Search results for ""Author Leo"

The reign of Alfonso VII occupied more than a quarter century during which the political landscape of medieval Spain was altered significantly. It was marked by the enhancement of royal administration, an increased papal intervention in the affairs of the peninsular church, and the development of the church's territorial structure. With the publication of The Kingdom of Leon-Castilla Under King Alfonso VII, 1126-1157, Bernard Reilly completes a detailed, three-part history of the largest of the Christian states of the Iberian peninsula from the mid-eleventh through the mid-twelfth century. Like his earlier books on the reigns of Queen Urraca and King Alfonso VI, this will no doubt be an essential resource for all students of European and Spanish history and to anyone investigating the antecedents of Castile's eventual preeminence in Iberian affairs.

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Leon Trotsky was the charismatic intellectual of the Russian Revolution, an authoritarian organizer, who might have succeeded Lenin and become the ruler of the Soviet Union. But by the time the Second World War broke out he was in exile, living in Mexico in a villa borrowed from the great artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, guarded only by several naïve young American acolytes. The household was awash with emotional turmoil - tensions grew between Trotsky and Rivera, as questions arose over his relations with Frida Kahlo. His wife was restless and jealous.Outside of the villa, Mexican communists tried to storm the house, the Trotskys' sons were being persecuted and killed in Europe, and in Moscow, Stalin personally ordered his secret police to kill his fiercest left-wing critic - at any cost. By the summer of 1940, they had found a man who could penetrate the tight security around the house in far-away Mexico . . .Bertrand Patenaude's book reconstructs a famous state crime with chilling precision and a page-turning quality. It tells the amazing story of a deadly rivalry, revolutionary fanaticism and tragic violence and loss.

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Every manual is written from hands-on experience gained from stripping down and rebuilding each vehicle in the Haynes Project Workshop. The practical step-by-step instructions and clear photos are easy to follow and provide information on maintenance, servicing, fault finding, the MoT, brakes, electrics and Haynes tips to make many tasks easier.

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Spots of a Leopard - on being a man is a personal quest by the Zambian-born, journalist Aernout Zevenbergen to discover the meaning of manhood in Africa, during an era plagued by economic and political troubles, sexual violence, violence, political violence and aids. On journeys he made through the continent, since 1996, Zevenbergen, encounters paupers and princes, a president and a preacher, bikers and truckers, a king dressed in rags as well as an ancestor who smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish. 'We are leopards who are trying to wipe away their spots.' Zevenbergen asks questions few have dared to ask men in Africa. Each man responds passionately and intimately about his life, expectations, dreams and frustrations. Inspired by their honesty, Zevenbergen delves into his own questions of identity. How relevant these issues are, was highlighted again mid-June, when the Medical Research Council published its research into non-consensual sex in three districts in South Africa, and shocked the nation by announcing that 27 per cent of men admitted to having raped a girl or woman. The Times columnist Justice Malala wrote a few days later: 'A conversation is needed among South African men. We need to start defining what we mean when we say that we are men. There is a problem with the way we perceive ourselves, and the way in which we present ourselves to the world: to our brothers, our sons, our sisters, our wives and our partners. We are not men; we are broken beings.' 'Spots of a leopard - on being a man' does just that: opening up debate about the question 'What does it mean to be a man, today'. Spots of a leopard - on being a man is the result of a journey through the hearts and minds of men in over a dozen countries in Africa. 'I did not set out to write something absurd like The All Encompassing Truth About Men In Africa. I wanted to tickle debate around issues of masculinity - a topic surrounded by a deafening silence. I wanted to hear the stories that men can tell on love and romance, sex and loneliness, friendship and fatherhood.'

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In Humanism and the Urban World, Caspar Pearson offers a profoundly revisionist account of Leon Battista Alberti’s approach to the urban environment as exemplified in the extensive theoretical treatise De re aedificatoria (On the Art of Building in Ten Books), brought mostly to completion in the 1450s, as well as in his larger body of written work. Past scholars have generally characterized the Italian Renaissance architect and theorist as an enthusiast of the city who envisioned it as a rational, Renaissance ideal. Pearson argues, however, that Alberti’s approach to urbanism was far more complex—that he was even “essentially hostile” to the city at times. Rather than proposing the “ideal” city, Pearson maintains, Alberti presented a variety of possible cities, each one different from another. This book explores the ways in which Alberti sought to remedy urban problems, tracing key themes that manifest in De re aedificatoria. Chapters address Alberti’s consideration of the city’s possible destruction and the city’s capacity to provide order despite its intrinsic instability; his assessment of a variety of political solutions to that instability; his affinity for the countryside and discussions of the virtues of the active versus the contemplative life; and his theories of aesthetics and beauty, in particular the belief that beauty may affect the soul of an enemy and thus preserve buildings from attack.

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