Search results for ""author rachel hewitt""

In the 1790s, Britain underwent what the politician Edmund Burke called 'the most important of all revolutions...a revolution in sentiments'. Inspired by the French Revolution, British radicals concocted new political worlds to enshrine healthier, more productive, human emotions and relationships. The Enlightenment's wildest hopes crested in the utopian projects of such optimists - including the young poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the physician Thomas Beddoes and the first photographer Thomas Wedgwood - who sought to reform sex, education, commerce, politics and medicine by freeing desire from repressive constraints. But by the middle of the decade, the wind had changed. The French Revolution descended into bloody Terror and the British government quashed radical political activities. In the space of one decade, feverish optimism gave way to bleak disappointment, and changed the way we think about human need and longing. A Revolution of Feeling is a vivid and absorbing account of the dramatic end of the Enlightenment, the beginning of an emotional landscape preoccupied by guilt, sin, failure, resignation and repression, and the origins of our contemporary approach to feeling and desire. Above all, it is the story of the human cost of political change, of men and women consigned to the 'wrong side of history'. But although their revolutionary proposals collapsed, that failure resulted in its own cultural revolution - a revolution of feeling - the aftershocks of which are felt to the present day.

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Rachel Hewitt is a writer and Lecturer in Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her first book, the best-selling MAP OF A NATION: A BIOGRAPHY OF THE ORDNANCE SURVEY (2010), won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction. She was awarded a Gladstone's Library Political Writing Residency for her second book, A REVOLUTION OF FEELING: THE DECADE THAT FORGED THE MODERN MIND (2017). Rachel is Director of the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts and received the prestigious work-in-progress prize, the Eccles British Library Writer's Award, for IN HER NATURE.She loves trail-running and was 1st Female in the Punk Panther Ultra Series in 2020 and 3rd Female in the Hardmoors Marathon Series in 2019. Her longest run to date was the Punk Panther Dales Way Challenge (c. 83 miles) in August 2021. She lives in Yorkshire.

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'A gripping story about the personalities who initiated the mapping of Britain and their extraordinary skill and endurance' Max Hastings, Sunday Times The Ordnance Survey is a much beloved British institution, but in our modern map-obsessed world how much do we know about its curious origins and extraordinary challenges? Here at last is the remarkable story of the creation of the first complete, accurate, affordable map of the British Isles. What it reveals is a colourful and engrossing secret history of the Ordnance Survey and the obsessive and ambitious men who dreamt and delivered it. The Ordnance Survey's story is one of political revolutions, rebellions and regional unions that altered the shape and identity of the United Kingdom over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It makes for an engaging and page-turning account of one of the great untold British adventure stories, following those intrepid individuals who lugged brass theodolites up mountains to make the country visible to itself for the first time. 'This is a brilliant book, and it's astonishing that no one has thought of writing it before... History at its best' A N Wilson, Reader's Digest 'Endlessly absorbing... In her lively and informative narrative, Hewitt highlights the Ordnance project's legion of draughtsmen, surveyors, dreamers and eccentrics' Ian Thomson, Observer

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**An Economist Book of the Year**** A Critic Book of the Year**A trail-blazing book about women's fights to access the great outdoors - and a very personal book about how running through the landscape helped the author in her journey from bereavement back to a sense of belonging'Heartfelt, passionate, infuriating and often devastating, this book will inspire you to fight for your right to tread your own path' CAROLINE CRIADO PEREZ, author of Invisible WomenWhen Rachel loses five family members in five months, grief magnifies other absences. Running used to help her feel at home, but now she becomes painfully aware of her inability to run without being cat-called or followed. She sees injustices facing women in sport, and male bias in competition regulations and media coverage. Running outdoors sharpens her sense of the grief women experience - every day, everywhere - for lack of freedom.Rachel goes in search of a new family: foremothers at the dawn of outdoor sport. She discovers Lizzie Le Blond, who scaled the Alps in woollen skirts, photographed fearless women skating and tobogganing at breakneck speeds, and founded the Ladies' Alpine Club, defying men who wanted the mountains to themselves. Yet after such groundbreaking progress in the late 1800s, a backlash drove women out of sports and public space.Are we now living through a similar reversal in women's rights or an era of unprecedented liberty? Telling Lizzie's story alongside her own, Rachel runs her way from bereavement to belonging, in a world that feels hostile to women. On the way she's inspired by the tenacious women, past and present, who insist that breaking boundaries outdoors is, and always has been, in her nature.

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