Search results for ""author victoria"
Goose Lane Editions Lost Land of Moses: The Age of Discovery on New Brunswick's Salmon Rivers
In the middle of the nineteenth century, most of New Brunswick was pristine wilderness. But by the end of the century the map of eastern Canada would be changed forever by the sport of salmon angling, and by the adventurers, gentlemen, rakes, and royalty, who were drawn together in their lust for the finest of fish. In Lost Land of Moses, Peter Thomas recounts the dramatic changes that occurred between 1840 and 1880, as strenuous wilderness idylls became the Victorian equivalent of adventure tourism. To illustrate his story, he has chosen more than fifty engravings, cartoons, maps, and photographs from archival collections and 19th century books and magazines. Moses Perley was a New Brunswick lawyer with a gift for contagious enthusiasm. Between 1839 and 1841, he published a series of articles in the British magazine Sporting Review describing his canoe trips with Mi'kmaq or Maliseet companions. The articles inspired a generation of young adventurers to visit New Brunswick. Soon, these young British gentlemen were joined by the rich and famous, as steamships brought fishermen right to the rivers, and needs were supplied by professional outfitters. In 1879, the Marquess of Lorne, then Governor General of Canada, and his daring wife, Princess Louise, spent two glorious weeks on the Restigouche, complete with a vice-regal retinue, a houseboat called Great Caesar's Ghost, and carpeted tents. The New Brunswick salmon waters were open for business. Many of the consequences of this influx were dire. Leases were let on the rivers, allowing only wealthy people to fish them. They founded clubs, built expansive camps, and hired wardens to patrol the pools. Most troubling of all, by the 1880s, the Mi'kmaq and Maliseet, at first respected as knowledgeable guides into their own territory, had been reduced to being perceived as mere servants. Moses Perley never foresaw the changes that large numbers of visitors would bring to New Brunswick's teeming salmon rivers. Lost Land of Moses reveals the consequences of his crusade to lure fly fishermen to New Brunswick. For good and ill, the legacy of those forty years is with us today.
£15.99
Faber & Faber This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew
The first comprehensive biography of this undervalued writer, who was considered 'far and away the best living woman poet' in her day.Andrew Motion's Spectator Book of the Year.'One of the many achievements of This Rare Spirit is its rejection of that tired view of the poet as mouse that barely roared in favour of a true sense of a spikily modern woman, bound by various obligations but resilient, headstrong, and poetically inventive . . . Copus's diligent, scholarly, sensitive work should help Mew's pipe play on for years to come.' Declan Ryan, Los Angeles Review of Books'[A] supreme biography . . . It is hard to do justice to the breadth of research Copus has done here, or the compassionate, detailed conjuring of Mew and her milieu . . . An essential book, a classic work of literary biography.' Seán Hewitt, Irish Times'[K]eenly intelligent, fascinating and nuanced biography . . . Save Charlotte Mew! And read this book.' Joanna Kavenna, Literary Review'An exquisitely told account of the life of a half-forgotten London poet whose work was admired by Hardy, Sassoon and Virginia Woolf. Julia Copus does her justice at last.' Claire Tomalin'This Rare Spirit is a classic - the biography of Mew we have all been waiting for.' Fiona BensonThe British poet Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was regarded as one of the best poets of her age by fellow writers, including Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sasson, Walter de la Mare and Marianne Moore. She has since been neglected, but her star is beginning to rise again, all the more since her 150th anniversary in 2019. This is the first comprehensive biography, from cradle to grave, and is written by fellow poet Julia Copus, who recently unveiled a blue plaque on Mew's childhood house in Doughty Street and was the editor of the Selected Poetry and Prose (2019).Mew was a curious mix of New Woman and stalwart Victorian. Her poems speak to us strongly today, in these strangely mixed times of exposure and seclusion: they reveal the private agony of an isolated being who was forced to keep secret the tragedies of her personal life while being at the same time propelled by her work into the public arena. Her poetry transfigures that very private suffering into art that has a universal resonance.
£25.00
Rowman & Littlefield An Unlikely Trust: Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan, and the Improbable Partnership That Remade American Business
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt and J. Pierpont Morgan were the two most powerful men in America, perhaps the world. As the nation’s preeminent financier, Morgan presided over an elemental shift in American business, away from family-owned companies and toward modern corporations of unparalleled size and influence. As president, Theodore Roosevelt expanded the power of that office to an unprecedented degree, seeking to rein in those corporations and to rebalance their interests with those of workers, consumers, and society at large. Overpowering figures and titanic personalities, Roosevelt and Morgan could easily have become sworn enemies. And when they have been considered together (never before at book length), they have generally been portrayed as battling colossi, the great trust builder versus the original trustbuster. But their long association was far more complex than that, and even mutually beneficial. Despite their many differences in temperament and philosophy, Roosevelt and Morgan had much in common—social class, an unstinting Victorian moralism, a drive for power, a need for order, and a genuine (though not purely altruistic) concern for the welfare of the nation. Working this common ground, the premier progressive and the quintessential capitalist were able to accomplish what neither could have achieved alone—including, more than once, averting national disaster. In the process they also changed forever the way that government and business worked together. An Unlikely Trust is the story of the uneasy but fruitful collaboration between Theodore Roosevelt and Pierpont Morgan. It is also the story of how government and business evolved from a relationship of laissez-faire to the active regulation that we know today. And it is an account of how, despite all that has changed in America over the past century, so much remains the same, including the growing divide between rich and poor; the tangled bonds uniting politicians and business leaders; and the pervasive feeling that government is working for the special interests rather than for the people. Not least of all, it is the story of how citizens with vastly disparate outlooks and interests managed to come together for the good of their common country.
£16.18
Bonnier Books Ltd The Dolocher
Victorian London had Jack the Ripper.Georgian Dublin had the Dolocher…The Dolocher is stalking the alleyways of Dublin. Half man, half pig, this terrifying creature has unleashed panic on the streets. Can it really be the evil spirit of a murderer who has cheated the hangman's noose by taking his own life in his prison cell, depriving the mob of their rightful revenge? Or is there some other strange supernatural explanation?This terror has come at the perfect time for down-at-heel writer Solomon Fish. With his new broadsheet reporting ever more gruesome stories of the mysterious Dolocher, sales are growing daily and fuelling the city's fear. But when the Dolocher starts killing and Solomon himself is set upon, he realises that there's more to the story than he could ever have imagined.With the help of his fearless landlady, ship's surgeon-turned-apothecary Merriment O'Grady, Solomon goes after the Dolocher. Torn between reason and superstition, they must hold their nerve as everyone around them loses theirs. But are they hunting the Dolocher or is the Dolocher hunting them?PRAISE FOR THE DOLOCHER"It's perfectly suspenseful, grisly in all the right places, and has characters with personalities that leap from the page. It's a seriously epic read, in every magnificent sense."LITTLE BOOKNESS LANE"This book had me hooked from page 1 and I loved every heart stopping second of it."DRINKING BOOKS"It's a wonderful, colourful tale that I think all will adore. It's almost like a fairy tale – but this is definitely one for grown-ups!"CRIMEWORM"This is a fabulous historical tale of crime along with fantasy and I loved it!"BOONS BOOKCASE"This must be one of the dirtiest books in terms of setting I've read in a long while. I even sniffed the book after reading to see if the pages were imbued with some sort of potion from Merriment's shop to make it even more authentic than it was."THE BOOKTRAILER"A great historical mystery... reason battles with superstition and fear, till it boils over."BOOK MOOD REVIEWS"A beautifully written work of historical fiction with some truly wonderful characters"THE WELSH LIBRARIAN
£8.99
Quarto Publishing PLC ArtQuake: The Most Disruptive Works in Modern Art
Discover art that dared to be different, risked reputations and put careers in jeopardy. This is what happens when artists take tradition and rip it up. ArtQuake tells the stories of 50 pivotal works that shook the world, telling the fascinating stories behind their creation, reception and legacy. The books begin with the rebels who struck out against Victorian conformism, daring painters and sculptors like Manet and Rodin, Van Gogh and Courbet, who experimented with expressionist and realist art styles as well as controversial subjects. Moving into the fin de siècle and the 20th century, we study the truly iconic works and turbulent lives of artists like Munch and Klimt, Picasso and Egon Schiele, whose work into abstraction, surrealism and cubism shocked and scandalized, but ultimately changed the course of western art forever. Moving into the second half of the 20th Century, we see spectacular works of conceptual rebellion, absurdity and political protest, from Andy Warhol and the Pop Art movement to Marina Abramovic, whose often visceral and violent works of performance art laid bare the savagery of the patriarchy and the human condition. In the 21st century, we see how iconoclastic creators have pushed the boundaries of art even further, from Banksy to Louise Bourgeoise, from self-destructing paintings to experimental works of computerized art. Complete with beautiful reproductions of their iconic works, as well as a glossary of terms and movements at the back, meet the huge egos, uncompromising feminists, gifted recluses, spiritualists, anti-consumerists, activists and satirists who have irrevocably carved their names into the history of art around the world. In telling the history of modern and contemporary art through the works that were truly disruptive, and explaining the context in which each was created, ArtQuake demonstrates the heart of modern art, which is to constantly question and challenge expectation. This book is from the Culture Quake series, which looks into iconic moments of culture which truly created paradigm shifts in their respective fields. Also available is FilmQuake, which tells the stories of 50 key films that consciously questioned the boundaries, challenged the status quo and made shockwaves we are still feeling today.
£12.99
Faber & Faber This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew
The first comprehensive biography of this undervalued writer, who was considered 'far and away the best living woman poet' in her day.Andrew Motion's Spectator Book of the Year.'One of the many achievements of This Rare Spirit is its rejection of that tired view of the poet as mouse that barely roared in favour of a true sense of a spikily modern woman, bound by various obligations but resilient, headstrong, and poetically inventive . . . Copus's diligent, scholarly, sensitive work should help Mew's pipe play on for years to come.' Declan Ryan, Los Angeles Review of Books'[A] supreme biography . . . It is hard to do justice to the breadth of research Copus has done here, or the compassionate, detailed conjuring of Mew and her milieu . . . An essential book, a classic work of literary biography.' Seán Hewitt, Irish Times'[K]eenly intelligent, fascinating and nuanced biography . . . Save Charlotte Mew! And read this book.' Joanna Kavenna, Literary Review'An exquisitely told account of the life of a half-forgotten London poet whose work was admired by Hardy, Sassoon and Virginia Woolf. Julia Copus does her justice at last.' Claire Tomalin'This Rare Spirit is a classic - the biography of Mew we have all been waiting for.' Fiona BensonThe British poet Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was regarded as one of the best poets of her age by fellow writers, including Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sasson, Walter de la Mare and Marianne Moore. She has since been neglected, but her star is beginning to rise again, all the more since her 150th anniversary in 2019. This is the first comprehensive biography, from cradle to grave, and is written by fellow poet Julia Copus, who recently unveiled a blue plaque on Mew's childhood house in Doughty Street and was the editor of the Selected Poetry and Prose (2019).Mew was a curious mix of New Woman and stalwart Victorian. Her poems speak to us strongly today, in these strangely mixed times of exposure and seclusion: they reveal the private agony of an isolated being who was forced to keep secret the tragedies of her personal life while being at the same time propelled by her work into the public arena. Her poetry transfigures that very private suffering into art that has a universal resonance.
£10.99
Baton Wicks Publications Classic Rock: Great British rock climbs
Ken Wilson’s Classic Rock is one of the most popular and iconic works of climbing literature ever written. Along with Hard Rock and Extreme Rock, it has acquired legendary status. First published in 1978, Classic Rock represented the absolute best of British climbing at that time, quickly establishing itself as a must-have publication. It is a celebration of 80 of the best lower-grade routes in Great Britain, bringing them to life through a superb selection of photographs, anecdotes and essays from some of the most accomplished climbers of the day. ‘Ticking’ the book became an instant and obvious challenge, and remains so to this day (Wilson wasn’t a fan, describing it as ‘puerile ticking’). Any climber working his or her way through the book will be taken on a tour of the finest routes on the best cliffs and crags to be found throughout England, Scotland and Wales. Many of the routes in the book were established over a century ago. At that time the Victorian and Edwardian alpinists, flushed with successes abroad, sought harder challenges at home. With their well-honed confidence, they went straight for the biggest cliffs of Scotland. Anyone seeking to retrace their steps will immediately be transported to bold lines of weakness up otherwise daunting precipices! Before long these pioneers trailed their hemp ropes and balanced their hobnail boots up the sea cliffs of Cornwall and the gritstone edges of the Pennines, and the crags of the Lake District and North Wales. These climbers provided us with a great national treasure – a repository of adventure and spectacle that can provide a lifetime’s enjoyment and challenge. An ascent of a great historic route will rarely disappoint. Such routes retain much of their original challenge, unsullied by the pitons and bolts often found on their continental equivalents. They take bold, logical lines up otherwise difficult cliffs – usually cleaned and stabilised by years of use. Classic Rock provides a mere sampling of these treasures. This latest edition has been transformed with over 300 new colour photos. These sit alongside archive images to create an inspirational dialogue between today’s climbers and those of history. Fifty-five chapters, contributed by acclaimed climbers and writers such as Jim Perrin, Paul Nunn and Angela Soper, describe the finest classic rock climbs in Britain.
£35.96
Pen & Sword Books Ltd A History of Women in Medicine and Medical Research: Exploring the Trailblazers of STEM
In the nineteenth century, a small but dedicated group of European and American women rose to agitate for the inclusion of women in the medical profession. It is a historic tale that we have told and retold for decades, but it is far from where the story of women as physicians and healers begins. Stretching back into deepest antiquity, we possess accounts of women who were consulted by emperors and paupers alike for their medical expertise. They were surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, university lecturers, and medical researchers in correspondence with the most learned societies of their time. And then it all came crashing down. A History of Women in Medicine and Medical Research is the story of the women who participated in that early Golden Age, and of a medical establishment closing ranks against them so effectively that, by the early Victorian era, they not only were barred from practicing medicine, but from so much as stepping into a classroom where medical topics were being discussed. It is the story of that intrepid band of reformers and pioneers who built back the women's medical profession from the ashes and constructed a thriving new community of researchers and practitioners who within a century had retaken not only the ground that had been lost, but boldly advanced to levels of fame and achievement unimaginable to any previous era. Told through in-depth accounts of the lives of the pioneers and practitioners who built and rebuilt the women's medical movement, this title dives into the lives of not only legendary figures like Florence Nightingale, Gertrude Elion, Rosalyn Yalow, and Elizabeth Blackwell, but visits women the world over whose medical contributions broke down doors and advanced the cause of women's and world health, like the revolutionary medieval physician Trota of Salerno, the pioneering eighteenth century midwife and businesswoman Madame du Coudray, the microbiological research trailblazer Mary Putnam Jacobi, and the HIV researcher and world epidemic response coordinator Francoise Barre-Sinoussi. With over 140 stories spanning three millennia of global medicine, this book shines a light on the unknown heroes, towering discoveries, tragic missteps, and profound struggles that have accompanied the Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of the women's medical profession.
£27.92
Johns Hopkins University Press Imagining Inclusive Society in Nineteenth-Century Novels: The Code of Sincerity in the Public Sphere
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.
£51.44
Signal Books Ltd Oxford
Oxford started as an Anglo-Saxon border outpost, with a bridge replacing the 'oxen ford' from which it takes its name. It became a centre for trade and religion and developed one of the oldest universities in Europe from the late twelfth century. Since the Middle Ages its individual colleges have gone on building--chapels, halls, accommodation, libraries--in an extraordinary variety of styles from Gothic to Brutalist. Oxford also has many churches, a Covered Market, an extraordinary museum of Natural History in soaring iron, glass and stone, and a flamboyant neo-Jacobean Town Hall. In such a place, suggested W.B. Yeats, 'one almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking'. Nevertheless, Oxford has become a busy modern city. For much of the twentieth century the car industry, established in Cowley by William Morris (Lord Nuffield), dominated local life. Today there are cinemas, theatres, innumerable restaurants, shopping centres, an ice-rink, business and technology centres, close links to London by bus and train. Amidst the expanding city Oxford University retains its academic excellence, its student exuberance and its physical beauty.And it has been joined by a notably successful second university, Oxford Brookes. Martin Garrett discusses the literature Oxford has generated: from Chaucer to Lewis Carroll, Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Barbara Pym, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and Iris Murdoch. There are also chapters on architecture, on religion, on theatre, film and art--including Oxford's great museum of art and history the Ashmolean--and on leisure pursuits (punting and rowing, gardens, student pranks, city fairs and carnival). A chapter on commerce focuses on Victorian shops, Cornmarket and the Morris Motor Works, while a brief social history includes the former Oxford Castle and a gallery of dons as rulers--visionary or ignorant, charismatic or dull. Garrett looks at social change, especially the transformation in the position of Oxford women, and considers the city's darker side of crime. A final chapter explores its rich surroundings: the countryside where Matthew Arnold's 'black-winged swallows haunt the glittering Thames', the baroque grandeur of Blenheim Palace, the ancient windswept Ridgeway and White Horse.
£12.99
Boydell & Brewer Ltd The Music of Frederick Delius: Style, Form and Ethos
This book examines Delius's individual approaches to genre, form, harmony, orchestration and literary texts which gave the composer's musical style such a unique voice. Frederick Delius' (1862-1934) music has proved impervious to analytical definition. Delius's approaches to genre, form, harmony, orchestration and literary texts are all highly individual, not to say eccentric in their deliberate aim to avoid conformity. Rarely does Delius follow a conventional line, and though one can readily point to important influences, the larger Gestalt of each work has a syntax and coherence for which conventional analytical methods are mostly inadequate. Delius's musical style has also defied one of the most essential critical tools of his musical epoque - that of national identity. His style bears no relation either to the Victorian or Edwardian aesthetic of British music spearheaded by Parry, Stanford and Elgar before the First World War, nor to the more overtly nationalist, folk-song-orientated pastoralism of post-war Britain in such composers as Vaughan Williams and Holst. In contrast, Delius acknowledged himself a 'stateless' individual and considered that his music refused to belong to any national school or movement. To test these claims, the book explores a number of important factors. Delius's musical education at the Leipzig Conservatorium and the works he produced there. Delius's musical voice, notably his harmonic and melodic style and the close structural relationship between these two factors. The book also explores the question of Delius and 'genre' in which the investigation of form is central, especially in opera, the symphonic poem, the choral work (where words are seminal to the creation of structural design) and the sonata and concerto (to which Delius brought his own individual solution). Other significant factors are Delius's cosmopolitan use of texts, operatic plots and picturesque impressions, his relationship to Nietzsche's writings and the genre of dance, and the role of his 'earlier' works (1888-1896) in which it is possible to plot a course of stylistic change with reference to the influences of Grieg, Sinding, Florent Schmitt, Wagner, Strauss and Debussy.
£45.00
Fordham University Press Here a Captive Heart Busted: Studies in the Sentimental Journey of Modern Literature
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.
£24.99
University of Exeter Press The Beginnings Of The Cinema In England,1894-1901: Volume 5: 1900
Describing in detail one of the most inventive periods in the history of English cinema, the volumes in this celebrated series are already established as classics in their field and represent a major contribution to international film studies. Each volume details the highlights of a single cinematic year, including details of production, manufacturers of equipment, dealers and exhibitors. This is augmented by numerous carefully chosen illustrations and a comprehensive filmography of English films, fiction and non-fiction, for the year. Particular attention is also paid to the ways in which the cinema of other countries affected the English industry. Volume 5 documents the emergence of Cecil M. Hepworth as one of England’s major film producers in 1900. The work of England’s two premier pioneers in the field of cinematography, Robert W. Paul and Birt Acres, is also examined. The conflict in South Africa against the Boers and the uprising of the Boxers in China proved popular subjects for new films and fictional representations. Forgotten pioneers of film are rescued from oblivion in this volume through the attention paid to their roles in English cinema. Volume 5 is introduced and edited by Richard Maltby. The long-awaited fifth and final volume in the series is published for the first time by UEP, and edited and introduced by Richard Maltby, Professor of Screen Studies, Flinders University, Australia. Describing in detail one of the most inventive periods in the history of English cinema, this series represents a major contribution to international film studies. Each illustrated volume details a single cinematic year, including details of production, manufacturers of equipment, dealers and exhibitors, as well as a comprehensive filmography of English films, fiction and non-fiction, for the year. The previous volumes are aready established as classics in their field and have recently been re-jacketed and re-issued by University of Exeter Press.The fifth and final volume documents the year 1900, when the conflict in South Africa against the Boers and the Boxer uprising in China proved popular subjects for news films and fictional representations. It includes a full Introduction by Richard Maltby which places Victorian cinema in its cultural, social and historical context
£75.00
Thomas Nelson Publishers NKJV, Large Print Thinline Reference Bible, Blue Letter, Maclaren Series, Genuine Leather, Black, Comfort Print: Holy Bible, New King James Version
This NKJV Large Print Thinline Bible is inviting to pick up and hard to put down. Unique to this edition, the words of Christ are highlighted in a restful blue ink that’s easy to read and colorblind-friendly.The slim design of the NKJV Large Print Thinline Reference Bible means you can bring it along, wherever your day takes you. This large print edition features Thomas Nelson’s NKJV Comfort Print®, designed to provide a smooth reading experience of the accurate and beautiful New King James Version. And with features including extensive cross-references, concordance, and full-color maps, you’ll still have the tools to get more out of God’s Word. Features include: Presentation page to personalize this special gift by recording a memory or a note Words of Christ in blue quickly identify verses spoken by Jesus Double column provides a nice readable flow of the text End-of-page cross-references and translator notes allow you to find related passages quickly and easily Concordance for finding a word’s occurrences throughout the Bible Full-color maps show a visual representation of Israel and other biblical locations for better context Durable Smyth-sewn binding lies flat in your hand or on your desk Two satin ribbon markers for you to easily navigate and keep track of where you are reading Elegant, gilded page-edge design Clear and readable 10-point NKJV Comfort Print About the Maclaren Series: Named for noted Victorian-era preacher Alexander Maclaren, this series of elegant Bibles features regal blue highlights and verse numbers and clear, line-matched text.Trusted by millions of believers around the world, the NKJV remains a bestselling modern “word-for-word” translation. It balances the literary beauty and familiarity of the King James tradition with an extraordinary commitment to preserving the grammar and structure of the underlying biblical languages. And while the translator’s relied on the traditional Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic text used by the translators of the 1611 KJV, the comprehensive translator notes offer important insights about the latest developments in biblical manuscript studies. The result is a Bible translation that is both beautiful and uncompromising—perfect for serious study, devotional use, and reading aloud.
£85.50
Oxford University Press Agincourt: Great Battles Series
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.
£12.99
Oxford University Press Orphans of Empire: The Fate of London's Foundlings
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.
£14.99
New York University Press The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American
Between the years 1850 and 1950, Americans became the leading energy consumers on the planet, expending tremendous physical resources on energy exploration, mental resources on energy exploitation, and monetary resources on energy acquisition. A unique combination of pseudoscientific theories of health and the public’s rudimentary understanding of energy created an age in which sources of industrial power seemed capable of curing the physical limitations and ill health that plagued Victorian bodies. Licensed and “quack” physicians alike promoted machines, electricity, and radium as invigorating cures, veritable “fountains of youth” that would infuse the body with energy and push out disease and death. The Body Electric is the first book to place changing ideas about fitness and gender in dialogue with the popular culture of technology. Whether through wearing electric belts, drinking radium water, or lifting mechanized weights, many Americans came to believe that by embracing the nation's rapid march to industrialization, electrification, and “radiomania,” their bodies would emerge fully powered. Only by uncovering this belief’s passions and products, Thomas de la Peña argues, can we fully understand our culture’s twentieth-century energy enthusiasm.
£24.99
Dorling Kindersley Ltd The Secret Language of Flowers
Discover the uses and symbolic meanings of flowers over the centuries and across the globe.Flowers have been depicted as objects of beauty and wonder in countless paintings and poems, exchanged as tokens of love and affection, and displayed as symbols of both celebration and remembrance - "saying it with flowers" is truly part of the human experience. But how does the significance of flowers vary across cultures and at different points in history? And what makes certain flowers special?The Secret Language of Flowers explores the meaning of more than 85 flowers, tracing their history as symbols and charting their role in folklore and mythology around the world. This fascinating book on flowers can help you to:-Unlock the meaning of flowers throughout history - from early peoples to the 19th-century.- Discover the Victorian language of flowers popular in the US, UK, and Europe.- Gain an insight into folklore and mythology in relation to different flowers.- Uncover what flowers mean in various cultures around the world. -Uncover traditional medicinal uses of plants, such as aloe, which is used to treat burns.Uncover the rich and fascinating histories of individual flowers - the sunflower, for example, which was regarded by the Aztecs as a symbol of war, but became a symbol of devotion in 19th-century painting due to the fact that it "turns its head" to follow the sun. Learn about the function of flowers in society, from the practical to the playful - flowers have been used as remedies and tonics - tea tree and coneflower (or echinacea), for example - as well as as a means of sending cryptic messages to lovers and friends.The Secret Language of Flowers is an entertaining guide to the rich stories that lie beyond the seductive aromas and dazzling beauty of flowers of all kinds. Each flower featured throughout the book is arranged by season, from the first snowdrops and primroses of spring, the glorious roses of summer, the stunning fuchsias and dahlias of autumn to the holly and poinsettia of the winter months, there's a flower for everyone to fall in love with. At DK, we believe in the power of discovery. So why stop there? If you like The Secret Language of Flowers, then why not try Great Loves which celebrates some of the most famous romances in history, or Lost Masterpieces to discover extraordinary stories behind the world's missing works of art.
£12.99
Stanford University Press Reconstructing Women’s Thoughts: The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Before World War II
A study of the women who led the United States section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in the interwar years, this book argues that the ideas of these women—the importance of nurturing, nonviolence, feminism, and a careful balancing of people's differences with their common humanity—constitute an important addition to our understanding of the intellectual heritage of the United States. Most of these women were well educated and prominent in their chosen fields: they included Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch, the only two United States women to win Nobel Prizes for Peace; Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress; and Dorothy Detzer, the woman who prompted the investigation of the munitions industry in the 1930's. The ideas of these women were not usually expressed in forms conventionally studied by intellectual historians. On the whole, their ideas must be teased out of organizational records, statements of principle and policy, and personal correspondence. When combined with an understanding of the personal backgrounds of the WIL leaders and placed in the context of early-twentieth-century America, these documents tell us what these women thought was important and why. The ideas of the WIL leaders are also analyzed in the context of the intellectual themes of Victorianism and modernism. Our understanding of these themes has been based largely on the work of privileged European and American men, and the ideas of women often fit uncomfortably into these traditional categories. A reconstruction of the ideas of the WIL leaders suggests that historians have overlooked an important, alternative intellectual tradition in the United States. To understand and appreciate women's thoughts, we must dissolve the old constructs and let new, multifaceted ones replace them.
£49.00
The University of Alabama Press Beautiful War: Studies in a Dreadful Fascination
A probing and holistic meditation on the key question: Why do we continue to make art, and thus beauty, out of war? Beautiful War: Studies in a Dreadful Fascination is a wide-ranging exploration of armed conflict as depicted in art that illustrates the constant presence of war in our everyday lives. Philip D. Beidler investigates the unending assimilation and pervasive presence of the idea of war in popular culture, the impulses behind the making of art out of war, and the unending and debatably aimless trajectories of war itself. Beidler's critical scope spans from Shakespeare's plays, through the Victorian battle paintings of Lady Butler, into the post–World War I writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf, and up to twenty-first-century films such as The Hurt Locker and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. As these works of art have become ubiquitous in contemporary culture, the many faces of war clearly spill over into our art and media, and Beidler argues that these portrayals in turn shift the perception of war from a savage truth to a concept. Beautiful War argues that the representation of war in the arts has always been, and continues to be, an incredibly powerful force. Incorporating painting, music, photography, literature, and film, Beidler traces a disturbing but fundamental truth: that war has always provided an aesthetic inspiration while serving ends as various and complex as ideological or geopolitical history, public memory, and mass entertainment.Beautiful War is a bold and vivid account of the role of war and military conflict as a subject of art that offers much of value to literary and cultural critics, historians, veterans, students of art history and communication studies, and those interested in expanding their understanding of art and media's influence on contemporary values and memories of the past.
£27.28
Historic England Jewish Heritage in Britain and Ireland: An Architectural Guide
Britain’s tiny Jewish community (about 263,000 people) is the oldest non-Christian minority in the country. In 1656 Jews returned to England after an absence of nearly 400 years and the Jewish community has enjoyed a history of continuous settlement in England since 1656, a record unmatched anywhere else in Europe. Jewish Heritage in Britain and Ireland celebrates in full colour the undiscovered heritage of Anglo-Jewry. First published in 2006, it remains the only comprehensive guide to historic synagogues and sites in the British Isles, based on an authoritative survey carried out with the support of English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund. The guide is simple to use, covering more than 300 sites, organised on a region-by-region basis. Each section highlights major Jewish landmarks, ranging from Britain’s oldest synagogue, Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London, through the Georgian gems of the West Country to the splendid High Victorian “cathedral synagogues” of Birmingham, Brighton, Liverpool and Glasgow. Relics of Anglo-Jewry’s medieval past are explored in York, Lincoln and Norwich, and venerable burial grounds with Hebrew inscriptions are found in the unlikeliest of places. Curious oddities are not to be missed, including a 19th-century private penthouse synagogue in Brighton and an Egyptian-style Mikveh [ritual bath] in Canterbury. The new edition has been completely revised and features many new images including, for the first time, of sites in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. The easy-to-follow heritage trails around former Jewish quarters in the major cities have been updated and full postcodes are now given for SatNav users.
£22.01
Boydell & Brewer Ltd A New History of Yachting
An overview of the history of yachting in its social, cultural, political and economic contexts. Shortlisted for the Maritime Foundation's Mountbatten Award 2018 This book, by a leading expert in the field, is the first major history of yachting for over a quarter of a century. Setting developments within political,social and economic changes, the book tells the story of yachting from Elizabethan times to the present day: the first uses of yachts, by monarchs, especially Charles II; yacht clubs and yacht racing in the eighteenth century; the early years of the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes and an analysis of the America Cup challenges; the pioneering developments in Ireland and the exporting of yachting to the colonies and trading outposts of the Empire; the expansion of yachting in Victorian times; the Golden Age of Yachting in the years before the First World War, when it was the sport of the crowned heads of Europe; the invention of the dinghy and the keelboat classes and, after the Second World War, the massive numbers of home-built dinghies; the breaking of new boundaries by risk-taking single-handers from the mid-1960s; the expansion of leisure sailing that came in the 1980s with the use of moulded plastic yachts; and current trends and pressures within the sport. Well-referenced yet highly readable, this book will be of interest both to the scholar and the sailing enthusiast. MIKE BENDER is an experienced yachtsman and qualified Ocean Yachtmaster, with some forty thousand miles, mostly singlehanded, under the keel. He is an Honorary Research Fellow in History at the University of Exeter.
£39.64
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Wonderful to Behold: A Centenary History of the Lincoln Record Society, 1910-2010
The growth and development of the Lincoln Record Society in its first hundred years highlights the contribution of such organisations to historical life. In 2010 the Lincoln Record Society celebrates its centenary with the publication of the hundredth volume in its distinguished series. Local record societies, financed almost entirely from the subscriptions of their members, have made an important contribution to the study of English history by making accessible in printed form some of the key archival materials relating to their areas. The story of the Lincoln society illustrates the struggles and triumphsof such an enterprise. Founded by Charles Wilmer Foster, a local clergyman of remarkable enthusiasm, the LRS set new standards of meticulous scholarship in the editing of its volumes. Its growing reputation is traced here througha rich archive of correspondence with eminent historians, among them Alexander Hamilton Thompson and Frank Stenton. The difficulties with which Kathleen Major, Canon Foster's successor, contended to keep the Society alive duringthe dark days of the Second World War are vividly described. The range of volumes published has continued to expand, from the staple cartularies and episcopal registers to more unusual sources, Quaker minutes, records ofCourts of Sewers and seventeenth-century port books. While many of the best-known publications have dealt with the medieval period, notably the magnificent Registrum Antiquissimum of Lincoln Cathedral, there have also beeneditions of eighteenth-century correspondence, twentieth-century diaries, and pioneering railway photographs of the late Victorian era. This story shows the Lincoln Record Society to be in good heart and ready to begin its secondcentury with confidence. Nicholas Bennett is currently Vice-Chancellor and Librarian of Lincoln Cathedral.
£30.00
Little, Brown Book Group Dancing On the Outskirts
Here is a wonderful collection of short stories by the writer known for 'the Mackay vision, suburban - as kitsch, as unexceptional, and yet as rich in history and wonder as a plain Victorian terrace house, its threshold radiant with tiling and stained-glass birds of paradise encased in leaded lights' - Guardian.Shena Mackay, who first came to fame before the age of twenty with two novellas, is the doyenne of the short form. In this volume of previously uncollected stories - including those read on radio - she constantly surprises with a view of the ordinary world that is not at all ordinary.A grasshopper determinedly takes up residence on a bathroom ceiling; a gecko hiding in a cupboard brings a strange sort of luck; a woman spies from a distance two older women friends after many long years and a memory of how they gallopedin the playground as Starlight Blaze and Pepperpot plays sweetly, suddenly in her mind; pigs are swaddled in blankets, looking like babies in shawls; luggage is packed with youthful hopes and ideals.She observes how people rub along and reveals the best and worst of us all: a disgruntled schoolboy and his hapless teacher conquer mountains and their antipathy for each other; a girl with green eyes and iridescent hair discovers revenge; a race to be the best mushroom-picker creates only losers; and rotten apples, in the right pair of hands, make a loving pie. Shena Mackay is a generous and keen-eyed chronicler of the everyday; she deftly brings wisdom and humour to the worlds she creates, worlds that we suddenly, excitingly see anew. She is an utterly original writer.
£16.99
The University of Chicago Press For the Love of Mars: A Human History of the Red Planet
A tour of Mars in the human imagination, from ancient astrologers to modern explorers. Mars and its secrets have fascinated and mystified humans since ancient times. Due to its vivid color and visibility, its geologic kinship with Earth, and its potential as our best hope for settlement, Mars embodies everything that inspires us about space and exploration. For the Love of Mars surveys the red planet’s place in the human imagination, beginning with ancient astrologers and skywatchers and ending in our present moment of exploration and virtual engagement. National Air and Space Museum curator Matthew Shindell describes how historical figures across eras and around the world have made sense of this mysterious planet. We meet Mayan astrologer priests who incorporated Mars into seasonal calendars and religious ceremonies; Babylonian astrologers who discerned bad omens; figures of the Scientific Revolution who struggled to comprehend it as a world; Victorian astronomers who sought signs of intelligent life; and twentieth- and twenty-first-century scientists who have established a technological presence on its surface. Along the way, we encounter writers and artists from each of these periods who take readers and viewers along on imagined journeys to Mars. By focusing on the diverse human stories behind the telescopes and behind the robots we know and love, Shindell shows how Mars exploration has evolved in ways that have also expanded knowledge about other facets of the universe. Captained by an engaging and erudite expert, For the Love of Mars is a captivating voyage through time and space for anyone curious about Curiosity and the red planet.
£20.00
Anness Publishing New Crafts: Decoupage
This book features 25 handcrafted projects shown in 280 step-by-step photographs. Features: the centuries-old craft of decoupage celebrated in exciting designs and practical projects; complete step-by-step instructions for 25 original projects, from a simple album cover for your photographs to a bright and cheerful kitchen table; an inspirational gallery features classic and innovative examples of decoupage from contemporary artists; a comprehensive guide to the art of decoupage, from cutting intricate paper scraps to applying crackle glaze and sealing the finish with varnish; the definitive modern approach to a traditional craft; and useful advice on preparing surfaces, applying adhesives and enhancing decoupage with decorative backgrounds. The art of applying paper-cuts to a background is a versatile and accessible craft. All you need is a pair of scissors, cut-out pictures, adhesive and a clean background surface. The principles of decoupage are easy to master, and this inspiring new book gives practical advice on all the basic techniques. An introduction details all the materials you will need to produce your own decoupage projects. There are 25 varied and exciting projects to create, including beautiful and functional objects as diverse as a painted chest of drawers decorated with a zebra design, an elegant gilded mirror frame and a headboard for a child's bed. There are traditional designs such as a simple bead tie-back for a stylish curtain, a wastebasket and a Victorian scrap table. Contemporary treatments include a bathroom cabinet with a nautilus design, and a bright kitchen table. With innovative ideas in many styles, this book is both a visual sourcebook and a practical reference guide to a classic craft.
£8.42
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Re:Cyclists: 200 Years on Two Wheels
‘As if Bill Bryson had taken to two wheels’ - FT Somewhere in a German forest 200 years ago, during the darkest, wettest summer for centuries, the story of cycling began. The calls to ban it were more or less immediate. Re:Cyclists is the tale of the following two centuries. It tells how cycling became a kinky vaudeville act for Parisians, how it was the basis of an American business empire to rival Henry Ford's, and how it found a unique home in the British Isles. The Victorian love of cycling started with penny-farthing riders, who explored lonely roads that had been left abandoned by the coming of the railways. Then high-society took to it - in the 1980s the glittering parties of the London Season featured bicycles dancing in the ballroom, and every member of the House of Lords rode a bike. Twentieth-century cycling was very different, and even more popular. It became the sport and the pastime of millions of ordinary people who wanted to escape the city smog, or to experience the excitement of a weekend's racing. Cycling offered adventure and independence in the good times, and consolation during the war years and the Great Depression. Re:Cyclists tells the story of cycling's glories and also of its despairs, of how it only just avoided extinction in the motoring boom of the 1960s. And finally, at the dawn of the 21st century, it celebrates how cycling rose again - a little different, a lot more fashionable, but still about the same simple pleasures that it always has been: the wind in your face and the thrill of two-wheeled freedom.
£12.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Tourists: How the British Went Abroad to Find Themselves
*FOYLES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH* 'I really can't recommend this enough - especially if you are going on holiday' Tom Holland 'Delightful ... Lucy Lethbridge has written a glorious romp of a book' Kathryn Hughes, The Mail on Sunday ‘It is the paramount wish of every English heart, ever addicted to vagabondizing, to hasten to the Continent…’ In 1815 the Battle of Waterloo brought to an end the Napoleonic Wars and the European continent opened up once again to British tourists. The nineteenth century was to be an age driven by steam technology, mass-industrialisation and movement, and, in the footsteps of the Grand Tourists a hundred years earlier, the British middle-classes flocked to Europe to see the sights. In Tourists, the voices of these travellers – puzzled, shocked, delighted and amazed – are brought vividly to life. From the discomfort of the stagecoach to the ‘self-contained pleasure palace’ of the beach resort, Lucy Lethbridge brilliantly examines two centuries of tourists’ experience. Among a range of disparate characters, we meet the commercial titans of Victorian tourism, Albert Smith, Henry Gaze and Thomas Cook, as well as their successor, Vladimir Raitz, the creator of the modern beach holiday. The growth of popular tourism introduced new markets in guidebooks, souvenirs, cuisine and health cures. It smoothed over class differences but also exacerbated them. It destroyed traditional cultures while at the same time preserving them. From portable cameras to postcards and suntans, Tourists explores how tourism has reflected changing attitudes to modernity and how, from the grand hotel to the campsite, the foreign holiday exposes deep fears, hopes and even longings for home.
£10.99
Princeton University Press The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began
In September of 1859, the entire Earth was engulfed in a gigantic cloud of seething gas, and a blood-red aurora erupted across the planet from the poles to the tropics. Around the world, telegraph systems crashed, machines burst into flames, and electric shocks rendered operators unconscious. Compasses and other sensitive instruments reeled as if struck by a massive magnetic fist. For the first time, people began to suspect that the Earth was not isolated from the rest of the universe. However, nobody knew what could have released such strange forces upon the Earth--nobody, that is, except the amateur English astronomer Richard Carrington. In this riveting account, Stuart Clark tells for the first time the full story behind Carrington's observations of a mysterious explosion on the surface of the Sun and how his brilliant insight--that the Sun's magnetism directly influences the Earth--helped to usher in the modern era of astronomy. Clark vividly brings to life the scientists who roundly rejected the significance of Carrington's discovery of solar flares, as well as those who took up his struggle to prove the notion that the Earth could be touched by influences from space. Clark also reveals new details about the sordid scandal that destroyed Carrington's reputation and led him from the highest echelons of science to the very lowest reaches of love, villainy, and revenge. The Sun Kings transports us back to Victorian England, into the very heart of the great nineteenth-century scientific controversy about the Sun's hidden influence over our planet.
£22.50
Little, Brown Book Group Oyster Isles: A Journey Through Britain and Ireland's Oysters
'Bobby's oyster travelogue is an ambitious, one-of-a-kind piece that shines a spotlight on the extraordinary and the everyday of the industry. It's the stuff that oyster bucket lists are made of' Julie Qiu, In A Half Shell blog'A masterpiece' Sandy Ingber, Executive Chef of the Grand Central Oyster Bar, New York'An amazing tome . . . The stories behind each oyster and location are informative, in depth, but, most importantly, fun' Michel Roux JrThe oyster. Ostrea edulis. 'Edible bones'. The Great British oyster is deeply embedded in our geographical, historical and socio-cultural landscape. Five-thousand-year-old oyster shells have been discovered in the northern reaches of Scotland, and oyster shells are littered along the extinct riverbeds deep beneath the London of today. A highly prized delicacy of the Romans, the oyster has always been a class leveller: an everyman food of the poor during the Victorian age to a food of decadence during the twentieth century. It is a superfood; a biological water meter; an ecological superpower. The oyster card, 'the world is your oyster' - it has even crept into our language.Bobby Groves, Head of Oysters at the Chiltern Firehouse, takes us on a wonderful journey of the British oyster, a five-thousand-mile motorcycle odyssey of Britain's spectacular coastlines. He vividly brings to life this strange and marvellous creature, shining a light on its rich and vibrant history, its cultural impact and ecological importance as well as those oyster folk who work so hard to protect them.Part travelogue, part social history, Oyster Isles is a celebration of the much-loved yet much-misunderstood British oyster.
£10.99
Inner Traditions Bear and Company The First Female Pharaoh: Sobekneferu, Goddess of the Seven Stars
Cleopatra. Nefertiti. Hatshepsut. All of them are ancient Egyptian female rulers who rose above their predominantly patriarchal societies to become controllers of a great empire. Missing from this list, however, is Sobekneferu, ancient Egypt’s first female ruler. Why was the reign of this powerful woman all but forgotten? Piecing together the lost history of the first female pharaoh, Andrew Collins presents the first comprehensive biography of Sobekneferu. Using every text and monument that concerns Sobekneferu and her time in power, he examines her achievements as ruler, the political and religious issues of her age, the temples and ruins associated with her, and her continuing impact on ancient Egypt after her reign. He explores her relationship with her brother Amenemhet IV, her sister Neferuptah, and their father Amenemhet III, regarded as one of the most beloved pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom. He examines Sobekneferu’s untimely end, the fate of her body, and the cult that developed in her name. Discussing Sobekneferu’s magical beliefs and practices, Collins shows how they centred on the crocodile god Sobek, the hippo goddess Neith, and the circumpolar stars of the night sky in which they were personified. He also reveals how the setting of the Crocodile Star (Eltanin), the brightest star in the constellation of Draco, aligns with Sobekneferu’s suspected pyramid. Examining the modern-day resurrection of Sobekneferu among the occultists and mystics of Victorian London, Collins shows how she is the true inspiration behind every ancient Egyptian female queen who comes back to life after her tomb is found--as featured first in Bram Stoker’s shocking 1903 novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars and later in several modern blockbuster movies. Revealing how Sobekneferu has left a lasting impact on culture and occulture through the ages despite being nearly erased from history, Collins shows how her continuing legacy is perhaps, ultimately, her true resurrection.
£17.99
New York University Press Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan’s Lost Places of Leisure
Winner of the Publication Award for Popular Culture and Entertainment for 2009 from the Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America Named to Pop Matters list of the Best Books of 2009 (Non-fiction) From the lights that never go out on Broadway to its 24-hour subway system, New York City isn't called "the city that never sleeps" for nothing. Both native New Yorkers and tourists have played hard in Gotham for centuries, lindy hopping in 1930s Harlem, voguing in 1980s Chelsea, and refueling at all-night diners and bars. The slim island at the mouth of the Hudson River is packed with places of leisure and entertainment, but Manhattan's infamously fast pace of change means that many of these beautifully constructed and incredibly ornate buildings have disappeared, and with them a rich and ribald history. Yet with David Freeland as a guide, it's possible to uncover skeletons of New York's lost monuments to its nightlife. With a keen eye for architectural detail, Freeland opens doors, climbs onto rooftops, and gazes down alleyways to reveal several of the remaining hidden gems of Manhattan's nineteenth- and twentieth-century entertainment industry. From the Atlantic Garden German beer hall in present-day Chinatown to the city's first motion picture studio—Union Square's American Mutoscope and Biograph Company—to the Lincoln Theater in Harlem, Freeland situates each building within its historical and social context, bringing to life an old New York that took its diversions seriously. Freeland reminds us that the buildings that serve as architectural guideposts to yesteryear's recreations cannot be re-created—once destroyed they are gone forever. With condominiums and big box stores spreading over city blocks like wildfires, more and more of the Big Apple's legendary houses of mirth are being lost. By excavating the city's cultural history, this delightful book unearths some of the many mysteries that lurk around the corner and lets readers see the city in a whole new light.
£22.99
University of Exeter Press The Beginnings Of The Cinema In England,1894-1901: Volume 4: 1899
Describing in detail one of the most inventive periods in the history of English cinema, the volumes in this celebrated series are already established as classics in their field and represent a major contribution to international film studies. Each volume details the highlights of a single cinematic year, including details of production, manufacturers of equipment, dealers and exhibitors. This is augmented by numerous carefully chosen illustrations and a comprehensive filmography of English films, fiction and non-fiction, for the year. Particular attention is also paid to the ways in which the cinema of other countries affected the English industry. Volume 4 examines how in 1899 two major events influenced British cinema. The Boer War created a boom in film production as a result of an insatiable demand for news and pictures of the campaign brought on my fervent patriotism. Though actual battle could not be filmed, ‘fake’ war films based on incidents from the campaign began to be produced by English filmmakers. The University of Exeter Press editions of Volumes 2, 3, 4 are re-jacketed re-issues of the first editions. The long-awaited fifth and final volume in the series is published for the first time by UEP, and edited and introduced by Richard Maltby, Professor of Screen Studies, Flinders University, Australia. Describing in detail one of the most inventive periods in the history of English cinema, this series represents a major contribution to international film studies. Each illustrated volume details a single cinematic year, including details of production, manufacturers of equipment, dealers and exhibitors, as well as a comprehensive filmography of English films, fiction and non-fiction, for the year. The previous volumes are aready established as classics in their field and have recently been re-jacketed and re-issued by University of Exeter Press.The fifth and final volume documents the year 1900, when the conflict in South Africa against the Boers and the Boxer uprising in China proved popular subjects for news films and fictional representations. It includes a full Introduction by Richard Maltby which places Victorian cinema in its cultural, social and historical context
£30.59
HarperCollins Publishers Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic
‘A delightful compendium of the kind of facts you immediately want to share with anyone you encounter’ New York Times ‘An ebullient, irrepressible spirit invests this book. It is erudite and sprightly’Sunday Times From the creation of the first encyclopedia to Wikipedia, from ancient museums to modern kindergarten classes—here is award-winning writer Simon Winchester’s brilliant and all-encompassing look at how humans acquire, retain, and pass on information and data, and how technology continues to change our lives and our minds. With the advent of the internet, any topic we want to know about is instantly available with the touch of a smartphone button. With so much knowledge at our fingertips, what is there left for our brains to do? At a time when we seem to be stripping all value from the idea of knowing things – no need for maths, no need for map reading, no need for memorisation – are we risking our ability to think? As we empty our minds, will we one day be incapable of thoughtfulness? Addressing these questions, Simon Winchester explores how humans have attained, stored and disseminated knowledge. Examining such disciplines as education, journalism, encyclopedia creation, museum curation, photography and broadcasting, he looks at a whole range of knowledge diffusion – from the cuneiform writings of Babylon to the machine-made genius of artificial intelligence, by way of Gutenberg, Google and Wikipedia to the huge Victorian assemblage of the Mundaneum, the collection of everything ever known, currently stored in a damp basement in northern Belgium. Studded with strange and fascinating details, Knowing What We Know is a deep dive into learning and the human mind. Throughout this fascinating tour, Winchester forces us to ponder what rational humans are becoming. What good is all this knowledge if it leads to lack of thought? What is information without wisdom? Does René Descartes’ ‘Cogito, ergo sum’—'I think, therefore I am’, the foundation for human knowledge widely accepted since the Enlightenment—still hold? And what will the world be like if no one in it is wise?
£22.50
Little, Brown & Company A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing
When Amanda Held Opelt suffered a season of loss-including three miscarriages and the unexpected death of her sister, New York Times bestselling writer Rachel Held Evans-she was confronted with sorrow she didn't know to how face. Opelt struggled to process her grief and accept the reality of the pain in the world. She also wrestled with some unexpectedly difficult questions: What does it mean to truly grieve and to grieve well? Why is it so hard to move on? Why didn't my faith prepare me for this kind of pain? And what am I supposed to do now?Her search for answers led her to discover that generations past embraced rituals that served as vessels for pain and aided in the process of grieving and healing. Today, many of these traditions have been lost as religious practice declines, cultures amalgamate, death is sanitized, and pain is averted. In this raw and authentic memoir of bereavement, Opelt explores the history of human grief practices and how previous generations have journeyed through periods of suffering. She explores grief rituals and customs from various cultures, including:- the Irish tradition of keening, or wailing in grief, which teaches her that healing can only begin when we dive headfirst into our grief- the Victorian tradition of post-mortem photographs and how we struggle to recall a loved one as they were- the Jewish tradition of sitting shiva, which reminds her to rest in the strength of her community even when God feels absent- the tradition of mourning clothing, which set the bereaved apart in society for a time, allowing them space to honour their griefAs Opelt explores each bereavement practice, it gives her a framework for processing her own pain. She shares how, in spite of her doubt and anger, God met her in the midst of sorrow and grieved along with her, and shows that when we carefully and honestly attend to our losses, we are able to expand our capacity for love, faith, and healing.
£15.99
Simon & Schuster Barefoot Dogs: Stories
Winner of the Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters * A San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book of 2015 * Fiction Finalist for the 2015 Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards * A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2015 * One of the Texas Observer’s “Five Books We Loved in 2015” * One of PRI’s “The World’s Five Books You Should Read in 2016” “Profound and wrenching…A deeply moving chronicle of one family’s collective devastation, full of remarkable wisdom and humor” (The New York Times Book Review) that follows the members of a wealthy Mexican family after their patriarch is kidnapped.On an unremarkable night, José Victoriano Arteaga—the head of a thriving Mexico City family—vanishes on his way home from work. The Arteagas find few answers; the full truth of what happened to Arteaga is lost to the shadows of Mexico’s vast underworld. But soon packages arrive to the family house, offering horrifying clues. Fear, guilt, and the prospect of financial ruin fracture the once-proud family and scatter them across the globe, yet delicate threads still hold them together: in a swimming pool in Palo Alto, Arteaga’s grandson struggles to make sense of the grief that has hobbled his family; in Mexico City, Arteaga’s mistress alternates between rage and heartbreak as she waits, in growing panic, for her lover’s return; in Austin, the Arteagas’ housekeeper tries to piece together a second life in an alienating new land; in Madrid, Arteaga’s son takes his dog through the hot and unforgiving streets, in search of his father’s ghost. A stunningly original exploration of the wages of a hidden war, Barefoot Dogs is a heartfelt elegy to the stolen innocence of every family struck by tragedy. Urgent and vital fiction, “these powerful stories are worthy of rereading in order to fully digest the far-reaching implications of one man’s disappearance…this singular book affords the reader the chance to step inside a world of privilege and loss, and understand how the two are inextricably intertwined” (San Francisco Chronicle).
£16.00
Skira The Eternal Baroque: Studies in Honor of Jennifer Montagu
Jennifer Montagu is a world-renowned art historian whose name has become synonymous with the study of Italian Baroque sculpture. In honor of Jennifer Montagu’s immeasurable contribution to the field of Italian Baroque sculpture, sixty-two of the foremost scholars of European sculpture have been invited to participate in a symposium in her honor on 6 - 7 September 2013 at the Wallace Collection, London. Thirty of the papers presented there were selected for the publication as a tribute to this generous colleague and friend who has inspired and mentored dozens of younger historians in European art. Dr. Montagu’s academic work began in Political Science at Oxford, but conversations with Ernst Gombrich led her to pursue an advanced degree in art history instead. In 1963, long before the study of Italian bronze statuettes reached the level of interest that it enjoys today, her classic survey, simply titled Bronzes, was met with great enthusiasm, eventually being printed in five languages. Montagu taught at the University of Reading until 1964, when she became an assistant curator of the Photographic Collection at the Warburg Institute. In 1971 she became a full curator of the collection, a position she held until 1991. During these years she published at an indefatigable rate, and following her retirement from that post, her productivity only increased. Montagu was a Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University, a Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art,Washington, D.C.), and a visiting professor at the Collège de France. Montagu’s numerous publications include her monumental study of Alessandro Algardi (Yale University Press, 1985), Roman Baroque Sculpture: the Industry of Art (Yale, 1989) and Gold, Silver and Bronze: Metal Sculpture of the Italian Baroque (Mellon Lectures, CASVA; Yale University Press, 1996). She was appointed LVO (Royal Victorian Order) in 2006 for services to the Royal Collection and CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 2012 for her contribution to the history of art.
£40.50
Boydell & Brewer Ltd The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Formative Years, 1835-1862: Charlotte Street to Cheyne Walk. I. 1835-1854
Major edition revealing key ideas and events in the lives and work of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and Victorian literary circles: 5,800 letters (including 2,000 previously unpublished letters) to 330 recipients. The best of these letters, flowing rapidly from his pen, radiate charisma and enthusiasm, warmth and care for his friends, and a total engagement with art and literature. BURLINGTON MAGAZINE [Julian Treuherz] 1835-1854: This nine-volume edition will represent the definitive collection of extant Rossetti correspondence, an outstanding primary witness to the range of ideas and opinions that shaped Rossetti's art and poetry. The largest collection ofRossetti's letters ever to be published, it features all known surviving letters, a total of almost 5,800 to over 330 recipients, and includes 2,000 previously unpublished letters by Rossetti and selected letters to him. In addition to this, about 100 drawings taken from within letter texts are also reproduced. In its entirety the collection will give an invaluable and unparalleled insight into Rossetti's character and art, and will form a rich resource for students and scholars studying all aspects of his life and work. The correspondence has been transcribed from collections in sixty-four manuscript repositories, containing Rossetti's letters to his companions in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt and Stephens; friends such as Boyce and Bell Scott; his early patrons, Ellen Heaton and James Leathart; and his publisher friend, Alexander Macmillan. An additional twenty-two printed sources have also been accessed. Index; extensive annotations.WILLIAM E. FREDEMAN (1928-1999) was professor of English at the University of British Columbia from 1956-1991. His many books, articles and reviews on the Pre-Raphaelites and their followersinclude his important Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study. He died in 1999 with this edition almost completed. An editorial committee chaired by Betty Fredeman has been formed to see it through the press.
£135.00
Taylor & Francis Ltd Secrecy and the Media: The Official History of the United Kingdom's D-Notice System
Secrecy and the Media is the first book to examine the development of the D-Notice system, which regulates the UK media's publication of British national security secrets. It is based on official documents, many of which have not previously been available to a general audience, as well as on media sources.From Victorian times, British governments have consistently seen the need, in the public interest, to prevent the media publishing secret information which would endanger national security. The UK media have meanwhile continuously resisted official attempts to impose any form of censorship, arguing that a free press is in the public interest. Both sides have normally seen the pitfalls of attempting to resolve this sometimes acrimonious conflict of interests by litigation, and have together evolved a system of editorial self-regulation, assisted by day-to-day independent expert advice, known colloquially as the D-Notice System. The book traces the development of this system from nineteenth-century colonial campaigns, through two world wars, to modern operations and counter-terrorism in the post-Cold War era, up to the beginning of the Labour government in 1997. Examples are drawn from media, political and official sources (some not yet open), and cover not only defence issues (including Special Forces), but also the activities of the secret intelligence services MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. These cases relate principally to the UK, but also to American and other allies’ interests. The story of how this sometimes controversial institution now operates in the modern world will be essential reading for those in the media and government departments, and for academics and students in the fields of security, defence and intelligence, as well as being an accessible exposé for the general reader.Nicholas Wilkinson served in the Royal Navy 1959-98, and from 1999 to 2004 he ran the independent Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee. He was a Press Complaints Commissioner from 2005 to 2008, and is a Cabinet Office Historian.
£86.99
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Lord Liverpool: A Political Life
Shaped by eighteenth-century assumptions, Liverpool nonetheless laid the foundations for the nineteenth-century Britain that emerged from the Reform era. Robert Banks Jenkinson (1770-1828), 2nd Earl of Liverpool, was Britain's longest serving prime minister since William Pitt the Younger. Liverpool's tenure in office oversaw a series of seismic events including the War of 1812 withthe United States, the endgame of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, the Corn Laws, the Peterloo Massacre, and escalating contention over the issue of Catholic Emancipation. However, Liverpool's overall standing within British political history has been overshadowed by contemporaries such as Castlereagh and Canning, and his reputation and achievements were downplayed by the Reform period that followed. This new political biography explores Liverpool's career and puts his efforts at resisting change into context, bringing this period of transformation into sharp focus. It shows Liverpool as a defender of the eighteenth-century British constitution, documentinghis efforts at adapting institutions to the challenges of war and then the very different post-1815 world. Shaped by eighteenth-century assumptions, Liverpool nonetheless laid the foundations for the nineteenth-century Britain that emerged from the Reform era. This book uses his career and outlook as a way of exploring the crucial transition from the Georgian to the Victorian era. WILLIAM ANTHONY HAY is Associate Professor of history at Mississippi State University and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
£30.00
New York University Press At Home in Nineteenth-Century America: A Documentary History
Few institutions were as central to nineteenth-century American culture as the home. Emerging in the 1820s as a sentimental space apart from the public world of commerce and politics, the Victorian home transcended its initial association with the private lives of the white, native-born bourgeoisie to cross lines of race, ethnicity, class, and region. Throughout the nineteenth century, home was celebrated as a moral force, domesticity moved freely into the worlds of politics and reform, and home and marketplace repeatedly remade each other. At Home in Nineteenth-Century America draws upon advice manuals, architectural designs, personal accounts, popular fiction, advertising images, and reform literature to revisit the variety of places Americans called home. Entering into middle-class suburban houses, slave cabins, working-class tenements, frontier dugouts, urban settlement houses, it explores the shifting interpretations and experiences of these spaces from within and without. Nineteenth-century homes and notions of domesticity seem simultaneously distant and familiar. This sense of surprise and recognition is ideal for the study of history, preparing us to view the past with curiosity and empathy, inspiring comparisons to the spaces we inhabit today—malls, movie theaters, city streets, and college campuses. Permitting us to listen closely to the nineteenth century’s sweeping conversation about home in its various guises, At Home in Nineteenth-Century America encourages us to hear our contemporary conversation about the significance and meaning of home anew while appreciating the lingering imprint of past ideals. Instructor's Guide
£23.99
Harvard University Press Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power
On the 150th anniversary of the death of the English historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay, Robert Sullivan offers a portrait of a Victorian life that probes the cost of power, the practice of empire, and the impact of ideas.His Macaulay is a Janus-faced master of the universe: a prominent spokesman for abolishing slavery in the British Empire who cared little for the cause, a forceful advocate for reforming Whig politics but a Machiavellian realist, a soaring parliamentary orator who avoided debate, a self-declared Christian, yet a skeptic and a secularizer of English history and culture, and a stern public moralist who was in love with his two youngest sisters.Perhaps best known in the West for his classic History of England, Macaulay left his most permanent mark on South Asia, where his penal code remains the law. His father ensured that ancient Greek and Latin literature shaped Macaulay’s mind, but he crippled his heir emotionally. Self-defense taught Macaulay that power, calculation, and duplicity rule politics and human relations. In Macaulay’s writings, Sullivan unearths a sinister vision of progress that prophesied twentieth-century genocide. That the reverent portrait fashioned by Macaulay’s distinguished extended family eclipsed his insistent rhetoric about race, subjugation, and civilizing slaughter testifies to the grip of moral obliviousness.Devoting his huge talents to gaining power—above all for England and its empire—made Macaulay’s life a tragedy. Sullivan offers an unsurpassed study of an afflicted genius and a thoughtful meditation on the modern ethics of power.
£44.96
University of California Press The Lure of the Beach: A Global History
A human and global take on a beloved vacation spot. The crash of surf, smell of salted air, wet whorls of sand underfoot. These are the sensations of the beach, that environment that has drawn humans to its life-sustaining shores for millennia. And while the gull’s cry and the cove’s splendor have remained constant throughout time, our relationship with the beach has been as fluid as the runnels left behind by the tide’s turning.The Lure of the Beach is a chronicle of humanity's history with the coast, taking us from the seaside pleasure palaces of Roman elites and the aquatic rituals of medieval pilgrims, to the venues of modern resort towns and beyond. Robert C. Ritchie traces the contours of the material and social economies of the beach throughout time, covering changes in the social status of beach goers, the technology of transport, and the development of fashion (from nudity to Victorianism and back again), as well as the geographic spread of modern beach-going from England to France, across the Mediterranean, and from nineteenth-century America to the world. And as climate change and rising sea levels erode the familiar faces of our coasts, we are poised for a contemporary reckoning with our relationship—and responsibilities—to our beaches and their ecosystems. The Lure of the Beach demonstrates that whether as a commodified pastoral destination, a site of ecological resplendency, or a flashpoint between private ownership and public access, the history of the beach is a human one that deserves to be told now more than ever before.
£21.00
University of California Press The Lure of the Beach: A Global History
A human and global take on a beloved vacation spot. The crash of surf, smell of salted air, wet whorls of sand underfoot. These are the sensations of the beach, that environment that has drawn humans to its life-sustaining shores for millennia. And while the gull’s cry and the cove’s splendor have remained constant throughout time, our relationship with the beach has been as fluid as the runnels left behind by the tide’s turning.The Lure of the Beach is a chronicle of humanity's history with the coast, taking us from the seaside pleasure palaces of Roman elites and the aquatic rituals of medieval pilgrims, to the venues of modern resort towns and beyond. Robert C. Ritchie traces the contours of the material and social economies of the beach throughout time, covering changes in the social status of beach goers, the technology of transport, and the development of fashion (from nudity to Victorianism and back again), as well as the geographic spread of modern beach-going from England to France, across the Mediterranean, and from nineteenth-century America to the world. And as climate change and rising sea levels erode the familiar faces of our coasts, we are poised for a contemporary reckoning with our relationship—and responsibilities—to our beaches and their ecosystems. The Lure of the Beach demonstrates that whether as a commodified pastoral destination, a site of ecological resplendency, or a flashpoint between private ownership and public access, the history of the beach is a human one that deserves to be told now more than ever before.
£22.50
University of Notre Dame Press Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars
In Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars, Margot Gayle Backus charts the rise of the newspaper sex scandal across the fin de siècle British archipelago and explores its impact on the work of James Joyce, a towering figure of literary modernism. Based largely on archival research, the first three chapters trace the legal, social, and economic forces that fueled an upsurge in sex scandal over the course of the Irish Home Rule debates during James Joyce’s childhood. The remaining chapters examine Joyce’s use of scandal in his work throughout his career, beginning with his earliest known poem, “Et Tu, Healy,” written when he was nine years old to express outrage over the politically disastrous Parnell scandal. Backus’s readings of Joyce’s essays in a Trieste newspaper, the Dubliners short stories, Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses show Joyce’s increasingly intricate employment of scandal conventions, ingeniously twisted so as to disable scandal’s reifying effects. Scandal Work pursues a sequence of politically motivated sex scandals, which it derives from Joyce's work. It situates Joyce within an alternative history of the New Journalism’s emergence in response to the Irish Land Wars and the Home Rule debates, from the Phoenix Park murders and the first Dublin Castle scandal to “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” and the Oscar Wilde scandal. Her voluminous scholarship encompasses historical materials on Victorian and early twentieth-century sex scandals, Irish politics, and newspaper evolution as well as providing significant new readings of Joyce’s texts.
£28.99
Duke University Press Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910
In Bodies in Dissent Daphne A. Brooks argues that from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, black transatlantic activists, actors, singers, and other entertainers frequently transformed the alienating conditions of social and political marginalization into modes of self-actualization through performance. Brooks considers the work of African American, Anglo, and racially ambiguous performers in a range of popular entertainment, including racial melodrama, spectacular theatre, moving panorama exhibitions, Pan-Africanist musicals, Victorian magic shows, religious and secular song, spiritualism, and dance. She describes how these entertainers experimented with different ways of presenting their bodies in public—through dress, movement, and theatrical technologies—to defamiliarize the spectacle of “blackness” in the transatlantic imaginary.Brooks pieces together reviews, letters, playbills, fiction, and biography in order to reconstruct not only the contexts of African American performance but also the reception of the stagings of “bodily insurgency” which she examines. Throughout the book, she juxtaposes unlikely texts and entertainers in order to illuminate the complicated transatlantic cultural landscape in which black performers intervened. She places Adah Isaacs Menken, a star of spectacular theatre, next to Sojourner Truth, showing how both used similar strategies of physical gesture to complicate one-dimensional notions of race and gender. She also considers Henry Box Brown’s public re-enactments of his escape from slavery, the Pan-Africanist discourse of Bert Williams’s and George Walker’s musical In Dahomey (1902–04), and the relationship between gender politics, performance, and New Negro activism in the fiction of the novelist and playwright Pauline Hopkins and the postbellum stage work of the cakewalk dancer and choreographer Aida Overton Walker. Highlighting the integral connections between performance and the construction of racial identities, Brooks provides a nuanced understanding of the vitality, complexity, and influence of black performance in the United States and throughout the black Atlantic.
£31.00
GB Publishing Org Kingswraith: Taste no Pity
When Scotland Yard involved the Professor and his young ward Martin Kingswraith in the strange case of the 'Depleted Men', neither of those skilled white wizards, or Lux Texentes, could foresee the terrible dangers they would face. In the soot-coated cobbled streets of late Victorian London, Kingswraith must overcome his greatest challenge or perish in the attempt. Kingswraith would receive help from the strangest quarters, not least Penelope Epimeliad and the mysterious children who haunted the stone forests of London town, children who had once been tree sprites in Britain's magnificent primordial woodlands when mammoths still trumpeted in the frozen wilds. The children now lived in a vast Roman reservoir under the Tower of London, from which they would emerge as a force of good, dedicated to fighting evil, bringing aid and comfort to the innocent, and food to the downtrodden masses. It was they who created the Depleted Men, actually wicked murderers, using ancient enchantments to suck the minerals from the killers' bodies, leaving behind a shell of soft, jelly-like protein. Penelope recognises Kingswraith's unique qualities as a scion of the house of Pendragon and she brings her own immense powers to bear to prepare him for his inevitable battle against sinister Haven Slighe, one of the ten Viventem Nominis Umbra, or malevolent Lords of Living Shadow. Slighe is a forceful mage. He and his nine fellows are a pitiless force of darkness driven towards reducing civilisation to its lowest possible ebb so they feed from humanity's despair. They will encourage any wickedness, drunkenness and lechery, until the whole population is lost without God or hope of redemption. The Lux Texentes has been standing in their way, but the Umbra has been cutting them down at every opportunity. To take Kingswraith, Haven Slighe captures the Professor. To save him Kingswraith must face Slighe alone, and afraid.
£12.09
Fordham University Press Fifth Avenue Famous: The Extraordinary Story of Music at St. Patrick's Cathedral
Victorian-era divas who were better paid than some corporate chairmen, the boy soprano who grew up to give Bing Crosby a run for his money, music directors who were literally killed by the job—the plot of a Broadway show or a dime-store novel? No, the unique and colorful history of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Since its inception more than 125 years ago, the Cathedral Choir has been considered the gold standard of liturgical music—an example of artistic excellence that has garnered worldwide renown. Yet behind this stately facade lies an intriguing mix of New York history, star secrets, and high-level office politics that has made the choir not only a source of prime musical entertainment but also fodder for tabloids and periodicals across the nation. In this unique and engaging book, readers are treated to a treasure trove of vibrant characters, from opera stars from around the world to the thousands of volunteer singers who brought their own hopes and dreams—and widely varying musical abilities—to the fabled choir. As the city’s preeminent Catholic institution, St. Patrick’s Cathedral has served one of the most dynamic and diverse communities in the world for well over a century. It has been intimately entwined with the history of New York: a major center of culture in the nation’s cultural capital. The Cathedral Choir provides an extraordinary and largely overlooked insight into this history, and in Salvatore Basile’s pitch-perfect exploration it becomes a microcosm for the larger trends, upheavals, and events that have made up the history of the city, the nation, and even the world. Basile also illuminates the choir’s important role in New Yorkers’ responses to some of the most momentous events of the past one hundred years, from world wars to world’s fairs, from the sinking of the Titanic to 9/11, as well as its central role in the rituals and celebrations that have made life in the city more joyful—and bearable—for millions of people over the decades. While the phrase “church choir” usually evokes the image of a dowdy group of amateurs, the phrase “Choir of St. Patrick’s Cathedral” has always meant something quite different. Salvatore Basile’s splendid history shows just how different, and just how spectacular, the music of St. Patrick’s is.
£19.99