Books by Richard Thomas

A young soldier injured on the battlefield of modern-day Afghanistan awakens to a nightmarish world of cannon smoke and gunfire and the realisation that he has somehow been transported back to 1880 on the eve of one of the British army¿s worst defeats, the battle of Maiwand.

A little mountain spends the days and nights looking up to a bigger mountain. One night, the earth begins to shake. When the sun rises the next day, the bigger mountain is gone. From its shadow, a tiny mountain now looks up to the little mountain. If a mountain could see, where would it look? If a mountain could talk, what would it say? If a mountain could learn, how would it teach? Now that the little mountain has become the big mountain, what will it do? A picture book for children, Mountains tells the story about the desert days and nights and the mountains that live there.

This volume charts the changing human-animal relationship at one particular location, Dudley Castle, West Midlands, over several centuries. The temporal span considered (the 11th-18th centuries) is, arguably, one of the most formative in the evolving relationship between humans and animals. The period was one of profound economic, social and demographic change, witnessing not only the evolution of modern breeds of domestic animals, but also a change in the way animals were perceived and treated. In this study, the animal bones recovered from archaeological excavations at Dudley Castle have been integrated with historical documentation to provide a basis from which to explore these issues. The size of the faunal assemblage, its chronology and location, combine to make the results of this analysis invaluable in enhancing our current state of knowledge. Just as human-animal relationships in the period reflected a combination of economic, social and cultural values, so the questions addressed in this volume reflect this diversity and inter-connectivity at a number of different scales. Thus, site-specific questions, as well as broader trends within the social and economic landscape of the medieval and post-medieval periods in England are considered. This study also attempts to explore dietary patterns on site, and the way in which the acquisition and consumption of food was used in the negotiation of social relationships.

How Elections are reported has important implications for the health of democracy and informed citizenship.