Lucy Hughes-Hallett's Books

Heroes

A History of Hero Worship

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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Heroes

A History of Hero Worship

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Beginning beneath the walls of Troy and culminating in 1930s Europe, a magisterial exploration of the nature of heroism in Western civilization. In this riveting and insightful cultural history, Lucy Hughes-Hallett brings to life eight exceptional men from history and myth to explore our timeless need for heroes. As she re-creates these extraordinary lives, Hughes-Hallett illuminates the attractions and dangers of hero worship. This is a fascinating book about dictatorship and democracy, seduction and mass hysteria, politics and culture, and the tensions between being good and being great.

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Page Count

744

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Anchor

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307485900

ISBN 13

9780307485908

Gabriele d'Annunzio

Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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Gabriele d'Annunzio

Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Godfather to Mussolini, national hero of Italy and the WWI irredentist movement, literary icon of Joyce and Pound, lover of actress Eleonora Duse: here is Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s extraordinary biography of Gabriele d’Annunzio, poet, bon vivant, harbinger of Italian fascism. Gabriele d’Annunzio was Italy’s premier poet at a time when poetry mattered enough to trigger riots. A brilliant self-publicist in the first age of mass media, he used his fame to sell his work, seduce women, and promote his extreme nationalism. In 1915 d’Annunzio’s incendiary oratory helped drive Italy to enter the First World War, in which he achieved heroic status as an aviator. In 1919 he led a troop of mutineers into the Croatian port of Fiume and there a delinquent city-state. Futurists, anarchists, communists, and proto-fascists descended on the city. So did literati and thrill seekers, drug dealers, and prostitutes. After fifteen months an Italian gunship brought the regime to an end, but the adventure had its sequel: three years later, the fascists marched on Rome, belting out anthems they’d learned in Fiume, as Mussolini consciously modeled himself after the great poet. At once an aesthete and a militarist, d’Annunzio wrote with equal enthusiasm about Fortuny gowns and torpedoes, and enjoyed making love on beds strewn with rose petals as much as risking death as an aviator. Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s stunning biography vividly re-creates his flamboyant life and dramatic times, tracing the early twentieth century’s trajectory from Romantic idealism to world war and fascist aggression.

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745

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Anchor

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ISBN 10

038534970X

ISBN 13

9780385349703

Gabriele d'Annunzio

Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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Gabriele d'Annunzio

Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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745

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Anchor

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ISBN 10

038534970X

ISBN 13

9780385349703

Cleopatra

Histories, Dreams and Distortions

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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Cleopatra

Histories, Dreams and Distortions

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Cleopatra VII--the last Queen of Egypt, Julius Caesar's mistress, Antony's partner, Rome's adversary--has been protrayed through time as a temptress, and a goddess. In Cleopatra, the author unmasks all the fantastic Cleopatras from Chaucer, Cecil B. DeMille, George Bernard Shaw, and others. 32 pages of illustrations.

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Page Count

388

Publisher

HarperCollins Publishers

Published Date

ISBN 10

0060920939

ISBN 13

9780060920937

William and Dorothy Wordsworth

'All in each other'

By: Lucy Newlyn

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William and Dorothy Wordsworth

'All in each other'

By: Lucy Newlyn

William Wordsworth's creative collaboration with his 'beloved Sister' spanned nearly fifty years, from their first reunion in 1787 until her premature decline in 1835. Rumours of incest have surrounded the siblings since the 19th century, but Lucy Newlyn sees their cohabitation as an expression of deep emotional need, arising from circumstances peculiar to their family history. Born in Cockermouth and parted when Dorothy was six by the death of their mother, the siblings grew up separately and were only reunited four years after their father had died, leaving them destitute. How did their orphaned consciousness shape their understanding of each other? What part did traumatic memories of separation play in their longing for a home? How fully did their re-settlement in the Lake District recompense them for the loss of a shared childhood? Newlyn shows how William and Dorothy's writings — closely intertwined with their regional affiliations — were part of the lifelong work of jointly re-building their family and re-claiming their communal identity. Walking, talking, remembering, and grieving were as important to their companionship as writing; and at every stage of their adult lives they drew nourishment from their immediate surroundings. This is the first book to bring the full range of Dorothy's writings into the foreground alongside her brother's, and to give each sibling the same level of detailed attention. Newlyn explores the symbiotic nature of their creative processes through close reading of journals, letters and poems — sometimes drawing on material that is in manuscript. She uncovers detailed interminglings in their work, approaching these as evidence of their deep affinity. The book offers a spirited rebuttal of the myth that the Romantic writer was a 'solitary genius', and that William Wordsworth was a poet of the 'egotistical sublime' — arguing instead that he was a poet of community, 'carrying everywhere with him relationship and love'. Dorothy is not presented as an undervalued or exploited member of the Wordsworth household, but as the poet's equal in a literary partnership of outstanding importance. Newlyn's book is deeply researched, drawing on a wide range of recent scholarship — not just in Romantic studies, but in psychology, literary theory, anthropology and life-writing. Yet it is a personal book, written with passion by a scholar-poet and intended to be of some practical use and inspirational value to non-specialist readers. Adopting a holistic approach to mental and spiritual health, human relationships, and the environment, Newlyn provides a timely reminder that creativity thrives best in a gift economy.

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Page Count

401

Publisher

OUP Oxford

Published Date

ISBN 10

0191504653

ISBN 13

9780191504655

The Scapegoat

The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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The Scapegoat

The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, an extraordinary history of the meteoric rise and fall of George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. As King James I’s favourite, Buckingham was also his confidant, gatekeeper, advisor and lover. When Charles I succeeded his father, he was similarly enthralled and made Buckingham his best friend and mentor. A dazzling figure on horseback and a skilful player of the political game, Buckingham rapidly transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth and power. He became one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic Englishmen at the heart of seventeenth-century royal and political life. With a novelist’s touch, Lucy Hughes-Hallett transports us into a courtly world of masques and dancing, exquisite clothes, the art of Rubens and Van Dyck, gender-fluidity, same-sex desire, and appallingly rudimentary medicine. Witch hunts coexisted with Descartian rationality and public opinion was becoming a political force. Falling from grace spectacularly, Buckingham came to represent everything that was wrong with the country. From kidnappings and murder plots to men weeping in Parliament over civil liberties, The Scapegoat navigates love, war-fever and pacifism in a society on the brink of cataclysmic change. In this immersive and authoritative account, Hughes-Hallett summons an era that still resonates today.

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Page Count

892

Publisher

HarperCollins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0062940155

ISBN 13

9780062940155

Fabulous

Stories

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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Fabulous

Stories

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

From the author of the "sophisticated and erudite" Peculiar Ground (Boston Globe), comes a collection of classic, witty fables, elegantly updated for our modern times. It's in the nature of myth to be infinitely adaptable. Each of these startlingly original stories is set in modern Britain. Their characters include a people-trafficking gang-master and a prostitute, a migrant worker and a cocksure estate agent, an elderly musician doubly befuddled by dementia and the death of his wife, a pest-controller suspected of paedophilia and a librarian so well-behaved that her parents wonder anxiously whether she'll ever find love. They're ordinary people, preoccupied, as we all are now, by the deficiencies of the health service, by criminal gangs and homelessness, by the pitfalls of dating in the age of #metoo. All of their stories, though, are inspired by ones drawn from Graeco-Roman myth, from the Bible or from folk-lore. The ancients invented myths to express what they didn't understand. These witty fables, elegantly written and full of sharp-eyed observation of modern life, are also visionary explorations of potent mysteries and strange passions, charged with the hallucinatory beauty and horror of their originals.

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Page Count

224

Publisher

Harper

Published Date

ISBN 10

0062940090

ISBN 13

9780062940094

Peculiar Ground

A Novel

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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Peculiar Ground

A Novel

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

A Kirkus Best Book of 2018 "Unlike anything I’ve read. With its broad scope and its intimacy and exactness, it cuts through the apparatus of life to the vivid moment. Haunting and huge, and funny and sensuous. It’s wonderful."—Tessa Hadley The Costa Award-winning author of The Pike makes her literary fiction debut with an extraordinary historical novel in the spirit of Wolf Hall and Atonement—a great English country house novel, spanning three centuries, that explores surprisingly timely themes of immigration and exclusion. It is the seventeenth century and a wall is being raised around Wychwood, transforming the great house and its park into a private realm of ornamental lakes, grandiose gardens, and majestic avenues designed by Mr. Norris, a visionary landscaper. In this enclosed world everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war. Dissenters shelter in the woods, lovers rendezvous in secret enclaves, and outsiders—migrants fleeing the plague—find no mercy. Three centuries later, far away in Berlin, another wall is raised, while at Wychwood, an erotic entanglement over one sticky, languorous weekend in 1961 is overshadowed by news of historic change. Young Nell, whose father manages the estate, grows up amid dramatic upheavals as the great house is invaded: a pop festival by the lake, a television crew in the dining room, a Great Storm brewing. In 1989, as the Cold War peters out, a threat from a different kind of conflict reaches Wychwood’s walls. Lucy Hughes-Hallett conjures an intricately structured, captivating story that explores the lives of game keepers and witches, agitators and aristocrats; the exuberance of young love and the pathos of aging; and the way those who try to wall others out risk finding themselves walled in. With poignancy and grace, she illuminates a place where past and present are inextricably linked by stories, legends, and history—and by one patch of peculiar ground.

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Page Count

521

Publisher

HarperCollins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0062684213

ISBN 13

9780062684219

Fabulous

Stories

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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Fabulous

Stories

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

From the author of the “sophisticated and erudite” Peculiar Ground (Boston Globe) comes a collection of classic, witty fables, elegantly updated for our modern times. It's in the nature of myth to be infinitely adaptable. Each of these startlingly original stories is set in modern Britain. Their characters include a people-trafficking gang-master and a prostitute, a migrant worker and a cocksure estate agent, an elderly musician doubly befuddled by dementia and the death of his wife, a pest-controller suspected of paedophilia and a librarian so well-behaved that her parents wonder anxiously whether she’ll ever find love. They’re ordinary people, preoccupied, as we all are now, by the deficiencies of the health service, by criminal gangs and homelessness, by the pitfalls of dating in the age of #metoo. All of their stories, though, are inspired by ones drawn from Graeco-Roman myth, from the Bible or from folk-lore. The ancients invented myths to express what they didn’t understand. These witty fables, elegantly written and full of sharp-eyed observation of modern life, are also visionary explorations of potent mysteries and strange passions, charged with the hallucinatory beauty and horror of their originals.

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Age

Page Count

167

Publisher

HarperCollins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0062940104

ISBN 13

9780062940100

The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

THE TIMES BIOGRAPHY OF THE DECADE WINNER OF THE 2013 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION WINNER OF THE 2013 COSTA BOOK AWARDS BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR The story of Gabriele D’Annunzio, poet, daredevil – and Fascist.

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Page Count

556

Publisher

HarperCollins UK

Published Date

ISBN 10

000735651X

ISBN 13

9780007356515

Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen (TEXT ONLY)

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen (TEXT ONLY)

By: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

From the author of ‘The Pike’ – winner of the 2013 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction – a compelling story of heroism told through eight famous lives that span from Achilles to Sir Francis Drake.

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Age

Page Count

639

Publisher

HarperCollins UK

Published Date

ISBN 10

0007404670

ISBN 13

9780007404674

Book's by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Heroes

Heroes

Gabriele d'Annunzio

Gabriele d'Annunzio

Gabriele d'Annunzio

Gabriele d'Annunzio

Cleopatra

Cleopatra

William and Dorothy Wordsworth

William and Dorothy Wordsworth

The Scapegoat

The Scapegoat

Fabulous

Fabulous

Peculiar Ground

Peculiar Ground

Fabulous

Fabulous

The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War

The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War

Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen (TEXT ONLY)

Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen (TEXT ONLY)

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