Search results for ""author john leigh""
Harvard University Press Touché: The Duel in Literature
The monarchs of seventeenth-century Europe put a surprisingly high priority on the abolition of dueling, seeing its eradication as an important step from barbarism toward a rational state monopoly on justice. But it was one thing to ban dueling and another to stop it. Duelists continued to kill each other with swords or pistols in significant numbers deep into the nineteenth century. In 1883 Maupassant called dueling “the last of our unreasonable customs.” As a dramatic and forbidden ritual from another age, the duel retained a powerful hold on the public mind and, in particular, the literary imagination.Many of the greatest names in Western literature wrote about or even fought in duels, among them Corneille, Molière, Richardson, Rousseau, Pushkin, Dickens, Hugo, Dumas, Twain, Conrad, Chekhov, and Mann. As John Leigh explains, the duel was a gift as a plot device. But writers also sought to discover in duels something more fundamental about human conflict and how we face our fears of humiliation, pain, and death. The duel was, for some, a social cause, a scourge to be mocked or lamented; yet even its critics could be seduced by its risk and glamour. Some conservatives defended dueling by arguing that the man of noble bearing who cared less about living than living with honor was everything that the contemporary bourgeois was not. The literary history of the duel, as Touché makes clear, illuminates the tensions that attended the birth of the modern world.
£32.36
AU Press A Very Capable Life: The Autobiography of Zarah Petri
Zarah Petri was just a little girl when her family left Hungary to finda new life in Canada in the 1920s. She showed spunk and a greatimagination that would serve her well as a new immigrant and youngmarried woman. Zarah and her family lived through the Depression, andshe learned to make ends meet in any way she could, even bending thelaw if necessary. Her son John writes this touching memoir, told in thefirst person, in Zarah’s own unique voice. Her remembrances aresometimes funny, sometimes sad but always entertaining.
£22.99
Voltaire Foundation Rousseau and the Eighteenth Century: Essays in Memory of R.A.Leigh
£85.89
Hackett Publishing Co, Inc The Figaro Plays
[Beaumarchais'] fame rests on Le Barbier de Seville (1775) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), the only French plays which his stage-struck century bequeathed to the international repertoire. But his achievement has been adulterated, for ‘Beaumarchais’ has long been the brand name of a product variously reprocessed by Mozart, Rossini, and the score or so librettists and musicians who have perpetuated his plots, his characters, and his name. The most intriguing question of all has centered on his role as catalyst of the Revolution. Was his impertinent barber the Sweeney Todd of the Ancien Régime, the true begetter of the guillotine? . . . Beaumarchais' plays have often seemed to need the same kind of shoring up as his reputation, as though they couldn't stand on their own without a scaffolding of good tunes. Yet, as John Wells' lively and splendidly speakable translations of the Barber, the Marriage, and A Mother's Guilt demonstrate, they need assistance from no one. [Beaumarchais] thought of the three plays as a trilogy. Taken together, they reflect, as John Leigh’s commentaries make clear, the Ancien Régime’s unstoppable slide into revolution. --David Coward in The London Review of Books
£36.89
Hackett Publishing Co, Inc Voltaire: Philosophical Letters: Or, Letters Regarding the English Nation
In his Philosophical Letters, Voltaire provides a pungent and often satirical assessment of the religion, politics, science, and arts of the England he observed during his nearly three-year exile. In addition to the Letters, this edition provides a translation of Voltaire's Proposal for a Letter about the English, a general Introduction, chronology, notes, and bibliography.
£11.99
Hackett Publishing Co, Inc The Figaro Plays
[Beaumarchais'] fame rests on Le Barbier de Seville (1775) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), the only French plays which his stage-struck century bequeathed to the international repertoire. But his achievement has been adulterated, for ‘Beaumarchais’ has long been the brand name of a product variously reprocessed by Mozart, Rossini, and the score or so librettists and musicians who have perpetuated his plots, his characters, and his name. The most intriguing question of all has centered on his role as catalyst of the Revolution. Was his impertinent barber the Sweeney Todd of the Ancien Régime, the true begetter of the guillotine? . . . Beaumarchais' plays have often seemed to need the same kind of shoring up as his reputation, as though they couldn't stand on their own without a scaffolding of good tunes. Yet, as John Wells' lively and splendidly speakable translations of the Barber, the Marriage, and A Mother's Guilt demonstrate, they need assistance from no one. [Beaumarchais] thought of the three plays as a trilogy. Taken together, they reflect, as John Leigh’s commentaries make clear, the Ancien Régime’s unstoppable slide into revolution. --David Coward in The London Review of Books
£13.99
Hackett Publishing Co, Inc Voltaire: Philosophical Letters: Or, Letters Regarding the English Nation
In his Philosophical Letters, Voltaire provides a pungent and often satirical assessment of the religion, politics, science, and arts of the England he observed during his nearly three-year exile. In addition to the Letters, this edition provides a translation of Voltaire's Proposal for a Letter about the English, a general Introduction, chronology, notes, and bibliography.
£32.39
