Charles Armstrong

North Korea, despite a shattered economy and a populace suffering from widespread hunger, has outlived repeated forecasts of its imminent demise. Charles K. Armstrong contends that a major source of North Korea's strength and resiliency, as well as of its flaws and shortcomings, lies in the poorly understood origins of its system of government. He examines the genesis of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) both as an important yet rarely...

"Something is troubling Inspector Henry Cutter. Sergeant Gideon Bliss is accustomed to his ill-tempered outbursts, but lately the inspector has grown silent and withdrawn. Then, the murders begin. The first to die is the elderly Sir Aneurin Considine, a decorated but obscure civil servant who long ago retired to tend his orchids. If the motive for his killing is a mystery, the manner of his death is more bewildering still. The victims that follow...

An oriental prince begins an affair in London with a girl of dubious reputation, to whom he gives an emblematic ruby that disappears along with the young woman. Hercule Poirot is summoned to retrieve it. Posing as a guest at the Lacey family home, the detective will share a traditional Christmas to follow the thieves' trail until he finds the valuable jewel.

Marcus Hardman, an antiques collector, hires Poirot to investigate the theft of some valuable jewels that disappeared from his safe while he was offering a little tea party. Only his close friends attended the meeting and Hardman doesn´t want to involve the police to avoid a scandal. Will the Belgian detective manage to recover the jewels and discover the thief?

The last great literary work of the Middle Ages and the first important book of the Renaissance, Dante's Divine Comedy culminates in this third and final section, Paradiso. The 14th-century allegory portrays a medieval perspective on the afterlife, tracing the poet's voyage across three realms - Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise - to investigate the concepts of sin, guilt, and redemption. Expressed in sublime verse, the trilogy concludes with this challenging...

In Agatha Christie's short story, "The Adventure of the Clapham Cook," Poirot is asked by a Mrs. Todd to investigate the sudden departure of her cook, Eliza. When elements of the case seem to correspond to miscellaneous articles read aloud from yesterday's paper to him by Hastings, Poirot begins to unravel a devilishly complex plot. This short story originally appeared in the November 14, 1923 issue of The Sketch magazine.

Poirot is asked by a friend, who is the director of the Northern Union Insurance Company, to investigate the case of a middle-aged man who died of an internal haemorrhage just a few weeks after insuring his life for fifty thousand pounds. There were rumours that Mr Maltravers was in a difficult financial position and the suggestion has been made that he paid the insurance premiums and then committed suicide for the benefit of his beautiful young wife....

In 1867, when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published the first American edition of The Inferno, Dante was almost unknown in this country. The New England poet and educator, who taught Italian literature at Harvard, introduced Dante's literary genius to the New World with this vibrant blank verse translation of the first and most popular book of the three-part Divine Comedy. Expressed in haunting poetry of great emotional power, The Inferno chronicles...

"A colorful and fast-moving account of how postwar London became the global center of the art market--a story of Impressionist masterpieces, dodgy dealers, and ground-breaking financial transactions. On October 15, 1958, Sotheby's of Bond Street staged an "event sale" of seven Impressionist paintings belonging to Erwin Goldschmidt: three Manets, two Čzannes, one Van Gogh, and a Renoir. Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, and Somerset Maugham were there...

A dead heiress on a train, a murdered recluse, a wealthy playboy slain at a costume ball are but a few of the unfortunate victims of confounding crimes committed in the pages of Agatha Christie's The Under Dog and Other Stories, a superior collection of short mystery fiction all featuring Hercule Poirot as the investigator.

A beautiful heiress has been found dead on a train. A playboy has been stabbed through the heart during

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