DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "English Eccentrics" by Edith Sitwell. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
The English eccentric is under threat. In our increasingly homogenised society, these celebrated parts of our national identity are anomalies that may soon no longer fit. Or so it seems. On his entertaining and thought-provoking quest to discover the most eccentric English person alive today, Henry Hemming unearths a surprisingly large array of delightfully odd characters. He asks what it is to be an eccentric. Is it simply to thrive on creativity and non-conformity, and where does this incarnation of Englishness stem from? Hemming concludes that this tribe is, in fact, in rude health, as essential as ever to the English national identity, only they are no longer to be found where you'd expect them. Featuring interviews with Dame Vivienne Westwood, the Marquess of Bath, Pete Doherty, the modern-day reincarnation of King Arthur, the Leopard Man of Skye, Sebastian Horsley, Chris Eubank, Captain Beany and Brian Haw among others.
From 1859 to 1880, Joshua Abraham Norton thought he was Emperor of the United States. Ann Atkin keeps 7,500 garden gnomes in her backyard. Brooklyn artist Peter McGough dresses and acts as if it were 1895. These are just a few of the eccentrics discussed by Dr. Weeks, the world's foremost expert on the subject.
George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics celebrates the lives, literature, and politics of a group of four 'radical eccentrics' - the Tory anarchist poet Stevie Smith, the Marxist Indian nationalist Mulk Raj Anand, and the glamour-girl-turned-socialist Inez Holden - who formed a friendly circle around the famously radical and eccentric George Orwell. Demonstrating that Smith, Anand, and Holden matter for literary history just as they mattered for Orwell, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics gives name and shape to a neglected movement within interwar and wartime English writing. It focuses on the lives and texts of Smith, Anand, and Holden in order to argue that these three writers throw into question limiting assumptions about art and politics-about standard relations between literary form and sex, gender, race, class, and empire-in ways that their group's most influential radical, Orwell, cannot. Embarking upon a kind of biographical-political-cultural-literary criticism, this book brings the radical eccentrics' vital, potentially transformative conversation to the attention of scholars of English literature for the first time, suggesting fascinating new approaches to the study of literary London during the thirties and forties.
This book explores the life and art of seven extraordinary women of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, who had a tremendous if not yet fully acknowledged impact on the modernist movement and its reception. Judith Gautier, Suzanne Valadon, Dorothy Bussy, Dora Carrington, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Emily Carr and Claude Cahun were powerful forces in their various fields. Each lived an unusual life, the eccentricity of which was in large part responsible for its creative intensity. Drawing on much unpublished material, the stories recounted here, often involving very famous men-- including Utrillo, Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Wagner, Hugo, Rilke, and Gide-- show a singular courage and determination. Whether as writers, translators, painters, or photographers, these innovators stood out among their contemporaries as remarkable contributors to modernism.
Baker brings to life Emerson and his circle of friends--Hawthorne, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and others. the result is a vivid and textured mosaic of not just their interrelationships, but of their daily lives--what they ate, what they wore, what they did for entertainment, what was valued, what was not, and how they managed life. Photos.
An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel. Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.”
A delightful romp around the British Isles searching out the mad marquess, the eccentric earl, the barmy baron, and the daft duke and gathering a fair collection of crackpot inventors, weird adventurers and fascinatingly and not to mention insanely curious customs along the way. All of which make this rainy little island home to that remarkable breed of individual - the British eccentric.This expanded book still doesn't tell you where Stonehenge is, but it does tell you where ten spookier stone circles are where there will be no crowds, no admission charges and no parking problems... This is a book for the intelligent, humorous, curious tourist who doesn't go with the crowd. It is also a great armchair read that has been known to have readers weeping with mirth at the weird ways of the British.
“Good corporate drama . . . an enlightening narrative of how new communications infrastructures often come about.” —The Economist, “A Book of the Year 2016” In the early 1990s, Motorola developed a revolutionary satellite system called Iridium that promised to be its crowning achievement. Its constellation of 66 satellites in polar orbit was a mind-boggling technical accomplishment, surely the future of communication. The only problem was that Iridium the company was a commercial disaster. Only months after launching service, it was $11 billion in debt, burning through $100 million a month and crippled by baroque rate plans and agreements that forced calls through Moscow, Beijing, Fucino, Italy, and elsewhere. Bankruptcy was inevitable—the largest to that point in American history. And when no real buyers seemed to materialize, it looked like Iridium would go down as just a “science experiment.” That is, until Dan Colussy got a wild idea. Colussy, a former head of Pan-Am now retired and working on his golf game in Palm Beach, heard about Motorola’s plans to “de-orbit” the system and decided he would buy Iridium and somehow turn around one of the biggest blunders in the history of business. Impeccably researched and wonderfully told, Eccentric Orbits is a rollicking, unforgettable tale of technological achievement, business failure, the military-industrial complex, and one of the greatest deals of all time. “Deep reporting put forward with epic intentions . . . a story that soars and jumps and dives and digresses . . . [A] big, gutsy, exciting book.” —The Wall Street Journal, “A Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2016” “Spellbinding . . . A tireless researcher, Bloom delivers a superlative history . . . A tour de force.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Where is Joe Merchant? That’s what his sister Trevor Kane, the hemorrhoid ointment heiress, wants to know. For South Seas psychic Desdemona, Merchant is the missing link needed to connect her with other worlds. And the mystery of the presumed dead but often-sighted rock star’s disappearance is turning renegade seaplane pilot Frank Bama’s life upside down. Jimmy Buffet fans will be enchanted with this modern-day pirate tale.
