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A new full cast adventure for the Eighth Doctor. The Doctor's past is catching up with him. And so is his future...As a dark chapter dawns for the universe, a friend is at hand. But how can River Song help the Doctor if she can't meet him? 2.1 BEACHHEAD by Nicholas Briggs. In an attempt to recharge his batteries after his confrontation with the Eleven, the Doctor takes Liv and Helen to the sleepy English seaside village of Stegmoor. But they find the village in turmoil and, to make matters worse, their arrival uncovers a mystery from the Doctor's past which threatens the future safety of the planet. Can the Doctor prevent the Voord from invading Earth? And more importantly why have they come in the first place? 2.2 SCENES FROM HER LIFE by John Dorney. Investigating the appearance of the Voord on Earth, the Doctor, Liv and Helen follow a trail which takes them to the other side of the universe. There they discover a mysterious and almost deserted gothic city lost in space and time, in which the grotesque inhabitants are conducting a vile and inhumane experiment.The Doctor and his companions must hurry to save the lives of those in danger before the experiment is a success and the unimaginable consequences become all too real. 2.3 THE GIFT by Marc Platt. The TARDIS deposits its crew on Earth in San Francisco, 1906. There they find an actor-manager desperate to stage his definitive production of King Lear. But a real storm is headed their way when he becomes the possessor of a mysterious psychic 'Gift' which is hungry for power and intent on wreaking havoc and destruction. But exposure to so much psychic activity has the Doctor becoming increasingly erratic. Can he battle his demons and save the world? 2.4 THE SONOMANCER by Matt Fitton. On the other side of the galaxy a mining company is exploiting the already unstable planet of Syra for every precious mineral it contains. River Song is attempting to save the native people. She needs the Doctor's help, but she also knows he mustn't yet discover her true identity. The final confrontation sees the Doctor once again face his enemy the Eleven in an attempt to prevent the destruction of Syra and the genocide of its inhabitants.Fullerlove (Yeva), John Banks (Galactic Heritage) and Mark Bonnar as The Eleven. Doctor Who - Doom Coalition is a follow-up to Big Finish's Dark Eyes series - the first of which received the Best Online Drama at the 2014 BBC Drama Awards.British TV and Hollywood star Paul McGann returns to his hugely popular portrayal of the Doctor (as seen on BBC TV in 2013's Night of the Doctor).Hattie Morahan has now appeared opposite two British fictional greats - the Doctor here, and Sherlock Holmes in 2015's film Mr Holmes with Sir Ian McKellen and Nicola Walker was one of the longest serving actresses in BBC's Spooks series.CAST: Paul McGann (The Doctor), Alex Kingston (River Song), Nicola Walker (Liv Chenka), Hattie Morahan (Helen Sinclair), Rebecca Night (Matilda Gregson), Julia Hills (Phillipa Gregson/Dispatch), Kirsty Besterman (Ishtek), Andrew Dickens (Voord Guard), Emma Cunniffe (Caleera), Vincent Franklin (Lord Stormblood), Jacqueline King (Lady Sepulchra), Hamish Clark (Swordfish), James Jordan (Charles Virgil McLean), Paul Marc Davis (Pepe Gonzalez), Cory English (Sam Sonora), Laura Harding (Ethel Halliday), Enzo Squillino Jnr (Aldo Deluca), Derek Ezenagu (Ruslan), Janet Fullerlove (Yeva), John Banks (Galactic Heritage) and Mark Bonnar as The Eleven.

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The study of Renaissance drawings allows for an intensive exploration of how artists constructed their works and how they thought, often by revealing the artists' ideas through the examination of private images that were deemed inappropriate for more public viewing. Rethinking Renaissance Drawings presents new and original research from art historians and curators from leading universities and museums across North America and Europe. Previous studies on drawings tend to focus on the work of one artist or a small regional group of artists. The essays in this collection address larger issues of the forms and functions of drawing in the Renaissance by exploring a variety of perspectives, including discussions of the process of drawing, the often unorthodox imagery of Renaissance drawings, the collecting and copying of Renaissance drawings, and the works of artists such as Michelangelo, Raphael, Bosch, Parmigianino, Annibale Carracci, Guercino, and Rembrandt. Some of the drawings discussed are exciting new discoveries, published here for the first time, whereas others are familiar works, but shown in a new light. Collectively, these studies offer alternate views of Renaissance art and show more intimate aspects of a period that is often remembered for its paintings and large-scale public monuments. Contributors include David de Witt (Rembrandt House Museum), Stephanie Dickey (Queen's University), Pierre du Prey (Queen's University), David Ekserdjian (University of Leicester), David Franklin (Archive of Modern Conflict), Catherine Monbeig Goguel (Musee du Louvre), Franziska Gottwald (Amsterdam), Sharon Gregory (St Francis Xavier University), Sally Hickson (University of Guelph), Michel Hochmann (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes), Cathleen Hoeniger (Queen's University), Charles Hope (Warburg Institute), Paul Joannides (Cambridge University), Casey Lee (Queen's University), James Mundy (Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center), Aimee Ng (Frick Collection), Sebastian Schutze (University of Vienna), Allison Sherman (Queen's University), Ron Spronk (Queen's University), Steven Stowell (Concordia University), Nicholas Turner (J. Paul Getty Museum), and Catherine Whistler (The Ashmolean).

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Set between January 1862 and January 1863, this second installment in the ambitious Civil War series paints an unforgettable portrait of the year that turned a secessionist rebellion into a war of emancipationIncluding eleven never-before-published pieces, here are more than 140 messages, proclamations, newspaper stories, letters, diary entries, memoir excerpts, and poems by more than eighty participants and observers, among them Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, George B. McClellan, Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Clara Barton, Harriet Jacobs, and George Templeton Strong, as well as soldiers Charles B. Haydon and Henry Livermore Abbott; diarists Kate Stone and Judith McGuire; and war correspondents George E. Stephens and George Smalley. The selections include vivid and haunting narratives of battles-Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, the gunboat war on the Western rivers, Shiloh, the Seven Days, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Iuka, Corinth, Perryville, Fredericksburg, Stones River-as well as firsthand accounts of life and death in the military hospitals in Richmond and Georgetown; of the impact of war on Massachusetts towns and Louisiana plantations; of the struggles of runaway slaves and the mounting fears of slaveholders; and of the deliberations of the cabinet in Washington, as Lincoln moved toward what he would call "the central act of my administration and the great event of the nineteenth century": the revolutionary proclamation of emancipation.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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* THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER * 'An enthralling read' GUARDIAN 'A thrilling blend of fantasy and horror, richly imagined and masterfully executed' SFX 'Terrific . . . A book that creeps up on you, wearing brass knuckles' CONN IGGULDEN _______________ The first in a captivating new historical fantasy series, ORDINARY MONSTERS introduces the Talents with a catastrophic vision of the Victorian world, and the gifted, broken children who must save it. There in the shadows was a figure in a cloak, at the bottom of the cobblestone stair, and it turned and stared up at them as still and unmoving as a pillar of darkness, but it had no face, only smoke . . . 1882. North of Edinburgh, on the edge of an isolated loch, lies an institution of crumbling stone, where a strange doctor collects orphans with unusual abilities. In London, two children with such powers are hunted by a figure of darkness – a man made of smoke. Charlie Ovid discovers a gift for healing himself through a brutal upbringing in Mississippi, while Marlowe, a foundling from a railway freight, glows with a strange bluish light. When two grizzled detectives are recruited to escort them north to safety, they are confronted by a sinister, dangerous force that threatens to upend the world as they know it. What follows is a journey from the gaslit streets of London to the lochs of Scotland, where other gifted children – the Talents – have been gathered at Cairndale Institute, and the realms of the dead and the living collide. As secrets within the Institute unfurl, Marlowe, Charlie and the rest of the Talents will discover the truth about their abilities and the nature of the force that is stalking them: that the worst monsters sometimes come bearing the sweetest gifts. _______________ 'A dazzling mountain of wild invention, Dickensian eccentrics, supernatural horrors and gripping suspense' JOE HILL 'Expansive in scope and storytelling, Ordinary Monsters builds an electrifying Victorian world' CARI THOMAS J.M. Miro's book 'Ordinary Monsters' was a #5 Sunday Times bestseller w/e 04-06-2022.

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What did the founders of America think about religion? Until now, there has been no reliable and impartial compendium of the founders' own remarks on religious matters that clearly answers the question. This book fills that gap. A lively collection of quotations on everything from the relationship between church and state to the status of women, it is the most comprehensive and trustworthy resource available on this timely topic. The book calls to the witness stand all the usual suspects--George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams--as well as many lesser known but highly influential luminaries, among them Continental Congress President Elias Boudinot, Declaration of Independence signer Charles Carroll, and John Dickinson, "the Pennsylvania Farmer." It also gives voice to two founding "mothers," Abigail Adams and Martha Washington. The founders quoted here ranged from the piously evangelical to the steadfastly unorthodox. Some were such avid students of theology that they were treated as equals by the leading ministers of their day. Others vacillated in their conviction. James Madison's religious beliefs appeared to weaken as he grew older. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, seemed to warm to religion late in life. This compilation lays out the founders' positions on more than seventy topics, including the afterlife, the death of loved ones, divorce, the raising of children, the reliability of biblical texts, and the nature of Islam and Judaism. Partisans of various stripes have long invoked quotations from the founding fathers to lend credence to their own views on religion and politics. This book, by contrast, is the first of its genre to be grounded in the careful examination of original documents by a professional historian. Conveniently arranged alphabetically by topic, it provides multiple viewpoints and accurate quotations. Readers of all religious persuasions--or of none--will find this book engrossing.

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It may not be the longest, deepest or widest river in the world but few bodies of water reveal as much about a nation's past and present, or are suggestive of its future, as England's River Thames. Tales of legendary lock-keepers and long-vanished weirs evoke the distant past of a river which evolved into a prime commercial artery linking the heart of England with the ports of Europe. In Victorian times, the Thames hosted regattas galore, its new bridges and tunnels were celebrated as marvels of their time, and London's river was transformed from sewer to centrepiece of the British Empire. Talk of the Thames Gateway and the effectiveness of the Thames Barrier keeps the river in the news today, while the lengthening Thames Path makes the waterway more accessible than ever before. Through quiet meadows, rolling hills, leafy suburbia, industrial sites and a changing London riverside, Mick Sinclair tracks the Thames from source to sea, documenting internationally-known landmarks such as Tower Bridge and Windsor Castle and revealing lesser known features such as Godstow Abbey, Canvey Island, the Sanford Lasher, and George Orwell's tranquil grave. PAINTINGS, WORDS AND MUSIC: Turner, Tissot, Whistler and Monet; Shakespeare at Southwark, Alexander Pope, Charles Dickens, Jerome K. Jerome, William Morris; Handel's Water Music, the first rendition of Rule Britannia, the Rolling Stones and The Who rocking Eel Pie Island. POWER, POLITICS AND INTRIGUE: Runnymede and Magna Carta, the first English parliament, Whitehall Palace, Cliveden and the Profumo affair, the Houses of Parliament and the brooding headquarters of MI5 and MI6. TRADE AND COMMERCE: Eel trapping, osier growing; bargemen, watermen and lightermen; the rise and fall of London's docks; urban regeneration, rural protection.

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During the U.S. Civil War, a combination of innovative technologies and catastrophic events stimulated the development of news media into a central cultural force. Reacting to the dramatic increases in news reportage and circulation, poets responded to an urgent need to make their work immediately relevant to current events. As poetry's compressed forms traveled more quickly and easily than stories, novels, or essays through ephemeral print media, it moved alongside and engaged with news reports, often taking on the task of imagining the mental states of readers on receiving accounts from the war front. Newspaper and magazine poetry had long editorialized on political happenings—Indian wars, slavery and abolition, prison reform, women's rights—but the unprecedented scope of what has been called the first modern war, and the centrality of the issues involved for national futures, generated a powerful sense of single-mindedness among readers and writers that altered the terms of poetic expression. In Battle Lines, Eliza Richards charts the transformation of Civil War poetry, arguing that it was fueled by a symbiotic relationship between the development of mass media networks and modern warfare. Focusing primarily on the North, Richards explores how poets working in this new environment mediated events via received literary traditions. Collectively and with a remarkable consistency, poems pulled out key features of events and drew on common tropes and practices to mythologize, commemorate, and ponder the consequences of distant battles. The lines of communication reached outward through newspapers and magazines to writers such as Dickinson, Whitman, and Melville, who drew their inspiration from their peers' poetic practices and reconfigured them in ways that bear the traces of their engagements.

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Biles' first-rate primer on the state's history will be a useful resource for anyone curious about a state whose residents have played crucial roles in almost every major episode in the nation's history.―Chicago Tribune Featuring 67 illustrations, Illinois will captivate readers of all ages and interests. Crossroads of the continent, Land of Lincoln, hub of commerce—or, as Charles Dickens viewed it, a landscape "oppressive in its barren monotony"—Illinois boasts a rich and varied past. In this far-reaching but compact history, Roger Biles provides a much-needed, up-to-date account of the state's development, from the early native settlements to the present. Focusing on Illinois' demographic changes over time, he highlights the key figures who contributed to the state's government, economy, culture, and the arts. While devoting attention to the touchstones of history, Illinois illuminates also the achievements of ordinary people, including the women, the African Americans, and the other minorities who—along with the politicians, the captains of industry, and the military heroes—contributed to the state's growth and prosperity. National events shaped the state as well, and Biles explores the impact of such crises as the Civil War and World War II on the people of Illinois. No history of Illinois can ignore the state's largest city, the dynamic metropolis on Lake Michigan—Chicago. Drawing on extensive research, Biles illuminates Chicago's past—its outbursts of labor unrest and racial tensions as well as the splendors of two world's fairs and an artistic renaissance—while at the same time relating Chicago to the larger story of Illinois and its people. Connecting lesser-known stories with the main events of the state's past, Biles writes in an accessible style that is at once entertaining and enlightening.

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'A masterpiece of the sacred and the profane... A literary triumph.' Jake Arnott, Guardian How do you build a nation? It takes statesmen and soldiers, farmers and factory workers, of course. But it also takes thieves, prostitutes and policemen. Nation-building demands sacrifice. And one man knows exactly where those bodies are buried: Cohen, a man who loves his country. A reasonable man for unreasonable times. A car bomb in the back streets of Tel Aviv. A diamond robbery in Haifa. Civil war in Lebanon. Rebel fighters in the Colombian jungle. A double murder in Los Angeles. How do they all connect? Only Cohen knows. Maror is the story of a war for a country's soul – a dazzling spread of narrative gunshots across four decades and three continents. It is a true story. All of these things happened. Praise for Maror: 'A bloody beast of a book.' Daily Mail 'This is crime writing in the tradition of Balzac and Dickens and a major achievement, full of sound, fury, drugs and blood... An earthquake of a book.' CrimeTime 'Some write in ink, others in song, Tidhar writes in fire... Maror is a kaleidoscopic masterpiece, immense in its sympathies, alarming in its irreverences and altogether exhilarating.' Junot Díaz 'One of the boldest, most visionary writers I've ever read creates both a vivid political exploration and a riveting crime epic. It's like the Jewish Godfather!' Silvia Moreno-Garcia 'Maror blends the page-turning wit of a hard-boiled detective noir with the stirring intrigue of a multi-national political epic. An ambitious achievement that weaves a tapestry of both story and statement.' Kevin Jared Hosein 'Radiant with [...] the richly nuanced complexity and style of Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings ... Will catch your breath as it presents the history of Israel from unique points of view, with dazzling multi-generational scope.' LoveReading

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Lesevergnügen garantiert: In 22 Geschichten erzählt Gerhard Gottschalk Spannendes und teilweise kaum Vorstellbares aus der Welt der Mikroben Mikroorganismen schufen durch ihre Vielfalt und ihre Aktivität die Voraussetzungen für die Evolution der Pflanzen- und Tierwelt auf unserer Erde. Nicht alle Mikroben, die das vollbracht haben, gehören zu den Bakterien. Neben den eigentlichen Bakterien gibt es das Reich der Archaeen. Das sind Extremisten, sie besiedeln Standorte, wie eben kochendes Wasser auf Island oder auch die stark sauren und heißen Tümpel in den Solfatara bei Neapel; sie haben diesem Buch den Titel gegeben. Bakterien sind ansonsten überall, und Gerhard Gottschalk führt uns in ihre so unterschiedlichen Lebensbereiche, * in die Ozeane, die wenige Bakterienzellen pro Liter enthalten, aber insgesamt gewaltige Mengen, größer als die Masse aller Fische zusammen * in die Meeressedimente und den Schlamm der Wattenmeere mit der auffälligen und geruchsintensiven Produktion von Schwefelwasserstoff * in den Boden, wo sie Dünger zu Nitrat umsetzen, das dann ins Grundwasser sickert * in den Dickdarm mit bis zu einer Billion Bakterien pro Gramm Inhalt, ein Ort mit mannigfachen Wirkungen auf unsere Physiologie und unser Wohlbefinden * in unseren bakteriell besetzten Körper, der dieser Besetzung nicht immer Herr wird und dann von Infektionskrankheiten heimgesucht wird * in die Bakterienfabriken für Käse, Essig, Alkohol, Antibiotika und Waschmittelenzyme, aber auch für viel Gentechnisches wie Humaninsulin. Wir erfahren außerdem, wie Bakterien das Weltklima beeinflussen, wie sie die grüne Gentechnik auf den Weg brachten und wie man mit Hilfe von passendem Bakteriendünger Ölteppiche abbauen kann. Mit Erstaunen erfahren wir, dass ein Bakterium aus der Gattung Clostridium bei der Gründung des Staates Israel eine Rolle spielte. Leben in kochendem Wasser und andere Mikrobengeschichten ? geschrieben von einem führenden Mikrobiologen unserer Zeit ? ist spannende und unterhaltsame Lektüre für jeden, der sich von der faszinierenden Welt der Mikroorganismen begeistern lassen möchte.

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"... a gorgeous compilation of interiors from the homes of famous artists past and present as a way of exhibiting each creator's 'power and legacy' - Publishers Weekly An inspiring collection of the extraordinary private spaces of 250 of the world's most creative people, past and present Life Meets Art presents an unparalleled, global, behind-the-scenes tour through 250 beautiful interiors from the homes of the most creative people in art, architecture, design, fashion, literature, music, film and theatre. These inspiring, unique spaces show us the spaces where the greatest creatives in history lived their lives, honed their crafts and, in many cases, produced some of the world's most celebrated masterpieces - providing an intimate and insightful perspective on the masters that define artistic history. Organized alphabetically by artist, each interior features a color photograph and a short descriptive text, including details on whether the house is open to the public or private. This book will inspire everyone fascinated by stylish living, creative interior design, and the myriad possibilities for home décor, as well as those fascinated by the personal and professional lives of their cultural heroes. Life Meets Art includes homes from creative masters of past centuries such as artists da Vinci, Raphael and Rubens, composers Handel, Lizst, and Verdi and writers Dickens, Byron, and Coleridge. The book also showcases the extraordinary interiors of many twentieth century stars and epoch-defining talents such as architects Frank Lloyd Wright, Eileen Gray, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius, artists Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Henry Moore, writers Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Agatha Christie and musicians Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, and Elvis Presley. Homes from some of the most celebrated talents of today are also featured, including artists Francisco Clemente, Cornelia Parker, and Gilbert and George, fashion designers Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs, and Diane von Furstenberg, designers Marc Newson and Es Devlin and musicians Moby, Jimmy Page, and David Bowie.

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‘A witty, heart-warming tale about woman’s best friend. You’ll love it!’ Nick Spalding ‘A love story that honestly will just make you cheer… I loved it.’ Miranda Dickinson When your dog plays cupid…what could possibly go wrong? Loyal rescue pug Doug wants his adoring owner Julie to find unconditional love and happiness – and he knows she won’t find either in the arms of Luke, her married boss. Doug is terrified that Julie will become a lonely cat-lover if she stays single too long, but he can’t let her fall for any more of Luke’s empty promises. Julie needs to move on – and Doug is convinced that Tom, a newly divorced V-E-T, is perfect for her (despite his questionable occupation). There’s just one problem: Julie and Tom can’t stand each other. Doug doesn’t quite understand the quirks and complexities of human relationships, but he won’t let that get in the way of his mission to bring Tom and Julie together. After all, being a ‘rescue’ works both ways… Readers LOVE Pug Actually! ‘A wonderful novel with delicious humour… I'm in love with Doug the pug!’ Jill Mansell ‘Charming, brilliant and an absolute hoot… This book makes the world feel a happier place to be.’ Milly Johnson ‘Absolutely loved it… A quirky, funny, cute read…I found myself smiling throughout…’ NetGalley reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘A marvellously light read that leaves you giggling… you will not regret this one bit.’ NetGalley reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘Absolutely brilliant…Laugh out loud hilarious’ NetGalley reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘A word of caution: Reading this in public may cause uncontrollable laughter and create a scene.’ Library Journal, starred review ‘[A] hilarious romance…’ The Washington Post ‘…amusing and heartwarming, and Doug is a fantastic star of the show.’ Booklist ‘Laugh-out-loud funny’ Publishers Weekly Praise for Matt Dunn:‘Matt Dunn is officially funny.’ Jojo Moyes ‘Funny, warm, honest…’ Jenny Colgan ‘Matt Dunn’s writing makes you laugh out loud.’ Sophie Kinsella

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LONGLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR PRIZE 2020 'Reads like a thriller, or even a spy novel...Walsh keeps you gripped' Rosamund Urwin, Sunday Times'A turbulent but ultimately inspiring tale. The candour...is rare and gripping' Matt Dickinson, The TimesIt was the story that shocked the world: Russian athletics was revealed to be corrupt from top to bottom, with institutionalised doping used to help the nation's athletes win medals they did not deserve. But the full story of the couple who blew the whistle has never been told - until now. When Russian anti-doping official Vitaly Stepanov met the young 800m athlete Yuliya Rusanova, for him it was love at first sight. Within two months, they were married. But there was a problem – in fact, there were lots of problems. She admitted she was doping and that everyone else was doping, and she let him know that she came from a dark place … It could all have brought a very swift end to a very hasty marriage, but gradually the Stepanovs began to realise that whatever you did, the system in Russia was stacked against you. In the end, the only ones they could rely upon were each other. Fully aware of the risks they were taking, they decided to turn the tables on those who had manipulated them and cheated the sporting world. The result of their investigative work sent shockwaves around the planet and led to Russia’s athletes being banned from world sport, while the Stepanovs themselves had to go into hiding. The Russian Affair is a gripping true-life drama that at times reads like a spy novel and at others like an epic love story. But, at the centre of it all, is a quietly determined couple who knew that if they stood together they could shine a light on a corrupt system and bring it crashing to the ground.

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Europe's leading existential thinkers-Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus-all felt that Americans were too self-confident and shallow to accept their philosophy of responsibility, choice, and the absurd. "There is no pessimism in America regarding human nature and social organization," Sartre remarked in 1950, while Beauvoir wrote that Americans had no "feeling for sin and for remorse" and Camus derided American materialism and optimism. Existentialism, however, enjoyed rapid, widespread, and enduring popularity among Americans. No less than their European counterparts, American intellectuals participated in the conversation of existentialism. In Existential America, historian George Cotkin argues that the existential approach to life, marked by vexing despair and dauntless commitment in the face of uncertainty, has deep American roots and helps to define the United States in the twentieth-century in ways that have never been fully realized or appreciated. As Cotkin shows, not only did Americans readily take to existentialism, but they were already heirs to a rich tradition of thinkers-from Jonathan Edwards and Herman Melville to Emily Dickinson and William James-who had wrestled with the problems of existence and the contingency of the world long before Sartre and his colleagues. After introducing this concept of an American existential tradition, Cotkin examines how formal existentialism first arrived in America in the 1930s through discussion of Kierkegaard and the early vogue among New York intellectuals for the works of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus. Cotkin then traces the evolution of existentialism in America: its adoption by Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison to help articulate the African-American experience; its expression in the works of Norman Mailer and photographer Robert Frank; its incorporation into the tenets of the feminist and radical student movements of the 1960s; and its lingering presence in contemporary American thought and popular culture, particularly in such films as Crimes and Misdemeanors, Fight Club and American Beauty. The only full-length study of existentialism in America, this highly engaging and original work provides an invaluable guide to the history of American culture since the end of the Second World War.

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The poems in Rachel Hadas's new book are united by a common preoccupation with passage--passage variously construed. In Section I, the four seasons are glimpsed in turn through the lenses of several types of personal associations, especially parenthood. As spring gives way to fall and winter, separation looms; diverse kinds of temporary and permanent renewal come with spring, and the fifth poem in this section steps outside this cycle. In Section II, the phrase "pass it on" recalls the game "telephone," in which a word is whispered by one speaker to another. Here the poems focus on tradition, primarily as it is transmitted through teaching, but also through art and again parenthood. Thoughts on teaching specific texts (the Iliad, Dickinson's poems, Sophocles' Philoctetes) alternate with more personal moments of contemplation. Finally, in Section III "pass it on" comes to signify transition--whether between spring and summer, city and country, youth and age, presence and absence, or life and death. From "Three Silences": Of all the times when not to speak is best, mother's and infant's is the easiest, the milky mouth still warm against her breast. Before a single year has passed, he's well along the way: language has cast its spell. Each thing he sees now has a tale to tell. A wide expanse of water-cean. Look! Next time, it seems that water is a brook. The world's loose leaves, bound up into a book. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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The Etruscans, a revenant and unusual people, had an Italian empire before the Greeks and Romans did. By the start of the Christian era their wooden temples and writings had vanished, the Romans and the early church had melted their bronze statues, and the people had assimilated. After the last Etruscan augur served the Romans as they fought back the Visigoths in 408 CE, the civilization disappeared but for ruins, tombs, art, and vases.No other lost culture disappeared as completely and then returned to the same extent as the Etruscans. Indeed, no other ancient Mediterranean people was as controversial both in its time and in posterity. Though the Greeks and Romans tarred them as superstitious and decadent, D.H. Lawrence praised their way of life as offering an alternative to modernity. In The Etruscans in the Modern Imagination Sam Solecki chronicles their unexpected return to intellectual and cultural history, beginning with eighteenth-century scholars, collectors, and archaeologists. The resurrection of this vanished kingdom occurred with remarkable vigour in philosophy, literature, music, history, mythology, and the plastic arts. From Wedgwood to Picasso, Proust to Lawrence, Emily Dickinson to Anne Carson, Solecki reads the disembodied traces of Etruscan culture for what they tell us about cultural knowledge and mindsets in different times and places, for the way that ideas about the Etruscans can serve as a reflection or foil to a particular cultural moment, and for the creative alchemy whereby artists turn to the past for the raw materials of contemporary creation. The Etruscans are a cultural curiosity because of their disputed origin, unique language, and distinctive religion and customs, but their destination is no less worthy of our curiosity. The Etruscans in the Modern Imagination provides a fascinating meditation on cultural transmission between ancient and modern civilizations.

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In this book Eileen Wallace focuses on the lives of working children in nineteenth-century Hertfordshire employed in agriculture, straw-plaiting, silk-throwing, paper and brickmaking and as chimney sweeps. In Hertfordshire, as elsewhere, children of a very young age worked long hours, received little education and endured poor housing, hunger and dreadful sanitation. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hertfordshire was still predominantly rural. A great many children worked on the land from an early age and were expected to be able to plough from ten years old. Other families employed their young children to carry out the heaviest tasks in brickmaking. Small boys, in particular, were also much sought after to climb and sweep chimneys, a practice which continued until the last quarter of the century in spite of earlier laws intended to abolish it. Many diseases afflicted these young chimney-sweeps, although deaths and injuries to children working in other industries were all too frequent as well. It is a common assumption that, during the Industrial Revolution, factories and mills existed only in the north of England but, as this book documents, there was industry in the south of the country too, including silk-throwing and papermaking, the working conditions of which matched those in the northern manufactories. Drawing on contemporary reports and illustrations, Eileen Wallace details the contributions of the children towards their families' livelihoods in hard times and the high price they paid in terms of poor health and diet and missed opportunities for education - regular attendance at school was unusual. Whilst there were rare examples of enlightened factory-owners such as John Dickinson, an innovative papermaker who built good housing for his employees to rent, the overall picture that emerges is one of harsh conditions and gruelling labour for Hertfordshire's children during this period.

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Shoreham airport, founded in 1910, is the oldest airport in the UK and the oldest purpose-built commercial airport in the world. Yet aviation began in Sussex far earlier, with balloonists making landfall at Kingsfold near Horsham in 1785. These early activities attracted much attention, with some 30,000 people gathering at Black Rock in Brighton, as well as on the surrounding hills, to watch the first balloon ascent from the town in July 1821 - using coal gas from the recently opened gas works. That particular balloonist, Charles Green, later became immortalised by Charles Dickens in his _Sketches By Boz_. The military were quick to appreciate the potential benefits of aerial observation and in 1880 balloons were deployed for the first time at the annual Volunteer Review at Brighton. Often wind conditions were not favourable for balloons, which prompted the army to consider employing kites and in June 1903 an international competition was held on the South Downs near Findon to see if kites could lift a man into the air. While this was found to be possible, it proved a terrifying experience for the unfortunate pilots. Before powered flight became a reality, it was gliders which were the first heavier than air machines to take to the skies. In 1902 Mr Jose Weiss began launching unmanned gliders off a ramp at Houghton Hill near Amberley, which flew up to two miles. But soon the internal combustion engine made powered, controlled flight a reality and on 7 November 1908, Alec Ogilvie flew a Wright Brothers biplane along the coast at Camber. By the time war broke out in 1914, the people of Sussex had seen the Brooklands to Brighton air race and the establishment of flying schools at Shoreham and Eastbourne. After the Armistice, aviation started becoming increasingly expensive and increasingly regulated. The halcyon days of swashbuckling amateurs taking to the skies in untested contraptions was drawing to a close.

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In this brilliant theological essay, Paul J. Griffiths takes the reader through all the stages of regret. To various degrees, all human beings experience regret. In this concise theological grammar, Paul J. Griffiths analyzes this attitude toward the past and distinguishes its various kinds. He examines attitudes encapsulated in the phrase, “I would it were otherwise,” including regret, contrition, remorse, compunction, lament, and repentance. By using literature (especially poetry) and Christian theology, Griffiths shows both what is good about regret and what can be destructive about it. Griffiths argues that on the one hand regret can take the form of remorse—an agony produced by obsessive and ceaseless examination of the errors, sins, and omissions of the past. This kind of regret accomplishes nothing and produces only pain. On the other hand, when regret is coupled with contrition and genuine sorrow for past errors, it has the capacity both to transfigure the past—which is never merely past—and to open the future. Moreover, in thinking about the phenomenon of regret in the context of Christian theology, Griffiths focuses especially on the notion of the LORD’s regret. Is it even reasonable to claim that the LORD regrets? Griffiths shows not only that it is but also that the LORD’s regret should structure how we regret as human beings. Griffiths investigates the work of Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Tomas Tranströmer, Paul Celan, Jane Austen, George Herbert, and Robert Frost to show how regret is not a negative feature of human life but rather is essential for human flourishing and ultimately is to be patterned on the LORD’s regret. Regret: A Theology will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy, theology, and literature, as well as to literate readers who want to understand the phenomenon of regret more deeply.

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In this brilliant theological essay, Paul J. Griffiths takes the reader through all the stages of regret. To various degrees, all human beings experience regret. In this concise theological grammar, Paul J. Griffiths analyzes this attitude toward the past and distinguishes its various kinds. He examines attitudes encapsulated in the phrase, “I would it were otherwise,” including regret, contrition, remorse, compunction, lament, and repentance. By using literature (especially poetry) and Christian theology, Griffiths shows both what is good about regret and what can be destructive about it. Griffiths argues that on the one hand regret can take the form of remorse—an agony produced by obsessive and ceaseless examination of the errors, sins, and omissions of the past. This kind of regret accomplishes nothing and produces only pain. On the other hand, when regret is coupled with contrition and genuine sorrow for past errors, it has the capacity both to transfigure the past—which is never merely past—and to open the future. Moreover, in thinking about the phenomenon of regret in the context of Christian theology, Griffiths focuses especially on the notion of the LORD’s regret. Is it even reasonable to claim that the LORD regrets? Griffiths shows not only that it is but also that the LORD’s regret should structure how we regret as human beings. Griffiths investigates the work of Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Tomas Tranströmer, Paul Celan, Jane Austen, George Herbert, and Robert Frost to show how regret is not a negative feature of human life but rather is essential for human flourishing and ultimately is to be patterned on the LORD’s regret. Regret: A Theology will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy, theology, and literature, as well as to literate readers who want to understand the phenomenon of regret more deeply.

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Wroxeter: Ashes under Uricon offers a perspective on how people over time have viewed the abandoned Roman city of Wroxeter in Shropshire. It responds to three main artistic outputs relating to the site: poetry, images and texts. The poets include Wilfred Owen, A.E. Housman and Mary Webb. The writers cover a range of interests relating to the site but include Darwin, Dickens, Rosemary Sutcliff and John Buchan. The artists are perhaps less well-known but include watercolours by Thomas Girtin, archaeological reconstructions by Alan Sorrell and Amedée Forrestier, and paintings by Wroxeter’s own resident artist, Thomas Prytherch. Photographs are represented by the work of Francis Bedford and others more closely associated with aerial archaeology such as J.K. St Joseph and Arnold Baker. While the famous names have their value, The book also investigates what locals and visitors thought of the site over time – how they perceived it and have responded to it. It reflects in particular upon how the public and locals responded to the archaeological discoveries on the site and perceived the narratives that were created by the archaeologists working on it. It contends that archaeologists are just as much story-tellers as the writers, poets or artists, although their work is more filtered or controlled, and through these narratives, they inspire others. A further strand to the book is to explore the increasing focus over the past century on the democratisation of access to and understanding of the site, alongside increasing state intervention in its running. This too has had its impact on who visits and what is understood about the site. A short concluding section offers a vision of how the site might develop in the near-future, and how its cultural side might flourish once again.

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Board: AQA Examination: English Language & Literature Specification: GCSE 9-1 Set Text covered: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens Type: Set Text Study Guide "World class targeted revision and practice, with lots of specific tips and tricks on how to excel in the exam." John Dabell, Teach Secondary magazine Combined revision and practice books for A Christmas Carol to get you top marks in your GCSE English Literature essays. Our study guides are specifically written to support your revision for the closed book AQA GCSE English Literature examination. Each study guide is written by experts in teaching English and uses an active, stepped approach to revision to maximise learning. This study guide covers the chronology of the text and focuses on key events, characters, themes, context, language and structure to help you demonstrate your knowledge and understanding and achieve higher marks. With loads of exam-style practice questions (and answers) you can't go wrong! Books in this series cover the following: Paper 1 Section A - Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth) Paper 1 Section B - Nineteenth-century novel (The Sign of Four, A Christmas Carol, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) Paper 2 Section A - Modern texts (Blood Brothers, An Inspector Calls,Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies) Paper 2 Sections B and C - Poetry (Love and Relationships anthology, Power and Conflict anthology and Unseen) The accompanying app uses cutting-edge technology to help you revise on-the-go to: Use the free, personalised digital revision planner and get stuck into the quick tests to check your understanding Download our free revision cards which you can save to your phone to help you revise on the go Implement 'active' revision techniques - giving you lots of tips and tricks to help the knowledge sink in Active revision is easy with the following features included throughout the study guides: Snap it! Read it, snap it on your phone, revise it...helps you retain key facts Nail it! Authoritative essential tips and guidance to help you understand what's required in the AQA exam Do it! Short activities to consolidate your knowledge and understanding of the text Stretch it! Support for the really tough stuff that will get you higher grades Define it! Definitions of unfamiliar language in the text and important subject terminology Scholastic have a full suite of revision guide, study guide, app, student book, revision cards and essay planners - the most comprehensive support for GCSE set texts available!

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Dear reader, There is nothing to be found in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events but misery and despair. You still have time to choose another international best-selling series to read. But if you insist on discovering the unpleasant adventures of the Baudelaire orphans, then proceed with caution… Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are intelligent children. They are charming, and resourceful, and have pleasant facial features. Unfortunately, they are exceptionally unlucky. In The Wide Window the siblings encounter a hurricane, a signalling device, hungry leaches, cold cucumber soup, a horrible villain and a doll named Pretty Penny. In the tradition of great storytellers, from Dickens to Dahl, comes an exquisitely dark comedy that is both literary and irreverent, hilarious and deftly crafted. Despite their wretched contents, A Series of Unfortunate Events has sold 60 million copies worldwide and been made into a Hollywood film starring Jim Carrey. And in the future things are poised to get much worse, thanks to the forthcoming Netflix series directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. You have been warned. Are you unlucky enough to own all 13 adventures? The Bad Beginning The Reptile Room The Wide Window The Miserable Mill The Austere Academy The Ersatz Elevator The Vile Village The Hostile Hospital The Carnivorous Carnival The Slippery Slope The Grim Grotto The Penultimate Peril The End And what about All The Wrong Questions? In this four-book series a 13-year-old Lemony chronicles his dangerous and puzzling apprenticeship in a mysterious organisation that nobody knows anything about: ‘Who Could That Be at This Hour?’ ‘When Did you Last See Her?’ ‘Shouldn’t You Be in School?’ ‘Why is This Night Different from All Other Nights?’ Lemony Snicket was born before you were and is likely to die before you as well. He was born in a small town where the inhabitants were suspicious and prone to riot. He grew up near the sea and currently lives beneath it. Until recently, he was living somewhere else. Brett Helquist was born in Ganado, Arizona, grew up in Orem, Utah, and now lives in New York City. He earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Brigham Young University and has been illustrating ever since. His art has appeared in many publications, including Cricket magazine and The New York Times.

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‘The word “mesmerising” is frequently applied to memoirs, but seldom as deservedly as in the case of Girl With Dove’ Financial Times ‘Reading is a form of escape and an avid reader is an escape artist…’ Brilliantly original, funny and clever Honor Clark, Spectator, Book of the Year Growing up in a dilapidated house by the sea where men were forbidden, Sally’s childhood world was filled with mystery and intrigue. Hippies trailed through the kitchen looking for God – their leader was Aunt Di, who ruled the house with charismatic force. When Sally’s baby brother vanishes from his pram, she becomes suspicious of the activities going on around her. What happened to Baby David and the woman called Poor Sue? And where did all the people singing and wailing prayers in the front room suddenly go? Disappearing into a world of books and reading, Sally adopts the tried and tested methods of Miss Marple. Taking books for hints and clues, she turns herself into a reading detective. Her discovery of Jane Eyre marks the beginning of a vivid journey through Victorian literature where she also finds the kind, eccentric figure of Charles Dickens’ Betsey Trotwood. These characters soon become her heroines, acting as a part of an alternative family, offering humour and guidance during many difficult moments in Sally’s life. Combining the voices of literary characters with those of her real-life counterparts, Girl With Dove reads as a magical series of strange encounters, climaxing with a comic performance of Shakespeare in the children’s home where Sally is eventually sent. Weaving literary classics with a young girl’s coming of age story, this is a book that testifies to the transformative power of reading and the literary imagination. Mixing fairy tale, literary classics, nursery rhymes and folklore, it is the story of a child’s adventure in wonderland and search for truth in an adult world often cast in deep shadow.

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Two eminent Deans Emeritus in two different continents unravel contemporary social and public policy issues that are seldom discussed in traditional textbooks. In a new Dickensian era, uplifting people's lives amidst faltering social institutions and massive cultural meltdowns, policy discourse is a crucial obligation; it's a discipline that entails pragmatic vision and prescient planning. Social Policy on the Cusp is a modest attempt to unravel the nexus of nihilism that thwarts even civilization-nations' efforts to promote inclusive diversity. Brij Mohan and Guy Backman have analyzed certain aspects and issues in American, European and Asian contexts that unravel intersectionality of problems, people, and policies. Brij Mohan, a policy gadfly, examines the human condition using Nietzschean, Foucautean and Gandhian thoughts that expose the hidden malaise of unhappiness, angst and anger in a globalized world. Social policy as a euphemism, he contends, sustains chaos and resentment without transforming oppressive systems. His five chapters offer penetrating insights into the problems that a therapeutic culture breeds. With an uncanny sagacity, he examines coloniality and post-colonialism as a womb that spells paroxysms of despair. Guy Bäckman has contributed five chapters, which are based on his research and findings on poverty and inequalities that plague the world today. The vision of a better, cohesive world has guided the design of the empirically oriented chapters in Part Two. Social policy, through the use of advanced technology and algorithmic solutions, promotes transformative policy actions based on preferred values and goals rooted in cultural conditions. In a new political economy, it could become the instructions we write to ourselves to navigate a society that is smarter, safer, and more just. Two invited contributions by Stan Weeber, USA and Eleni Makri, Greece, further narrate the tales of "smart city" and "workplace discrimination" in light of the failed public policies in a new brave world.

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In her first collection of essays, Molly McQuade performs the role of the ideal reader-passionately interested in ideas and irrepressibly ambivalent. She considers poetry from its composition or translation to its publication, critical reception, and consumption. Her close readings of poems by Emily Dickinson and John Ashbery, among others, offer new insights for those readers blinded by familiarity. She reflects on the consequences of literary friendships, such as Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop's, and contends with hostile influences and their benefits-in her own case, confronting and absorbing the work of E.B. White.But McQuade refuses to stay within the lines that describe poetry per se. Her thoughts on the genre are also enriched by discussions of distinctly nonverbal poetic expression in painting and film, theater and dance. McQuade invigorates prosody's perennial questions-form and function, fashion and faction-and addresses the importance of humor as an elixir for thinking. She dares to define the subject of poetry itself as pleasure. "Poetry," she ventures, "doesn't need to be literary."In every instance, these essays feature a fine mind's play on the page as well as McQuade's characteristic expertise: an awareness that is at once historically informed and hip. If metaphor itself expands the mind's capacity for contrary ideas, then McQuade is a metaphor made manifest. Among writers on writing, here is a writer who is utterly and remarkably unlike any other.Molly McQuade's essays and criticism have appeared in The Village Voice, Hungry Mind Review, New England Review, Boston Review, Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. She has served as editor of the monthly Poetry Calendar magazine and previously founded and edited the poetry review column of Publishers Weekly. Her writing has received fellowships and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the Illinois Arts Council. Her first book, An Unsentimental Education, a collection of biographical portraits of writers, was published in 1995 by the University of Chicago Press. Her poetry, nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, ha

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In Curios, her first collection of poetry, Judith Taylor emerges as the speediest meditative poet since Emily Dickinson. Her poems set off for all the worthy old ontological destinations, but what new routes they discover! Taylor can cover more ground in eight lines than most poets manage in eighty. But her rapid transit is accomplished without loss of density or emotional resonance.Taylor's love of literary tales is deeply embedded in-and extended by-her poems. References to Wilde, Rilke, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Charlotte Brontë, and Lady Murasaki are rife, as are characters from fairy tales and children's stories. Even familial figures take on archetypal roles, lending the speaker's personal memory a mythic significance. The most pronounced motifs in Curios suggest a world enriched by fantasy: ghosts, fans, screens, masks, silk, windows, dreams, and curtains. But Taylor makes apparent that her imagination has bloomed not only to augment but to accommodate the world's multifariousness: I wanted everything connected to everything in a logical universe. / . . . In time, the world begins to shape your stubborn mind. ("She's Got Mail")This debut collection is remarkable not only for its consistent style but also because it showcases a new form of poem-her own invention-a "curio" in itself. In extended lines, usually seven to eight, Taylor delivers deadpan statements and poses questions that are startlingly provocative-more like koans than interrogatives. Her poems range widely and wildly, at times taking surrealistic turns, yet they always maintain contact with the earth. It is a bonus to the reader that Taylor's grounding wire is humor. Even as the poems astonish by their swiftness, daring, and the accuracy of their surprising connections, they make us laugh: Do the stars hiss when they slash across the sky, cooling down? / Get a grip on yourself, said Mother often. ("Excess")The volume's title, Curios, is remarkably apt. With unexpected images and questions reminiscent of childhood, Taylor riddles the surface of perception. These poems prove that curiosity-and imagination-will get the best of us. This title received a grant from the Greenwall Fund of The Academy of Ameri

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Europe's leading existential thinkers-Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus-all felt that Americans were too self-confident and shallow to accept their philosophy of responsibility, choice, and the absurd. "There is no pessimism in America regarding human nature and social organization," Sartre remarked in 1950, while Beauvoir wrote that Americans had no "feeling for sin and for remorse" and Camus derided American materialism and optimism. Existentialism, however, enjoyed rapid, widespread, and enduring popularity among Americans. No less than their European counterparts, American intellectuals participated in the conversation of existentialism. In Existential America, historian George Cotkin argues that the existential approach to life, marked by vexing despair and dauntless commitment in the face of uncertainty, has deep American roots and helps to define the United States in the twentieth-century in ways that have never been fully realized or appreciated. As Cotkin shows, not only did Americans readily take to existentialism, but they were already heirs to a rich tradition of thinkers-from Jonathan Edwards and Herman Melville to Emily Dickinson and William James-who had wrestled with the problems of existence and the contingency of the world long before Sartre and his colleagues. After introducing this concept of an American existential tradition, Cotkin examines how formal existentialism first arrived in America in the 1930s through discussion of Kierkegaard and the early vogue among New York intellectuals for the works of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus. Cotkin then traces the evolution of existentialism in America: its adoption by Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison to help articulate the African-American experience; its expression in the works of Norman Mailer and photographer Robert Frank; its incorporation into the tenets of the feminist and radical student movements of the 1960s; and its lingering presence in contemporary American thought and popular culture, particularly in such films as Crimes and Misdemeanors, Fight Club and American Beauty. The only full-length study of existentialism in America, this highly engaging and original work provides an invaluable guide to the history of American culture since the end of the Second World War.

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A dramatic and heartwarming Victorian saga, perfect for fans of Maggie Hope and Anne Bennett.Shropshire, 1875.Hettie Jones has grown up in Ironbridge. She has never known her father and, since her mother's death, has been brought up by the Malone family, who treat her as one of their own. She works as a pit girl at the local coal mine, alongside her childhood playfellow, Evan - although lately, their friendship seems to be blossoming into something more.But when Queenie King takes a fancy to her, Hettie's life is transformed. Trained first as a lady's maid, and then hurtled into a world of luxury and gentility, she finds her new position difficult to reconcile with her past life. And with Queenie's daughter-in-law scheming against her, Hettie's situation becomes dire.Can Hettie really use her new position for good, and will she find a way to bridge the divide between rich and poor?'A compelling blend of real history, rich period detail, and a gritty, authentic story brimming with love, loss, intrigue, hope, and bitter revenge, The Orphan of Ironbridge delivers a dramatic final chapter to this exciting trilogy.' Lancashire Evening Post Praise for The Daughters of Ironbridge: 'A Journey. Compelling. Addictive.' Val Wood'Evocative, dramatic and hugely compelling . . . The Daughters of Ironbridge has all the hallmarks of a classic saga. I loved it' Miranda Dickinson 'Feisty female characters, an atmospheric setting and a spell-binding storyline make this a phenomenal read' Cathy Bramley 'The Daughters of Ironbridge has that compulsive, page-turning quality, irresistible characters the reader gets hugely invested in, and Walton has created a brilliantly alive, vivid and breathing world in Ironbridge' Louisa Treger 'Such great characters who will stay with me for a long time' Beth Miller 'The attention to period detail and beautiful writing drew me right in and kept me reading' Lynne Francis 'Vivid, page-turning drama' Pippa Beecheno 'A powerful sense of place and period, compelling characters and a pacy plot had me racing to the end' Gill Paul 'A story that is vivid, twisting and pacy, with characters that absolutely leap off the page' Iona Grey'Beautiful and poignant. I'll definitely be reading The Secrets of Ironbridge' Tania Crosse

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In the great age of English garden design, eighteenth-century women working in the “sister arts” of painting, poetry, and landscape gardening adapted the Linnaean system of plant classification and the tradition of the erotic garden to create art with and for other women that celebrated everything from classical friendship to erotic love. In this book, filled with lush illustrations and intriguing stories, Lisa L. Moore reveals how these women artists used flowers, gardens, and landscapes to express their love for other women.Aristocratic diarist Mary Delany built a garden grotto for the exclusive use of herself and the naturalist and collector Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland. Romantic poet Anna Seward, mourning the loss of Honora Sneyd to an unworthy marriage and then death, wrote her beloved’s face and body into her landscape poems. And in 1790s Connecticut, feminist intellectual Sarah Pierce transformed texts and images into a new poetic evocation of intimacy between women both egalitarian and erotic. These women, Moore shows, influenced later works by Emily Dickinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, and Tee Corinne.Moore goes on to trace the legacy of the lesbian sister arts tradition in subsequent art and poetry, including contemporary multimedia work by Kara Walker, Michelene Thomas, Alma Lopez, and Allyson Mitchell. Her book redefines this unstudied sister arts tradition, which becomes visible only when we understand how the works of these women exemplify what she deems “lesbian genres.” It will captivate readers who want to know more about women’s contributions to garden history and landscape design—as well as those looking for a new perspective on queer history, literature, and culture.

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The TOP FIVE Sunday Times Bestseller***PLUS Carrie's BRAND-NEW novel In The Time We Lost is available to PRE-ORDER now***'Enchanting, evocative and utterly magical.. I LOVED this book!'MIRANDA DICKINSON'A brilliant book' LOUISE PENTLAND'Bewitching'HEAT******Theatres have a certain kind of magic. When the curtain rises, we are all enraptured by the glare of the lights and the smell of the greasepaint but it's when the curtain falls that the real drama begins . . . In 1952 two young lovers meet, in secret, at the beautiful Southern Cross theatre in the very heart of London's West End. Their relationship is made up of clandestine meetings and stolen moments because there is someone who will make them suffer if he discovers she is no longer 'his'. But life in the theatre doesn't always go according to plan and tragedy and heartache are waiting in the wings for all the players . . . Almost seventy years later, a new production of When the Curtain Falls arrives at the theatre, bringing with it Oscar Bright and Olive Green and their budding romance. Very soon, though, strange things begin to happen and they learn about the ghost that's haunted the theatre since 1952, a ghost who can only be seen on one night of the year. Except the ghost is appearing more often and seems hell bent on sabotaging Oscar and Olive. The young couple realise they need to right that wrong from years gone by, but can they save themselves before history repeats itself and tragedy strikes once more?Moulin Rouge meets Phantom of the Opera in this spellbinding and magical story of unrequited love and revenge. When the Curtain Falls is Carrie Hope Fletcher at her romantic best - it will take your breath away.

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Copper Nickel is a meeting place for multiple aesthetics, bringing work that engages with our social and historical context to the world with original pieces and dynamic translations. Since the journal’s relaunch in 2015, work published in Copper Nickel has been selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has been listed as “notable” in the Best American Essays. Contributors to Copper Nickel have received numerous honors for their work, including the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; the Laughlin Award; the American, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington State Book Awards; the Georg Büchner Prize; the Prix Max Jacob; the Lenore Marshall Prize; the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; the Lambda Literary Award; as well as fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Witter Bynner, Soros, Rona Jaffee, Bush, and Jerome Foundations. Issue 24 features twenty-two “flash fictions” by established and emerging fiction writers, including Ed Falco, Robert Long Foreman, Stephanie Dickinson, Pedro Ponce, Matthew Salesses, Ruth Joffre, Danielle Lazarin, Joseph Aguilar, Thomas Legendre, Patricia Murphy, Wendy Oleson, Alicita Rodríguez, and Thaddeus Rutkowski. Also featured are translation folios by Italian experimental poet and computer scientist Lorenzo Carlucci, Brazilian poet and PEN Brazil National Prize Winner Denise Emmer, and internationally renowned Russian poet Tatiana Shcherbina. Other contributors include poets Kaveh Akbar, Adam Tavel, David Dodd Lee, Kerri French, Ashley Keyser, Ryan Sharp, Kevin Craft, J. Allyn Rosser, Zeina Hashem Beck, Ed Bok Lee, John A. Nieves, &c.; fiction writers Bradley Bazzle, Erin Kate Ryan, and T. D. Storm; and nonfiction writers Aimée Baker, Dan Beachy-Quick, and S. Farrell Smith.

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Cosy up with this heartwarming winter love story . . .'Sensitive, insightful and wonderfully authentic. A beautiful festive love story’ HEIDI SWAIN'An utter delight; festive and funny, tender and humorous' READER REVIEW *****'A gently woven love story . . . heartfelt, perceptive and very, very human' JULIETTA HENDERSON'A really great read for a cold winter's day with a hot chocolate' READER REVIEW *****'Relatable and emotional . . . beautifully captures all the romance and magic of Christmas. A festive gem' HOLLY MILLER*****ONE DECEMBER DAY, LAURA MEETS LUKE...Luke loves Christmas. He loves the woolly scarves, the mulled wine, the music, the snow. But he’s beginning to ask: what good is it, if you have no one to share it with?Laura doesn’t think there’s anything magical about December. She’d never normally be seen dead with a man in a Christmas jumper. But, at a crowded gig this winter's evening, has she found her soulmate in handsome, funny frontman, Luke?Under the lights, something magical begins. But will Luke and Laura still feel the same on this day next December? And the one after that?Finding love at Christmas is special. But is staying in love - year after year, through the joy and heartbreak - the real miracle?Luke and Laura are about to find out. One December day at a time...Praise for Rachel Marks:'A total delight. Beautifully observed, painfully funny and profoundly moving, it's a wise and wonderful story of hope and love. I adored it!' MIRANDA DICKINSON'A delightful, heart-warming read. The characters feel so real... I'm sure I must know them somehow!' SOPHIE COUSENS'Rachel Marks packs a novel with all the emotions - hope, fear, love, despair and - ultimately - joy' CLARE POOLEY'Unpredictable and satisfying' HEIDI SWAIN'As tender and emotional as it is funny, it made me laugh out loud A LOT, and it made me sob' CRESSIDA McLAUGHLIN'Heartbreaking, heartwarming, perfect!' ROSIE GOODWIN

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The Sunday Times Bestseller'Enchanting, evocative and utterly magical, When The Curtain Falls is a theatrical delight... I LOVED this book!' Miranda Dickinson'Carrie Hope Fletcher has carved out a lovely niche with her fantastical novels. But this new one - set in the West End showbiz world - sees her brilliance go up a notch. Bewitching.' Heat Magazine'A brilliant book' Louise Pentland******Theatres have a certain kind of magic. When the curtain rises, we are all enraptured by the glare of the lights and the smell of the greasepaint but it's when the curtain falls that the real drama begins . . . In 1952 two young lovers meet, in secret, at the beautiful Southern Cross theatre in the very heart of London's West End. Their relationship is made up of clandestine meetings and stolen moments because there is someone who will make them suffer if he discovers she is no longer 'his'. But life in the theatre doesn't always go according to plan and tragedy and heartache are waiting in the wings for all the players . . . Almost seventy years later, a new production of When the Curtain Falls arrives at the theatre, bringing with it Oscar Bright and Olive Green and their budding romance. Very soon, though, strange things begin to happen and they learn about the ghost that's haunted the theatre since 1952, a ghost who can only be seen on one night of the year. Except the ghost is appearing more often and seems hell bent on sabotaging Oscar and Olive. The young couple realise they need to right that wrong from years gone by, but can they save themselves before history repeats itself and tragedy strikes once more?Moulin Rouge meets Phantom of the Opera in this spellbinding and magical story of unrequited love and revenge. When the Curtain Falls is Carrie Hope Fletcher at her romantic best - it will take your breath away.

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The novel has lost its purpose, Joseph Bottum argues in this fascinating new look at the history of fiction. We have not transcended our need for what novels provide, but we have grown to distrust the culture that allowed novels to flourish. “For almost three hundred years,” Bottum writes, “the novel was a major art form, perhaps the major art form, of the modern world—the device by which, more than any other, we tried to explain ourselves to ourselves.” But now we no longer “read novels the way we used to.”In a historical tour de force—the kind of sweeping analysis almost lost to contemporary literary criticism—Bottum traces the emergence of the novel from the modern religious crisis of the individual soul and the atomized self. In chapters on such figures as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Mann, he examines the enormous ambitions once possessed by novels and finds in these older works a rebuke of our current failure of nerve.“We walk with our heads down,” Bottum writes. “Without a sense of the old goals and reasons––a sense of the good achieved, understood as progress––all that remains are the crimes the culture committed in the past to get where it is now. uncompensated by achievement, unexplained by purpose, these unameliorated sins must now seem overwhelming: the very definition of a failed culture.” In readings of everything from genre fiction to children’s books, Bottum finds a lack of faith in the ability of art to respond to the deep problems of existence. “the decline of the novel’s prestige reflects and confirms a genuine cultural crisis,” he writes.Linking the novel to its religious origins, Bottum describes the urgent search for meaning in the new conditions of the modern age: “If the natural world is imagined by modernity as empty of purpose, then the hunt for nature’s importance is supernatural, by definition.” the novel became a fundamental device by which culture pursued the supernatural—facilitated by modernity’s confidence in science and cultural progress. Losing that confidence, Bottum says, we lost the purpose of the art: “the novel didn’t fail us. We failed the novel.”Told in fast-paced, wide-ranging prose, Bottum’s The Decline of the Novel is a succinct critique of classical and contemporary fiction, providing guidelines for navigating the vast genre. this book is a must-read for those who hunger for grand accounts of literature, students of literary form, critics of contemporary art, and general readers who wish to learn, finally, what we all used to know: the deep moral purpose of reading novels.

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Riverdance exploded across the stage at Dublin’s Point Theatre one spring evening in 1994 during a seven-minute interval of the Eurovision Song Contest hosted by Ireland. It was a watershed moment in the cultural history of a country embracing the future, a confident leap into world music grounded in the footfall of the choreographed kick-line. It was a moment forty-five years in the making for its composer. In this tenderly unfurled memoir Bill Whelan rehearses a lifetime of unconscious preparation as step by step he revisits his past, from with his Barrington Street home in 1950s Limerick, to the forcing ground of University College Dublin and the Law Library during the 1960s, to his attic studio in Ranelagh. Along the way the reader is introduced to people and places in the immersive world of fellow musicians, artists and producers, friends and collaborators, embracing the spectrum of Irish music as it broke boundaries, entering the global slipstream of the 1980s and 1990s. As art and commerce fused, dramas and contending personalities come to view behind the arras of stage, screen and recording desk. Whelan pays tribute to a parade of those who formed his world. He describes the warmth and sustenance of his Limerick childhood, his parents and Denise Quinn, won through assiduous courtship; the McCourts and Jesuit fathers of his early days, the breakthrough with a tempestuous Richard Harris who summoned him to London; Danny Doyle, Shay Healy, Dickie Rock, Planxty, The Dubliners and Stockton’s Wing, Noel Pearson, Seán Ó Riada; working with Jimmy Webb, Leon Uris, The Corrs, Paul McGuinness, Moya Doherty, John McColgan, Jean Butler and Michael Flatley. Written with wry, inimitable Irish humour and insight, Bill Whelan’s self deprecation allows us to to see the players in all their glory, vulnerability and idiosyncracy. This fascinating work reveals the nuts, bolts, sheer effort and serendipities that formed the road to Riverdance in his reinvention of the Irish tradition for a modern age. As the show went on to perform to millions worldwide, Whelan was honoured with a 1997 Grammy Award when Riverdance was named the ‘Best Musical Show Album.’ Richly detailed and illustrated, The Road to Riverdance forms an enduring repository of memory for all concerned with the performing arts.

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Dear reader, There is nothing to be found in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events but misery and despair. You still have time to choose another international best-selling series to read. But if you insist on discovering the unpleasant adventures of the Baudelaire orphans, then proceed with caution… Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are intelligent children. They are charming, and resourceful, and have pleasant facial features. Unfortunately, they are exceptionally unlucky. In The Miserable Mill the siblings encounter a giant pincher machine, a bad casserole, a man with a cloud of smoke where his head should be, a hypnotist, a terrible accident and coupons. In the tradition of great storytellers, from Dickens to Dahl, comes an exquisitely dark comedy that is both literary and irreverent, hilarious and deftly crafted. Despite their wretched contents, A Series of Unfortunate Events has sold 60 million copies worldwide and been made into a Hollywood film starring Jim Carrey. And in the future things are poised to get much worse, thanks to the forthcoming Netflix series directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. You have been warned. Are you unlucky enough to own all 13 adventures? The Bad Beginning The Reptile Room The Wide Window The Miserable Mill The Austere Academy The Ersatz Elevator The Vile Village The Hostile Hospital The Carnivorous Carnival The Slippery Slope The Grim Grotto The Penultimate Peril The End And what about All The Wrong Questions? In this four-book series a 13-year-old Lemony chronicles his dangerous and puzzling apprenticeship in a mysterious organisation that nobody knows anything about: ‘Who Could That Be at This Hour?’ ‘When Did you Last See Her?’ ‘Shouldn’t You Be in School?’ ‘Why is This Night Different from All Other Nights?’ Lemony Snicket was born before you were and is likely to die before you as well. He was born in a small town where the inhabitants were suspicious and prone to riot. He grew up near the sea and currently lives beneath it. Until recently, he was living somewhere else. Brett Helquist was born in Ganado, Arizona, grew up in Orem, Utah, and now lives in New York City. He earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Brigham Young University and has been illustrating ever since. His art has appeared in many publications, including Cricket magazine and The New York Times.

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Americans have come to expect that the nation’s presidential campaigns will be characterized by a carnival atmosphere emphasizing style over substance. But this fascinating account of the pivotal 1840 election reveals how the now-unavoidable traditions of big money, big rallies, shameless self-promotion, and carefully manufactured candidate images first took root in presidential politics.Pulitzer Prize–nominated former Wall Street Journal reporter Ronald G. Shafer tells the colorful story of the election battle between sitting president Martin Van Buren, a professional Democratic politician from New York, and Whig Party upstart William Henry Harrison, a military hero who was nicknamed “Old Tippecanoe” after a battlefield where he fought and won in 1811. Shafer shows how the pivotal campaign of “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” marked a series of firsts that changed presidential politicking forever: the first presidential campaign as mass entertainment, directed at middle- and lower-income voters; the first “image campaign,” in which strategists painted Harrison as an everyman living in a log cabin sipping hard cider (in fact, he was born into wealth, lived in a twenty-two-room mansion, and drank only sweet cider); the first campaign in which a candidate, Harrison, traveled and delivered speeches directly to voters; the first one influenced by major campaign donations; the first in which women openly participated; and the first involving massive grassroots rallies, attended by tens of thousands and marked by elaborate fanfare, including bands, floats, a log cabin on wheels, and the world’s tallest man.Some of history’s most fascinating figures—including Susan B. Anthony, Charles Dickens, Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, Thaddeus Stevens, and Walt Whitman—pass through this colorful story, which is essential reading for anyone interested in learning when image first came to trump ideas in presidential politics.

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Engage diverse learners in your classroom with culturally responsive instruction!How to Teach Students Who Don′t Look like You helps educators recognize the impact that culture has on the learning process. The term "diverse learners" encompasses a variety of student groups, including homeless children, migrant children, English language learners, children experiencing gender identity issues, children with learning disabilities, and children with special needs.This revised second edition reflects the latest trends in education, and includes new coverage of standards-based, culturally responsive lesson planning and instruction, differentiated instruction, RTI, and the Common Core State Standards. Bonnie M. Davis helps all educators: Tailor instruction to their own unique student population Reflect on their own cultures and how this shapes their views of the world Cultivate a deeper understanding of race and racism in the U.S. Create culturally responsive instruction Understand culture and how it affects learning How to Teach Students Who Don′t Look like You provides crucial strategies to assist educators in addressing the needs of diverse learners and closing the achievement gap."This book ′fires up′ educators by speaking from the soul to reach the heart, from the research to engage the mind, and from the skillful hand to build the necessary expertise."—Peggy Dickerson, Professional Service ProviderRegion XIII Texas Education Service Center, Austin, TX "The vignettes and classroom situations help the reader understand how race plays out in our society and in our classrooms. Dr. Davis takes on a very volatile topic and is able to engage the reader without offending. The examples, vignettes, cases, and stories will hook the readers just as they did me. Once I began reading the book, I could not put it down."—Ava Maria Whittemore, Minority Achievement CoordinatorFrederick County Public Schools, MD

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'In the Research Handbook of Expatriates, Yvonne McNulty and Jan Selmer have created a seminal work that should be on the bookshelf of all social scientists who work in the field of expatriation. More senior scholars will appreciate the ''deep dive'' each chapter takes into the literature, each one acting as a reservoir they can draw from to powerfully inform their future research efforts. Doctoral students and newly minted PhDs will find this book to be especially valuable - the final chapter of the book alone provides inestimable career and ''how-to-publish'' guidance for them in the field of expatriation. The coverage of the history, construct, milieu, research methodologies, and issues is the best I have come across in a single volume in over 30 years of working in the field. In short, this is a monumental contribution to the study of expatriates and global mobility.'- Mark E. Mendenhall, University of Tennessee'McNulty and Selmer's edited volume does a wonderful job of consolidating and integrating everything we know about expatriates and their different types. This long-overdue Handbook, featuring chapters by top researchers, lays a trail for scholars to further advance the study of expatriates.'- Joyce Osland, San Jose State University'McNulty and Selmer's edited book of readings on virtually all aspects of expatriates deserves a prominent place in the library of researchers and practitioners interested in this subject. The Handbook provides a historical overview as well as the latest trends in expatriate studies and concludes with useful guidelines on how to conduct as well as improve the quality of research in this field.'- Rosalie L. Tung, Simon Fraser University, CanadaConstituting a comprehensive and carefully designed collection of contributions, the Research Handbook of Expatriates provides a nuanced and up-to-date discussion of expatriates. Theoretically broad and groundbreaking, it offers important and contemporary insights into emerging areas of research warranting future consideration.Drawing upon a range of perspectives from the field’s most distinguished academics, contributions review the history of the literature in relation to expatriates, from the development of the expatriate construct through to the current state of research on business expatriates. Subsequent chapters progress into detailed examinations of the various types of business expatriates including LGBT, self-initiated expatriates, female assignees, inpatriates, international business travellers and commuters, and millennials. Other themes include expatriate performance, adjustment, expatriates to and from developing countries, global talent management, and expatriates’ safety and security. The Research Handbook also covers expatriates in diverse communities such as education, military, missionary, sports and ‘Aidland’, and provides additional commentaries relating to methodological issues, research with practitioners, case studies, biculturals and ATCKs, and global families. The Research Handbook concludes with publishing advice for PhD and early career researchers.Stimulating insightful new areas of study, this collection is a must read for academics and scholars in the field of expatriate research, international management, global human resource management and business administration. It also offers a wealth of guidance for executives and recruiters along with expatriates and professionals who may expatriate.Contributors: M. Andresen, C. Brewster, L. Care, J.-L. Cerdin, L. Clarke, D.G. Collings, M. Collins, A. Corbin, M. Crowley-Henry, M. Dickmann, H. Dolles, R. Donohue, C. Doss, B. Egilsson, A. Fee, K.L. Fisher, K.J. Hanek, A. Haslberger, T. Hippler, K. Hutchings, M. Isichei, J. Lauring, L. Mäkelä, R. McPhail, S. Michailova, M. Moeller, B. Oberholster

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The untold story of Point Frederick, where early nineteenth-century Canadians built warships that stopped invasion and brought peace.Warriors and Warships brings to life a much neglected part of Canada’s military history, covering the warships and the people who built them at Point Frederick from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. Opposite Kingston, Point Frederick was the 1789 dockyard home of the Provincial Marine on Lake Ontario and the headquarters of Britain’s Royal Navy from 1813 to 1853. Today, it is the home of the Royal Military College of Canada. In this detailed narrative, with over one hundred colour archival maps, aerial views, photographs, and 3D reconstructions, Banks recounts Point Frederick’s building of great sail and steam warships and the roles these vessels played in conflict on Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River, and Niagara. Among the conflicts is the War of 1812, when French Canadian and British shipwrights made warships that forced the U.S. Navy into port and led to the American withdrawal from Canada. Banks also covers the role of the ships in the settlement of Upper Canada, the rebellion of 1837, the early planning of the Rideau Canal, and the beginning of the undefended border. Along the way, Banks introduces an array of people from Upper Canada, such as Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe and his wife, Elizabeth Posthuma; Governor General Lord Dorchester; General Isaac Brock; Sir James Yeo, and even Charles Dickens. He also describes the day-to-day activities at Point Frederick, beyond shipbuilding and military campaigns, such as skating parties, sleigh rides, theatricals, disease and death, and crime and punishment. Banks shares the moments of hardship, triumph, and tragedy of both the warriors and the warships in this important contribution to Canadian history.

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Emerson's journals of 1847-1848 deal primarily with his second visit to Europe, occasioned by a British lecture tour that began at Manchester and Liverpool in November of 1847, took him to Scotland in the following February, and concluded in London during June after he had spent a month as a sightseer in Paris. The journals of these years, along with associated notebooks and letters, recorded the materials for lectures that Emerson composed while abroad, for additional lectures on England and the English that he wrote shortly after his return to Concord, and ultimately, for English Traits, the book growing out of his travels that he was to publish in 1856.Travel abroad provided a needed change for Emerson in 1847 as it had done on previous occasions, though with his usual discounting of the values of mere change of place he was slow in deciding to make the trip. Discouragement with the prevailing political climate at the time of the Mexican War and the old uncertainty about his own proper role in the "Lilliput" of American society were much on his mind as the year began. In March he thought of withdrawing temporarily "from all domestic & accustomed relations"--preferably to enjoy "an absolute leisure with books," though he also recognized the want of some "stated task" to stimulate his flagging vitality; in July he finally agreed to accept a long-standing invitation to visit England as a lecturer. As matters turned out, a full schedule of lectures and travel, unexpectedly heavy social engagements along the way, and proliferating correspondence left Emerson little time for reading but did not prevent him from filling his journals with sharp observations on the passing scene.As Emerson moved about England his acknowledged admiration for the English rose every day, though he was careful to distinguish their less admirable qualities.The Englishman's "stuff or substance seems to be the best of the world," he told Margaret Fuller. "I forgive him all his pride. My respect is the more generous that I have no sympathy with him, only an admiration." He took a wry amusement from the new experience of being lionized by his hosts. In his journals are lively portraits of those who entertained him, such as Richard Monckton Milnes, his particular sponsor in the society of London and Paris, and sketches of literary notables including Rogers, Dc Quincey, Wilson, Tennyson, and Dickens. He renewed acquaintance with Wordsworth and recorded in detail the pronouncements of his old friend Carlyle. Settling in London in March and April of 1848, he divided his time between work at his desk, visits to nearby points of interest, and the mixed pleasures of a busy social life. In May he went to France just as an abortive uprising against the new provisional government was brewing. Four weeks in Paris served to correct his old "prejudice" against the French, who on closer acquaintance rose in his estimation just as the English had done. In June he returned to London to lecture, and in July, after visiting Stonehenge with Carlyle, he sailed home. As the journals reveal, he reached Concord refreshed and renewed by the change of scene, the new acquaintance, and the generous reception that the trip had brought him, and with an enlarged perspective that revealed to him once again the "proper glory" of his own country.

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In Imagining Inclusive Society in Nineteenth-Century Novels, Pam Morris traces a dramatic transformation of British public consciousness that occurred between the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867. This brief period saw a shift from a naturalized acceptance of social hierarchy to a general imagining of a modern mass culture. Central to this collective revisioning of social relations was the pressure to restyle political leadership in terms of popular legitimacy, to develop a more inclusive mode of discourse within an increasingly heterogeneous public sphere and to find new ways of inscribing social distinctions and exclusions. Morris argues that in the transformed public sphere of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the urbane code of civility collapsed under the strain of the conflicting interests that constitute mass society. It was replaced by a "code of sincerity," often manipulative and always ideological in that its inclusiveness was based upon a formally egalitarian assumption of mutual interiorities. The irresistible movement toward mass politics shifted the location of power into the public domain. Increasingly, national leaders sought to gain legitimacy by projecting a performance of charismatic "sincerity" as a flattering and insinuating mode of address to mass audiences. Yet, by the latter decades of the century, while the code of sincerity continued to dominate popular and political culture, traditional political and intellectual elites were reinscribing social distinctions and exclusions. They did so both culturally-by articulating sensibility as skepticism, irony, and aestheticism-and scientifically-by introducing evolutionist notions of sensibility and attaching these to a rigorous disciplinary code of bodily visuality. Through an intensive, intertextual reading of six key novels (Bronte's Shirley, Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Dickens's Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend, Gaskell's North and South, and Eliot's Romola) and an array of Victorian periodicals and political essays, Morris analyzes just how actively novelists engaged in these social transformations. Drawing on a wide range of literary, cultural, and historical thinkers-Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Benedict Anderson, Mary Poovey, and Charles Tilly-Morris makes an original and highly sophisticated contribution to our understanding of the complex and always contested processes of imagining social inclusiveness.

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Contemporary readers who look at late-eigteenth-century or nineteenth-century imaginative literature must be struch by a phenomenon that is nearly universal in the period: the powerful presence of sentimentality. An often overlooked fact is that "Sentimentality" not only is a critical term, but is limited to a historical period, from roughly 1700 to the present. Fulweiler's hypothesis is that setimentality in writing has played a crucial part in shaping Western consciousness. As a study of evolution of consciousness-rather than the history of ideas- the argument grows out of the work of philosophers such as Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer, historical philosophers including R.G. Collingwood, Thomas Kuhn, and Michel Foucault, historically oriented literary critics such as Erich Auerbach, and finally the eclectic writing of Owen Barfield. Fulweiler's hypothesis is that the general consciousness of Western society has undergone severe shocks as a result of the loss-and sometimes repression- of an older human awareness of what anthropologists have called "participation," a term that may be defined as a non-sensory link between human beings and nature. This loss of participation has become gradually apparant with the erosiion of its visible emblems: The Church (with its supporting Law); the extended family, as visualized in feudal, hierarchical theories of society; and finally the nineteeth-century ideal, the nuclear family, with its sacred location, the home, and its glorified Proprietress, the Woman. Sentimentality emerges, then, as a desperate, if often illegitimate, attempt to regain what has been lost, so that imaginative literature of the nineteenth century, even very good literature, is overwhelmed by domestic sentimentality. In the twentieth century it has been heavily, although covertly, affected by a sexual sentimentality of the previous era. This sentimental journey is traced by focusing on six major writers: Tennyson and Dickens as the giants of Victorian domestic sentimentality, Hopkins and Hardy as transitional figures in whom the sentimental tropes of the ninteenth century are moving toward the sexual sentimentality of the twentieth, Lawrence and Eliot as representatives, in different ways, of that era. This multi-faceted study will be of considerable interest to specialists across a number of fields including literature, history, psychology, philosophy, and religious studies.

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From Shakespeare to The Beatles, the battle of Agincourt has dominated the cultural landscape as one of the most famous battles in British history. Anne Curry seeks to find out how and why the legacy of Agincourt has captured the popular imagination. Agincourt (1415) is an exceptionally famous battle, one that has generated a huge and enduring cultural legacy in the six hundred years since it was fought. Everybody thinks they know what the battle was about. Even John Lennon, aged 12, wrote a poem and drew a picture headed 'Agincourt'. But why and how has Agincourt come to mean so much, to so many? Why do so many people claim their ancestors served at the battle? Is the Agincourt of popular image the real Agincourt, or is our idea of the battle simply taken from Shakespeare's famous depiction of it? Written by the world's leading expert on the battle, this book shows just why it has occupied such a key place in English identity and history in the six centuries since it was fought, exploring a cultural legacy that stretches from bowmen to Beatles, via Shakespeare, Dickens, and the First World War. Anne Curry first sets the scene, illuminating how and why the battle was fought, as well as its significance in the wider history of the Hundred Years War. She then takes the Agincourt story through the centuries from 1415 to now, from the immediate, and sometimes surprising, responses to it on both sides of the Channel, through its reinvention by Shakespeare in King Henry V (1599), and the enduring influence of both the play and the film versions of it, especially the patriotic Laurence Olivier version of 1944, at the time of the D-Day landings in Normandy. But the legacy of Agincourt does not begin and end with Shakespeare's play: from the eighteenth century onwards, on both sides of the Channel and in both the English and French speaking worlds the battle was used as an explanation of national identity, giving rise to jingoistic works in print and music. It was at this time that it became fashionable for the gentry to identify themselves with the victory, and in the Victorian period the Agincourt archer came to be emphasized as the epitome of 'English freedom'. Indeed, even today, historians continue to 'refight' the battle.

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Eighteenth-century London was teeming with humanity, and poverty was never far from politeness. Legend has it that, on his daily commute through this thronging metropolis, Captain Thomas Coram witnessed one of the city's most shocking sights-the widespread abandonment of infant corpses by the roadside. He could have just passed by. Instead, he devised a plan to create a charity that would care for these infants; one that was to have enormous consequences for children born into povertyin Britain over the next two hundred years. Orphans of Empire tells the story of what happened to the thousands of children who were raised at the London Foundling Hospital, Coram's brainchild, which opened in 1741 and grew to become the most famous charity in Georgian England. It provides vivid insights into the lives and fortunes of London's poorest children, from the earliest days of the Foundling Hospital to the mid-Victorian era, when Charles Dickens was moved by his observations of the charity's work to campaign on behalf of orphans. Through the lives of London's foundlings, this book provides readers with a street-level insight into the wider global history of a period of monumental change in British history as the nation grew into the world's leading superpower. Some foundling children were destined for Britain's 'outer Empire' overseas, but many more toiled in the 'inner Empire', labouring in the cotton mills and factories of northern England at the dawn of the new industrial age. Through extensive archival research, Helen Berry uncovers previously untold stories of what happened to former foundlings, including the suffering and small triumphs they experienced as child workers during the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution. Sometimes, using many different fragments of evidence, the voices of the children themselves emerge. Extracts from George King's autobiography, the only surviving first-hand account written by a Foundling Hospital child born in the eighteenth century, published here for the first time, provide touching insights into how he came to terms with his upbringing. Remarkably he played a part in Trafalgar, one of the most iconic battles in British Naval history. His personal courage and resilience in overcoming the disadvantages of his birth form a lasting testimony to the strength of the human spirit.

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FALL IN LOVE WITH THIS HILARIOUSLY ROMANTIC STORY ABOUT A SECOND CHANCE AT LOVE . . . 'Charming, funny and very relatable!' JOSIE SILVER 'Made me laugh out loud, cry my heart out and put a big grin on my face' 5***** Reader Review 'Utterly adorable and romantic. I feel uplifted!' GIOVANNA FLETCHER ________ It's love . . . what could go wrong? When Josh proposes in a pod on the London Eye at New Years' Eve, he thinks it's perfect. Until she says no. And they have to spend the next 29 excruciating minutes alone together. Realising he can't trust his own judgment, Josh decides from now on he will make every decision through the flip of a coin. Maybe the coin will change his life forever. Maybe it will find him find the girl of his dreams . . . Hilarious, feel-good and uplifting. Fans of The Flatshare, Don't You Forget About Me and Richard Curtis will LOVE this. A romantic comedy perfect for anyone who has ever failed at love. ________ 'A funny, sparky read that feels fresh and modern . . . this book is fab' SOPHIE COUSENS 'Really sweet, warm hearted story with some very funny moments . . . Thoroughly enjoyed it' CARRIE HOPE FLETCHER 'Refreshing, funny and heart-warming . . . we could not get enough of this' HEAT, Read of the Week 'It's like finding yourself in the middle of the warmest, funniest, most amazing romantic comedy you've ever comes across. Everyone is going to fall in love with it' MIRANDA DICKINSON 'Lovely, very funny' i newspaper, best new books for the autumn 'I devoured this book in a few hours and couldn't put it down . . . a laugh-out-loud, heart-warming romantic comedy that will leave you pondering whether you could ever leave fate up to the flip of a coin' *****'It's always a good sign when a story has me laughing out loud from the first few chapters!' *****'It was fantastic! A perfect summer read!!' *****'A lovely story for modern times with lovely characters throughout' *****'A hilarious book that I enjoyed reading from beginning to end. There wasn't a dull moment' *****'A lovely, laugh out loud romcom ... I read The Flip Side in two sittings, and didn't want it to end' *****

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'A total delight. Witty and fresh - I absolutely loved it!' MILLY JOHNSONIn the modern tech-fuelled world of dating, is it possible to find true love? Hannah lives life on the edge. Never one to pass up on a new adventure, she has truly been living her best life. But once the adrenaline wears off, she wishes she had someone to spend the quieter moments with too. Learning that her best friend’s online dating business has taken a hit, she comes up with an idea that just might solve both of their problems... Jess has been with her husband for twenty years. They have a stable marriage, great kids and run their own businesses. But what looks like a perfect life from the outside has its own problems within, and with her business on the brink Jess can’t help but wonder where the spark has gone in her life, and whether settling down is all it’s cracked up to be. When Hannah embarks upon her latest scheme: finding a man using Jess’s dating app and meeting him for the first time at the altar, both women start to realise the grass isn't always greener. Can Hannah help her friend save her failing business or will Jess stop her from making what could be the biggest mistake of her life? 'A very funny, feel-good read' HOLLY MILLER‘Fun, feelgood, fab!’ KATE EBERLEN'Refreshing, brilliantly-written and highly addictive! HELLY ACTON'A witty, warm, wonderful read!' SOPHIE COUSENS'Fresh, funny, and wonderfully timely – it's feel-good fiction at its finest!' LAURA JANE WILLIAMS'Funny, feel good and full of warmth, love and friendship' LAURA KEMP'A witty, tender story that packs a real emotional punch. I loved it!' NICOLA GILL‘A heart-warming and joyous page-turner. Impossible to put down!’ HOLLY MARTIN'If you’re looking for a story to make you giggle, shed a few tears and cheer, this is the one!' MIRANDA DICKINSON'Enthralling and entertaining!' HEIDI SWAIN'I couldn’t put it down. What a wonderful, warm, wise and witty book!' ALEX BROWN'Fresh, funny and romantic, I totally loved it' SARAH MORGAN'Fresh, funny, and the perfect tonic for these gloomy times' LIA LOUIS'Witty, fun and fresh, Married at First Swipe is the perfect book to lift your spirits and put a smile on your face' PHAEDRA PATRICK'A fabulously fun, heart-warming novel' ANNA BELL'Heartwarming, insightful and very, very funny' KATIE MARSH

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