A World of Love
A World of Love

Author: Elizabeth Bowen

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2003-08-12

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 1400031052

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In a writing career that spanned the 1920s to the 1960s, Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen created a rich and nuanced body of work in which she enlarged the comedy of manners with her own stunning brand of emotional and psychological depth. In A World of Love, an uneasy group of relations are living under one roof at Montefort, a decaying manor in the Irish countryside. When twenty-year-old Jane finds in the attic a packet of love letters written years ago by Guy, her mother’s one-time fiance who died in World War I, the discovery has explosive repercussions. It is not clear to whom the letters are addressed, and their appearance begins to lay bare the strange and unspoken connections between the adults now living in the house. Soon, a girl on the brink of womanhood, a mother haunted by love lost, and a ruined matchmaker with her own claim on the dead wage a battle that makes the ghostly Guy as real a presence in Montefort as any of the living.

Reading Radio 4
Reading Radio 4

Author: Macdonald Daly

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-12-01

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 113757657X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is a study of contemporary Radio 4 output, covering the entire broadcast day. Radio is largely neglected by media and cultural studies. The small body of existing work on Radio 4 is predominantly historical, focusing on institutional history, or sociological, focusing on contemporary BBC editorial and journalistic practices. Reading Radio 4, by contrast, analyses contemporary Radio 4 programmes entirely from the point of view of today’s listener. Individual chapters correspond to all existing Radio 4 timeslots in the entire broadcast day of 19 hours 40 minutes, from 5.20am to 1.00am. The study, while academic in approach, aims to promote an informed and critical appreciation of Radio 4 for all listeners, as well as students of the media.

Burning the Books
Burning the Books

Author: Richard Ovenden

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-10-13

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0674241207

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The director of the famed Bodleian Libraries at Oxford narrates the global history of the willful destruction—and surprising survival—of recorded knowledge over the past three millennia. Libraries and archives have been attacked since ancient times but have been especially threatened in the modern era. Today the knowledge they safeguard faces purposeful destruction and willful neglect; deprived of funding, libraries are fighting for their very existence. Burning the Books recounts the history that brought us to this point. Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts—political, religious, and cultural—and the broader themes that shape this history. He also looks at attempts to prevent and mitigate attacks on knowledge, exploring the efforts of librarians and archivists to preserve information, often risking their own lives in the process. More than simply repositories for knowledge, libraries and archives inspire and inform citizens. In preserving notions of statehood recorded in such historical documents as the Declaration of Independence, libraries support the state itself. By preserving records of citizenship and records of the rights of citizens as enshrined in legal documents such as the Magna Carta and the decisions of the US Supreme Court, they support the rule of law. In Burning the Books, Ovenden takes a polemical stance on the social and political importance of the conservation and protection of knowledge, challenging governments in particular, but also society as a whole, to improve public policy and funding for these essential institutions.

All Made Up
All Made Up

Author: Janice Galloway

Publisher: Granta Books

Published: 2011-09-01

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1847084427

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the second volume of her memoirs, the prize-winning author Janice Galloway reveals how the child introduced in This is Not About Me evolved through her teenage years. When she started secondary school, Galloway was still sharing a bed with her mother and was more excited by Latin and school orchestra than by boys. But as she struggled with the physical and emotional changes of adolescence, almost everything she thought she knew began to change. Combining visceral descriptions of puberty, sex and school-room politics with the story of a family's secrets, Galloway casts her gaze on the morals and ambitions of one small town, in writing that is personal, defiant and eloquent.

Entangled Life
Entangled Life

Author: Merlin Sheldrake

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2020-05-12

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0525510338

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “brilliant [and] entrancing” (The Guardian) journey into the hidden lives of fungi—the great connectors of the living world—and their astonishing and intimate roles in human life, with the power to heal our bodies, expand our minds, and help us address our most urgent environmental problems. “Grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of An Immense World ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, BBC Science Focus, The Daily Mail, Geographical, The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, London Evening Standard, Science Friday When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave. In the first edition of this mind-bending book, Sheldrake introduced us to this mysterious but massively diverse kingdom of life. This exquisitely designed volume, abridged from the original, features more than one hundred full-color images that bring the spectacular variety, strangeness, and beauty of fungi to life as never before. Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They are metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life’s processes. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. By examining fungi on their own terms, Sheldrake reveals how these extraordinary organisms—and our relationships with them—are changing our understanding of how life works. Winner of the Wainwright Prize, the Royal Society Science Book Prize, and the Guild of Food Writers Award • Shortlisted for the British Book Award • Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize

An Experiment in Love
An Experiment in Love

Author: Hilary Mantel

Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

Published: 2007-04-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1429900598

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year It was the year after Chappaquiddick, and all spring Carmel McBain had watery dreams about the disaster. Now she, Karina, and Julianne were escaping the dreary English countryside for a London University hall of residence. Interspersing accounts of her current position as a university student with recollections of her childhood and an ever difficult relationship with her longtime schoolmate Karina, Carmel reflects on a generation of girls desiring the power of men, but fearful of abandoning what is expected and proper. When these bright but confused young women land in late 1960s London, they are confronted with a slew of new preoccupations--sex, politics, food, and fertility--and a pointless grotesque tragedy of their own. Hilary Mantel's magnificent novel examines the pressures on women during the early days of contemporary feminism to excel--but not be too successful--in England's complex hierarchy of class and status.

Venice
Venice

Author: Jan Morris

Publisher:

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780571168972

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Often hailed as one of the best travel books ever written, Venice is neither a guide nor a history book, but a beautifully written immersion in Venetian life and character, set against the background of the city's past. Analysing the particular temperament of Venetians, as well as its waterways, its architecture, its bridges, its tourists, its curiosities, its smells, sounds, lights and colours, there is scarcely a corner of Venice that Jan Morris has not investigated and brought vividly to life. Jan Morris first visited the city of Venice as young James Morris, during World War II. As she writes in the introduction, 'it is Venice seen through a particular pair of eyes at a particular moment - young eyes at that, responsive above all to the stimuli of youth.' Venice is an impassioned work on this magnificent but often maddening city. Jan Morris's collection of travel writing and reportage spans over five decades and includes such titles as Sydney, Coronation Everest, Hong Kong, Spain and Manhattan '45. Since its first publication, Venice has appeared in many editions, won the W.H. Heinemann award and become an international bestseller. 'The best book about Venice ever written' Sunday Times 'No sensible visitor should visit the place without it . . . Venice stands alone as the essential introduction, and as a work of literature in its own right.' Observer

In Our Time
In Our Time

Author: Melvyn Bragg

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2011-12-21

Total Pages: 632

ISBN-13: 144474285X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time series regularly enlightens and entertains substantial audiences on BBC Radio 4. For this book he has selected episodes which reflect the diversity of the radio programmes, and takes us on an amazing tour through the history of ideas, from philosophy, physics and history to religion, literature and biology. We can discover the reasons for the fall of the Byzantine empire, and why women were persecuted as witches in the seventeenth century. What happened in the peasants' revolt? What shape is the origin of life? Where does our calendar come from? We can unearth the influence of great Islamic thinkers, prime numbers, Socrates and Tectonic plates. Melvyn Bragg orchestrates the ideas of leading academics in each field so that the dynamic and lively discussion from the programmes comes through vividly on the page. In Our Time brings to life the signposts of history, the moments that significantly changed the world as we know it, and the individuals and ideas that made us what we are today.

The Unbelievable Truth
The Unbelievable Truth

Author: Graeme Garden

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2013-09-01

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1848094191

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Enter Mr. David Mitchell’s amazing Cabinet of Curiosities and prepare to marvel at this hand-picked and lavishly illustrated compendium of incredible facts, each one painstakingly culled from the hugely acclaimed BBC Radio and Australian TV show The Unbelievable Truth. Plus—try your own truth-detection skills over a series of ingenious comic essays on a diverse range of subjects, from Armadillos to Sir Walter Raleigh, by the show’s co-inventor Dr. Graeme Garden. Each essay contains five incredible truths, tantalizingly concealed amongst a host of barely credible lies. The Unbelievable Truth is hosted by the award-winning actor, comedian, and writer David Mitchell, and was first broadcast on Radio 4 in 2006, since when it has become one of BBC Radio’s most popular and successful shows.