Search results for ""Author Alex Harvey""

Forgotten Vikings provides a chronological overview of the Viking Age (7931066) and quite a lot of history either side of these arbitrary dates. Arbitrary? This book aims to explore the phenomenon of the Vikings' from new angles, forged out of recent academic breakthroughs largely unexplored in popular history books; the Viking Age viewed as a longer, discrete period from the sixth to the fifteenth centuries.Focusing on lesser-known aspects of the period, Alex Harvey taps into more obscure regions of the world these people visited, more obscure characters, and more obscure cultural elements. Examples include the evidence for viking activity on the Azores and Madeira, thirteenth-century Baltic raids, and the presence of viking armies in the Netherlands long before they became a threat to England.Offering unfamiliar perspectives, Forgotten Vikings will change the way you see these often misunderstood people, and unearth a forgotten history.

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Song Noir examines the formative first decade of Tom Waits’ career, when he lived, wrote and recorded nine albums in Los Angeles; from his soft, folk-inflected debut, Closing Time (1973), to the abrasive, surreal Swordfishtrombones (1983). Starting his song-writing career in the ’70s, Waits absorbed la’s wealth of cultural influences. Combining the spoken idioms of writers like Kerouac and Bukowski with jazz-blues rhythms, he explored the city’s literary and film noir traditions to create hallucinatory dreamscapes. Waits mined a rich seam of the city’s low-life locations and characters, letting the place feed his dark imagination. Mixing the domestic with the mythic, Waits turned quotidian, autobiographical details into something more disturbing and emblematic; a vision of la as the warped, narcotic heart of his nocturnal explorations.

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