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Author: Boyd Hilton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2008-06-19
Total Pages: 784
ISBN-13: 0199218919
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn a period scarred by apprehensions of revolution, war, invasion, poverty and disease, elite members of society lived in fear of revolt. Boyd Hilton examines the changes in society between 1783-1846 and the transformations from raffish and rakish behaviour to the new norms of Victorian respectability.
Author: Boyd Hilton
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2006-02-16
Total Pages: 784
ISBN-13: 0191606820
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis was a transformative period in English history. In 1783 the country was at one of the lowest points in its fortunes, having just lost its American colonies in warfare. By 1846 it was once more a great imperial nation, as well as the world's strongest power and dominant economy, having benefited from what has sometimes (if misleadingly) been called the 'first industrial revolution'. In the meantime it survived a decade of invasion fears, and emerged victorious from more than twenty years of 'war to the death' against Napoleonic France. But if Britain's external fortunes were in the ascendant, the situation at home remained fraught with peril. The country's population was growing at a rate not experienced by any comparable former society, and its manufacturing towns especially were mushrooming into filthy, disease-ridden, gin-sodden hell-holes, in turn provoking the phantasmagoria of a mad, bad, and dangerous people. It is no wonder that these years should have experienced the most prolonged period of social unrest since the seventeenth century, or that the elite should have been in constant fear of a French-style revolution in England. The governing classes responded to these new challenges and by the mid-nineteenth century the seeds of a settled two-party system and of a more socially interventionist state were both in evidence, though it would have been far too soon to say at that stage whether those seeds would take permanent root. Another consequence of these tensions was the intellectual engagement with society, as for example in the Romantic Movement, a literary phenomenon that brought English culture to the forefront of European attention for the first time. At the same time the country experienced the great religious revival, loosely described under the heading 'evangelicalism'. Slowly but surely, the raffish and rakish style of eighteenth-century society, having reached a peak in the Regency, then succumbed to the new norms of respectability popularly known as 'Victorianism'.
Author: Samira Ahmed
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2020-04-07
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 1616959908
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDiscover New York Times bestseller Samira Ahmed’s romantic, sweeping adventure through the streets of Paris told in alternating narratives that bridge centuries, continents, and the lives of two young Muslim women fighting to write their own stories. Smash the patriarchy. Eat all the pastries. It’s August in Paris and 17-year-old Khayyam Maquet—American, French, Indian, Muslim—is at a crossroads. This holiday with her parents should be a dream trip for the budding art historian. But her maybe-ex-boyfriend is ghosting her, she might have just blown her chance at getting into her dream college, and now all she really wants is to be back home in Chicago figuring out her messy life instead of brooding in the City of Light. Two hundred years before Khayyam’s summer of discontent, Leila is struggling to survive and keep her true love hidden from the Pasha who has “gifted” her with favored status in his harem. In the present day—and with the company of Alex, a très charmant teen descendant of Alexandre Dumas—Khayyam searches for a rumored lost painting, uncovering a connection between Leila and Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Delacroix, and Lord Byron that may have been erased from history. Echoing across centuries, Leila and Khayyam’s lives intertwine, and as one woman’s long-forgotten life is uncovered, another’s is transformed.
Author: Ranulph Fiennes
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2009-11-26
Total Pages: 501
ISBN-13: 1848944403
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRanulph Fiennes has travelled to the most dangerous and inaccessible places on earth, almost died countless times, lost nearly half his fingers to frostbite, raised millions of pounds for charity and been awarded a polar medal and an OBE. He has been an elite soldier, an athlete, a mountaineer, an explorer, a bestselling author and nearly replaced Sean Connery as James Bond. In his autobiography he describes how he led expeditions all over the world and became the first person to travel to both poles on land. He tells of how he discovered the lost city of Ubar in Oman and attempted to walk solo and unsupported to the North Pole - the expedition that cost him several fingers, and very nearly his life. His most recent challenge was scaling the north face of the Eiger, one of the most awesome mountaineering challenges in the world. Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes OBE, 3rd Baronet, looks back on a life lived at the very limits of human endeavour. 'Even readers with a broadly low tolerance for macho heroism will find themselves gripped . . . compelling' - Time Out
Author: Spike Webb
Publisher: Kings Road Publishing
Published: 2010-07-26
Total Pages: 202
ISBN-13: 1857829972
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNever have so many famous drummers been gathered together in one place! Drummer and writer Spike Webb has spent more than three years meeting fellow drummers in bars, clubs and cafes, shooting the breeze for a couple of hours and extracting anecdote after anecdote for posterity. This is truly a labour of love - and somebody had to do it. In this book you'll meet drummers like Nick Mason (Pink Floyd), Don Powell (Slade), Adam Facek (Babyshambles), Steve White (Paul Weller), Topper Headon (The Clash), Woody (Madness) and world-class session players like Toto's drummer Simon Phillips. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant but always entertaining, it's the ultimate insight into what it really means to be a drummer and an explanation, at last, for what really makes someone do a 20-minute solo. You'll be asking for an encore!
Author: Colm Tóibín
Publisher: Picador Australia
Published: 2018-10-30
Total Pages: 169
ISBN-13: 1760783595
DOWNLOAD EBOOK'A father...is a necessary evil.' Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses William Butler Yeats' father was an impoverished artist, an inveterate letter writer, and a man crippled by his inability to ever finish a painting. Oscar Wilde's father was a doctor, a brilliant statistician and amateur archaeologist who was taken to court by an obsessed lover in a strange foreshadowing of events that would later befall his son. The father of James Joyce was a garrulous, hard-drinking man with a violent temper, unable or unwilling to provide for his large family, who eventually drove his son from Ireland. In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, Colm Tóibín presents an illuminating, intimate study of Irish culture, history and literature told through the lives and works of Ireland's most famous sons, and the complicated, influential relationships they each maintained with their fathers. 'A supple, subtle thinker, alive to hunts and undertones, wary of absolute truths.' New Statesman 'Tóibín writes about writers' families...with great subtlety and sometimes with splendid impudence.' Sunday Telegraph
Author: Chloé Esposito
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2017-06-13
Total Pages: 354
ISBN-13: 1101986018
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this compulsively readable debut, set between London and Sicily over one blood-drenched week in the dead of summer, an identical twin reveals the crazy lies and twists she'll go through to not only steal her sister's perfect life, but to keep on living it. Alvie Knightly is a trainwreck: aimless, haphazard, and pretty much constantly drunk. Alvie's existence is made even more futile in contrast to that of her identical and perfect twin sister, Beth. Alvie lives on social media, eats kebabs for breakfast, and gets stopped at security when the sex toy in her carry-on starts buzzing. Beth is married to a hot, rich Italian, dotes on her beautiful baby boy, and has always been their mother's favorite. The twins' days of having anything in common besides their looks are long gone. When Beth sends Alvie a first-class plane ticket to visit her in Italy, Alvie is reluctant to go. But when she gets fired from the job she hates and her flatmates kick her out on the streets, a luxury villa in glitzy Taormina suddenly sounds more appealing. Beth asks Alvie to swap places with her for just a few hours so she can go out unnoticed by her husband. Alvie jumps at the chance to take over her sister's life--if only temporarily. But when the night ends with Beth dead at the bottom of the pool, Alvie realizes that this is her chance to change her life. Alvie quickly discovers that living Beth's life is harder than she thought. What was her sister hiding from her husband? And why did Beth invite her to Italy at all? As Alvie digs deeper, she uncovers Mafia connections, secret lovers, attractive hitmen, and one extremely corrupt priest, all of whom are starting to catch on to her charade. Now Alvie has to rely on all the skills that made her unemployable--a turned-to-11 sex drive, a love of guns, lying to her mother--if she wants to keep her million-dollar prize. She is uncensored, unhinged, and unforgettable.
Author: Christopher Frayling
Publisher:
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 239
ISBN-13: 9781861892850
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSince its origin cinema has had an uneasy relationship with science and technology: scientists are almost always impossibly mad or impossibly saintly, and technology is nearly always very bad for you. In Mad, Bad and Dangerous?, Christopher Frayling explores the genealogy of the film scientist in films made in Western Europe, and especially in Hollywood after the 1930s, showing how in film the scientist has often been used to represent the prevailing phobias of the time. In the 1950s, for example, films were dominated by the fear of botched atomic research, and were a showcase of mutated, outsized creatures and radioactive zombies. Since Hitchcock’s The Birds, however, the role of the scientist has been less straightforward, and by the 1970s damage to the environment and the spread of diseases were the predominant consequences of science gone wrong. Scientists – and the corporations that controlled them – became the ‘baddies’. The author also examines in parallel the portrayal of real-life scientists in the movies, noting how they are in the main depicted as misfits, immersed in their work, sacrificing any normal life to the interests of science, yet distrusted by the scientific establishment. Interestingly, the cinematic portrayal of fictional and real-life scientists follow very similar dramatic conventions, and Frayling concludes that the mad scientist and the saintly one are two sides of the same Hollywood coin.
Author: Dave Stone
Publisher: Blake Publishing
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781844543960
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe summer of 2006 belonged to Russell Brand. From being the commentator on Big Brother to upstaging Jonathan Ross on the chat show king's own programme, there was no escaping Russell's lewd, innuendo-laden humour. This is the biography of Russell Brand.
Author: Paul Langford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1998
Total Pages: 844
ISBN-13: 9780198207337
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe first volume of Sir George Clark's Oxford History of England was published in 1934. Over the following 50 years that series established itself as a standard work of reference, and a repertoire of scholarship. The New Oxford History of England, of which this is the first volume, is its successor. Each volume will set out an authoritative view of the present state of scholarship, presenting a distillation of the knowledge built up by a half-century's research and publication of new sources, and incorporating the perspectives and judgements of modern scholars.
