What explains the growth of a business, and more broadly the development or decline of a whole economy? What role does a particular entrepreneur or indeed a culture of entrepreneurship play? Does the evidence suggest that a particular structure or organizational form was or should be adopted to ensure best practice and commercial success? These fundamental questions have long preoccupied business and economic historians. With the current expansion of business and management education and training, the investigations and findings of the historian may have wider significance and relevance.
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All Patrick O'Brian's strengths are on parade in this novel of action and intrigue, set partly in Malta, partly in the treacherous, pirate-infested waters of the Red Sea. While Captain Aubrey worries about repairs to his ship, Stephen Maturin assumes the center stage for the dockyards and salons of Malta are alive with Napoleon's agents, and the admiralty's intelligence network is compromised. Maturin's cunning is the sole bulwark against sabotage of Aubrey's daring mission.

Captain Jack Aubrey, R. N., ashore after a successful cruise, is persuaded by a casual acquaintance to make certain investments in the City. This innocent decision ensnares him in the London criminal underground and in government espionage the province of his friend Stephen Maturin. Is Aubrey's humiliation and the threatened ruin of his career a deliberate plot? This dark tale is a fitting backdrop to the brilliant characterization and sparkling dialogue which O'Brian's readers have come to expect."

Savior of his nation in war; bold man of letters; patriot; a statesman who achieved reality for his political vision by the overwhelming force of his will: the personality that emerges in Jean Lacouture's magnificent biography of Charles de Gaulle seems larger than life, a presence of mythic proportions. The story begins with de Gaulle's childhood in Lille and follows him through his heroic experiences in World War I and his swift rise to prominence in the French army, to that great moment of triumph, the liberation of Paris in August 1944. Perceptions of the private de Gaulle--the schoolboy,...

Everything about Picasso, except his physical stature, was on an enormous scale. No painter of the first rank has been so awe-inspiringly productive. No painter of any rank has made so much money. A few painters have rivaled his life span of ninety years, but none has attracted so avid, so insatiable, a public interest Patrick O'Brian knew Picasso sufficiently well to have a strong sense of his personality. The man that emerges from this scholarly, passionate, and brilliantly written biography is one of many contradictions: hard and tender, mean and generous, affectionate and cold, private...

Joseph Pugh, sick of Oxford and of teaching, decides to take some time off to live in a wild and beautiful Welsh farm valley. There he falls physically ill and is nursed back to health by Bronwen Vaughn, the wife of a neighboring farmer. Slowly, unwillingly, Bronwen and Pugh fall in love;' and while that word is never spoken between them, their story is as passionate and as tragic as that of Vronsky and Anna Karenina

Although the tone of this collection ranges effortlessly from the humorous to the dramatic, the most characteristic and memorable stories often have to do with a glimpse of savage, destructive forces through the fragile shell of human civilization. The threatened chaos may be psychological, as in "On the Wolfsberg," or it may be lurking in the natural world, as in "A Passage of the Frontier," or, as in the dark masterpiece "The Chian Wine," it is suddenly discovered in the ancient, irrational impulses of human nature The setting may be the marshes of western Ireland, the Pyrenees, or the...

InThe Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir seeks greater understanding of our perception of elders. With bravery, tenacity, and forceful honesty, she guides us on a study spanning a thousand years and a variety of different nations and cultures to provide a clear and alarming picture of "Society's secret shame"--the separation and distance from our communities that the old must suffer and endure.

The Wager was parted from Anson's squadron in the fierce storms off Cape Horn and struggled alone up the coast of Chile until she was driven against the rocks and sank. The survivors were soon involved in trouble of every kind. A surplus of rum, a disappearing stock of food, and a hard, detested captain soon drove them into drunkenness, mutiny, and bloodshed. After many months of privation, a handful of men made their way northward under the guidance of a band of Indians, at last finding safety in Valparaiso This saga of survival is the background to the adventures of two young men aboard the...

A stark tale encompassing the cruelty and beauty of the natural world, and a clear demonstration of the storytelling gift that would later flower in the Aubrey/Maturin series. When he was fourteen years old and beset by chronic ill health, Patrick O'Brian began creating his first fictional character. "I did it in my bedroom, and a little when I should have been doing my homework," he confessed in a note on the original dust-jacket. Caesar tells the picaresque, enchanting, and quite bloodthirsty story of a creature whose father is a giant panda and whose mother is a snow leopard. Through the...