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Ancien Regime and the Revolution
By Alexis De Tocqueville. 2008
The Ancien Régime and the Revolution is a comparison of revolutionary France and the despotic rule it toppled. Alexis de…
Tocqueville (1805–59) is an objective observer of both periods – providing a merciless critique of the ancien régime, with its venality, oppression and inequality, yet acknowledging the reforms introduced under Louis XVI, and claiming that the post-Revolution state was in many ways as tyrannical as that of the King; its once lofty and egalitarian ideals corrupted and forgotten. Writing in the 1850s, Tocqueville wished to expose the return to despotism he witnessed in his own time under Napoleon III, by illuminating the grand, but ultimately doomed, call to liberty made by the French people in 1789. His eloquent and instructive study raises questions about liberty, nationalism and justice that remain urgent today.Ancestors: The story of China told through the lives of an extraordinary family
By Frank Ching. 2009
Frank Ching brings to life 900 years of Chinese history through his own fascinating family tree. Beginning with his search…
for the grave of his first recorded ancestor, the 11th century poet Qin Guan, and ending with a moving account of his relationship with his father, a victim of China's historic upheaval, Frank Ching introduces a colourful cast of characters. His unbroken family line includes - among many others - a lovelorn concubine, a traitor, a military hero, an imperial ghost-writer, a minister of punishments and a woman noted for her skills in both verse and martial arts. There is scarcely an aspect of Chinese life, from shamanism to violent rebellion, that Ching doesn't touch upon in this fascinating work. Through his vivid and personal portraits of his ancestors the history of China itself unfolds: from the days of the ancient empire to its radical transformation today.Critical Terms for the Study of Africa (Critical Terms)
By Gaurav Desai, Adeline Masquelier. 2018
For far too long, the Western world viewed Africa as unmappable terrain—a repository for outsiders’ wildest imaginings. This problematic notion…
has had lingering effects not only on popular impressions of the region but also on the development of the academic study of Africa. Critical Terms for the Study of Africa considers the legacies that have shaped our understanding of the continent and its place within the conceptual grammar of contemporary world affairs. Written by a distinguished group of scholars, the essays compiled in this volume take stock of African studies today and look toward a future beyond its fraught intellectual and political past. Each essay discusses one of our most critical terms for talking about Africa, exploring the trajectory of its development while pushing its boundaries. Editors Gaurav Desai and Adeline Masquelier balance the choice of twenty-five terms between the expected and the unexpected, calling for nothing short of a new mapping of the scholarly field. The result is an essential reference that will challenge assumptions, stimulate lively debate, and make the past, present, and future of African Studies accessible to students and teachers alike.Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library
By Gaurav Desai. 2001
Subject to Colonialism provides a much needed revisionist perspective on the way twentieth-century Africa is viewed and analyzed among scholars.…
Employing literary, historical, and anthropological techniques, Gaurav Desai attempts to generate a new understanding of issues that permeate discussions of Africa by disrupting the centrality of postcolonial texts and focusing instead on the cultural and intellectual production of colonial Africans. In particular, Desai calls for a reevaluation of the "colonial library"--that set of representations and texts that have collectively "invented" Africa as a locus of difference and alterity. Presenting colonialism not as a singular, monolithic structure but rather as a practice frought with contradictions and tensions, Desai works to historicize the foundation of postcolonialism by decentering both canonical texts and privileged categories of analysis such as race, capitalism, empire, and nation. To achieve this, he focuses on texts that construct or reform--rather than merely reflect--colonialism, placing explicit emphasis on processes, performances, and the practices of everyday life. Reading these texts not merely for the content of their assertions but also for how they were created and received, Desai looks at works such as Jomo Kenyatta's ethnography of the Gikuyu and Akiga Sai's history of the Tiv and makes a particular plea for the canonical recuperation of African women's writing. Scholars in African history, literature, and philosophy, postcolonial studies, literary criticism, and anthropology will welcome publication of this book.Commerce with the Universe
By Gaurav Desai. 2013
Reading the life narratives and literary texts of South Asians writing in East Africa, Gaurav Desai builds a new history…
of Africa's encounter with slavery, colonialism, migration, nationalism, development, and globalization. Rather than approach literature and culture from a nation-centered perspective, Desai connects the medieval trade routes of the Islamicate empire, the early independence movements galvanized in part by Gandhi's southern African experiences, the invention of new ethnic nationalisms, and the rise of plural, multiethnic nations to the fertile exchange taking place across the Indian Ocean.Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped The Western World
By John Man. 2000
The idea behind the alphabet - that language with all its wealth of meaning can be recorded with a few…
meaningless signs - is an extraordinary one. So extraordinary, in fact, that it has occurred only once in human history: in Egypt about 4000 years ago. Alpha Beta follows the emergence of the western alphabet as it evolved into its present form, contributing vital elements to our sense of identity along the way. The Israelites used it to define their God, the Greeks to capture their myths, the Romans to display their power. And today, it seems on the verge of yet another expansion through the internet.Tracking the alphabet as it leaps from culture to culture, John Man weaves discoveries, mysteries and controversies into a story of fundamental historical significance.Almost the Equinox: Selected Poems
By Sarah Maguire. 2007
* A POETRY BOOK SOCIETY SPECIAL COMMENDATION *Sarah Maguire’s first collection, Spilt Milk, established her as one of the most…
original voices in British poetry, and led to her being chosen as one of the New Generation Poets. Three critically acclaimed volumes have since followed – The Invisible Mender, The Florist’s at Midnight and The Pomegranates of Kandahar – to form a lucid, lyrical and rich body of work remarkable for its intelligence and artistry.This welcome selection of Maguire’s poems spans time and continents – from the ‘bare flanks’ of the Thames at low tide to the night streets of Marrakech – bringing us the sights and sounds of distant lands, as well as taking us to the very heart of human feeling. Verdant in imagery and imagination, this is poetry of extraordinary precision and power – fully attuned to ‘that precious music, / the pitch of flesh / on flesh’.All the Best: The Selected Poems of Roger McGough
By Roger McGough. 2003
A wonderful selection of over 100 of Roger's own best-loved poems from his vast Puffin catalogue of poetry collections. Lots…
of favourites and some lesser known surprises, too. Packed with fabulous Lydia Monks illustrations throughout.All One Breath
By John Burnside. 2014
Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection‘There are lines in All One Breath…
for instance, that brand themselves into your brain with the fire of painful recognition. And yet it is also part of his genius to be ever alert to beauty, too.’ - Sebastian Barry, a New Statesman Book of the YearIn this absorbing, brilliant new collection – his first since Black Cat Bone – John Burnside examines our shared experience of this mortal world: how we are ‘all one breath’ and – with that breath – how we must strive towards the harmony of choir. Recognising that our attitudes to other creatures – human and non-human – cause too much damage and hurt, that ‘we’ve been going at this for years: / a steady delete / of anything that tells us what we are’, these poems celebrate the fleeting, charged moments where, through measured and gracious encounters with other lives, we find our true selves, and bring some brief, insubstantial goodness and beauty into being. He presents the world in a series of still lifes, in tableaux vivants and tableaux morts, in laboratory tests, anatomy lessons, in a Spiegelkabinett where the reflections in the mirrors, distorted as they seem, reveal buried truths. All the images are in some sense self-portraits: all are, in some way, elegies.One of the finest and most celebrated lyric poets at work today, John Burnside is a master of the moment – when the frames of our film seem to slow and stop and a life slips through the gap in between – and each poem here is a perfect, uncanny hymn to humanity, set down ‘to tell the lives of others’.Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas
By Isaiah Berlin. 2013
Berlin's main theme in these essays is the importance in the history of ideas of dissenters whose thinking still challenges…
conventional wisdom - among them Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Herzen and Sorel. With his unusual powers of imaginative re-creation, he brings to life original minds that swam against the current of their times, and in the process offers a powerful defence of variety in our visions of life. Roger Hausheer's introduction surveys Berlin's whole oeuvre, and the full bibliography of his pubication has been updated for this Pimlico edition.After The Deafening
By Gerard Woodward. 1994
With the publication of his first book, HOUSEHOLDER, Gerard Woodward emerged as one of the most talented and unusual new…
poets of the 1990s. In his forthcoming collection AFTER THE DEAFENING, Woodward's powerful imagination, and the details of everyday life take on an extraordinary and exotic significance. 'A kind of punk anthropologist, his unsettling imagination violates all the thresholds between inner and outer. ' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS 'Vivid and rarely whimsical' OBSERVER 'There are enough poems in this collection which are both felt AND written to justify Woodward's claim on our attention. Where he exhibits emotional generosity, he is very good indeed. ' Carol Ann DuffyAfropean: Notes from Black Europe
By Johny Pitts. 2019
Winner of the Jhalak Prize'A revelation' Owen Jones'Afropean seizes the blur of contradictions that have obscured Europe's relationship with blackness…
and paints it into something new, confident and lyrical' Afua Hirsch A Guardian, New Statesman and BBC History Magazine Best Book of 2019 'Afropean. Here was a space where blackness was taking part in shaping European identity ... A continent of Algerian flea markets, Surinamese shamanism, German Reggae and Moorish castles. Yes, all this was part of Europe too ... With my brown skin and my British passport - still a ticket into mainland Europe at the time of writing - I set out in search of the Afropeans, on a cold October morning.'Afropean is an on-the-ground documentary of areas where Europeans of African descent are juggling their multiple allegiances and forging new identities. Here is an alternative map of the continent, taking the reader to places like Cova Da Moura, the Cape Verdean shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon with its own underground economy, and Rinkeby, the area of Stockholm that is eighty per cent Muslim. Johny Pitts visits the former Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, where West African students are still making the most of Cold War ties with the USSR, and Clichy Sous Bois in Paris, which gave birth to the 2005 riots, all the while presenting Afropeans as lead actors in their own story.African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History
By Hakim Adi. 2023
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE A major new history of Britain that transforms our understanding of this country's past'I've…
waited so long so read a comprehensively researched book about Black history on this island. This is it: a journey of discovery and a truly exciting and important work' Zainab Abbas Despite the best efforts of researchers and campaigners, there remains today a steadfast tendency to reduce the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain to a simple story: it is one that begins in 1948 with the arrival of a single ship, the Empire Windrush, and continues mostly apart from a distinct British history, overlapping only on occasion amid grotesque injustice or pioneering protest.Yet, as acclaimed historian Hakim Adi demonstrates, from the very beginning, from the moment humans first stood on this rainy isle, there have been African and Caribbean men and women set at Britain's heart. Libyan legionaries patrolled Hadrian's Wall while Rome's first 'African Emperor' died in York. In Elizabethan England, 'Black Tudors' served in the land's most eminent households while intrepid African explorers helped Sir Francis Drake to circumnavigate the globe. And, as Britain became a major colonial and commercial power, it was African and Caribbean people who led the radical struggle for freedom - a struggle which raged throughout the twentieth century and continues today in Black Lives Matter campaigns.Charting a course through British history with an unobscured view of the actions of African and Caribbean people, Adi reveals how much our greatest collective achievements - universal suffrage, our victory over fascism, the forging of the NHS - owe to these men and women, and how, in understanding our history in these terms, we are more able to fully understand our present moment.Afghanistan: Agony of a Nation
By Sandy Gall. 1988
This book is an account of Sandy Gall's last trip to Afghanistan in 1986 to report the war. It tells…
of his journey, with all its hardships and dangers, as well as explaining the background to the war including some dramatic pictures of the fighting. Sandy Gall chose to revisit the man he regards as the outstanding commander in Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Masud, who is trying to organize resistance to the Russians on a regional and eventually national scale. The author views the war as Russia's Vietnam and believes it merits much wider attention. He believes it has been largely neglected because of the difficulties of the terrain and the length of time it takes to get to the remoter areas. For his work in Afghanistan, Sandy Gall - a Reuter correspondent for ten years and ITN "trouble shooter" since 1963 - was awarded the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal in 1987.Affirming: Letters 1975-1997
By Isaiah Berlin. 2015
‘IB was one of the great affirmers of our time.’ John Banville, New York Review of BooksThe title of this…
final volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters is echoed by John Banville’s verdict in his review of its predecessor, Building: Letters 1960–75, which saw Berlin publish some of his most important work, and create, in Oxford’s Wolfson College, an institutional and architectural legacy. In the period covered by this new volume (1975–97) he consolidates his intellectual legacy with a series of essay collections. These generate many requests for clarification from his readers, and stimulate him to reaffirm and sometimes refine his ideas, throwing substantive new light on his thought as he grapples with human issues of enduring importance.Berlin’s comments on world affairs, especially the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and the collapse of Communism, are characteristically acute. This is also the era of the Northern Ireland Troubles, the Iranian revolution, the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, and wars in the Falkland Islands, the Persian Gulf and the Balkans. Berlin scrutinises the leading politicians of the day, including Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev, and draws illuminating sketches of public figures, notably contrasting the personas of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov. He declines a peerage, is awarded the Agnelli Prize for ethics, campaigns against philistine architecture in London and Jerusalem, helps run the National Gallery and Covent Garden, and talks at length to his biographer. He reflects on the ideas for which he is famous – especially liberty and pluralism – and there is a generous leavening of the conversational brilliance for which he is also renowned, as he corresponds with friends about politics, the academic world, music and musicians, art and artists, and writers and their work, always displaying a Shakespearean fascination with the variety of humankind.Affirming is the crowning achievement both of Berlin’s epistolary life and of the widely acclaimed edition of his letters whose first volume appeared in 2004.The Aeneid
By Virgil. 2003
'The most truthful translation ever, conveying as many nuances and whispers as are possible from the original' The TimesAfter a…
century of civil strife in Rome and Italy, Virgil wrote the Aeneid to honour the emperor Augustus by praising his legendary ancestor Aeneas. As a patriotic epic imitating Homer, the Aeneid also set out to provide Rome with a literature equal to that of Greece. It tells of Aeneas, survivor of the sack of Troy, and of his seven-year journey: to Carthage, where he falls tragically in love with Queen Dido; then to the underworld,; and finally to Italy, where he founds Rome. It is a story of defeat and exile, of love and war, hailed by Tennyson as 'the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man'.Translated with an Introduction by DAVID WESTAdventures on the High Teas: In Search of Middle England
By Stuart Maconie. 2009
Everyone talks about 'Middle England'. Sometimes they mean something bad, like a lynch mob of Daily Mail readers, and sometimes…
they mean something good, like a pint of ale in a sleepy Cotswold village in summer twilight. But just where and what is Middle England? Stuart Maconie didn't know either, so he packed his Thermos and sandwiches and set off to find out...Is Middle England about tradition and decency or closed minds and bigotry? Is it maypoles and evensong, or flooded market towns and binge drinkers in the park? And is Slough really as bad as Ricky Gervais and John Betjeman make out? From Shakespeare to JK Rowling, Vaughan Williams to Craig David, William Morris to B&Q, Stuart Maconie leads the expedition, with plenty of stop-offs for tea and scones, to discover the truth.Accomplishment: How to Achieve Ambitious and Challenging Things
By Michael Barber. 2021
'Excellent . . . reveals that high accomplishment has a signature pattern that reoccurs from sport to politics to business…
to government' Matthew SyedThere is no secret formula for success, especially when tackling a new challenge. But what if there were a pattern you could follow? A way of mapping the route and navigating the obstacles that arise?Michael Barber has spent many years advising governments, businesses and major sporting teams around the world on how to achieve ambitious goals on time. Drawing on stories of historic visionaries and modern heroes - from Mary Fischer and Rosa Parks to Paula Radcliffe and Gareth Southgate - Barber presents a unique combination of personal anecdote, historical evidence and interviews from inspirational figures to unpack the route to success.The Abandoned Settlements
By James Sheard. 2017
Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot PrizePBS Autumn RecommendationThe poems in James Sheard’s remarkable third book are about love…
and leaving, of how the rift of departure brings on a kind of haunting – of the people involved and the places where they lived – an emotional trace of departed lives and loves. This is what these poems are: the scars of separation, the spoors of desire. Sheard writes powerfully about loss, about how the vestiges of significance, of sensual heat, are retained by structures – in ghost towns, war-zones, deserted villages or resorts – but also by the human body and memory: ‘for love exists, and then is ruined, and then persists.’These are poems about permanence and fragility, of being uncertain whether the house you live in is a shell, or if you have become a shell by living there – whether emptiness means loss and abandonment or a clean start and a new beginning. But these are also poems full of the ache of desire, the tart, lingering smell of sex: poems shaped by longing.James Sheard is one of Britain’s most assured and precise lyric poets, and his third collection brings all his considerable strengths to poems as accurate and strange as thermal images.A.E. Housman: The Collected Poems Of A. E. Housman
By A. E. Housman. 1995
A. E. Housman, being one of the most famous and widely read poets of the early twentieth century, is certainly…
worthy of praise. His 'Collected Poems' are therefore a valuable read because they allow readers to gain an impression of the author's mind, opinions and lifestyle. Furthermore, they simultaneously depict a man who was deeply pessimistic and obsessed with death, and, on the other hand, illustrate a man who was also very much concerned with love, youth, life and the fleetingness of the these concepts.It is easy to understand why Housman's sensitive and sympathetic depictions of heroic English soldiers influenced and affected his readers, as his poetry is often written in an uncomplicated, yet sensitive style, which allows readers to feel as if they are witnessing events almost as the poet writes them down. These poems are also intriguing to read if you are a Shakespeare fan, as it is possible to spot many Shakespeare references in Housman's writing. A glossary or footnotes at the back of this book would be appreciated in any further editions, in order to allow readers to gain more understanding of the other poets and authors that Housman was influenced by. In brief, this collection presents the literary highlights of Housman's career, and this will be most appreciated by readers new to Housman's poetry.