Search results for ""CONNELL PUBLISHING LTD""

'Humans have always had sex. But look through the keyhole of history and you will see they have not always had sex in the same manner, with the same kinds of people or with the same beliefs about whether what they are doing is right or desirable.” So writes Charlie McCann in this fascinating study of sex and sexuality through the ages. Beginning with the world of antiquity and ending with the present, she traces our changing attitudes to our bodies and what we do with them, conducting us on a tour which takes in the gymnasiums of ancient Greece, where men seduced boys, to the caves occupied by Christian ascetics, to the fashionable drawing rooms of Georgian London, where libertines hunted for women to prey on, and the clubs of Weimar Berlin, where lesbians debated the nature of their desire. Nowadays, in Europe and North America, the way we think about sexuality is a fundamental part of our identity. To a greater ext

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In 1954 William Golding was 43 years old and a nobody. He had been demobbed from the navy at the end of World War Two and returned to his pre-war job teaching English at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. Always hard up, he lived in what he called a “lousy council flat” with his wife, Ann, and their two young children. In 1952 he finished the novel that was to become Lord of the Flies, and sent it to five publishers and a literary agency. They all rejected it. The sixth publisher he tried was Faber and Faber, and the professional reader wrote her opinion on the typescript: “Time the Future. Absurd & uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the Colonies. A group of children who land in jungle country near New Guinea. Rubbish & dull.”  But the novel was rescued from the reject pile by a new recruit to Faber, and when it was finally published in September 1954 the poet Stevie Smith greeted it as “this beautiful and de

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Writing matters. We all do it, and we all admire it when it’s done well. It doesn’t just express us; it represents us. We write to connect with other people – to make them laugh, or cry, or think. We also write to work out what we think ourselves: there’s nothing like it for concentrating the mind.  So what’s the secret of a stylish essay, or story, or email? How do you make your sentences sparkle? Dorothy Parker had a point when she said that writing “is the art of applying the ass to the seat”, but in this slim volume, a leading editor who is also a pop critic and sportswriter shows you much fun you can have while sharpening your pen. Tim de Lisle’s book is packed with good, simple advice: be clear, be concise, be vivid, be organised. In a few breezy chapters, he explains the secrets of good writing, and along the way he quotes dozens of great lines, from the plays of Shakespeare to the journalism of Caitlin Moran. “Writ

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