Bøker av Ian Yearsley

An accessible history of Southend from prehistory to the present day highlighting the city's significant events and people

Essex is a remarkable county with a fascinating history, but how well do you know it?This fun, easy-to-use book contains 500 quiz questions in 50 rounds which are designed to test your knowledge about Essex. They range in difficulty from very easy to very hard and they cover topics as diverse as history, ancient buildings, scenes, waterways, transport, towns and villages, local claims to fame, towers, fortifications, the seaside, people, sport, writers, industry, science and islands. There are also some anagrams and some cryptic questions for you to try. Fourteen of the rounds are picture rounds. Can you recognise the places in them?This book can be used to test your own knowledge or the knowledge of your family members and friends. It can also be used in more competitive team quiz challenges in a village hall or a pub. You can even take it with you on a journey and test your knowledge of the places you visit as you go to. The book can also be used as an educational tool, providing ideas for places to visit, as the answers include background information on all the topics covered. There is much of interest in Essex and this book will help you uncover it and learn about many aspects of the county's long and interesting history.Enjoy discovering or rediscovering the many fascinating places in the best county in the country!

Did you know that aspersions are always cast, umbrage is always taken and the only thing that's madding is a crowd?All this and more can be explored in Single-context Words: A Study of a Quirk of the English Language, which uncovers the stories behind numerous words which are only ever used in one context.Ian Yearsley has spent 15 years collecting and researching single-context words and has written up over 300 examples in this volume. He explains how they came about and gives examples of their usage, with special reference throughout to the different parts of speech and how some suit single-context words better than others.The book explores a hitherto unexplored aspect of language and would be ideal as a gently humorous reference book, an educational work or an amusing, quirky gift book.This unique and compelling collection complements the existing body of language publications and is for anyone and everyone who has a love of and a fascination for language.

The story of Count Dracula, the blood-sucking vampire of Bram Stoker's classic gothic horror novel and the subsequent star of a multitude of stage and film presentations, is well-known: a creature which comes alive at night when everyone else is asleep to feast on the warm blood of young maidens before returning to its coffin home at dawn; one which can be repelled by garlic and crosses but killed only by a stake through the heart. What is not so well known is that much of Stoker's original 1897 novel is set in Essex - in the Thameside village (as it was then) of Purfleet, near Grays.Why should Bram Stoker have chosen such a seemingly insignificant settlement as the place where the Transylvanian vampire makes his English home? Could it be that the fiction of Dracula is based on some horrifying fact? Does Purfleet perhaps have a history of vampire associations? Are the characters and the locations in the novel drawn from actual people and places in the village? Or is there a more mundane reason for this Essex location being Stoker's choice?This book sets out to answer all these questions and more to provide once and for all an answer to the mystery of why Bram Stoker should wish to set such a horrific blood-curdling story in a quiet Essex Thameside village...

A history of Southend

A history of Hadleigh