Search results for ""author victoria"
Liverpool University Press Shelley's Broken World: Fractured Materiality and Intermitted Song: 2021
Shortlisted for the University English Book Prize 2022Shelley’s Broken World is a provocative and profound reassessment of Shelley’s poetic art and thought. Bysshe Inigo Coffey returns to a peculiarity of Shelley’s expressive repertoire first noticed by his Victorian readers and editors: his innovatory use of pauses, which registered as irregularities in ears untuned to his innovations. But his pauses are more than a quirk; various intermittences are at the centre of Shelley’s artistry and his thought. This book aims to transform the philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic contexts in which Shelley is positioned. It offers a ground-breaking analysis of his reading, and is the first study to refer to and include images of the unpublished ‘Marlow List’, a record of the books Shelley left behind him on his departure for Italy in 1818. Shelley’s prosody grew to articulate his sense that actuality is experienced as ruptured and fractured with gaps and limit-points. He shows us the weakness of the actual. As we approach the bicentenary of the poet’s death, Shelley’s Broken World provides an exciting new beginning for the study of a major Romantic poet, the history of materialism, and prosody.
£29.99
Workman Publishing How to Get Away with Myrtle (Myrtle Hardcastle Mystery 2)
An Edgar® Award Winning SeriesBefore the train has left the station, Victorian England’s most accomplished new detective already is on a suspect’s trail, and readers will be delighted to travel along. Myrtle Hardcastle has no desire to go on a relaxing travel excursion with her aunt Helena when there are More Important things to be done at home, like keeping close tabs on criminals and murder trials. Unfortunately, she has no say in the matter. So off Myrtle goes—with her governess, Miss Judson, and cat, Peony, in tow—on a fabulous private railway coach headed for the English seaside. Myrtle is thrilled to make the acquaintance of Mrs. Bloom, a professional insurance investigator aboard to protect the priceless Northern Lights tiara. But before the train reaches its destination, both the tiara and Mrs. Bloom vanish. When Myrtle arrives, she and Peony discover a dead body in the baggage car. Someone has been murdered—with Aunt Helena’s sewing shears. The trip is derailed, the local police are inept, and Scotland Yard is in no rush to arrive. What’s a smart, bored Young Lady of Quality stranded in a washed-up carnival town to do but follow the evidence to find out which of her fellow travelers is a thief and a murderer?
£8.71
British Library Publishing The Philosophy of Beards
'The absence of Beard is usually a sign of physical and moral weakness.' 'Take two drawings of the head of a lion, one with and the other without the mane. You will see how much of the majesty of the king of the woods, as well as that of the lord of the earth, dwells in this free-flowing appendage.' 'There is scarcely a more naturally disgusting object than a beardless old man. The Beard keeps gradually covering, varying and beautifying, and imparts new graces even to decay, by heightening all that is still pleasing, veiling all that is repulsive.' This eccentric Victorian book argues a strong case for the universal wearing of a beard - that essential symbol of manly distinction since ancient times. Thomas S. Gowing contrasts the vigour and daring of bearded men through history with the undeniable effeminacy of the clean-shaven. He reminds the modern man that 'ladies, by their very nature, like everything manly', and cannot fail to be charmed by a 'fine flow of curling comeliness'. Gowing's book is now republished for the first time since 1850, accompanied by illustrations of impressive beards from history.
£10.00
Harvard University Press Carmina Burana: Volume I
Carmina Burana, literally “Songs from Beuern,” is named after the village where the manuscript was found. The songbook consists of nearly 250 poems, on subjects ranging from sex and gambling to crusades and corruption. Compiled in the thirteenth century in South Tyrol, a German-speaking region of Italy, it is the largest surviving collection of secular Medieval Latin verse and provides insights into the vibrant social, spiritual, and intellectual life of the Middle Ages. The multilingual codex includes works by leading Latin poets such as the Archpoet, Walter of Châtillon, and the canonist Peter of Blois, as well as stanzas by German lyric poets. More than half these poems are preserved nowhere else.A selection from Carmina Burana first appeared in Victorian England in 1884 under the provocative title Wine, Women and Song. The title Carmina Burana remains fixed in the popular imagination today, conjured vividly by Carl Orff’s famous cantata—no Medieval Latin lyrics are better known throughout the world. This new presentation of the medieval classic in its entirety makes the anthology accessible in two volumes to Latin lovers and English readers alike.
£26.96
Reaktion Books Gilded Youth: Privilege, Rebellion and the British Public School
The British public school is an iconic institution, a training ground for the ruling elite and a symbol of national identity and tradition. But beyond the elegant architecture and evergreen playing fields is a turbulent history of teenage rebellion, sexual dissidence, and political radicalism. James Brooke-Smith wades into the wilder shores of public-school life over the last three hundred years in Gilded Youth. He uncovers armed mutinies in the late eighteenth century, a Victorian craze for flagellation, dandy-aesthetes of the 1920s, quasi-scientific discourse on masturbation, Communist scares in the 1930s, and the salacious tabloid scandals of the present day.Drawing on personal experience, extensive research, and public school representations in poetry, school slang, spy films, popular novels, and rock music, Brooke-Smith offers a fresh account of upper-class adolescence in Britain and the role of elite private education in shaping youth culture. He shows how this central British institution has inspired a counterculture of artists, intellectuals, and radicals — from Percy Shelley and George Orwell to Peter Gabriel and Richard Branson — who have rebelled against both the schools themselves and the wider society for which they stand.
£22.50
Amazon Publishing The Raven Song: A Novel
Fleeing Victorian London, a witch finds her newfound independence comes with all-new perils—both mortal and immortal. Forever untangling the branches of her strange family tree, Edwina Blackwood is at a turning point. Her parents’ disappearances still strike her as unaccountably odd. Her sister’s questionable life and untimely death have left her shaken. Spellfire has transformed her home and livelihood to ash. And now a devious stalker is on her trail. With supernatural detective Ian Cameron by her side, Edwina can’t get out of London fast enough. Gaining safe passage, she finds refuge with Sir Henry Elvanfoot, famed wizard of the north, and is promised protection from ill-aimed curses. But in this unfamiliar city of fair folk and witches, where the veil between Earth and the Otherworld is about to be lifted, something is amiss. How else to explain Edwina’s sudden prophetic visions? Or the fear that surviving whoever pursues her will require the powers of an ancient bloodline she’s only beginning to comprehend? Whatever destiny awaits, it’s Edwina’s to finally control. Where will it lead? Only time, cunning, and magic—in this world or the Other—will tell.
£9.15
Oxford University Press The Oxford History of Science
Histories you can trust. The first part of the book tells the story of science in both East and West from antiquity to the Enlightenment: from the ancient Mediterranean world to ancient China; from the exchanges between Islamic and Christian scholars in the Middle Ages to the Chinese invention of gunpowder, paper, and the printing press; from the Scientific Revolution of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe to the intellectual ferment of the eighteenth century. The chapters that follow focus on the increasingly specialized story of science since end of the eighteenth century, covering experimental science in the laboratory from Michael Faraday to CERN; the exploration of nature, from intrepid Victorian explorers to twentieth century primatologists; the mapping of the universe, from the discovery of Uranus to Big Bang theory; the impact of evolutionary ideas, from Lamarck, Darwin, and Wallace to DNA; and the story of theoretical physics, from James Clark Maxwell to Quantum Theory and beyond. A concluding chapter reflects on how scientists have communicated their work to a wider public, from the Great Exhibition of 1851 to the internet in the early twenty-first century.
£14.99
Umbriel La sonrisa del diablo The Devils Grin
Es el inicio de la serie Los crímenes de Kronberg, que suma ya tres títulos.Recupera literariamente al personaje de Sherlock Holmes, tan de moda en televisión.Su heroína, Anna Kronberg, es una creación a la altura del famoso detective londinense.En el verano de 1889, cuando un cadáver con síntomas de la enfermedad del cólera aparece flotando en los depósitos de agua de Londres, Scotland Yard solicita la ayuda del doctor Anton Kronberg, el más eminente epidemiólogo del reino. Pero el riesgo de infección no va a ser su principal problema. Primero, porque hasta el lugar se ha desplazado un detective asesor de la policía llamado Sherlock Holmes, quien de inmediato descubre su gran secreto: Anton es en realidad Anna, y el engaño acerca de su identidad, caso de hacerse público, la llevaría a la cárcel. Pero, sobre todo, porque tras el caso se esconde una conspiración criminal que podría hacer tambalear los cimientos de la Inglaterra victoriana. Con el primer volumen de Los crímene
£8.17
Marcial Pons Ediciones de Historia, S.A. Trabajos de cristal ensayo de historia de la ciencia 16501900
Encuadernación: RústicaTrabajos de cristal es un conjunto de ensayos y artículos, reunidos por primera vez y traducidos al castellano, de uno de los grandes historiadores de la ciencia, Simon Schaffer. Los episodios aquí descritos comprenden desde unas portentosas transfusiones de sangre animal en la Inglaterra de la Restauración, hasta las ideas físicas y los intereses comerciales que impulsaron el negocio de las pompas de jabón en la era victoriana, pasando por las vicisitudes del experimento crucial de la óptica newtoniana, el secreto del autómata ilustrado que jugaba al ajedrez o la extraña vida social de los instrumentos astronómicos en la China y el Pacífico en la Ilustración. Trabajos de cristal quiere recoger la transparencia y la visualización de los hechos, pero también su carácter contingente, la fragilidad sobre la que se construye el edificio del saber. Schaffer desmenuza en estos nueve capítulos la trama artesanal y mundana de las operaciones científicas, indaga en sus
£24.04
University College Dublin Press The Depiction of Eviction in Ireland 1845-1910
Dispossession has a long and tortuous history in Ireland, reaching back to the eleventh century. In the Victorian era, evictions became major social, cultural and political events, especially with the notorious clearances of the Great Famine years. In numbers, evictions declined dramatically after the mid-1850s, but in terms of media attention and political import they reached their zenith in the 1880s after the founding of the Irish National Land League. When tenantry defended their abodes, reporters and artists flocked to the scene and their descriptions of these conflicts form the central part of this book. Drawing on memoirs, ballads, poems, folklore and novels and providing numerous illustrations of contemporary prints and photographs, Curtis provides the first book-length study of rural evictions over a period of sixty years.
£50.00
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Beauty and Cosmetics 1550 to 1950
The source of tremendous power and the focus of incredible devotion, throughout history notions of beauty have been integral to social life and culture. Each age has had its own standards: a gleaming white brow during the Renaissance, the black eyebrows considered charming in the early eighteenth century, and the thin lips thought desirable by Victorians. Beauty has ensured good marriages, enabled social mobility and offered fame and notoriety, and has led women – and some men – to remarkable lengths in cultivating it, from the dangerous quantities of lead applied by Elizabeth I, to the women of the 1940s and '50s, who employed face powder, lipstick and mascara to look their best during the privations of war and austerity, creating a chic appearance to which many still aspire.
£8.99
Penguin Books Ltd Summer Will Show
'A novel of love, war and death; brilliantly entertaining and far ahead of its time' Guardian 'She is my husband's mistress - and here am I, taking her out to dinner'Sophia Willoughby of Blandamer House, upstanding Victorian matriarch, has packed her errant husband off to Paris with his mistress Minna. But when tragedy throws her life off balance Sophia goes to seek him out, and instead finds herself intensely attracted to the charismatic, bohemian Minna, who leads her on a wild, chaotic adventure through a city in the throes of revolution.'One of the great under-read British novelists of the twentieth century. This is my favourite of her novels' Sarah Waters'Every page contains something brilliant, arresting or amusing, and one comes away from it staggered' Claire Harman
£9.99
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Healthy Boundaries: Property, Law, and Public Health in England and Wales, 1815-1872
Argues that the legacies of Victorian public health in England and Wales were not just better health and cleaner cities but also new ideas of property, liability, and community. This book argues that the legacies of nineteenth-century public health in England and Wales were not just better health and cleaner cities but also new ideas of property and people. Between 1815 and 1872, the work of public healthactivists led to multiple redefinitions of both, shifting the boundaries between public and private nuisances, public and private services, taxable and nontaxable property, cities and suburbs, the state and the individual, and, finally, between different kinds of individuals. These boundary-making processes were themselves inflected by different material, political, and ideological developments in the areas of disease, demography, democracy, and domesticity. The changes in boundaries manifested themselves in the creation of new nuisance laws and in the minute control by the state of private domestic arrangements. Most important, these changes also promoted a radical shiftin ideas on who should bear financial responsibility for the health of others, stimulating in the process a controversy on the nature of community. Public health thus served as an important, if contradictory, site in the creationof communities, enhancing the right to health for some while simultaneously restricting in the name of health the privacy rights of others. Relying on underused legal sources, this book presents a fresh view of the local originsand legal and political significance of the public health movement of the nineteenth century. James G. Hanley is associate professor of history at the University of Winnipeg.
£115.00
Johns Hopkins University Press Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies
Imagined Homelands chronicles the emerging cultures of nineteenth-century British settler colonialism, focusing on poetry as a genre especially equipped to reflect colonial experience. Jason Rudy argues that the poetry of Victorian-era Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada-often disparaged as derivative and uncouth-should instead be seen as vitally engaged in the social and political work of settlement. The book illuminates cultural pressures that accompanied the unprecedented growth of British emigration across the nineteenth century. It also explores the role of poetry as a mediator between familiar British ideals and new colonial paradigms within emerging literary markets from Sydney and Melbourne to Cape Town and Halifax. Rudy focuses on the work of poets both canonical-including Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow, and Hemans-and relatively obscure, from Adam Lindsay Gordon, Susanna Moodie, and Thomas Pringle to Henry Kendall and Alexander McLachlan. He examines in particular the nostalgic relations between home and abroad, core and periphery, whereby British emigrants used both original compositions and canonical British works to imagine connections between their colonial experiences and the lives they left behind in Europe. Drawing on archival work from four continents, Imagined Homelands insists on a wider geographic frame for nineteenth-century British literature. From lyrics printed in newspapers aboard emigrant ships heading to Australia and South Africa, to ballads circulating in New Zealand and Canadian colonial journals, poetry was a vibrant component of emigrant life. In tracing the histories of these poems and the poets who wrote them, this book provides an alternate account of nineteenth-century British poetry and, more broadly, of settler colonial culture.
£43.00
Cornell University Press The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the British Empire
Buddhism is indisputably gaining prominence in the West, as is evidenced by the growth of Buddhist practice within many traditions and keen interest in meditation and mindfulness. In The Lotus and the Lion, J. Jeffrey Franklin traces the historical and cultural origins of Western Buddhism, showing that the British Empire was a primary engine for curiosity about and then engagement with the Buddhisms that the British encountered in India and elsewhere in Asia. As a result, Victorian and Edwardian England witnessed the emergence of comparative religious scholarship with a focus on Buddhism, the appearance of Buddhist characters and concepts in literary works, the publication of hundreds of articles on Buddhism in popular and intellectual periodicals, and the dawning of syncretic religions that incorporated elements derived from Buddhism. In this fascinating book, Franklin analyzes responses to and constructions of Buddhism by popular novelists and poets, early scholars of religion, inventors of new religions, social theorists and philosophers, and a host of social and religious commentators. Examining the work of figures ranging from Rudyard Kipling and D. H. Lawrence to H. P. Blavatsky, Thomas Henry Huxley, and F. Max Müller, Franklin provides insight into cultural upheavals that continue to reverberate into our own time. Those include the violent intermixing of cultures brought about by imperialism and colonial occupation, the trauma and self-reflection that occur when a Christian culture comes face-to-face with another religion, and the debate between spiritualism and materialism. The Lotus and the Lion demonstrates that the nineteenth-century encounter with Buddhism subtly but profoundly changed Western civilization forever.
£39.60
University of California Press Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital
In the public imagination, Silicon Valley embodies the newest of the new—the cutting edge, the forefront of our social networks and our globally interconnected lives. But the pressures exerted on many of today’s communications tech workers mirror those of a much earlier generation of laborers in a very different space: the London workforce that helped launch and shape the massive telecommunications systems operating at the turn of the twentieth century. As the Victorian age ended, affluent Britons came to rely on information exchanged along telegraph and telephone wires for seamless communication: an efficient and impersonal mode of sharing thoughts, demands, and desires. This embrace of seemingly unmediated communication obscured the labor involved in the smooth operation of the network, much as our reliance on social media and app interfaces does today.Serving a Wired World is a history of information service work embedded in the daily maintenance of liberal Britain and the status quo in the early years of the twentieth century. As Katie Hindmarch-Watson shows, the administrators and engineers who crafted these telecommunications systems created networks according to conventional gender perceptions and social hierarchies, modeling the operation of the networks on the dynamic between master and servant. Despite attempts to render telegraphists and telephone operators invisible, these workers were quite aware of their crucial role in modern life, and they posed creative challenges to their marginalized status—from organizing labor strikes to participating in deviant sexual exchanges. In unexpected ways, these workers turned a flatly neutral telecommunications network into a revolutionary one, challenging the status quo in ways familiar today.
£22.50
Gooseberry Patch Shaker Fancy Goods
Shaker Fancy Goods tells the story of the Shaker Sisters of the nineteenth and early twentieth century who responded to the economic perils of the Industrial Revolution by inventing a lucrative industry of their own—Fancy Goods, a Victorian term for small adorned household objects made by women for women. Thanks to their work ethic, business savvy, and creativity, the tireless Shaker Sisters turned a seemingly modest trade into the economic engine that sustained their communal way of life, just as the men were abandoning the sect for worldly employment. Relying on journals and church family records that give voice to the plainspoken accounts of the sisters themselves, the book traces the work they did to establish their principal revenue streams, from designing the products, to producing them by hand (and later by machine, when they could do so without compromising quality) to bringing their handcrafts to market. Photographs, painstakingly gathered over years of research from museums and private collections, present the best examples of these fancy goods. Fancy goods include the most modest and domestic of items, like the pen wipes that the Sisters shaped into objects such as dolls, mittens, and flowers; or the emeries, pincushions, and needle books lovingly made back in an era when more than a minimal competency in sewing was expected in women; to more substantial purchases like the Dorothy cloaks that were in demand among fashionable women of the world; or the heavy rib-knitted sweaters, cardigans, and pullovers that became popular items among college boys and adventurous women.
£27.00
HarperCollins The Other Side of Mrs. Wood
For fans of The Lost Apothecary or the Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, a deliciously atmospheric historical novel about the rivalry between two female mediums during Victorian London’s obsession with Spiritualism.Mrs. Violet Wood is London’s premier medium, a woman of supreme ambition whose unique abilities have earned her the admiration and trust of London’s elite. Mrs. Wood is indeed a clever and gifted seer—her skill is unmatched in predicting exactly what her wealthy patrons want to hear from the beyond.But times are changing. First, a nosey newspaperman has begun working to expose false mediums across London. Many of Mrs. Wood’s friends—and, yes, some of her foes—have fallen to his merciless accusations. Worse yet, though Mrs. Wood’s monthly séance tables are still packed, she’s noticed that it’s been harder to snare coveted new patrons. There are rumors from Amer
£27.00
Laertes Editorial, S.L. Fantasia heroica
El 6 d'octubre de 1896 moria a Anglaterra, als 62 anys, William Morris, una de les figures més rellevants del segle XIX, després d'una vida dedicada sense descans al treball i, sobretot, a la creativitat en tots els seus vessants. Aquest proteic gegant del segle XIX, un geni comparable només a aquelles grans personalitats del Renaixement perquè els seus interessos abracen una àmplia esfera d'activitats, i que fou també un dels més famosos poetes Victorians, encarna la segona etapa d'aquella confraria artística i literària, la Germandat prerafaelita ("Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood"), fundada a Londres l'any 1828 per un grup de joves personalitats que van representar l'alternativa a la devoradora industrialització. Aquest llibre, Fantasia heroica, ofereix als lectors el vessant poètico-literari i figuratiu del primer període de William Morris, amb el qual Morris inicià una extraordinària carrera com a escriptor que va acabar, al final de la seva vida, dedicat de ple a les arts del llibre. A
£8.77
HarperCollins Publishers Inc The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: Book III: The Unseen Guest
The third book in the Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place—the acclaimed and hilarious Victorian mystery series by Maryrose Wood, perfect for fans of Lemony Snicket and Trenton Lee Stewart—has a brand-new look.Since returning from London, the three Incorrigible children and their plucky governess, Miss Penelope Lumley, have been exceedingly busy. When Lord Fredrick's long-absent mother arrives with the noted explorer, Admiral Faucet, gruesome secrets tumble out of the Ashton family tree. And when the Admiral's prized racing ostrich gets loose in the forest, it will take all the Incorrigibles' skills to find her.The hunt for the runaway ostrich is on. But Penelope is worried. Once back in the wild, will the children forget about books and poetry, and go back to their howling, wolfish ways What if they never want to come back to Ashton Place at all
£9.42
Editon Synapse A Collection of Governess Novels in Nineteenth-Century Britain
This set represents a collection of rare British fictions published from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, featuring a governess as the heroine. Featuring facsimile reprints of the first editions of six novels which are all difficult to find in academic libraries in the UK or the US, this set is a valuable resource for all students and scholars of Victorian Studies and Literature.From Shigeo Yokoyama’s Introduction:Despite considerable critical attention accorded to them, most of the governess novels have been rarely read not least due to their inaccessibility. Only a handful of libraries in Britain and the US hold the copies of them. I hope the present collection, though much limited in its comprehensiveness, might fill to some extent this gap which has existed for a long period of time by providing valuable primary sources for the students and scholars of nineteenth-century British fiction as well as cultural and women’s history.
£525.00
Salt Publishing Bodies of Water
Shortlisted for Best Novella in the 2017 British Fantasy AwardsDen of Geek Top Books of 2016Ginger Nuts of Horror Top 20 Books of 2016After ministering to fallen women in Victorian London, Evelyn has suffered a nervous breakdown and finds herself treated by the Water Doctors in the imposing Wakewater House, a hydropathy sanatorium.Years later, Wakewater House is renovated into modern apartments and Kirsten moves in, fresh from a break up and eager for the restorative calm of the Thames. But her archivist neighbour, Manon, fills her head with the river’s murky past and with those men of science and art who were obsessed with the drowned women who were washed up on its banks. As Kirsten learns more about Wakewater’s secrets, she becomes haunted by a solitary figure in the river and increasingly desperate to understand what the water wants from her.
£8.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Angel of Vengeance
FBI Special Agent Pendergast and Constance Greene take a final stand against the deadliest serial killer in the history of New York: Pendergast''s own ancestor, Dr. Enoch Leng. The latest thrilling timeslip adventure in the New York Times-bestselling series from Preston and Child.A desperate bargain is broken...A clever trap is set...A vengeful angel will not be deterred...Having travelled back in time to Victorian-era New York City to save her siblings, Constance Greene confronts Manhattan's most dangerous serial killer, Dr. Leng, but she is betrayed and left incandescent with rage.Agent Pendergast is determined to assist Constance, who is now on a fanatical quest for vengeance. And Diogenes, Pendergast''s brother, also takes a trip out of his own time, offering to help the duo for unexplained reasons of his own.Diogenes establishes himself in New York''s notorious Five Points slum, watc
£18.00
The History Press Ltd The SS Great Britain Story
The SS Great Britain Story is a concise account of one of the most famous steamships ever built. The great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel embraced the latest innovations, including an iron hull and a screw-propeller, to create an ocean liner that was decades ahead of its time. Launched by Prince Albert in 1843, the SS Great Britain was nearly lost three years later when she ran aground in Dundrum Bay, Ireland. Fortunately she weathered the winter storms and went on to enjoy a long and chequered career. She spent many years transporting emigrants to Australia, served as a cargo vessel, and almost ended her days stranded on the Falkland Islands. Following an incredible rescue mission in the 1970s, fully documented here, she was returned to dry-dock in Bristol, where she was originally built, and is now the centrepiece of a fascinating and ongoing restoration project.
£9.99
Global Books A Life of Sir Harry Parkes: British Minister to Japan, China and Korea, 1865-1885
Harry Parkes was at the heart of Britain’s relations with the Far East from the start of his working life at fourteen, to his death at fifty-seven. Orphaned at the age of five, he went to China on his own as a child and worked his way to the top. God-fearing and fearless, he believed his mission was to bring trade and ‘civilisation’ to East Asia. In his day, he was seen as both a hero and a monster and is still bitterly resented in China for his part in the country’s humiliations at Western hands, but largely esteemed in Japan for helping it to industrialise. Morton’s new biography, the first in over thirty years, and benefiting in part from access to the Parkes’ family and archives, offers a more intimate and informed profile of the personal and professional life of a Victorian titan and one of Britain’s most undiplomatic diplomats in the history of the British Civil Service.
£93.00
Amberley Publishing Blackpool Tower A History
When Blackpool Tower was being built, many people said it would be a failure. Originally estimated at £150,000, it ended up costing twice that much and John Bickerstaffe nearly went bust building this unique attraction. But he was right. Once the Tower was open, his company made a profit every year that it existed as an independent public entity. Not only was the Tower profitable, but it fuelled the Tower Company as Bickerstaffe built it into the dominant entertainment group in Blackpool. Under his leadership it acquired the Palace and later the Winter Gardens and Opera House. By the 1930s it was running ballrooms, cinemas, live theatre and the famous Tower Circus. The Bickerstaffe brothers were also key figures in Blackpool’s civic life. This is a story of the Victorian entrepreneurship that created Blackpool’s most iconic building, and led to Blackpool being the apogee of seaside entertainment.
£18.99
Pitch Publishing Ltd Manchester United On This Day: History, Facts & Figures from Every Day of the Year
Manchester United On This Day revisits all the most magical and memorable moments from the club's distinguished past, mixing in a maelstrom of quirky anecdotes and legendary characters to produce an irresistibly dippable diary of Red Devils history - with an entry for every day of the year. From the club's Victorian foundation as Newton Heath through to their emergence as one of the world's most successful clubs, United's rollercoaster history takes in winding-up orders, the Munich air disaster and the joys of United's first European Cup triumph, all crowned by the drama of winning the first ever Treble. Pivotal historic events such as the club's first ever trophy win, the 1960s rebirth and Sir Alex Ferguson's arrival form a backdrop against which Old Trafford heroes - Duncan Edwards, George Best and Bobby Charlton, Eric Cantona, David Beckham and Billy Meredith - all loom larger than life.
£9.99
Dundurn Group Ltd The Maple Leaf and the White Cross: A History of St. John Ambulance and the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem in Canada
As a foundation of the Order of St. John, St. John Ambulance has been providing first aid training programs in Canada for the past 125 years. From the sweatshops of the Victorian era and military hospitals of the First World War to a modern-day volunteer organization devoted to the service of humanity, this history recounts the remarkable story of the Order’s contribution to our country and those who made it possible. With connections to the hospitaller work of the Order of St. John in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Order of St. John finds its modern roots in the English revival of this charitable work in 1831. The 1883 establishment of the Order of St. John in Canada signalled the beginning of a long and distinguished history of service to Canadians and people around the globe. As a nationwide volunteer organization involving more than 25,000 Canadians, St. John Ambulance continues to be the principal provider of first aid training in Canada.
£22.50
Hodder & Stoughton The Golden Hour
''What a sumptuous, evocative triumph of a novel!'' Jenny Ashcroft At the golden hour, hidden truths and desires come to light . . . In the genteel squares of late-Victorian Brighton, Ellen and Reynold Harper - twins, companions, colleagues - ply their trade as portrait photographers. But at the golden hour, the models arrive to pose for the lucrative - and illicit - photographs that really keep the Harpers'' business afloat. This is the other, shadowy world of the city: a world of erotic tableaux, boundary-crossing music hall performers, and the sinister figure of the local gangster, the Croc. When Ellen is drawn into the orbit of unhappy newly-wed Clementine, she finds herself torn between loyalty to her brother, her dangerous attraction to new model, Lily, and her burgeoning friendship with Clem. And as the two worlds of Brighton collide, the three women discover that there is only a knife edge between the
£19.80
Alma Books Ltd A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes
Shortlisted for the HW Fisher Best First Biography Prize 2012 "The only Western woman to enlist as a soldier in the First World War, the Englishwoman Flora Sandes became a heroine and a media sensation when she fought for the Serbian Army and pursued a distinguished career in its ranks. This account charts her incredible story: her tomboyish childhood in genteel Victorian England, her mission to Serbia as a Red Cross volunteer and subsequent military enrolment, her celebrity lecture tours, her marriage to a fellow officer, her survival in a Gestapo prison during the Second World War and her final years in Suffolk. A fascinating character of her times and an inspiration to women the world over, Flora Sandes is brought to life and restored to her rightful place in history by this biography, compiled with the help of her family, and using hitherto unpublished private papers and photographs."
£9.99
Little, Brown Book Group Transgressions
Terrifying, dark and bold, Sarah Dunant's breakthrough psychological thriller transcends genres and audiences; it crosses all boundaries, encroaching on the darker side of sex and fantasy, male and female. Elizabeth Skorvecky has just come out of a long-term relationship with her boyfriend. Alone in her Victorian house, her only companions are her cat, a trashy crime novel she's translating from Czech, and her music. As the summer ends and the days draw in, unsettling things begin to happen. First it's just a missing CD, then music playing in an empty kitchen at midnight, then a table laid for breakfast for two. Poltergeist? Insanity? When Elizabeth wakes at four in the morning to find a man sitting at the end of her bed, she knows, sickeningly , she's very sane - and being stalked. She also discovers that the means of surviving can be just as shocking as surrender.
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Gallop: Selected Poems
Alison Brackenbury's poems are haunted by horses, unseasonable love, history, hares, and unreasonable hope. Brackenbury's Selected Poems begins in the almost Victorian villages of remote Lincolnshire, where her father tramped, as a ploughboy, behind great Shires and Percherons. Her acclaimed early poem, Dreams of Power, gives voice to a little-known woman from the past, Arbella Stuart, and her still-contemporary choices: safe solitude, fashionable London, dangerous love. Her song-like poems draw on years of experience of bookkeeping and manual work in industry, of VAT, of trichloroethylene on `a thrumming lorry'. The poems take readers to northern China winters and the damp heat of Hanoi. And always the countryside returns: its mud, its huge hares, its stubborn sun. After nine books, major prizes and national broadcasts, the rush of Brackenbury's poems are a work in wonderful progress, full of surprises and renewals.
£12.99
Penguin Books Ltd Leonardo da Vinci
'In this painting of Leonardo's there was a smile so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human.'Often called "the first art historian", Vasari writes with delight on the lives of Leonardo and other celebrated Renaissance artists .Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574). Vasari's works available in Penguin Classics are Lives of the Artists Volume I and Volume II.
£5.28
Bonnier Books Ltd The Eureka Moment Evolution
Follow Charles Darwin in this inspiring, informative narrative non-fiction book and discover how his quest for knowledge changed the world.Driven by a restless resolve, follow famed scientist Charles Darwin as he boards the Beagle and sets off on a scientific adventure to the Galapagos islands. Here, Darwin will uncover one of the most groundbreaking milestones in modern science: his theory of evolution, natural selection and survival of the fittest. Discover how Darwin's radical ideas revolutionised the world, and learn more about the hostility he faced from the Victorian society around him.The Eureka Moment series explores the greatest moments in science through the eyes of the scientists and inventors themselves, educating and encouraging a new generation of innovators. Each book is interspersed with short comic strips, dramatising all the missteps and struggles that ultimately lead to that 'Eureka' moment of triumph. Also contains a timeline, a
£6.66
Pan Macmillan To End All Wars: How the First World War Divided Britain
In this brilliant new work of history, Adam Hochschild follows a group of characters connected by blood ties, close friendships or personal enmities and shows how the war exposed the divisions between them. They include the brother and sister whose views on the war could not have been more diametrically opposed – he a career soldier, she a committed pacifist; the politician whose job was to send young men who refused conscription to prison, yet whose godson was one of those young men and the suffragette sisters, one of whom passionately supported the war and one of whom was equally passionately opposed to it. Through these divided families, Hochschild paints a vivid picture of Britain poised between the optimism of the Victorian era and the era of Auschwitz and the Gulag – a divided country, fractured by the seismic upheaval of the Great War and its aftermath.
£17.09
University of Pennsylvania Press Frank Furness: Architecture in the Age of the Great Machines
Frank Furness (1839-1912) has remained a curiosity to architectural historians and critics, somewhere between an icon and an enigma, whose importance and impact have yet to be properly evaluated or appreciated. To some, his work pushed pattern and proportion to extremes, undermining or forcing together the historic styles he referenced in such eclectic buildings as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania Library. To others, he was merely a regional mannerist creating an eccentric personal style that had little resonance and modest influence on the future of architecture. By placing Furness in the industrial culture that supported his work, George Thomas finds a cutting-edge revolutionary who launched the beginnings of modern design, played a key part in its evolution, and whose strategies continue to affect the built world. In his sweeping reassessment of Furness as an architect of the machine age, Thomas grounds him in Philadelphia, a city led by engineers, industrialists, and businessmen who commissioned the buildings that extended modern design to Chicago, Glasgow, and Berlin. Thomas examines the multiple facets of Victorian Philadelphia's modernity, looking to its eager embrace of innovations in engineering, transportation, technology, and building, and argues that Furness, working for a particular cohort of clients, played a central role in shaping this context. His analyses of the innovative planning, formal, and structural qualities of Furness's major buildings identifies their designs as initiators of a narrative that leads to such more obviously modern figures as Louis Sullivan, William Price, Frank Lloyd Wright and eventually, the architects of the Bauhaus. Misunderstood and reviled in the traditional architectural centers of New York and Boston, Furness's projects, commissioned by the progressive industrialists of the new machine age, intentionally broke with the historical styles of the past to work in a modern way—from utilizing principles based on logistical planning to incorporating the new materials of the industrial age. Lavishly illustrated, the book includes more than eighty black-and-white and thirty color photographs that highlight the richness of his work and the originality of his design spanning more than forty years.
£28.99
Chicago Review Press Maiden Flight: A Novel
Maiden Flight is the true-life story of the Wright sister who in 1926 left her world-famous and intensely possessive older brother to marry newspaper editor Harry Haskell, the man she loved, and suffered the unhappy consequences. An international celebrity in her own right, Katharine embodied the worldly, independent, and self-fulfilled New Woman of the early twentieth century. Yet she remained in many ways a Victorian. Torn between duty and love, she agonized for months before making her devastating break with Orville at age fifty-two.Cast in the form of three interwoven first-person memoirs, Maiden Flight is imaginatively reconstructed from personal letters, newspaper reports, and other documents of the period—in particular, Katharine's lively and extraordinarily revealing love letters to Harry. In allowing Katharine to step outside of Wilbur and Orville's shadow, it sheds new light on the central role she played in their private lives, as well as on her often misunderstood contribution to their scientific work. Above all, Maiden Flight celebrates Katharine's abundant store of what she called ""human nature""—her lively and perceptive outlook on life, her great capacity for both love and indignation, and her acute and sometimes crippling self-awareness.
£15.95
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Love the Dark Days
A Guardian biography of the year 2022 Non-Fiction winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023 This frank, fearless and multi-layered debut centres on a privileged but dysfunctional Indian family, with themes of empire, migration, race, and gender. The Victorian India elephant in the room in Ira Mathur's silk-swathed memoir is in chains. By the time calypso replaces the Raj in post-colonial Trinidad, the chains are off three generations of daughters and mothers in a family in their New World exile. But they are still stuck in place and enduring insecurity and threats, seen and unseen. Set in India, England, Trinidad and a weekend in St Lucia, with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, Love the Dark Days follows the story of a girl, Poppet, of mixed middle-class Hindu and Elite Muslim parentage from post- independent India to her family's migration to post-colonial Trinidad. Profoundly raw, unflinching, layered, but not without threads of humour and perceived absurdity, Love the Dark Days reassembles the story of a disintegrating Empire. "Reads like a fictional family saga as it leaps back and forth in time against a backdrop of patriarchal hegemony and a collapsing empire" - Guardian Best Biographies of 2022 "Compelling" The Observer "A gem of a memoir... Monique Roffey is spot on when she calls it a blaze of a book" The Bookseller
£12.99
Liverpool University Press Soldiers as Citizens: Popular Politics and the Nineteenth-Century British Military
Rank and file soldiers were not ‘the scum of the earth’ but included a cross section of working-class men, who retained their former civilian culture. While they often exhibited pride in regiment and nation, soldiers could also demonstrate a growing class consciousness and support for political radicalism. The book will challenge assumptions that the British army was politically neutral, if privately conservative, by uncovering a rich vein of liberal and radical political thinking among some soldiers, officers and political commentators. This ranges from the Whig ‘militia’ tradition, through radical theories on tactics and army reform, to attempted ultra-radical subversion amongst troops, and the involvement of soldiers in riots and risings. Case studies are given of individual 'military radicals', soldiers or ex-soldiers who were reforming and later socialist activists. Popular anti-French feeling of the Napoleonic Wars is examined, alongside examples of rank and file bravery which fostered widespread loyalty and patriotism. This contributed to soldiers being used successfully in strike breaking, and deployed against rioters or Chartist revolts. By the late Victorian period, popular imperialism was an important part of working-class support for Conservatism. The book explores what impact this had on rank and file soldiers, whilst outlining minority support for socialism.
£29.99
C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd The Tyne Bridge: Icon of North-East England
The Tyne Bridge, opened in 1928 by King George V, is one of Britain’s most iconic structures, a Grade II* listed building. Linking Newcastle and Gateshead, this symbol of Tyneside and the region is also a monument to the Tyne’s industrial past. Paul Brown’s popular history explores what the bridge means to the people of North-East England, and its deep connection with their heritage. Brown recounts the story of the bridge’s predecessors, from the Roman Pons Aelius–the first crossing over the Tyne–to the Victorian era. He then brings to life the individuals who built the modern bridge: Ralph Freeman, the structural engineer who also designed the Sydney Harbour Bridge; Dorothy Buchanan, the first female member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, who produced drawings and calculations; John Carr, the boatman who bravely rescued workers from the Tyne on dozens of occasions; and the scaffolder Nathaniel Collins, the only man not to survive construction of the arch, who fell from the bridge just weeks before its completion. This richly illustrated book charts the Tyne Bridge’s story right to the present, exploring how it remains a North-Eastern cultural emblem, in a region that has changed almost unrecognisably since its heyday in the late 1920s.
£16.99
C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd Memsahibs: British Women in Colonial India
For young Englishwomen stepping off the steamer, the sights and sounds of humid colonial India were like nothing they'd ever experienced. For many, this was the ultimate destination to find a perfect civil servant husband. For still more, however, India offered a chance to fling off the shackles of Victorian social mores. The word 'memsahib' conjures up visions of silly aristocrats, well-staffed bungalows and languorous days at the club. Yet these women had sought out the uncertainties of life in Britain's largest, busiest colony. Memsahibs introduces readers to the likes of Flora Annie Steel, Fanny Parks and Emily Eden, accompanying their husbands on expeditions, travelling solo across dangerous terrain, engaging with political questions, and recording their experiences. Yet the Raj was not all adventure. There was disease, and great risk to young women travelling alone; for colonial wives in far-flung outposts, there was little access to 'society'. Cut off from modernity and the Western world, many women suffered terrible trauma and depression. From the hill-stations to the capital, this is a sweeping, vividly written anthology of colonial women's lives across British India. Their honesty and bravery, in their actions and their writings, shine fresh light on this historical world.
£30.00
Fonthill Media Ltd Defending Leicestershire and Rutland
Leicestershire and Rutland, occupying the area between the Great North Road and Watling Street have seen the movement of armies from Roman times to the Civil War, with the decisive battles of Bosworth and Naseby fought within or close to their borders. The Victorian era saw the development of both the regular and volunteer forces that would later fight in two world wars, while the development of military flight in both defensive and offensive roles was a twentieth-century theme. Leicestershire and Rutland witnessed defence against the Zeppelins in the First World War; jet engines and US airborne forces in the Second World War; and elements of Britain's nuclear deterrent during the Cold War. The eavesdroppers of the 'Y' Service at Beaumanor Hall provided much of the raw material for Bletchley Park's code-breakers during the Second World War. Evidence of this military activity is visible in the landscape: castles of earthwork, stone or brick; barracks and volunteer drill halls; airfields, missile sites and munitions factories; pillboxes, observer corps posts and bunkers. This book places sites into their social, political, historical and military contexts, as well as figures such as William the Conqueror, Richard III, and Oliver Cromwell.
£16.99
Pan Macmillan Palace of Palms: Tropical Dreams and the Making of Kew
'A glorious green adventure story.' Ann Treneman, The Times 'Books of the Year''The most enthralling historical book I’ve read this year.' Claire Tomalin, New Statesman 'Books of the year' Daringly innovative when it opened in 1848, the Palm House in Kew Gardens remains one of the most beautiful glass buildings in the world today. Seemingly weightless, vast and yet light, the Palm House floats free from architectural convention, at once monumental and ethereal. From a distance, the crowns of the palms within are silhouetted in the central dome; close to, banana leaves thrust themselves against the glass. To enter it is to enter a tropical fantasy. The body is assaulted by heat, light and the smell of damp vegetation. In Palace of Palms, Kate Teltscher tells the extraordinary story of its creation and of the Victorians’ obsession with the palms that filled it. It is a story of breathtaking ambition, of scientific discovery and, crucially, of the remarkable men whose vision it was. The Palm House was commissioned by the charismatic first Director of Kew, Sir William Hooker, designed by the audacious Irish engineer, Richard Turner, and managed by Kew’s forthright curator, John Smith, who battled with boilers and floods to ensure the survival of the rare and wondrous plants it housed.
£9.99
Duke University Press How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time
How Soon Is Now? performs a powerful critique of modernist temporal regimes through its revelatory exploration of queer ways of being in time as well as of the potential queerness of time itself. Carolyn Dinshaw focuses on medieval tales of asynchrony and on engagements with these medieval temporal worlds by amateur readers centuries later. In doing so, she illuminates forms of desirous, embodied being that are out of sync with ordinarily linear measurements of everyday life, that involve multiple temporalities, that precipitate out of time altogether. Dinshaw claims the possibility of a fuller, denser, more crowded now that theorists tell us is extant but that often eludes our temporal grasp.Whether discussing Victorian men of letters who parodied the Book of John Mandeville, a fictionalized fourteenth-century travel narrative, or Hope Emily Allen, modern coeditor of the early-fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe, Dinshaw argues that these and other medievalists outside the academy inhabit different temporalities than modern professionals operating according to the clock. How Soon Is Now? clears space for amateurs, hobbyists, and dabblers who approach medieval worlds from positions of affect and attachment, from desires to build other kinds of worlds. Unruly, untimely, they urge us toward a disorderly and asynchronous collective.
£27.99
New York University Press Transnational Women's Activism: The United States, Japan, and Japanese Immigrant Communities in California, 1859-1920
Following landmark trade agreements between Japan and the United States in the 1850s, Tokyo began importing a unique American commodity: Western social activism. As Japan sought to secure its future as a commercial power and American women pursued avenues of political expression, Protestant church-women and, later, members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) traveled to the Asian coast to promote Christian teachings and women's social activism. Rumi Yasutake reveals in Transnational Women's Activism that the resulting American, Japanese, and first generation Japanese-American women's movements came to affect more than alcohol or even religion. While the WCTU employed the language of evangelism and Victorian family values, its members were tactfully expedient in accommodating their traditional causes to suffrage and other feminist goals, in addition to the various political currents flowing through Japan and the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century. Exploring such issues as gender struggles in the American Protestant church and bourgeois Japanese women's attitudes towards the "pleasure class" of geishas and prostitutes, Yasutake illuminates the motivations and experiences of American missionaries, U.S. WCTU workers, and their Japanese protégés. The diverse machinations of WCTU activism offer a compelling lesson in the complexities of cultural imperialism.
£48.60
Taylor & Francis Ltd Time Present and Time Past: The Art of John Everett Millais
John Everett Millais (1829-1896) is undoubtedly among the most important of Victorian artists. In his day, and our own, he remains also the most controversial. While, during his lifetime, controversy centred around his early Pre-Raphaelite paintings, in particular Christ in the house of his Parents (1850), during the twentieth century the most intense criticism has been directed towards Millais's later works, such as Bubbles (1886), which has been widely condemned as sentimental 'kitsch'. These later paintings have been held up as the epitome of the degradation of art, against which avant-garde and Modernist pioneers struggled. None of the existing literature on Millais addresses the fundamental problem that this double-identity reveals. While there is extensive material on the Pre-Raphaelite movement in general, Millais's own work after the 1850s is rarely discussed in detail, despite the fact that he lived and worked for another 30 years after his abandonment of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Time Present and Time Past: The Art of John Everett Millais presents the first comprehensive account of Millais's artistic career from beginning to end. The book considers the question of 'high' and 'low' cultural status in debates during Millais's own day, and in subsequent critical thinking, situating Millais's art as a whole within this cultural framework.
£135.00
ibidem-Verlag, Jessica Haunschild u Christian Schon The Biographer and the Subject – A Study on Biographical Distance
A good biography is a well-staged illusion. It creates - on paper - a vivid, rounded, and immediate sense of lived life. In contrast to purely fictional forms, biography writing does not allow total freedom to the biographer in the creative act. Ideally, a biography's backbone is formed by accurate historical facts. But its soul lies elsewhere. Since the concern is life, something more is needed: Nothing dry, cold or dead, but a vibrant impression of life that is left in the air after one turns over the last page. But how does a biographer do it? The way a biographer creates a subject is largely dictated by the historical distance between them. There are three types of distance in biographical writing: First, where the biographer and the subject personally know one another; second, where the biographer is a near contemporary of the subject; and third, where biographer and subject are distinctly separated, in some cases, by hundreds of years. This study explores how some of the most accomplished biographers manage to recreate life" across time and space. She closely examines Samuel Johnson's Life of Mr. Richard Savage, James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, Michael Holroyd's Lytton Strachey, Park Honan's Jane Austen, and Andrew Motion's Keats.
£26.09
Schiffer Publishing Ltd British Longcase Clocks
"The longcase clock has been a part of the Englishman's home for some 300 years and has gained a place in his heart seldom if every achieved by any other domestic item. An example of its importance in family life is that it, with the bed and the house, was nearly always mentioned specifically in the will." In Derek Roberts's important new book, readers find a wealth of valuable information detailing the British origins, evolution, and wide range of longcase clocks that have been produced since the 16th century. In twenty chapters Mr. Roberts provides a detailed overview of many facets of these beautiful and useful art works, including early square dial, rare, astronomical and equation clocks, walnut breakarch longcase clocks (and those in other woods), and thirty-hour clocks. Other chapters detail various dial and decoration forms, precision timekeeping, important makers, and clocks of the Victorian and Edwardian eras right up to modern times. A glossary of terms and lengthy index of makers are included. In British Longcase Clocks, Mr. Roberts share his wealth of knowledge enthusiastically and presents over 300 black and white and full-color photographs of details and whole clocks. His book will interest clock owners and all who love fine furniture.
£78.29