Twenty years after joining St Julians Hospice, Dr David Trevelyan faces a crisis of conviction with the opening of an assisted dying centre within its grounds. But then something extraordinary happens that has repercussions for him, the hospice and further afield. The evolving story, linked to events at a mission hospital in Africa almost fifty years before, encompasses the satirical, the supernatural and the surreal, and provides a backdrop to an exploration of moral courage, dignity in dying, and Christian faith.
The trillion-dollar Elysium Corporation has perfected the science of genetically-induced immortality. Decay and death are no longer inevitable. For the right price, you can now enjoy eternal youth, and in great luxury. This is mankind's ultimate achievement.It also proves an irresistible lure for an indelicate journalist, who suspects that people and permanence should never mix . . .
David Trevelyan is waiting for the right post to come up in his career progression to becoming a consultant surgeon. Almost on a whim, he takes an interim post at St. Julian's Hospice, where he discovers a very different environment of working and caring compared to his experience in hospitals. He soon finds himself beguiled by the ethos and the characters he encounters, and amidst the pathos and humour of life there he experiences something of a spiritual awakening. David's own personal journey opens a window onto the often misunderstood world of hospice and care for the dying, and grapples with the themes of suffering and loss, of transcending love, and human resilience.
Chuck Fung and Swami Shoeman are as different as night and day. But when they meet in Ubud, Bali, they become inseparable opposites, thus unwittingly embodying ancient Balinese cosmology. Attempting to make a buck off the ever-burgeoning crowd of spiritual seekers drawn to this paradise island, they pool their talents and enlist the help of a Balinese Shaman. The Shaman spins a cryptic yarn that convinces the hapless chumps that they have extraordinary powers of creative visualization. The Fung Shoe brothers write a book about the wellspring of abundance they have discovered through their meeting with the Shaman. By sheer coincidence and dumb luck, the book becomes a bestseller and a Hollywood movie. Soon Ubud is crawling with book clutching seekers and what was once a quaint exotic village turns into a nightmare of traffic and out of control development. Chuck and Swami hightail it back to the Shaman in a desperate attempt to reverse the tide of events. But are they too late to save Ubud? Foreword One of the finest books about Bali, simply titled "The Island of Bali," was written by Mexican Artist Miguel Covarrubias and first published in 1937. Covarrubias first arrived in Bali in the spring of 1930; when he returned in 1933, he wrote; ..".we were disappointed; the tourist rush was in full swing...the young were developing contempt for Balinese ways...lands were being sold...we feared we had made a mistake in returning." Ironically, more and more tourists would arrive after reading his book. The saga of modern tourism has pretty much followed this pattern since the industry began: the search for the idyllic, the urge to tell others of the "Paradise found," the subsequent mourning for "Paradise Lost." Since David and Swami arrived in Bali in the late 1980s, a great deal has changed. Television, motor bikes, cars, computers, cellphones, ATMs, fancy restaurants, big hotels, boutiques, yoga centers and spas have proliferated. It's tempting to say: "We are disappointed; maybe we made a mistake in returning!" It would be too easy to point the finger and place the blame. But of course when one assigns the blame, there are always three fingers pointing back at oneself. What to do? What can we say? Perhaps, "Bali is ruined, don't bother coming," or, "Bali is still wonderful, we'll see you in Nuris for a Martini, or in the Kafe for a Turmeric liver cleanse." Whatever you do, don't blame us! OK? "The Monster That Ate Ubud" is the first episode in the adventures of Chuck Fung and Swami Shoeman. It explores the lighter side of life's journeys through the tales of this inseparable pair of chumps. There is something very Asian (and particularly Balinese) about this set up. Although almost extinct in most of SE Asia, Shadow Puppetry (Wayang Kulit) is still a big deal in Bali. The stark black animation on a screen is employed by puppeteers (dalangs) to provide a magical and ritualistic enactment of the battle between the forces of good and evil, while delivering wry political and social commentary that may not be acceptable from the masses, but is deemed "fair play" from the mouths of puppets. There are always two clown puppets that deliver the play's main message. These bozos embody all that is foolish in the human condition and allow the Balinese to laugh at themselves while contemplating ethical, spiritual and current political affairs. So popular are the clown puppets that the most famous puppeteer in Bali is known by the name of the two fools he created; "Ceng, Blong" as fans don't recognize the name of the Dalang himself. (I would give you his name, but I can't remember it!) In the telling this tale of our beloved adopted home - Bali - we have embraced this age-old technique. By laughing at our own folly, we invite you to laugh at yours - or Chuck and Swami's if you like - it's all the same: Fung Shoe. Newmi and David
With In Churchill's Shadow, David Cannadine offers an intriguing look at ways in which perceptions of a glorious past have continued to haunt the British present, often crushing efforts to shake them off. The book centers on Churchill, a titanic figure whose influence spanned the century. Though he was the savior of modern Britain, Churchill was a creature of the Victorian age. Though he proclaimed he had not become Prime Minister to "preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," in effect he was doomed to do just that. And though he has gone down in history for his defiant orations during the crisis of World War II, Cannadine shows that for most of his career Churchill's love of rhetoric was his own worst enemy. Cannadine turns an equally insightful gaze on the institutions and individuals that embodied the image of Britain in this period: Gilbert & Sullivan, Ian Fleming, Noel Coward, the National Trust, and the Palace of Westminster itself, the home and symbol of Britain's parliamentary government. This superb volume offers a wry, sympathetic, yet penetrating look at how national identity evolved in the era of the waning of an empire.
This book is an in-depth exploration of the Popular Front and United Front campaigns in Britain in the late 1930s. Dr Blaazer aims to dispel the myth that these campaigns can be understood largely as a ruse engineered by the Communists into which non-Communists were blindly drawn. Instead he searches for the idea of 'progressive unity' in earlier episodes in the history of the British progressive tradition. By re-assessing the significance of these episodes, and by reconsidering the role of seminal progressive thinkers, he shows that the relationships between liberals and socialists, reformists and revolutionaries, had long been both intimate and fluid. Indeed, the reasons and assumptions behind individual decisions to support the struggle for progressive unity show that the Popular Front was a reasoned and culturally familiar response to a major political crisis.
This book provides a detailed history of the struggle by Parliament and the British public to make the Executive accountable for the use of public funds, from early historical developments through to modern principles and practice.
A biography of the historian and public intellectual Sir Lewis Namier from his origins in a secular Jewish family in Poland to recognition as the most important historian of his day, whose ‘revolutionary’ method was enshrined in the verb to Namierise.
Six months after the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution was all but lost. A powerful British force had routed the Americans at New York, occupied three colonies, and advanced within sight of Philadelphia. Yet, as David Hackett Fischer recounts in this riveting history, George Washington--and many other Americans--refused to let the Revolution die. On Christmas night, as a howling nor'easter struck the Delaware Valley, he led his men across the river and attacked the exhausted Hessian garrison at Trenton, killing or capturing nearly a thousand men. A second battle of Trenton followed within days. The Americans held off a counterattack by Lord Cornwallis's best troops, then were almost trapped by the British force. Under cover of night, Washington's men stole behind the enemy and struck them again, defeating a brigade at Princeton. The British were badly shaken. In twelve weeks of winter fighting, their army suffered severe damage, their hold on New Jersey was broken, and their strategy was ruined. Fischer's richly textured narrative reveals the crucial role of contingency in these events. We see how the campaign unfolded in a sequence of difficult choices by many actors, from generals to civilians, on both sides. While British and German forces remained rigid and hierarchical, Americans evolved an open and flexible system that was fundamental to their success. The startling success of Washington and his compatriots not only saved the faltering American Revolution, but helped to give it new meaning.
First published in 1972, the second edition of this highly respected classic of Trollope criticism will be welcomed by Trollope scholars everywhere. David Skilton examines the literary background against which Trollope wrote, and drawing on the vast evidence of mid-Victorian periodical criticism, he shows how this criticism controlled the novelist's creativity. He then goes on to examine Trollope's particular type of realism in the context of the theories of literary imagination current in the 1860s. 'A book I admire. It has been of great value to me.' - J. Hillis Miller 'The first and still the best study of Trollope's relationships, connections and interactions with the literary world of his own time. Skilton's is the necessary introduction to any serious investigation of Trollope's fiction.' - John Sutherland
A gripping history of the Security Service and its covert surveillance on British writers and intellectuals in the twentieth century. In the popular imagination MI5, or the Security Service, is know chiefly as the branch of the British state responsible for chasing down those who pose a threat to the country's national security--from Nazi fifth columnists during the Second World War, to Soviet spies during the Cold War and today's domestic extremists. Yet, aided by the release of official documents to the National Archives, David Caute argues in this radical and revelatory history of the Security Service in the twentieth century, suspicion often fell on those who posed no threat to national security. Instead, this 'other history' of MI5, ignored in official accounts, was often as not fuelled by the political prejudices of MI5's personnel, and involved a huge programme of surveillance against anyone who dared question the status quo. Caute, a prominent historian and expert on the history of the Cold War, tells the story of the massive state operation to track the activities of a range of journalists, academics, scientists, filmmakers, writers and others who, during the twentieth century, the Security Service perceived as a threat to the national interest. Those who were tracked include such prominent figures as Kingsley Amis, George Orwell, Doris Lessing, John Berger, Benjamin Britten, Eric Hobsbawm, Michael Foot, Harriet Harman, and others.
The First World War was an epic event of huge proportions that lasted over four years and involved the armies of more than twenty nations, resulting in 30 million casualties, including more than 8 million killed. Set against the backdrop of this massive carnage, The Search for Negotiated Peace is the gripping story of the events that moved high profile American and European citizens, particularly women, into the international peace movement. This small, transatlantic network put forth proposals for changing the international system of negotiation. They supported non-annexationist war aims and attempted to discredit nations’ secret diplomacy, militarism and narrowly nationalistic practices. Instead, they wanted to develop a ‘new diplomacy.’ David Patterson skillfully develops the interactions of many of the notable leaders of the movement, including Jane Addams, Aletta Jacobs, and Rosika Schwimmer, into an absorbing narrative that brings together the various strands of women's history, international diplomatic history, and peace history for the first time. The Search for Negotiated Peace is an essential read for anyone interested in the social history of World War I and the foundations of citizen activism today.
Once teetering on the brink of oblivion, the British Liberal Party has again re-established itself as a major force in national and local politics. David Dutton's approachable study offers new insights into the waning, near death and ultimate recovery of the Liberal Party from 1900 to the present day. Discussions of politics, philosophy and performance are all skilfully interwoven as Dutton demonstrates how the party has become, once more, a formidable player on the political stage. The second edition of this established text offers: - An entirely new chapter on the coalition government - A chronology of key events - Numerous suggestions for further reading This lively survey of British Liberalism from the era of Campbell-Bannerman to that of Nick Clegg reviews existing literature while offering its own distinctive perspective on one of the most compelling of political dramas.
New Age writer of the popular Aquarian Conspiracy Marilyn Ferguson observed that many of the leading lights of the New Age movement claim Teilhard as one of the most influential persons in their lives. Other influences acknowledged include C. G. Jung, Aldous Huxley, Swami Muktananda, Thomas Merton, Werner Erhard, and Maharishi Yogi. Indeed, of the 185 New Age leaders surveyed, Teilhard was the most frequently mentioned of any person who had most influenced their thinking. If this is the case, then if we are to understand the New Age movement properly it behooves us to take a careful and critical look at Teilhard de Chardin. David Lane has done precisely this in a clear, well documented, and penetrating way.... In this crucial book David Lane lays bare the philosophical, theological, and scientific failures of Teilhard's New Age enterprise. In a highly documented and insightful scrutiny of Teilhard's cosmic evolution, Lane unveils the apostate Christian roots of one of the most important forerunners of the New Age movement. This is one of the most significant and serious treatments of the modern roots of the New Age in print.
The Labour Party became a major political force during the 1920s. It unexpectedly entered office as a minority government in 1924; five years later as the largest party in the Commons it took office again. For many the party's enhanced status was associated closely with its leader, Ramsay MacDonald. The years of optimism were destroyed by rising unemployment; in August 1931, the second Labour Government faced pressures for public expenditure cuts in the midst of a financial crisis. The Government collapsed, and MacDonald led a new administration composed of erstwhile opponents and a few old colleagues. Labour went into opposition; an early election reduced it to a parliamentary rump. This study offers a uniquely detailed analysis of Labour in the 1920s based on a wide variety of unpublished sources. The emphasis is on the variety of identities available within the party, and demonstrates how disputes over identity made a crucial contribution to the 1931 crisis. Thorough scholarship and distinctive interpretation combine to provide an important examination of a major episode in twentieth-century history.
DS Aector McAvoy investigates his darkest, most brutal case yet The call comes in before DS Aector McAvoy has had time for breakfast. The news is bad: A body. Found in the woods out at Brantingham. The reality is even worse. The young man's mutilated corpse lies tangled in the roots of a newly fallen tree, two silver Roman coins nailed through his sightless eyes. Who would torture their victim in such a brutal manner - and why? DS McAvoy makes the victim a promise: I will find answers. You will know justice. But justice always comes at a cost, and this time it may be McAvoy's own family who pay the price. David Mark brings Hull to dark, brutal life in this gripping novel in the critically acclaimed DS McAvoy series - a perfect pick for fans of Denise Mina, Val McDermid and Peter Robinson.
This book is a gift for both Irish and Australian friends worldwide. Irish endurance and resilience is what we are made of! We are the awakening of the Celt!
Paying attention to the uses that Anishinaabe authors make of visual images and marks made on surfaces such as rock, bark, paper, and canvas, David Stirrup argues that such marks—whether ancient pictographs or contemporary paintings—intervene in artificial divisions like that separating precolonial/oral from postcontact/alphabetically literate societies. Examining the ways that writers including George Copway, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Gordon Henry, Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, and others deploy the visual establishes frameworks for continuity, resistance, and sovereignty in that space where conventional narratives of settlement read rupture. This book is a significant contribution to studies of the ways traditional forms of inscription support and amplify the oral tradition and in turn how both the method and aesthetic of inscription contribute to contemporary literary aesthetics and the politics of representation.
As David Matless argues in this book—updated in this accessible, pocket edition—landscape has been central to definitions of Englishness for centuries. It is the aspect of English life where visions of the past, present, and future have met in debates over questions of national identity, disputes over history and modernity, and ideals of citizenship and the body. Extensively illustrated, Landscape and Englishness explores just how important the aesthetics of Britain’s cities and countryside have been to its people. Matless examines a wide range of material, including topographical guides, health manuals, paintings, poetry, architectural polemics, photography, nature guides, and novels. Taking readers to the interwar period, he explores how England negotiated the modern and traditional, the urban and rural, the progressive and preservationist, in its decisions over how to develop the countryside, re-plan cities, and support various cultures of leisure and citizenship. Tracing the role of landscape to Englishness from then up until the present day, he shows how familiar notions of heritage in landscape are products of the immediate post-war era, and he unveils how the present always resonates with the past.
From the day he entered the army at Sandhurst life moved into the fast lane taking him from the pinnacle of a successful career to the depths of despair. Money, beautiful women, diamonds, priceless historical documents and a perfect crime, an extraordinary ex-soldier at loose with a deadly weapon in his arsenal. Hunted and finally recruited into MI6 by the Home Secretary in a no option deal the British Government has a lethal recruit in agent Nick Trevelyan. But the path that has led him to this point has been thorny, studded with bizarre adventures. Martial Arts transform the human body into a potentially deadly weapon yet there is another attribute that humans possess which is potentially far more lethal than muscle, sinew and bone. The human psyche is a phenomenal more dangerous than any Karate blow. This has been known for millennium but training the mind to appropriate another human has eluded most that have attempted to harness its power. Nick Trevelyan is the Hypnotist.
This book traces the history of youth culture from its origins among the student communities of inter-war Britain to the more familiar world of youth communities and pop culture. Grounded in extensive original research, it explores the individuals, institutions and ideas that have shaped youth culture over much of the twentieth century.
In the late 1930s the Lancashire town of Bolton witnessed a ground-breaking social experiment. Over three years, a team of ninety observers recorded, in painstaking detail, the everyday lives of ordinary working people at work and play - in the pub, dance hall, factory and on holiday. Their aim was to create an 'anthropology of ourselves'. The first of its kind, it later grew into the Mass Observation movement that proved so crucial to our understanding of public opinion in future generations. The project attracted a cast of larger-than-life characters, not least its founders, the charismatic and unconventional anthropologist Tom Harrisson and the surrealist intellectuals Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings. They were joined by a disparate band of men and women - students, artists, writers and photographers, unemployed workers and local volunteers - who worked tirelessly to turn the idle pleasure of people-watching into a science. Drawing on their vivid reports, photographs and first-hand sources, David Hall relates the extraordinary story of this eccentric, short-lived, but hugely influential project. Along the way, he creates a richly detailed, fascinating portrait of a lost chapter of British social history, and of the life of an industrial northern town before the world changed for ever.
From one of our most acclaimed historians, a wise and provocative call to re-examine the way we look at the past: not merely as the story of incessant conflict between groups but also of human solidarity throughout the ages. Investigating the six most salient categories of human identity, difference, and confrontation—religion, nation, class, gender, race, and civilization—David Cannadine questions just how determinative each of them has really been. For while each has motivated people dramatically at particular moments, they have rarely been as pervasive, as divisive, or as important as is suggested by such simplified polarities as “us versus them,” “black versus white,” or “the clash of civilizations.” For most of recorded time, these identities have been more fluid and these differences less unbridgeable than political leaders, media commentators—and some historians—would have us believe. Throughout history, in fact, fruitful conversations have continually taken place across these allegedly impermeable boundaries of identity: the world, as Cannadine shows, has never been simply and starkly divided between any two adversarial solidarities but always an interplay of overlapping constituencies. Yet our public discourse is polarized more than ever around the same simplistic divisions, and Manichean narrative has become the default mode to explain everything that is happening in the world today. With wide-ranging erudition, David Cannadine compellingly argues against the pervasive and pernicious idea that conflict is the inevitable state of human affairs. The Undivided Past is an urgently needed work of history, one that is also about the present—and the future.
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