Search results for ""Author Victoria"

**THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER**A compulsively readable account of an African country now virtually inaccessible to the outside world and one journalist's daring and adventurous journey.When war correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to cover Africa in 2000 he quickly became obsessed with the idea of recreating H.M. Stanley's famous nineteenth century trans-Africa expedition - but travelling alone. Despite warnings that his plan was 'suicidal', Butcher set out for the Congo's eastern border with just a rucksack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his boots. Making his way in an assortment of vessels including a motorbike and a dugout canoe, helped along by a cast of unlikely characters, he followed in the footsteps of the great Victorian adventurers. Butcher's journey was a remarkable feat, but the story of the Congo, told expertly and vividly in this book, is more remarkable still.‘A masterpiece’ John Le Carré‘Extraordinary, audacious, completely enthralling’ William Boyd‘A remarkable marriage of travelogue and history, which deserves to make Tim Butcher a star for his prose, as well as his courage’ Max Hastings

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A look at the dark side of life, Victorian-style, when nothing was quite as it seemed and a public execution could be an entertaining family day out. Murderers, poachers, thieves, pickpockets and vagabonds all went about their business with impunity. Crime took place on the streets, on public transport, in homes, pubs, prisons, asylums, workhouses and brothels - it was all part of everyday life in Brighton and Hove in the late 1800s. Read about the notorious railway murderer, Percy Lefroy, who appeared at his trial in full evening dress and went to the gallows in an old brown suit. Gasp at the audacity of a temptress who fell in love with a doctor and tried to poison his wife, with strychnine laced chocolate. Then there's little Emily, a girl who received imprisonment with hard labour for stealing a few tempting pieces of gingerbread while a gaggle of disruptive young women loved causing a riot, flirting with men and smashing windows. It was madness and mayhem in those weird and wonderful times - and it's brought vividly to life by Janet Cameron in Brighton and Hove - Murder and Misdemeanours.

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Michelle Gomez, who last played the Doctor’s best friend and wicked enemy, Missy, in the Doctor Who television series in 2017, returns to her role in some brand new audio adventures from Big Finish Productions made in arrangements with BBC studios. 1.1 Spoonful of Mayhem by Roy Gill. In a spot of bother in Victorian London, Missy is forced to take on governess duties but she has another scheme in mind, and her charges are simply in the way. She’s going to have to teach the children some rather harsh lessons about getting what you want. And there will be tears before bedtime. 1.2 Divorced, Beheaded, Regenerated by John Dorney. Missy arrives in Tudor England, throwing the plans of another renegade Time Lord into chaos.King Henry VIII is on the throne, and aliens are stomping through the countryside. Missy just wants to be Queen. And the Monk? Once he knows who else is on the scene, he’ll be glad just to stay alive. 1.3 The Broken Clock by Nev Fountain. Tonight, on Dick Zodiac’s America’s Most Impossible Killers, Detective Joe Lynwood hunts the most impossible killer of his career. There’s a trail of bodies. Impossible bodies. And Joe has one long night to solve the case. Luckily, D.I. Missy Masters from Scotland Yard in England, London, England is here to help. 1.4 The Belly of the Beast by Jonathan Morris. Missy’s scheme nears completion. All she must do is subjugate one little planet and bend the inhabitants to her will. Not too much to ask. But slaves will keep rebelling. It’s almost as if they don’t want to unearth an ancient artefact to fulfil Missy’s plans for universal domination.She’ll have to do something about that. CAST: Michelle Gomez (Missy/Matis), Rufus Hound (The Monk), Oliver Clement (Oliver Davis), Bonnie Kingston (Lucy Davis), Simon Slater (Montague Davis / Moses Walker / Coachman), Dan Starkey (Mr. Cosmo / Park Keeper / Old Man / Sphinx), Beth Chalmers (Djinn / Housemaid), Maggie Service (Catherine Parr), Leighton Pugh (Sir Foxcroft / Gramoryan 1 / Priest), Graham Seed (Gramoryan 2 / Taverner / Squire), Kenneth Jay (Dick Zodiac), Guy Paul (Joe Lynwood), Ryan Forde Iosco (The Actor Playing Joe Lynwood), Daniel Goode (Mark /Roy), Rachel Verkuil (Frankie and The Actress Playing Missy), Abbie Andrew (Aleyna), John Scougall (Cort / Guards), Lucy Goldie (Sath / Mother), Jason Nwoga(Doctor Goodnight), Jamie Laird (Mister Bryce / Father). Other parts played by members of the cast.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION A schoolgirl catches the eye of the future leader of Nazi Germany. An aspiring playwright writes to a convicted serial killer, seeking inspiration. A pair of childhood sweethearts reunite to commit rape and murder. A devoted Mormon wife follows her husband into the wilderness after he declares himself a prophet. The twelve stories in The Love of a Bad Man imagine the lives of real women, all of whom were the lovers, wives, or mistresses of various ‘bad’ men in history. Beautifully observed, fascinating, and at times horrifying, the stories interrogate power, the nature of obsession, and the lengths some women will go to for the men they love. PRAISE FOR LAURA ELIZABETH WOOLLETT ‘Like Helen Garner, Laura Woollett is impelled to explore the darkest corners of the human heart, the savage cognitive distortions of love; to understand and empathise with the monstrous, rather than to instinctively recoil or judge … Woollett's pitch-perfect command of narrative voice, period, and psychology creates 12 tales to fascinate and unnerve.’ The Age ‘The Love of a Bad Man imagines the inner lives of historical figures who committed crimes all in the name of love … The stories treat death with a gothic inevitability and explore human darkness with a light touch.’ The Guardian

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A FLAME TREE NOTEBOOK. Beautiful and luxurious the journals combine high-quality production with magnificent art. Perfect as a gift, and an essential personal choice for writers, notetakers, travellers, students, poets and diarists. Features a wide range of well-known and modern artists, with new artworks published throughout the year. BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED. The highly crafted covers are printed on foil paper, embossed then foil stamped, complemented by the luxury binding and rose red end-papers. PRACTICAL, EASY TO USE. Flame Tree Notebooks come with practical features too: a pocket at the back for scraps and receipts; two ribbon markers to help keep track of more than just a to-do list; robust ivory text paper, printed with lines; and when you need to collect other notes or scraps of paper the magnetic side flap keeps everything neat and tidy. THE ARTIST. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew has a gallery dedicated to the paintings of the remarkable Victorian artist Marianne North, who had a great eye for botanical detail. She set out in 1871 on a painterly progress through world flora. THE FINAL WORD. As William Morris said, "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

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The period of prohibition, from 1919 to 1933, marks the fault line between the cultures of Victorian and modern America. In Domesticating Drink, Murdock argues that the debates surrounding alcohol also marked a divide along gender lines. For much of early American history, men generally did the drinking, and women and children were frequently the victims of alcohol-associated violence and abuse. As a result, women stood at the fore of the temperance and prohibition movements and, as Murdock explains, effectively used the fight against drunkenness as a route toward political empowerment and participation. At the same time, respectable women drank at home, in a pattern of moderation at odds with contemporaneous male alcohol abuse. During the 1920s, with federal prohibition a reality, many women began to assert their hard-won sense of freedom by becoming social drinkers in places other than the home. Murdock's study of how this development took place broadens our understanding of the social and cultural history of alcohol and the various issues that surround it. As alcohol continues to spark debate about behaviors, attitudes, and gender roles, Domesticating Drink provides valuable historical context and important lessons for understanding and responding to the evolving use, and abuse, of drink.

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London, a fascinating metropolis not just in terms of its history and landmark buildings, is also a city that grew out of villages. Its unique geography is expressed in a mosaic of districts, each with its own distinctive character and pedigree. London's districts, with their patchwork layout of primarily Georgian and Victorian squares and terraces juxtaposed with modern buildings and estates, reflect changing ideals in architecture, urban design and planning as well as shifting values in real estate and the insatiable thirst of its consumers. London is thus both text and context: fossilized social history, layerings of economic, social, and architectural history conveyed in stock brick, stucco, Portland stone, glass and steel. Underpinning this urban landscape is an evolutionary resilience that has maintained the basic spatial framework of the metropolis and sustained its imitable character. The city's institutional framework has been severely ruptured and reinvented time and time again after fires, bombs, floods or wholesale redevelopment. Political unrest and racial conflict have resulted in riots, while successive rounds of investment and disinvestment have replaced elements of the built environment many times over. This book offers an insightful perspective into the distinctiveness of London as expressed through its socially significant buildings and districts.

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Barns strike a sentimental chord among the populace, perhaps as reminder of our nation's agricultural heritage, most definitely as symbols of solid and imposing timber frame forms. While many of these architecturally significant buildings are succumbing to neglect and development, others are getting a new lease on life. This coffee-table book presents over thirty barn conversion projects by creative architects, developers, and homeowners who have capitalized on the flexible space offered by barns. Over 300 striking photographs provide fresh design ideas for the conversion of barns into residences and business spaces. You will see a Pennsylvania stone bank barn converted into a stunning residence, an abandoned dairy barn made livable complete with office space in the old silo, and a Victorian era barn which now links the old farmhouse to the new living space. In addition to stunning homes, you will see barns utilized for office space, retail, and even a non-denominational chapel. A wealth of wonderful ideas is offered for maintaining the historic integrity of these structures while providing for today's vastly different needs. This is a design treasure for architects, builders, contractors, and homeowners, to help them visualize the transformation of historic agricultural buildings into new and treasured landmarks.

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A compact biography of one of nineteenth-century England’s most renowned illustrators. George Cruikshank (1792–1878) was a key transitional figure in the changing world of nineteenth-century London’s graphic humor. He carried his eighteenth-century-trained wit from the field of political satire during the Regency years into the Victorian era of journals and books. His witty drawings of boisterous London streets in 1820–1836 made him a household name, and in 1836, his masterful etchings were key to the positive reception of Charles Dickens’s first novel. Illustrated throughout by his one-of-a-kind drawings, “The Great George” traces Cruikshank’s career from his ascent, by 1820, as the preeminent political satirist to the end of his career. During the 1840s and 50s, with the rising popularity of Dickens, the arrival of Punch, and his adoption of the temperance movement as his work’s focus, Cruikshank was eventually eclipsed by new generations of artists. Using as her launchpad the argument that drawing with humor takes both great draftsmanship and a highly perceptive sense of humanity, Josephine Lea Iselin not only details the trajectory of Cruikshank’s art but also provides valuable context for his work, placing his drawings alongside pieces from his artistic predecessors and principal contemporaries.

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The case of Jack the Ripper and his savage serial killing and horrendous mutilation of five women in the East End of Victorian London is the greatest of all unsolved murder mysteries. For over 100 years the long line of candidates for the bloodstained laurels of Jack the Ripper has been paraded before us. Policemen and Ripperologists have tried in vain to put a name to the faceless silent killer. Richard Whittington-Egan, one of the founding fathers of the search, published, in 1975, his Casebook on Jack the Ripper, now eagerly sought after but long out of print and virtually unobtainable (except at mammoth prices), in which he documented the history, the crimes, the investigations and the investigators. He also included some fundamentally new discoveries and points, such as the real story of the kidney in Mr Lusk’s renal post-bag, wrongly said to be that of Catherine Eddowes (Ripper Victim No. 4). The endless nightmare of Jack the Ripper has rolled on, unstoppable, and now Richard Whittington-Egan, in a completely revised and very considerably enlarged edition of the 1975 Casebook, has taken a new look, from a longer perspective, at the theories and the personages who advanced them, from the time of the murders right up to the present day.

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The Oxford Illustrated History of Science is the first ever fully illustrated global history of science, from Aristotle to the atom bomb - and beyond. 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.

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Peterborough grew up around its cathedral, originally founded as an Anglo-Saxon monastery, but it was only in the nineteenth century that this city on the edge of the Fens started to grow to its present size as one of the largest cities in the east of England. The arrival of the railways and development of new industries in the early nineteenth century brought large numbers of people to Peterborough, and the expansion continued with its designation as a New Town in the 1960s, which led to a large programme of house building and redevelopment of the city centre. A–Z of Peterborough reveals the history behind the city’s streets and buildings, industries, and the people connected with it. Alongside the famous historical connections are unusual characters, tucked-away places and unique events that are less well known. Readers will discover tales of the importance of brickmaking, the tragic accident of a Victorian lady balloonist and parachutist, a pioneering eighteenth-century botanist and riots during the First World War among many other fascinating facts in this tour of Peterborough’s history. It is fully illustrated throughout and will appeal to all those with an interest in this city in the east of England.

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In 1897, Archibald Constable and Company published Bram Stoker's "Dracula", the most famous horror novel of all time. For reasons still debated by critics, the first chapter of "Dracula" was cut from the book just weeks before publication. Here, it becomes the central clue in a spine-tingling mystery - published in the same format as Quirk's "The Crimes of Dr Watson". "Dracula's Heir" begins ten years after the horrific events described in the original novel. Jonathon and Mina Harker are happily married and enjoying life in Bixby, England. Meanwhile, their friend Dr. John Seward is tracking a string of crime that seems eerily familiar; a 14-year-old girl sleepwalks out of her parent's house and disappears into the night. Two "accident victims" are found drained of their blood, yet there is no crime scene evidence to explain its loss. When Seward shares his discoveries with the famous vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing, all the evidence points to Jonathon Harker.After all, Harker spent several months imprisoned in Castle Dracula as a guest of the Count - was he infected without anyone else realising it? Has the mild-mannered English solicitor spent the last ten years lurking in the shadows as a nosferatu? Or is someone (or something) else getting away with murder? As with "The Crimes of Dr Watson", "Dracula's Heir" features an original mystery novella plus 8 removable clues, including a newspaper, a journal, a death certificate, a Victorian calling card and more. Once you've solved the mystery, you can open the final signature (sealed at the printer) to test your sleuthing skills.

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Few writers have had a greater impact upon British society than Charles Dickens. His stories, and, in particular, his many memorable characters, highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged within society at a time when Britain was the leading economic and political power in the world. Dickens' portrayal of the poor, such as Oliver Twist daring to ask for more food in the parish workhouse, and Bob Cratchit struggling to provide for his family at Christmas, roused much sympathy and an understanding of the poor and the conditions in which they lived. This led to many people founding orphanages, establishing schools to educate the underprivileged, or to set up hospitals for those who could not afford medical treatment -one such was Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital where one of its wards was named after the great writer. Little wonder, then, that his legacy can be found across the UK. From the buildings where he lived, the inns and hotels he frequented, the streets and towns which formed the backdrop to his novels and short stories, to the places where he gave readings or performed his own amateur dramatic productions to raise funds for his philanthropic causes. Dickensian memorabilia also abound, including his original manuscripts to his famous works and letters to his wife. Many of these have been woven in a single volume which transports the reader magically through stories and images into the Dickensian world of Victorian Britain.

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Nellie Dowell was a match factory girl in Victorian London who spent her early years consigned to orphanages and hospitals. Muriel Lester, the daughter of a wealthy shipbuilder, longed to be free of the burden of money and possessions. Together, these unlikely soulmates sought to remake the world according to their own utopian vision of Christ's teachings. The Match Girl and the Heiress paints an unforgettable portrait of their late-nineteenth-century girlhoods of wealth and want, and their daring twentieth-century experiments in ethical living in a world torn apart by war, imperialism, and industrial capitalism. In this captivating book, Seth Koven chronicles how each traveled the globe--Nellie as a spinster proletarian laborer, Muriel as a well-heeled tourist and revered Christian peacemaker, anticolonial activist, and humanitarian. Koven vividly describes how their lives crossed in the slums of East London, where they inaugurated a grassroots revolution that took the Sermon on the Mount as a guide to achieving economic and social justice for the dispossessed. Koven shows how they devoted themselves to Kingsley Hall--Gandhi's London home in 1931 and Britain's first "people's house" founded on the Christian principles of social sharing, pacifism, and reconciliation--and sheds light on the intimacies and inequalities of their loving yet complicated relationship. The Match Girl and the Heiress probes the inner lives of these two extraordinary women against the panoramic backdrop of shop-floor labor politics, global capitalism, counterculture spirituality, and pacifist feminism to expose the wounds of poverty and neglect that Christian love could never heal.

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It’s the last months of the nineteenth century and twenty-two year old Euphemia Thorniwork, is out of step with the men’s world she lives in. A mathematical research student at Oxford, looked on with suspicion by her her tutor, Professor Milton, she is forced to collaborate with fellow-student, Leo Lazarus, also under suspicion—for being Jewish. At home in London, life is under pressure—for months a toxic fog has engulfed the city each evening, bringing illness to many, including Euphemia’s widowed mother. The fog has been accompanied by a wave of body-snatching and the body of Euphemia’s beloved cousin, Pearl, remains missing. Additionally, money is tight and Euphemia and her mother must move in with relatives who disapprove of her lifestyle. Haunted by dreams of Pearl in which numbers, a red heifer and Biblical purification rites provide insoluble clues, she discovers an article about communicating with the dead using sound waves. Determined to cling to rational explanations, Euphemia returns to Oxford, but when she begins to fall in love with Leo, and learns something of esoteric Judaism, their research takes an unconventional turn and the questions mount. Can Euphemia and Leo find the body snatchers? What is the origin of the toxic fog and can they find a way to defeat it? Will Leo and Euphemia’s love survive their religious divide? Blending Victorian romance and drama with a compelling supernatural story, The Sound of Gematria is an engaging debut novel not to be missed.

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A richly detailed history of Ashdown Forest -- home of Winnie-the-Pooh. The seeming tranquility of many rural landscapes can hide a combative history. This biography of one such landscape, Ashdown Forest in the Weald of Sussex, exemplifies the evolving conflicts that have taken place over many centuries. Wealth and poverty, power and exclusion, have all characterised this landscape through the ages. When a thirteenth-century boundary was erected to form a hunting park it was imposed upon a landscape which for centuries had provided sustenance for peasant families, for swine herds, for itinerant groups, all of whom had developed grazing and collecting rights and customary ties with the area. Conflict between manorial lords and commoners, "turbulent foresters", was born, and the evolution of this conflict over succeeding centuries is the recurring motif of this book. We move through the exploitation of iron ore and timber during the Tudor period, learn of the real threats of enclosure, of military occupation, to be followed by a landscape aesthetic bringing wealthy incomers, attracted by scenery easily reachable from London by train. All sides felt that the Forest was theirs by right. Victorian law-suits, twentieth-century protective legislation and a growing environmental consciousness have all left their mark. And the struggle for Ashdown continues amid ongoing development pressures. This book demonstrates that multi-layered conflict has been a characteristic feature of what still miraculously remains the largest area of internationally recognised heath in the South-East of England.

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Winner, LGBT Studies Lammy Award presented by Lambda Literary Neither queer theory nor queer activism has fully reckoned with the role of race in the emergence of the modern gay subject. In A Taste for Brown Bodies, Hiram Pérez traces the development of gay modernity and its continued romanticization of the brown body. Focusing in particular on three figures with elusive queer histories—the sailor, the soldier, and the cowboy— Pérez unpacks how each has been memorialized and desired for their heroic masculinity while at the same time functioning as agents for the expansion of the US borders and neocolonial zones of influence. Describing an enduring homonationalism dating to the “birth” of the homosexual in the late 19th century, Pérez considers not only how US imperialist expansion was realized, but also how it was visualized for and through gay men. By means of an analysis of literature, film, and photographs from the 19th to the 21st centuries—including Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Anne Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” and photos of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison—Pérez proposes that modern gay male identity, often traced to late Victorian constructions of “invert” and “homosexual,” occupies not the periphery of the nation but rather a cosmopolitan position, instrumental to projects of war, colonialism, and neoliberalism. A Taste for Brown Bodies argues that practices and subjectivities that we understand historically as forms of homosexuality have been regulated and normalized as an extension of the US nation-state, laying bare the tacit, if complex, participation of gay modernity within US imperialism.

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No self-respecting Victorian lady would enter a British pub, a florid drinking den where working men guzzled pints of beer. When brewers, inspired by the Progressive belief that the physical environment influenced moral behavior, turned to the problem of working-class drinking during the interwar years, they set to work reinventing the pub itself. Acting on a genuine belief in the possibility of social betterment, reformers found ready allies among not only government officials but religious leaders, social workers, journalists, the landed classes, even the royal family. In the process, brewers sought to undermine the stigma against pubic drinking and attract a broader clientele. Their Progressive ideas shaped the emergence of an "improved public house" that blurred distinctions among pubs, on one hand, and up-market hotels, restaurants, and roadhouses, on the other. Outside, cheerful gardens, children's playgrounds, and bowling greens greeted delighted customers. Inside, brewers wooed new patrons with meals, music, dancing, and live entertainment. Tea or entertainment rooms beckoned men, women, and even families; couples found intimacy in the new stylish lounge. In this astonishing story of the transformation of the pub, Gutzke draws on an array of sources and methods from gender studies, cultural history, literature, architecture, and urban planning, without neglecting the crucial role of ideology, economics, and politics. This broad-based study, which includes numerous illustrations, will appeal not just to specialists but to anyone interested in the history of a pivotal English social institution.

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Devizes began as the satellite town of a great Norman castle built in the twelfth century by Bishop Roger of Salisbury to defend the boundaries of his church's domain. Roger was Chancellor to Henry I and a powerful man in the land while the king was fighting in France. The castle in Devizes, by all accounts an impressive structure, played an important role in military and political events as Stephen and Matilda vied for the English throne following Henry's death. At the end of the Middle Ages the importance of the castle declined and Devizes became primarily a market town, trading in leather, corn and wool. Surviving merchants' houses from the fifteenth century are evidence of the town's flourishing trade at that time.Just as the existence of many Georgian houses reflect a 'Golden Age' of Devizes in the eighteenth century when wool was the major source of the town's wealth. Today the town preserves many fine buildings including two Norman churches, a medieval street plan and one of the largest and most attractive market places in the country. The medieval castle has gone but a Victorian replacement built by a Devizes businessman picturesquely occupies the castle site. A feature of the book is a guided tour of the town that can be used independently of the main text of the book, enabling the reader to embark straight away on a journey into Devizes' past through its existing streets and buildings. Lorna Haycock lives in Devizes and is currently the Sandell Librarian at Devizes Museum in Long Street.

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From 1934 to 1954 Joseph I. Breen, a media-savvy Victorian Irishman, reigned over the Production Code Administration, the Hollywood office tasked with censoring the American screen. Though little known outside the ranks of the studio system, this former journalist and public relations agent was one of the most powerful men in the motion picture industry. As enforcer of the puritanical Production Code, Breen dictated "final cut" over more movies than anyone in the history of American cinema. His editorial decisions profoundly influenced the images and values projected by Hollywood during the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. Cultural historian Thomas Doherty tells the absorbing story of Breen's ascent to power and the widespread effects of his reign. Breen vetted story lines, blue-penciled dialogue, and excised footage (a process that came to be known as "Breening") to fit the demands of his strict moral framework. Empowered by industry insiders and millions of like-minded Catholics who supported his missionary zeal, Breen strove to protect innocent souls from the temptations beckoning from the motion picture screen. There were few elements of cinematic production beyond Breen's reach--he oversaw the editing of A-list feature films, low-budget B movies, short subjects, previews of coming attractions, and even cartoons. Populated by a colorful cast of characters, including Catholic priests, Jewish moguls, visionary auteurs, hardnosed journalists, and bluenose agitators, Doherty's insightful, behind-the-scenes portrait brings a tumultuous era--and an individual both feared and admired--to vivid life.

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The regular Mounted Infantry was one of the most important innovations of the late Victorian and Edwardian British Army. Rather than fight on horseback in the traditional manner of cavalry, they used horses primarily to move swiftly about the battlefield, where they would then dismount and fight on foot, thus anticipating the development of mechanised infantry tactics during the twentieth century. Yet despite this apparent foresight, the mounted infantry concept was abandoned by the British Army in 1913, just at the point when it may have made the transition from a colonial to a continental force as part of the British Expeditionary Force. Exploring the historical background to the Mounted Infantry, this book untangles the debates that raged in the army, Parliament and the press between its advocates and the supporters of the established cavalry. With its origins in the extemporised mounted detachments raised during times of crisis from infantry battalions on overseas imperial garrison duties, Dr Winrow reveals how the Mounted Infantry model, unique among European armies, evolved into a formalised and apparently highly successful organisation of non-cavalry mounted troops. He then analyses why the Mounted Infantry concept fell out of favour just eleven years after its apogee during the South African Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. As such the book will be of interest not only to historians of the nineteenth-century British army, but also those tracing the development of modern military doctrine and tactics, to which the Mounted Infantry provided successful - if short lived - inspiration.

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The female leg is a sexual oddity. Non-genital, and nearly identical in structure to the corresponding male body part, there is no obvious reason why it’s eroticized. Yet, through much of history, across many cultures, the female leg was hidden from sight and treated as such a taboo topic that it became an object of intense sexual obsession. In the Victorian era the word “leg” was so forbidden that it couldn’t be uttered in polite society, lest men be driven wild with lust. Even now, 100 years after women’s legs came out of hiding, their allure remains strong. In this third book of Dian Hanson’s wildly successful body parts series she explores how freeing the female leg became central to women’s liberation, beginning with the post-French Revolution cancan and ending with the 1960’s Sexual Revolution miniskirt. Over 400 photos document the first burlesque “leg shows” of the 1800s, the silk-stockinged flappers of the 1920s, the nylon-mania of the 1940s, the dawn of the stiletto heel in the 1950s, all leading to the golden age of leg magazines in the 1960s. Learn who wore the first high heels, how nylons became a weapon of war, why Betty Grable’s were the million dollar legs, where Elmer Batters got his start, and just what the deal is with feet, while enjoying great vintage photos by Irving Klaw, Batters and other masters of leg art.

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The 1890s have become legendary: the period of Wilde, Beardsley and the Yellow Book; a decadent twilight at the close of the Victorian century, when young poets weary of life sat about drinking absinthe and talking of strange sins. The provenance of this beguiling picture is peculiar, for the myth of the Decadent Nineties was created during the period itself. It was an age of artistic self-consciousness, during which writers and painters believed that they had to create not only their works but also their personalities. In Passionate Attitudes, Matthew Sturgis examines the varying extents to which ambitious poets, penurious painters, canny publishers and a controversialist press all conspired to promote the notion of decadence. He explores in detail the cataclysmic effect upon English decadence of the spectacular trial and subsequent conviction of Wilde in 1895, a fall which was to cast a blight over the whole generation. As well as the luminaries Wilde, Beardsley and Beerbohm, Sturgis portrays Arthur Symons, the poet of the music halls, who divided his energies between promoting Verlaine and chasing after chorus girls; Ernest Dowson, the demoralised romantic of the Rhymers Club; Count Erik Stenbock, who kept a snake up his sleeve and went mad; and John Gray, who may have been the model for Wilde's Dorian. John Lane published most of their books; Owen Seaman and Ada Leverson parodied their manners. Elegantly written, Passionate Attitudes provides a hugely informative and richly entertaining account of the zeitgeist behind the glorious decade of excess.

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This easy-to-use easel format book is ideal for both complete beginners and more experienced artists who want to expand their skills. It contains clear instructions, reliable advice and friendly encouragement to unleash your creativity. It features over 600 illustrations and photographs lead you step by step through each project. It features carefully planned lessons that teach you how to draw the detailed features of people and pets. It offers easy-to-follow guidance on composition, perspective, medium, and the best sitting position for drawing. In this title, projects include household objects, winter tree, Victorian house, portrait of a girl, and ducks on the pond. From flowers and still lifes to landscape and family portraits - you can learn how to draw in just 15 simple, fun lessons. All you need to get started is some basic equipment and a sketchbook. Then just follow the step-by-step directions to learn time-tested techniques for using pencils, pens, pastels and charcoal, and watch your artwork form before your eyes. A useful introduction contains guidance on types of easel, sitting positions, basic equipment and choosing a sketchbook, as well as simple instructions for basic shapes. The chapters that follow cover Still Life, Flowers and Trees, Landscape, People and Portraits, and Animals. Each project is illustrated with detailed stage-by-stage pictures, including close-ups of difficult sections. The practical easel format makes this book easy to use by any aspiring artist.

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The pre-eminent political and spiritual leader of India's independence movement, pioneer of non-violent resistance to tyranny through mass civil disobedience (satyagraha), honoured in India as 'father of nation', Mohandas K. Gandhi has inspired movements for civil rights and political freedom across the world. Jad Adams offers a concise and elegant account of Gandhi's life: from his birth and upbringing in a small princely state in Gujarat during the high noon of the British Raj, to his assassination at the hands of a Hindu extremist in 1948 only months after the birth of the independent India which he himself he had done so much to bring about. He delineates the principal events of a career that may truly be said to have changed the world: his training as a barrister in late Victorian London; his civil rights work in Boer War-era South Africa; his leadership of the Indian National Congress; his focus on obtaining self-government and control of all Indian government institutions, and the campaigns of non-cooperation and non-violence against British rule in India whereby he sought to achieve that aim (including the famous 'Salt March' of March/April 1930); his passionate opposition to partition in 1947 and his fasts-unto-death in a bid to end the bitter and bloody sectarian violence that attended it. Jad Adams's accessible and thoughtful biography not only traces the outline of an extraordinary life with exemplary clarity, but also examines why Mahatma Gandhi and his teachings are still profoundly relevant today.

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The County Durham town of Darlington has a long and interesting history. In medieval times it was a market town for the surrounding area, with records of the market dating back to the twelfth century. The Victorian covered market is an iconic feature at the heart of Darlington today but was hugely controversial when built in the 1860s and its floor collapsed when it opened, killing a local farmer. By this time Darlington had been transformed by the opening of the world’s first passenger railway in the town, built with the wealth acquired by the Pease family’s wool mills. Secret Darlington explores the lesser-known episodes and characters in the history of the town through the centuries, including scandals such as the Cheese Affair involving the Bishop of Durham, war heroes, sporting stars such as the dentist who won the town’s first Olympic gold medal as a football goalkeeper but who died while making a save, a Quaker-born adventurer who fled to Easter Island, a global screen star engaged to Fred Perry who died in an air raid during the Second World War, campaigners for women’s suffrage, industries that have disappeared today including the forge that built the rudder for the Titanic, and forgotten places of entertainment, not least the largest number of cinemas per head of population in the country in the 1930s. With tales of remarkable people, unusual events and tucked-away historical places, Secret Darlington will appeal to all those with an interest in the history of this town in County Durham.

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t’s Halloween in Vermont, winter is coming, and five humans, two dogs, and a cat are a crowd in Mercy Carr’s small cabin. She needs more room - and she knows just the place: Grackle Tree Farm, with thirty acres of woods and wetlands and a Victorian manor to die for. They say it’s haunted by the ghosts of missing children and lost poets and a murderer or two, but Mercy loves it anyway. Even when Elvis finds a dead body in the library. There’s something about Grackle Tree Farm that people are willing to kill for - and Mercy needs to figure out what before they move in. A coded letter found on the victim points to a hidden treasure that may be worth a fortune - if it’s real. She and Captain Thrasher conduct a search of the old place - and end up at the wrong end of a Glock. A masked man shoots Thrasher, and she and Elvis must take him down before he murders them all. Under fire, she and Elvis manage to run the guy off, but not before they are wounded, leaving Thrasher fighting for his life in the hospital, Mercy on crutches, and Elvis on the mend. Now it’s up to Mercy and Troy and the dogs to track down the masked murderer in a county overflowing with leaf peepers, Halloween revelers, and treasure hunters and bring him to justice before he strikes again and the treasure is lost forever, along with the good name of Grackle Tree Farm….

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AS RECOMMENDED BY LYN ANDREWS Liverpool, 1861.Annie Shaw longs to be taken seriously. At 14, she's fed up of being babied by her big sister Delilah. It's true that Delilah has been the closest thing to a mother that Annie or any of her siblings have ever known, but she's secretive about the past and won't let her little sister out of her sight. When Annie's old friend Clara visits with tales of the good money that can be made at the cotton mill outside Ormskirk, she sees her chance at adventure and runs away.The work is gruelling and Annie is shocked to witness children as young as eight working long days around dangerous machinery. But it seems that, as long as the cotton is produced on time, the mill owners turn a blind eye to the very real human toll to be paid. The children from the workhouse are treated especially poorly and Annie can't help but make it her responsibility to rescue them.Soon Annie finds herself caring for three young orphans, now a makeshift mum herself. As hard times hit the mill and hundreds of jobs are lost, will Annie be able to keep her young charges warm, fed and safe? In order to face a turbulent future, Annie needs to first dig into the secrets buried in the past . . .PRAISE FOR JUDY SUMMERS:'I thoroughly enjoyed this book... The characters are well drawn and believable' - Lyn Andrews'Fascinating insights into Victorian Liverpool and a heart-warming story make for an inspiring read' - Mollie Walton

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Although Birmingham’s history goes back beyond the Middle Ages, there are only a few fragments of medieval Birmingham left, some of which have been moved from their original site as the city expanded. The city expanded rapidly in the industrial age and although Birmingham has many properties from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was radically transformed by the bombing raids of the Second World War and the subsequent rejuvenation by city planners. Some 1960s and 1970s buildings like the Rotunda have become icons of the city, but in recent years much of the mid-twentieth-century building, often in concrete brutalist style, has in turn been replaced by new structures like Beetham Tower and Birmingham Library. As England’s second city, Birmingham was a major centre of manufacture, and many of the buildings still stand today. It was also the home of a significant art and architecture movement, the Arts and Crafts movement, which has left its mark on the architectural legacy of Birmingham. Birmingham in 50 Buildings explores the history of this fascinating West Midlands metropolis through a selection of its most interesting buildings and structures, showing the changes that have taken place over the years. It uncovers the earliest churches and dwellings in the city, unique pieces of industrial architecture, the amazing heritage of Victorian religious and municipal structures, art deco cinemas, modernist high-rise blocks and iconic shopping centres. This book will appeal to all those who live in Birmingham or have an interest in the city.

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Control is a book about eugenics, what geneticist Adam Rutherford calls “a defining idea of the twentieth century.” Inspired by Darwin’s ideas about evolution, eugenics arose in Victorian England as a theory for improving the British population, and quickly spread to America, where it was embraced by presidents, funded by Gilded Age monopolists, and enshrined into racist American laws that became the ideological cornerstone of the Third Reich. Despite this horrific legacy, eugenics looms large today as the advances in genetics in the last thirty years—from the sequencing of the human genome to modern gene editing techniques—have brought the idea of population purification back into the mainstream. Eugenics has “a short history, but a long past,” Rutherford writes. The first half of Control is the history of an idea, from its roots in key philosophical texts of the classical world all the way into their genocidal enactment in the twentieth century. The second part of the book explores how eugenics operates today, as part of our language and culture, as part of current political and racial discussions, and as an eternal temptation to powerful people who wish to improve society through reproductive control. With disarming wit and scientific precision, Rutherford explains why eugenics still figures prominently in the twenty-first century, despite its genocidal past. And he confronts insidious recurring questions—did eugenics work in Nazi Germany? And could it work today?—revealing the intellectual bankruptcy of the idea, and the scientific impossibility of its realization.

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Creative genius, war artist, adventurer, lover. These are just some of the words that can be used to describe Aberdeenshire-born painter and printmaker James McBey (1883-1959). McBey was a Scottish superstar amongst the creative spirits that fuelled the Etching Revival of the late nineteenth century and Etching Boom of the early twentieth century, and in an historical context, was the acknowledged heir to Whistler and Rembrandt. But after his death in Tangier, Morocco, in 1959, his renown as one of Britain’s most accomplished artists – who took the art world by storm – faded from public consciousness. Born illegitimately in the tiny parish of Foveran, Aberdeenshire, in the late Victorian era, he was brought up by his blind mother and elderly grandmother amid the rigid Presbyterian confines of Scotland’s north-east. Tragedy, dreary work as a bank clerk and a craving for success on his own terms all precipitated his leaving Aberdeen to live the life of an artist in London where he quickly became one of the most-talked about creatives of his generation. At the heart of this biography – the first ever to be published on McBey – is his time as a war artist in the Middle East during the Great War – where he would meet and paint T. E. Lawrence – his many love affairs, marriage to the beautiful American, Marguerite Loeb, and his enduring passion for Morocco. Drawing on his many diaries and letters and artistic creations, this is the story of one man who – clever, kind, intrepid, dashing, insecure and flawed – triumphed against the odds.

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'There's something about the Whiteknights area that makes people stay here.' - From the Foreword by Fiona Talkington, BBC Radio 3 Presenter and long-term resident Two hundred years ago, the aptly named 'Southern Hill' that rises steeply from the edge of the river plain south of Reading was part of Whitley and largely farmland. However, its vistas, fresh air and proximity to the town led prominent Victorians to invest in and develop the area and their contributions have shaped it into the 'village within a town' that it is today. Schools, the University, hotels and a care home now occupy many of the sites originally owned by the town's famous industrialists and their elegant homes have been co-opted for community use which gives the area its unique aura of egalitarian refinement. Celebrated in the annual walking tour of artists' studios, the creative heart of the district beats stronger than ever and this book brings together 28 artists to respond in their own way and their own medium to the place we call 'Whiteknights'. And to give context to the artwork, local historians paint a fascinating picture of the Whiteknights estate that became the University campus, the buildings, the streets and the people who lived here. This joint venture from the Whiteknights Studio Trail, celebrating 20 years, and Two Rivers Press, publishing in the area for 25 years, pays tribute to the heritage we are privileged to be part of.

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To the impartial observer Britain does not appear to have any mountains. Yet the British invented the sport of mountain climbing and for two periods in history British climbers led the world in the pursuit of this beautiful and dangerous obsession. Unjustifiable Risk is the story of the social, economic and cultural conditions that gave rise to the sport, and the achievements and motives of the scientists and poets, parsons and anarchists, villains and judges, ascetics and drunks that have shaped its development over the past two hundred years. The history of climbing inevitably reflects the wider changes that have occurred in British society, including class, gender, nationalism and war, but the sport has also contributed to changing social attitudes to nature and beauty, heroism and death. Over the years, increasing wealth, leisure and mobility have gradually transformed climbing from an activity undertaken by an eccentric and privileged minority into a sub-division of the leisure and tourist industry, while competition, improved technology and information, and increasing specialisation have helped to create climbs of unimaginable difficulty at the leading edge of the sport. But while much has changed, even more has remained the same. Today's climbers would be instantly recognisable to their Victorian predecessors, with their desire to escape from the crowded complexity of urban society and willingness to take "unjustifiable" risk in pursuit of beauty, adventure and self-fulfilment. Unjustifiable Risk was shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker prize in 2011.

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Winner, LGBT Studies Lammy Award presented by Lambda Literary Neither queer theory nor queer activism has fully reckoned with the role of race in the emergence of the modern gay subject. In A Taste for Brown Bodies, Hiram Pérez traces the development of gay modernity and its continued romanticization of the brown body. Focusing in particular on three figures with elusive queer histories—the sailor, the soldier, and the cowboy— Pérez unpacks how each has been memorialized and desired for their heroic masculinity while at the same time functioning as agents for the expansion of the US borders and neocolonial zones of influence. Describing an enduring homonationalism dating to the “birth” of the homosexual in the late 19th century, Pérez considers not only how US imperialist expansion was realized, but also how it was visualized for and through gay men. By means of an analysis of literature, film, and photographs from the 19th to the 21st centuries—including Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Anne Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” and photos of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison—Pérez proposes that modern gay male identity, often traced to late Victorian constructions of “invert” and “homosexual,” occupies not the periphery of the nation but rather a cosmopolitan position, instrumental to projects of war, colonialism, and neoliberalism. A Taste for Brown Bodies argues that practices and subjectivities that we understand historically as forms of homosexuality have been regulated and normalized as an extension of the US nation-state, laying bare the tacit, if complex, participation of gay modernity within US imperialism.

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How do we understand Christmas? What does it mean? This book is a lively introduction to the study of popular culture through one central case study. It explores the cultural, social and historical contexts of Christmas in the UK, USA and Australia, covering such topics as fiction, film, television, art, newspapers and magazines, war, popular music and carols. Chapters explore the ways in which the production of meaning is mediated by the social and cultural activities surrounding Christmas (watching Christmas films, television, listening or engaging with popular music and carols), its relationship to a set of basic values (the idealised construct of the family), social relationships (community), and the ways in which ideological discourses are used and mobilised, not least in times of conflict, terrorism and war. Packed with examples ranging from Charles Dickens' seminal text, A Christmas Carol, Coca-colonisation and Santa Claus, Victorian cartoons and Christmas cards, to Dr Who, The Office, 'A Fairy Tale of New York', 'Happy Christmas (War is Over)', and such dystopian films as Jingle All the Way and All I Want For Christmas, the case studies offer an incisive account of the ways in which Christmas relates to social change, and how such recent events as 9/11 and the continuing conflict in Iraq focus attention on traditional themes of community and family. Christmas, Ideology and Popular Culture offers students and scholars alike an opportunity to explore the hidden agendas of the world's most popular festival and what it means to the outsider looking in.

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Nicholas Frankel presents a new and revisionary account of Wilde’s final years, spent in poverty and exile on the European continent following his release from an English prison for the crime of “gross indecency” between men. Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years challenges the prevailing, traditional view of Wilde as a broken, tragic figure, a martyr to Victorian sexual morality, and shows instead that he pursued his post-prison life with passion, enjoying new liberties while trying to resurrect his literary career.After two bitter years of solitary confinement, Frankel shows, Wilde emerged from prison in 1897 determined to rebuild his life along lines that were continuous with the path he had followed before his conviction, unapologetic and even defiant about the crime for which he had been convicted. England had already done its worst. In Europe’s more tolerant atmosphere, he could begin to live openly and without hypocrisy.Frankel overturns previous misunderstandings of Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the great love of his life, with whom he hoped to live permanently in Naples, following their secret and ill-fated elopement there. He describes how and why the two men were forced apart, as well as Wilde’s subsequent relations with a series of young men. Oscar Wilde pays close attention to Wilde’s final two important works, De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, while detailing his nearly three-year residence in Paris. There, despite repeated setbacks and open hostility, Wilde attempted to rebuild himself as a man—and a man of letters.

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Long before the satirical comedy of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the comic operas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan were the hottest send-ups of the day's political and cultural obsessions. Gilbert and Sullivan's productions always rose to the level of social commentary, despite being impertinent, absurd, or inane. Some viewers may take them straight, but what looks like sexism or stereotype was actually a clever strategy of critique. Parody was a powerful weapon in the culture wars of late-nineteenth-century England, and with defiantly in-your-face sophistication, Gilbert and Sullivan proved that popular culture can be intellectually as well as politically challenging. Carolyn Williams underscores Gilbert and Sullivan's creative and acute understanding of cultural formations. Her unique perspective shows how anxiety drives the troubled mind in the Lord Chancellor's "Nightmare Song" in Iolanthe and is vividly realized in the sexual and economic phrasing of the song's patter lyrics. The modern body appears automated and performative in the "Junction Song" in Thespis, anticipating Charlie Chaplin's factory worker in Modern Times. Williams also illuminates the use of magic in The Sorcerer, the parody of nautical melodrama in H.M.S. Pinafore, the ridicule of Victorian aesthetic and idyllic poetry in Patience, the autoethnography of The Mikado, the role of gender in Trial by Jury, and the theme of illegitimacy in The Pirates of Penzance. With her provocative reinterpretation of these artists and their work, Williams recasts our understanding of creativity in the late nineteenth century.

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The personal journals examined in Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent are not the witty, erudite, and gracefully written exercises that have drawn the attention of most biographers and literary scholars. Prosaic, ungrammatical, and poorly spelled, the fifteen surviving volumes of Henry Trent's hitherto unexamined diaries are nevertheless a treasure for the social and cultural historian.Henry Trent was born in England in 1826, the son of a British naval officer. When he was still a boy, his father decided to begin a new life as a landed gentleman and moved the family to Lower Canada. At the age of sixteen Trent began writing in a diary, which he maintained, intermittently, for more than fifty years. As a lonely youth he narrates days spent hunting and trapping in the woods owned by his father. On the threshold of manhood and in search of a vocation, he writes about his experiences in London and then on Vancouver Island during the gold rush. And finally, as the father of a large family, he describes the daily struggle to make ends meet on the farm he inherited in Quebec's lower St Francis valley.As it follows Trent through the different stages of his long life, Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent explores the complexities of class and colonialism, gender roles within the rural family, and the transition from youth to manhood to old age. The diaries provide a rare opportunity to read the thoughts and follow the experiences of a man who, like many Victorian-era immigrants of the privileged class, struggled to adapt to the Canadian environment during the rise of the industrial age.

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When Isaac Newton published the "Principia" three centuries ago, only a few scholars were capable of understanding his conceptually demanding work. Yet this esoteric knowledge quickly became accessible in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Britain produced many leading mathematical physicists. In this book, Andrew Warwick shows how the education of these "masters of theory" led them to transform our understanding of everything from the flight of a boomerang to the structure of the universe. Warwick focuses on Cambridge University, where many of the best physicists trained. He begins by tracing the dramatic changes in undergraduate education there since the 18th century, especially the gradual emergence of the private tutor as the most important teacher of mathematics. Next he explores the material culture of mathematics instruction, showing how the humble pen and paper so crucial to this study transformed everything from classroom teaching to final examinations. Balancing their intense intellectual work with strenuous physical exercise, the students themselves - known as the "Wranglers" - helped foster the competitive spirit that drove them in the classroom and informed the Victorian ideal of a manly student. Finally, by investigating several historical "cases", such as the reception of Albert Einstein's special and general theories of relativity, Warwick shows how the production, transmission and reception of new knowledge was profoundly shaped by the skills taught to Cambridge undergraduates. Drawing on a wealth of new archival evidence and illustrations, "Master of Theory" examines the origins of a cultural tradition through which the complex world of theoretical physics was made commonplace.

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The thrilling second novel in the acclaimed series The Brightstorm Chronicles! The Brightstorm twins are back for another adventure! Eudora Vane has organized an explorer fleet to search the last known destination of missing adventurer Ermitage Wrigglesworth. Harriet Culpepper and the crew of the Aurora join the mission, but they don't believe that Eudora has good intentions. What is she really looking for? Arthur is determined to find out, and when disaster strikes and the Brightstorm twins are separated, will he and Maudie be able to find their way back to each other? The long-awaited sequel to Brightstorm, which was selected as the first Booksellers Association Children's Book of the Season, won the West Sussex Children's Story Book Award, was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Awards and the Waterstones' Children's Book Prize, and longlisted for the Blue Peter Book Award. Perfect for fans of books by Peter Bunzl, Abi Elphinstone, and Alex Bell. PRAISE FOR BRIGHTSTORM: "A pacy tale of lies and greed versus loyalty" Observer "Hardy has drunk from the same cup as Philip Reeve and Philip Pullman. This is a skilful, gripping and hugely enjoyable account of the bonds that keep families together." Literary Review "Full of surprises and keeps you desperate to find the truth" National Geographic Kids "An unputdownable Victorian adventure with vivid characters that travels at lightning speed" BookTrust's Great Books Guide "A highly entertaining old-school adventure" The Bookseller

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Conrad in Italy provides international students and researchers with a variety of critical approaches. Richard Ambrosini surveys Conrad's reception within the Italian academy. Franco Marenco's essay on "Heart of Darkness" outlines Conrad's centrality in English Modernism. Alessandro Serpieri deals with Conrad's impressionistic treatment of space in The Secret Agent and other texts. Giuseppe Sertoli focuses on Conrad's debt to the Comtesse de Boigne's Memoires and to James's Portrait of a Lady in the writing of Suspense. Fausto Ciompi investigates the isotopy of dream in Lord Jim and other early novels. Elio Di Piazza reads the The Mirror of the Sea as an inquiry into British and Russian empires. Maria Teresa Chialant's study of "Amy Foster" and "Tomorrow" accounts for the interest of Italian critics in Conrad's minor works. Francesco Marroni unfolds the moral structure of "The Secret Sharer". Nicoletta Vallorani tackles the theme of the double in "The Secret Sharer" from the perspective of the art of photography. Luisa Villa illuminates the complex structure of Chance in the light of Conrad's re-elaboration of the Victorian multi-plot novel. Mario Domenichelli proposes a reading of Conrad's cooperation with Ford. The Inheritors is the subject of Mario Curreli's essay on Conrad's debt to H.G. Wells, Zangwill, and Drumont, while it places the issue of fourth-dimension in the context of European colonialisms. Marialuisa Bignami's survey of Conrad's influence on Primo Levi and Marilena Saracino's intertextual analysis of "Heart of Darkness" and Luigi Guarneri's Tenebre sul Congo are two exercises in dialogic reading which confirm Conrad's well-established reception in Italian culture.

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Fairy stories, especially from the rich tradition of Ireland where the supernatural grew from the legends of the Celts, are the magic stories of everyday folk seeking solutions to the challenges of the day. This spritely new collection brings together the fables and stories of banshees, kings, trembling farmers, tricksters and beloved princesses. ‘Smallhead and the King's Sons’ (a Cinderella story) and ‘The Haughty Princess’ (recalling Grimm’s ‘Kings Thrushbeard’) are amongst the many delightful tales of hope and reckless determination. Fairy tales bring the myths of ancient times into the Victorian and Modern eras, where superstition and the supernatural still exist. Rooted in the past, such fairy stories bring morals and lessons for the young, and wise words for the old. They are a reminder of the power of the natural world and offer suggestions for our inner fears of the dark and the shadows. These tales provide a link between the myths and legends of the Celts, and the modern tales of dark monsters, of vampires and bewitchment, of the dark voices hidden in the earth, and the stars. FLAME TREE 451: From myth to mystery, the supernatural to horror, fantasy and science fiction, Flame Tree 451 offers a healthy diet of werewolves and mechanical men, blood-lusty vampires, dastardly villains, mad scientists, secret worlds, lost civilizations and escapist fantasies. Discover a storehouse of tales gathered specifically for the reader of the fantastic.

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Writer Harry Pearson takes a warm and witty journey around Britain in pursuit of the lost folk sports that somehow still linger on in the glitzy era of the Premier League and Sky Sports to find out how and why they have survived and to meet the characters who keep them going. When Victorian public schoolmasters and Oxbridge-educated gentlemen were taming football, codifying cricket, bringing the values of muscular Christianity to the boxing ring and the athletics field, games that dated back to the pagan era clung on in isolated pockets of rural Britain, unmodified by contemporary tastes, shunned by the media and sport’s ruling elites. Here they remain, small, secret worlds, free from media scrutiny and VAR controversies, wreathed in an arcane language of face-gaters, whack-ups, potties, gates-of-hell and the Dorset flop; as much a part of the British countryside as the natterjack toad and almost as endangered. No Pie, No Priest! travels through Britain in search of the nation’s traditional rural sports, seeking out the championship of Knur and Spell (a Viking forefather of golf) on the West Yorkshire moors; watching Irish Road Bowling in County Armagh (once a surprising interest of England cricket captain Mike Brearley), Popinjay at Kilwinning Abbey in Ayrshire, the Aunt Sally competitions of Oxfordshire, and taking in world championship Stoolball (often considered the dairymaid’s form of cricket) and Toad-in-the-Hole in West Sussex.No Pie, No Priest! combines sports reporting, travelogue and history, and features a cast of bucolic eccentrics and many deeply impenetrable regional accents.

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In 1881, a writer in the Saturday Review called tattooing ‘an art without a history’. ‘No-one’, it went on, ‘has made it the business of his life to study the development of tattooing.’ Until now. Painted People is a beguiling and intimate look at an untold history of humanity. The earliest tattoos yet identified belonged to Ötzi, the ‘iceman’, whose mummy allows us a brief glimpse into the prehistory of the practice. We know that over the more than five thousand years since he was tattooed, countless cultures have performed this ancient practice, and people in every corner of the world have been tattooed. For the most part, these fascinating histories remain stubbornly untold, and the secrets of Siberian princesses, Chinese generals and Victorian socialites have been hidden on the skin, under layers of clothing and under layers of history. Now with access to a wealth of new and unreported material, this book will roll up its sleeves and reveal the artwork hidden beneath them. In Painted People, Dr Matt Lodder, one of the world’s foremost experts on tattooing, tells the stories of people like Arnaq, who was tattooed in keeping with her cultural and religious traditions in sixteenth-century Canada, and Horace Ridler, who was tattooed as a means to make money in 1930s London. And in between these two extremes, he describes tattoos inked for love, for loyalty, for sedition and espionage and for self-expression, as well as tattoos inflicted on the unwilling, to ostracise. Taken together, these twenty-one tattoos paint a portrait of humanity as both artist and canvas.

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Britain fought three major wars, and two minor ones, with the Asante people of West Africa in the nineteenth century. Only the Sudanese and Zulu campaigns saw a greater loss of life, both for the British and the indigenous population. Like the Zulus, the Asante were a warrior nation who offered a tough adversary for the British regulars - they were respected for their martial skills and bravery. And yet these wars have rarely been written about and are little understood. That is why Stephen Manning's vivid, detailed new history of this neglected colonial conflict is of such value. In the war of 1823-6 the British were defeated - the British governor's head was severed and his skull was taken to the Asante king who made a cast of gold and this trophy was paraded once a year during an Asante ceremony. The years 1873-4 witnessed the brilliance of Sir Garnet Wolseley in overcoming the logistical problems of sending a large British expedition deep into the jungle where it faced not only a formidable foe but a climate so unforgiving that the region became known as 'The White Man's Grave'. Finally, the 1900 campaign culminated in the epic siege of the British fort in Kumasi which must rank as one of the great Victorian escapades alongside the more famous sieges of Peking and Mafikeng. Stephen Manning's account, which is based on Asante as well as British sources, offers a fascinating view from both sides of one of the most remarkable and protracted struggles of the colonial era.

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Creatively and intellectually there is no other species that has ever come close to equalling humanity’s achievements, but nor is any other species as suicidally prone to internecine conflict. We are the only species on the planet whose ingrained habit of conflict constitutes the chief threat to our own survival. Human history can be seen as a catalogue of cold-hearted murders, mindless blood-feuds, appalling massacres and devastating wars, but, with developments in forensic science and modern psychology, and with raised education levels throughout the world, might it soon be possible to reign in humanity’s homicidal habits? Falling violent crime statistics in every part of the world seem to indicate that something along those lines might indeed be happening. Colin and Damon Wilson, who between them have been covering the field of criminology for over fifty years, offer an analysis of the overall spectrum of human violence. They consider whether human beings are in reality as cruel and violent as is generally believed and they explore the possibility that humankind is on the verge of a fundamental change: that we are about to become truly civilised. As well as offering an overview of violence throughout our history – from the first hominids to the twenty-first century, touching on key moments of change and also indicating where things have not changed since the Stone Age – they explore the latest psychological, forensic and social attempts to understand and curb modern human violence. To begin with, they examine questions such as: Were the first humans cannibalistic? Did the birth of civilisation also lead to the invention of war and slavery? Priests and kings brought social stability, but were they also the instigators of the first mass murders? Is it in fact wealth that is the ultimate weapon? They look at slavery and ancient Roman sadism, but also the possibility that our own distaste for pain and cruelty is no more than a social construct. They show how the humanitarian ideas of the great religious innovators all too quickly became distorted by organised religious structures. The book ranges widely, from fifteenth-century Baron Gilles de Rais, ‘Bluebeard’, the first known and possibly most prolific serial killer in history, to Victorian domestic murder and the invention of psychiatry and Sherlock Holmes and the invention of forensic science; from the fifteenth-century Taiping Rebellion in China, in which up to 36 million died to the First and Second World Wars and more recent genocides and instances of ‘ethnic cleansing’, and contemporary terrorism. They conclude by assessing the very real possibility that the internet and the greater freedom of information it has brought is leading, gradually, to a profoundly more civilised world than at any time in the past.

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The more red-faced and bearded or impulsive a man, the more dark, calm, cool and quiet should his wife be; and vice versa. Those very fleshy should not marry those equally so, but those spare and slim. A spare man is much better adapted to a fleshy woman than a round-favored man. Two very beautiful persons rarely do or should marry; nor two extra homely. Learn all this and much, much more in Marriage and Love, a gem of Victorian wisdom on courtship and marriage, immoral conduct, and what to look for in a spouse. The ideal funny gift book for newlyweds or brides-to-be, it includes a potpourri of advice on such matters as wooing and courting; determining the character of a potential mate by hair color, eye color, nose type, laugh, and height; tips on encouraging—and avoiding—sex with your husband; how to dress up, spruce up, and be on the alert; and, of course, the acceptable length and frequency of unavoidable sexual encounters. Includes essential advice on: *Wooing and courting*Determining the character of a potential mate by hair color, eye color, nose type, laugh, and height*Tips on avoiding sex with your husband*The evils of novels and the theater*The dangers of over-corseting*• HowHow to dress up, spruce up, and be on the alert. ("Don’t wait too long to get one much more perfect than you are; but settle on some one soon."} • Appropriate night-wear for the wedded couple• The acceptable length and frequency of unavoidable sexual encounters

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