Search results for ""Renard Press Ltd""

Formed of sixty fifteen-line stanzas, this haunting and consistently entertaining collection can be read like a journal, tracking lines of thought through time and space, painting detailed, witty and moving pictures of a countryside and life that lie unchanged, even through periods of great upheaval political, ecological and cultural.

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Although her legacy as a politician is certainly more enduring than as a poet, her verse was highly acclaimed upon publication, and when The Golden Threshold, her first collection, came out in 1905, contemporary poets queued up to offer recommendations.

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Concepts of belonging and community have constantly evolving definitions, and have been at the centre of fierce debate in recent years. The first twenty-three years of the new millennium have seen a rise in rhetoric aimed at those without the voice to argue back, and waves of toxic abuse have proliferated – and genocide. How relevant, then, to unite and raise our voices, to celebrate the rich tapestry of humanity, and to explore the labels we use to identify and express ourselves. Kinship is a poetry anthology that seeks to provide a platform for marginalised voices, and to celebrate the great diversity and rich variation in the identities of people from around the world and from a huge cross-section of walks of life.

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'If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.' One of the most prolific and respected playwrights of the twentieth century, Bernard Shaw's legacy shows no signs of waning, and his beautifully written plays, laced with wry wit and invective alike, have seen countless performances over the years, their finest lines paraded in literary conversation and review. Meticulously selected by Simon Mundy, the Wit and Acid series collects the sharpest lines from Shaw's oeuvre in small neat volumes, allowing the reader to sample some of the very best barbs and one-liners the twentieth century has to offer, and this, the second volume, covers lines from the great writer's works published after 1911. With an introduction by Simon Mundy, a poet, novelist, trenchant music critic and occasional playwright.

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The poetry of Dylan Thomas has long been heralded as amongst the greatest of the Modern period, and along with his play, Under Milk Wood, his books are amongst the best-loved works in the literary canon. First published in 1940, at the height of his fame, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog is a collection of short autobiographical stories that paint fascinating and humorous portraits of life in rural Wales, and pre-empt characters and traits that echo throughout his later work. Now rightly considered one of the most important volumes in his oeuvre, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog is the key to unlocking the great poet's work.

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Hope’s leaving her home town up north for the bright lights of London. It’s going to be mind-blowing. Attractive Hinge dates, mature new friends… A job at a dinosaur-themed bar? Hell. Yes. Several months in things are looking slightly less rosy. Her housemate seems to hate her and her manager’s a creep… But we don’t need to talk about that. Do we? Almost Adult is a brilliantly funny play that lays bare the darker side of slick modern workplaces and the underhand employment practices that police them – or fail to – with stunning lightness of touch.

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'"What?" said the reverend gent, "Dance through my hours of leisure? Smoke? Bathe myself with scent? Play croquet? Oh, with pleasure!"' Today W.S. Gilbert is best known for the comic operas he produced in collaboration with Arthur Sullivan, but another of his great - and numerous - literary contributions were his humorous ballads, written and illustrated under the pseudonym 'Bab'. Combining his trademark absurdist wit with keenly observed character studies, the ballads are a satirical tour de force that lambast society figures. This new selection, chosen and introduced by Andrew Crowther, Secretary of the W.S. Gilbert Society, brings together the very best of the ballads and presents the 'Bab' works for a new readership.

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William Morris is perhaps best known today for the beautiful textile designs he created under the banner of Morris & Co, which continue to decorate homes around the globe. As one of the leading lights of British socialism, however, he is less well known, and this series of Morris's Manifestos seeks to highlight his extraordinary contribution to the literary canon on subjects socialist and artistic. Based on a lecture given at the Manchester Royal Institution in 1883, Art, Wealth and Riches is a thought-provoking essay that considers art as having educative and aesthetic value that should be shared with the many, rather than financial value that should be hoarded by the few. Morris asks: 'Is art to be limited to a narrow class who only care for it in a very languid way, or is it to be the solace and pleasure of the whole people?'

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Many musical and theatrical traditions walk the very narrow path between the sublime and the ridiculous, but perhaps none more so than opera, which, while maintaining an elegant reputation, makes a show out of princes making romantic speeches to soft fruit, noses being accidentally cut off and woodpeckers performing wedding ceremonies. Opera Obscura is a beautifully illustrated collection that contributes twenty-five brand new impossibly madcap operas to the canon of magnificent absurdities, along with the intricate blueprints for several incredible opera houses and information on of a whole range of almost unbelievably incredible instruments.

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Silent Movements brings all Simon Mundy’s experience in politics and the music business together. Set in 1980 at the end of the Cold War, it tells the story of a Soviet violinist being helped by a young British cellist to defect. Along the way Mundy accurately depicts the challenges and excitement of concert performance. As Julian Lloyd Webber says, ‘Simon Mundy really knows the point where music, politics and history collide. He also understands the processes of a performer’s life.’

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The Caribbean island of St James in the 1980s should have been paradise. Instead the post-independence rulers turned it into a perverted and corrupt private fiefdom. The US would not act because its Government is anti-communist and American privateers wanted to keep it that way. Britain didn’t care enough to intervene officially. The disgusting practices of the Prime Minister and his family were too much to ignore, though. Philip Goshawk was sent to try to find a solution. In this atmospheric political thriller James Eno catches the dark mood just beneath the surface glamour of islands in the sun.

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Seeking the Spoils is a fast-moving thriller from James Eno that contrasts the raw beauty of Scotland with the machinations of the European Parliament. Young MEP Seona Mackenzie and New York Times journalist Gaynor Schultz finds themselves in a battle to save the landscape from the combined threat of corporate greed and political corruption.

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George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. On Reading, the seventh in the Orwell’s Essays series, collects together Orwell’s short essays on books – ‘Bookshop Memories’, ‘Good Bad Books’, ‘Nonsense Poetry’, ‘Books vs. Cigarettes’ and ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’ – giving a rounded view of the great writer’s opinions on the literature of his day, and the vessels in which it was sold.

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Eighteenth-century poetry was dominated by men of education and wealth, and bookcases sagged under the weight of volumes by Swift, Johnson and Pope. When Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour was published in 1730, however, it was a sensation – highlighting the plight of the working class in verse was hereto simply unthought of. Duck’s poem came to the attention of Mary Collier, a washerwoman working in Hampshire, who was astounded to read Duck’s dismissal of women as work-shy layabouts who indulged in ‘noisy prattle’, and she penned a stinging riposte, The Woman’s Labour, which reframed Duck’s relation of harvest-time toil from a woman’s perspective. This edition of The Woman’s Labour seeks to give a wider view of the conversation, and includes The Thresher’s Labour, ‘The Three Wise Sentences’ (which Collier included in the first publication of her reply), ‘An Epistolary Answer to an Exciseman Who Doubted Her Being the Author’ and the elegy she wrote for Stephen Duck after he died.

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Fantomina, or, Love in a Maze is a novella by Eliza Haywood which charts an unnamed female protagonist’s pursuit of the charming, shallow Beauplaisir. Dealing with major themes such as identity, class and sexual desire, and first published in 1725, Fantomina subverts the popular ‘persecuted maiden’ narrative, and reaches a climax which would have shocked its contemporary readership. Moving to London, a young woman – let’s call her Fantomina – meets a dashing man at the theatre. After a short, but intense, fling, Beauplaisir grows bored of Fantomina, and leaves her. Outraged that she should be so treated, Fantomina discards her disguise in favour of another, and sets off in hot pursuit of her victim, and a game of cat and mouse begins. This edition features an introduction by Dr Sarah R. Creel, Bethany E. Qualls and Dr Anna K. Sagal of the International Eliza Haywood Society.

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The second in the Morris's Manifestos series, The Decorative Arts is a passionate argument against the homogenisation of production, and a cry for art to make itself seen in design art will make our streets as beautiful as the woods, as elevating as the mountainsides.'

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Jane Austen, one of the nation’s most beloved authors, whose face adorns our currency, surely needs no introduction, but while many are familiar with her groundbreaking novels, and despite lending its name to a film adaptation of Lady Susan in 2016, her burlesque Love and Freindship is an unjustly neglected gem of satirical comedy. Written when she was still in her teens, Love and Freindship is a fascinating, light-hearted epistolary work that shows Austen’s wit developing into the satirical prowess she is remembered for, and casts the novels with which her name is so associated in a new light.

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First published in 1905, O. Henry's masterpiece, The Gift of the Magi, is a moving short story that highlights the plight of the poor at Christmastime. Desperately in love but destitute, Della and Jim try to find ways to drum up the cash for presents for one another, but in the end find they have sacrificed too much along the way. An ode to love and a warning against the consequences of capitalism, The Gift of the Magi has stood the test of time and has sadly never been more relevant. Part of Renard's successful Christmas Card Classics series, 25% of the RRP of each book sold goes to the Three Peas, a small charity supporting refugees.

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George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. Inside the Whale, the eighth in the Orwell’s Essays series, discusses Henry Miller’s controversial Tropic of Cancer, and considers the driving power behind the great books of the 1930s. Comparing Miller with other literary giants, Orwell lambasts the notion that all literature is good, forcing the reader to think for themselves, with his final words ringing in their ears: ‘five thousand novels are published in England every year and four thousand nine hundred of them are tripe.’

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