, Catlow examines - fishing and shooting memories and why they differ - why both sports are so important to him - the loss of his shooting dog and the undertaking of a new one - best fishing days and how these differ from best shooting days - the anxieties of running a guest shooting day - fishing in middle age compared to in youth Catlow writes with great wit, modesty and insight."

You want your home, your clothes and your car to be really clean.You don't want to put harmful chemicals down the drains, nor to breathe them indoors.And maybe you would like to save money at the same time, and to enjoy the creative satisfaction of making your own simple cleaning agents.Not only does Austrian author Manfred Neuhold tell you what works, he explains in plain English WHY it works. Which means you can clean betterHere are 160 easy, illustrated recipes to inspire you to make all your own basic cleaning products such as: washing up liquids rinse aids fabric conditioners toilet cleaners dishwasher powdersAnd the specialist stuff: anti-flea carpet cleaner wine stain remover car air fresheners anti-mist window and mirror cleaners sweat-mark removers car seat cleaners rust removers lingerie handwash liquid

A Celebration of Britain's 59 species. There are 59 species of British butterfly and each one deserves a couple of stunning photographs, some interesting facts about its life cycle and a poem dedicated to it. Lifelong butterfly lover and poet Jonathan Bradley and his photographer friend Yealand Kalfayan have done just that in this colourful and inspiring book.