Search results for ""Author Matthew Beresford""

Since the discovery of Britain’s first Ice Age cave art in 2003, the site of Creswell Crags has gained international recognition as one of Britain’s leading Ice Age sites. For the first time the history of the site is brought together in one accessible volume. Documenting the early fieldwork at the site it uncovers antiquarian discoveries such as the famous horse engraving, excavations in the 1920s that saw our understanding of our early ancestors take shape, discusses the demise of the Neanderthals and the emergence of Modern Man, and looks at how Creswell Crags grew as a heritage attraction of potential World Heritage Status. In Beyond the Ice, Matthew Beresford examines how our ancestors lived, how they hunted, examines the tools and weapons they made and, most importantly, what they left behind. The book also challenges the term ‘Creswellian’, an isolated British culture that occupied the fringe lands of western Europe, and instead offers hard evidence for viewing Creswell Crags and its inhabitants as being part of a vast Ice Age world. Finally, it looks at what happened right at the end of the last Ice Age and examines what the changes in climate and landscape meant to our early ancestors. Beyond the Ice will appeal as much to the general reader as it will to the student or scholar, as it raises fundamental questions and offers up interpretations that apply to us all.

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In blood-soaked lore handed down the centuries, the vampire is a monster of endless fascination: from Bram Stoker's "Dracula" to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", this seductive lover of blood haunts popular culture and inhabits our darkest imaginings. The history of the vampire is a compelling tale that is now documented in "From Demons to Dracula", which reveals why the vampire myth and this creature of the undead fascinates us. Beresford's chronicle roams from the mountains of Eastern Europe, to the foggy streets of Victorian England, to Hollywood film, as he investigates the portrayal of the vampire in history, literature and art. Investigating the historical "Dracula", "Vlad the Impaler", and his status as a national hero in Romania, Beresford endeavours to winnow out truths from the complex legend and folklore. "From Demons to Dracula" tracks the evolution of the vampire, drawing on classical Greek and Roman myths, witch trials and medieval plagues, Gothic literature and even contemporary works such as Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire and Elizabeth Kostova's "The Historian". Beresford also looks at the widespread impact of screen vampires from television shows, classic movies starring Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, and more recent films such as "Underworld" and "Blade". Whether as a demon of the underworld or a light-fearing hunter of humans, the vampire has endured through the centuries, the book reveals, as a powerful symbolic figure for human concerns with life, death and the afterlife. Wide-ranging and engrossing, "From Demons to Dracula" casts this bloodthirsty nightstalker as a remarkably complex and telling totem of our nightmares, real and imagined.

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