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Showing 101 - 120 of 50048 items
One of the greatest nineteenth-century scientist-explorers, Alexander von Humboldt traversed the tropical Spanish Americas between 1799 and 1804. By the…
time of his death in 1859, he had won international fame for his scientific discoveries, his observations of Native American peoples and his detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna of the 'new continent'. The first to draw and speculate on Aztec art, to observe reverse polarity in magnetism and to discover why America is called America, his writings profoundly influenced the course of Victorian culture, causing Darwin to reflect: 'He alone gives any notion of the feelings which are raised in the mind on first entering the Tropics'.By Stuart Maconie. 2013
These are the songs that we have listened to, laughed to, loved to and laboured to, as well as downed…
tools and danced to. Covering the last seven decades, Stuart Maconie looks at the songs that have sound tracked our changing times, and – just sometimes – changed the way we feel. Beginning with Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’, a song that reassured a nation parted from their loved ones by the turmoil of war, and culminating with the manic energy of ‘Bonkers’, Dizzee Rascal’s anthem for the push and rush of the 21st century inner city, The People’s Songs takes a tour of our island’s pop music, and asks what it means to us. This is not a rock critique about the 50 greatest tracks ever recorded. Rather, it is a celebration of songs that tell us something about a changing Britain during the dramatic and kaleidoscopic period from the Second World War to the present day. Here are songs about work, war, class, leisure, race, family, drugs, sex, patriotism and more, recorded in times of prosperity or poverty. This is the music that inspired haircuts and dance crazes, but also protest and social change. The companion to Stuart Maconie’s landmark Radio 2 series, The People’s Songs shows us the power of ‘cheap’ pop music, one of Britain’s greatest exports. These are the songs we worked to and partied to, and grown up and grown old to – from ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ to ‘Rehab', ‘She Loves You’ to ‘Star Man’, ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ to ‘Radio Ga Ga’.By Professor James Walvin. 1994
At the beginning of the twentieth century, soccer was widely accepted as the most popular game in the western world.…
In the space of a few decades, it had become the best-supported team game in Britain, watched and played by more boys and men than any other sport. Yet here was a game with strong traditional folk roots and a history that stretched back to the late Middle Ages. In the course of the nineteenth century, football was transformed, mainly within the British public schools, to become the codified and disciplined game of urban working men. The passion for the game spread from one town to another, a passion that, though familiar today, was new in the years after 1870. Thereafter, the game rapidly spread to much of the world: to Europe, South America and a host of other societies. This book tells the story of the rise of this remarkable British game and the way it became the game of the masses across the world. In the wealth of literature about football published in recent years, no other book provides so concise and colourful an account as The People's Game.By Roy Porter. 1990
A portrait of 18th century England, from its princes to its paupers, from its metropolis to its smallest hamlet. The…
topics covered include - diet, housing, prisons, rural festivals, bordellos, plays, paintings, and work and wages.By Dr Jose Harris. 1993
The late nineteenth century and Edwardian era, suggests Jose Harris in this book, represent a sharp break with the early…
years of Queen Victoria's reign. Indeed, despite the intense upheavals of two world wars, it was the beliefs, social structures and oppositional forces established between 1870 and 1914 which dominated British life right up until the 1960s.By J M Roberts, Odd Arne Westad. 2013
This is a completely new and updated edition of J. M. Roberts and Odd Arne Westad's widely acclaimed, landmark bestseller…
The Penguin History of the World.For generations of readers The Penguin History of the World has been one of the great cultural experiences - the entire story of human endeavour laid out in all its grandeur and folly, drama and pain in a single authoritative book. Now, for the first time, it has been completely overhauled for its 6th edition - not just bringing it up to date, but revising it throughout in the light of new research and discoveries, such as the revolution in our understanding of many civilizations in the Ancient World. The closing sections of the book reflect what now seems to be the inexorable rise of Asia and the increasingly troubled situation in the West.About the authors:J.M. Roberts, CBE, published The Penguin History of the World in 1976 to immediate acclaim. His other major books include The Paris Commune from the Right, The Triumph of the West (which was also a successful television series), The Penguin History of Europe and The Penguin History of the Twentieth Century. He died in 2003.Odd Arne Westad, FBA, is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. He has published fifteen books on modern and contemporary international history, among them The Global Cold War, which won the Bancroft Prize, and Decisive Encounters, a standard history of the Chinese civil war. He also served as general co-editor of the Cambridge History of the Cold War.Reviews'A work of outstanding breadth of scholarship and penetrating judgements. There is nothing better of its kind' Jonathan Sumption, Sunday Telegraph 'A stupendous achievement' A.J.P. Taylor'A brilliant book ... the most outstanding history of the world yet written' J.H. PlumbBy Owen Chadwick. 1972
The beginning the sixteenth century brought growing pressure within the Western Church for Reformation. The popes could not hold Western…
Christendom together and there was confusion about Church reform. What some believed to be abuses, others found acceptable. Nevertheless over the years three aims emerged: to reform the exactions of churchmen, to correct errors of doctrines and to improve the moral awareness of society. As a result, Western Europe divided into a Catholic South and Protestant North. Across the no man's land between them were fought the bitterest wars of religion in Christian historyThis third volume of ‘The Penguin History of the Church’ deals with the formative work of Erasmus, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, and analyses the special circumstances of the English Reformation as well as the Jesuits and the Counter-ReformationBy Nigel Townson. 2023
‘The best account in a single volume of Spain since 1898, exemplary for concision and for accuracy in the use…
of language, as well as for equanimity and generosity of spirit’ Felipe Fernández-Armesto, TLSA revelatory new history of Spain, from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first'Spain is different,' proclaimed the Franco regime in the 1940s, keen to attract foreign tourists. For the most part, the world has agreed. From the end of its 'glorious empire' in 1898 to the dazzling World Cup victory in 2010, the prevailing narrative of modern Spain has emphasized the country's peculiarity. Generations of historians and readers have been transfixed by its implosion into civil war in the 1930s, seduced by the valiant struggle of the republicans, horrified by the barbarity of the dictatorship which followed. Franco's Spain was seen as an anomaly in the midst of prosperous and permissive post-war Western Europe. But, as Nigel Townson shows in this richly layered and exciting new history, beyond the familiar image, there lies a radically different history of Spain: of a dynamic and progressive society that fits firmly into the narrative of modern Europe. Drawing on over forty years of post-Franco scholarship, The Penguin History of Modern Spain transforms our knowledge of Spain and its politics, society, economics and culture. It interweaves cutting-edge Spanish-led research - never before published in English - and testimonies of peasants, housewives, soldiers, workers, entrepreneurs, feminists and worker-priests, for an original and surprising portrait, which allows us, at last, to discern the country behind the veil of propaganda and romantic myths which still endure todayBy Edwin Williamson. 2009
Now fully updated to 2009, this acclaimed history of Latin America tells its turbulent story from Columbus to Chavez. Beginning…
with the Spanish and Portugese conquests of the New World, it takes in centuries of upheaval, revolution and modernization up to the present day, looking in detail at Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Cuba, and gives an overview of the cultural developments that have made Latin America a source of fascination for the world. 'A first-rate work of history ... His cool, scholarly gaze and synthesizing intelligence demystify a part of the world peculiarly prone to myth-making ... This book covers an enormous amount of ground, geographically and culturally' Tony Gould, Independent on SundayThe sixth of nine volumes in the major Penguin History of Britain series, A Monarchy Transformed narrates the tempestuous political…
events of the Stuart dynasty. It charts the reigns of six monarchs, and the course of two revolutions as well as religious upheavals that shook the beliefs of seventeenth-century Britons to the core.No period in British history today retains more resonance and mystery than the sixteenth century. The leading figures of the…
time have become almost mythical, and the terrors and grandeurs of Tudor Britain have resonance with even the least historically minded readers. Above all Brigden sees the key to the Tudor world as religion - the new world of Protestantism and its battle with the the old world of uniform Catholicism. This great religious rent in the fabric of English society underlies the savage violence and turbulence of the period - from Henry VIII's break with Rome to the overwhelming threat of the Spanish Armada. 'NEW WORLDS, LOST WORLDS' is a startlingly atmospheric tour de force.By Monika Maron. 1999
Teasing her family's past out of the fog of oblivion and lies, one of Germany's greatest writers asks about the…
secrets families keep, about the fortitude of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and about what becomes of the individual mind when the powers that be turn against it.Born in a working-class suburb of wartime Berlin, Monika Maron grew up a daughter of the East German nomenklatura, despairing of the system her mother, Hella, helped create. Haunted by the ghosts of her Baptist grandparents, she questions her mother, whose selective memory throws up obstacles to Maron's understanding of her grandparents' horrifying denouement in Polish exile. Maron reconstructs their lives from fragments of memory and a forgotten box of letters. In telling her family's powerful and heroic story, she has written a memoir that has the force of a great novel and also stands both as an elaborate metaphor for the shame of the twentieth century and a life-affirming monument to her ancestors.By Martin Pugh. 2001
The suffragettes outraged Victorian society but their personal lives were just as dramatic as their public actions. In this gripping…
and incisive account of the Pankhursts, Martin Pugh reveals the full story behind this unique family: Emmeline, the domineering mother; Christabel, the favourite daughter, who became an Adventist and admirer of Mussolini; Sylvia, the 'scarlet woman'; adn Adela, banished to Australia after a bitter rift.The result is a narrative that reads like a novel, and a brilliant insight into the history of a family that changed the face of British society for ever.By Patricia Fara. 2004
'Had God intended Women merely as a finer sort of cattle, he would not have made them reasonable.' Writing in…
1673, Bathsua Makin was one of the first women to insist that girls should receive a scientific education. Despite the efforts of Makin and her successors, women were excluded from universities until the end of the nineteenth century, yet they found other ways to participate in scientific projects.Taking a fresh look at history, Pandora's Breeches investigates how women contributed to scientific progress. As well as collaborating in home-based research, women corresponded with internationally-renowned scholars, hired tutors, published their own books and translated and simplified important texts, such as Newton's book on gravity. They played essential roles in work frequently attributed solely to their husbands, fathers or friends.By David Hepworth. 2020
The Beatles landing in New York in February 1964 was the opening shot in a cultural revolution nobody predicted. Suddenly…
the youth of the richest, most powerful nation on earth was trying to emulate the music, manners and the modes of a rainy island that had recently fallen on hard times.The resulting fusion of American can-do and British fuck-you didn’t just lead to rock and roll’s most resonant music. It ushered in a golden era when a generation of kids born in ration card Britain, who had grown up with their nose pressed against the window of America’s plenty, were invited to wallow in their big neighbour’s largesse.It deals with a time when everything that was being done - from the Beatles playing Shea Stadium to the Rolling Stones at Altamont, from the Who performing their rock opera at the Metropolitan Opera House to David Bowie touching down in the USA for the first time with a couple of gowns in his luggage - was being done for the very first time.Rock and roll would never be quite so exciting again.By Ali Al-Naimi. 2016
The extraordinary memoir of global oil's former central bankerAli Al-Naimi is the former Saudi oil minister - and OPEC kingpin…
- a position he held for the two decades between August 1995 and May 2016. In this time, Al-Naimi's briefest utterances moved markets. But it wasn't always that way.Al-Naimi was born into abject poverty as a nomadic Bedouin in the 1930s, just as US companies were discovering vast quantities of oil under the baking Arabian deserts. From his first job as a shepherd boy, aged four, to his appointment to one of the most powerful political and economic jobs in the world, Out of the Desert charts Al-Naimi's extraordinary rise to power. Described by Alan Greenspan as 'the most powerful man you've never heard of', Al-Naimi's incredible journey proves that anyone can make it - even a poor Bedouin shepherd boy. This is his exclusive inside story of power, politics and oil.His Excellency Ali Ibrahim Al-Naimi is the former Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. One of the most powerful economic and political jobs in the world, he held this post from August 1995 to May 2016.Prior to that he held a wide range of leadership positions in the Kingdom's national oil company, Saudi Aramco. He was the first Saudi national to be named President of the company in 1984 and became the first Saudi CEO in 1988. Al-Naimi joined the company, then called Aramco, as an office boy in 1947. A Bedouin, he was born in the deserts of eastern Arabia in 1935.By Marit Kapla. 2019
A SUNDAY TELEGRAPH AND GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEARWINNER OF SWEDEN'S AUGUST PRIZEWINNER OF THE WARWICK PRIZE FOR WOMEN IN…
TRANSLATIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZE'Osebol is a magnificent success; it is hard to imagine it better ... Kapla is a magician ... mesmerizing' Sara Wheeler, TLS'A simple, pared-back and down-to-earth masterpiece' James Rebanks'We listen to them like something caught on the wind ... so moving and so strangely beckoning' Nicci Gerrard, Observer'[Among] the year's most pleasing books' Rishi Dastidar, Guardian, Books of the Year'Engrossing and humbling and quietly revelatory' Max Porter'Fascinating ... I was riveted' Lydia Davis'Like standing outside an open window on a warm summer evening and listening to a piece of contemporary history' Länstidningen'What a wonderful book . . . You want to move into it' ExpressenNear the river Klarälven, snug in the dense forest landscape of northern Värmland, lies the secluded village of Osebol. It is a quiet place: one where relationships take root over decades, and where the bustle of city life is replaced by the sound of wind in the trees.In this extraordinary and engrossing book, an unexpected cultural phenomenon in its native Sweden, the stories of Osebol's residents are brought to life in their own words. Over the last half-century, the automation of the lumber industry and the steady relocations to the cities have seen the village's adult population fall to roughly forty. But still, life goes on; heirlooms are passed from hand to hand, and memories from mouth to mouth, while new arrivals come from near and far.Marit Kapla has interviewed nearly every villager between the ages of 18 and 92, recording their stories verbatim. What emerges is at once a familiar chronicle of great social metamorphosis, told from the inside, and a beautifully microcosmic portrait of a place and its people. To read Osebol is to lose oneself in its gentle rhythms of simple language and open space, and to emerge feeling like one has really grown to know the inhabitants of this varied community, nestled among the trees in a changing world.By Friedrich Engels. 1972
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), was a provocative and profoundly influential critique of the…
Victorian nuclear family. Engels argued that the traditional monogamous household was in fact a recent construct, closely bound up with capitalist societies. Under this patriarchal system, women were servants and, effectively, prostitutes. Only Communism would herald the dawn of communal living and a new sexual freedom and, in turn, the role of the state would become superfluous.By Margaret Humphreys. 2011
Also published as Empty Cradles.In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker, investigated a woman's claim that, aged four, she…
had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. At first incredulous, Margaret discovered that this was just the tip of an enormous iceberg. Up to 150,000 children, some as young as three years old, had been deported from children's homes in Britain and shipped off to a 'new life' in distant parts of the Empire, right up until as recently as 1970.Many were told that their parents were dead, and parents often believed that their children had been adopted in Britain. In fact, for many children it was to be a life of horrendous physical and sexual abuse far away from everything they knew. Margaret reveals how she unravelled this shocking secret and how it became her mission to reunite these innocent and unwilling exiles with their families in Britain before it was too late.By Askold Krushnelnycky. 2006
In December 2004, the world watched as hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians gathered to defy the results of a transparently…
rigged presidential election. The charismatic popular candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, had been poisoned and disfigured by his opponents. The security forces threatened violent repression. But the demonstrators stayed and, as international pressure grew, the corrupt old regime that had been supported by Putin's Kremlin was deposed. It was the most significant moment for Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall.An Orange Revolution is the gripping account of this historic uprising and the events that led to it. Ukraine was treated roughly by the twentieth century, occupied by the Germans and annexed by the Soviets. It saw guerrilla fighting after the Second World War and dissent was crushed by successive Communist administrations. Its history has been one of corruption, power struggles, organised crime, but a resiliently optimistic population.Based on firsthand observation and interviews with major players and anonymous demonstrators alike, this is about a people who have forced a lasting change: judges who defied death threats, a murdered journalist, amateur musicians who composed an anthem for the people, and soldiers who staked their lives to back the opposition. An Orange Revolution also traces the story of the author's family, who paid a high price for speaking out. An Orange Revolution is a captivating book about a defining moment in European history.