Paul Woods spent 1972 as a VSO teacher of English at a government secondary school in Kaltungo, in north-east Nigeria. Based on letters he wrote, interspersed with flashbacks to the days of the early missionaries in Kaltungo and fast-forwarding to the present day, he describes the trials and tribulations of a volunteer teacher, including linguistic and cultural misunderstandings, a farcical public execution, tribal warfare at a school football match, supervising exams, catching cheats and preparing lesson plans retrospectively for a government inspection. Books ordered for the school library...

It lasted almost a century, from the horse-and-buggy era to the Internet age. It was beloved by Canadians-mostly women and girls-who ordered goods from its catalogues or flocked to its cozy stores to buy supplies from clerks who were as passionate as their customers about crafting. If you liked to make pretty or useful things, chances are you would find what you needed in the Lewiscraft catalogue or one of its dozens of shopping-mall outlets from coast to coast. Beads and Sequins: The Lewiscraft Story covers the history of Lewiscraft, from its humble beginnings as a one-man leather...

Brunei and Tanzania - two countries in stark contrast. One oil-rich, with a tiny population and an extremely high standard of living; the other aid-dependent and desperately poor. Paul Woods describes his experience of teaching English and training teachers in the 1970's, moving from an expatriate life-style revolving around barbecues and banquets in Brunei, where colonial dependency was gradually giving way to Islamic fundamentalism, to a daily struggle for survival implementing Education for Self-Reliance in Nyerere's Tanzania, first at a militarised college in Tabora and later on running...