Search results for ""author peter swaab""

Edward Lear (1812-1888) is one of the best-loved of English poets. His comic invention and unconstrained sense of the absurd have been enjoyed by generations of children, and treasured by adults conscious of the subtle melancholy that underlies the fun. This collection includes all the favourite nonsense poems. Peter Swaab sets them alongside a generous selection from Lear's six travel books (including his three Journals of a Landscape Painter), first published between 1841 and 1870, and long out of print. For the first time Lear is presented as an adventurer, not only in the fabled lands of the Jumblies and the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, but also in nineteenth-century Albania, Greece, Calabria and Corsica, where his encounters with the people and customs of these sometimes equally strange and challenging cultures are recorded with the same acute and rueful comic imagination.

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Considered by Thomas de Quincey to be 'perhaps the most superb work in the language', The Two Noble Kinsmen is set in Athens and was co-written by Shakespeare with John Fletcher. This Penguin Shakespeare edition is edited by N. W. Bawcutt with an introduction by Peter Swaab.'Once, he kissed me. I loved my lips the better ten days after'When Theseus, Duke of Athens, learns that the ruler of Thebes has killed three noble kings he swears to take revenge. But after Athens triumphs over the rival city, Theseus is struck by the bravery of two Theban cousins and orders his surgeons to attend to them. Soon, the cousins' lifelong friendship is threatened, as both become overwhelmed with love for the duke's beautiful sister.This book contains a general introduction to Shakespeare's life and Elizabethan theatre, a separate introduction to the play, a chronology, suggestions for further reading, an essay discussing performance options on both stage and screen, and a commentary.

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The films of Thorold Dickinson (1903-1984), now being rediscovered, engage with major issues including national identity, the post-colonial world, and political violence – and they also show a rare mastery of style, a thrilling eroticism, a preoccupation with the psychology of betrayal. But the director of Gaslight, The Next of Kin and The Queen of Spades was also an editor, documentarist, trade unionist, film producer (for the British Army and the UN), pioneering academic and controversialist. His adventurous and truly global involvement in film took him to Paris in the heyday of silent cinema in the 1920s, to Stalin’s USSR in 1937, to the Spanish Civil War, to Africa, India, Israel and America.This book gives a lively, multi-angled account of Dickinson’s works, life and times, conveying a sense of his own voice and fascinating character. It includes a richly detailed introduction, a film-by-film discussion of Dickinson with Scorsese, vivid personal memoirs of the director, a dossier of Dickinson’s original writings and interviews from 1924 to 1973 (some never previously published), critical essays on all the feature films, and a ground-breaking reference section. The book draws on extensive archival research and close consultation with those who knew Dickinson well.Contributors include: Martin Scorsese, Gavin Millar, Lutz Becker, Charles Barr, Laura Marcus, Kevin Jackson, Kevin Gough-Yates, Ian Christie, Gregory Dart, Hillel Tryster, Janet Moat.

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