A captivating literary portrait of London explored at night by some of the city’s most iconic writers throughout history “Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,” wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know today – home to the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative history of London by focusing on those of its denizens who surface on the streets when the sun’s down. If nightwalking is a matter of “going astray” in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers represent some of the most suggestive and revealing guides to the neglected and forgotten aspects of the city. In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Beaumont shines a light on the shadowy perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers: Chaucer and Shakespeare; William Blake and his ecstatic peregrinations and the feverish ramblings of opium addict Thomas De Quincey; and, among the lamp-lit literary throng, the supreme nightwalker Charles Dickens. We discover how the nocturnal city has inspired some and served as a balm or narcotic to others. In each case, the city is revealed as a place divided between work and pleasure, the affluent and the indigent, where the entitled and the desperate jostle in the streets. With a foreword and afterword by Will Self, Nightwalking is a fascinating literary exploration of the writers who traverse the city at night and the people they meet.
You can tell a lot about people by how they walk. Matthew Beaumont argues that our standing, walking body holds the social traumas of history and its racialized inequalities. Our posture and gait reflect our social and political experiences as we navigate the city under capitalism. Through a series of dialogues with thinkers and walkers, his book explores the relationship between freedom and the human body How We Walk foregrounds the work of Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and leading thinker of liberation, who was one of the first people to think about the politics of 'walking while black'. It also introduces us to the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who wrote that one could discern the truth about a person through their posture and gait. For Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, the ability to walk upright and with ease is a sign of personal and social freedom. Through these excursions, Beaumont reimagines the canonical literature on walking and presents a new interpretation of the impact of class and race on our physical and political mobility, raising important questions about the politics of the body.
The man's become inhuman ... He has cut himself off from his kind. His blood be upon his own head.' One night in the depths of winter, a bizarre and sinister stranger wrapped in bandages and eccentric clothing arrives in a remote English village. His peculiar, secretive activities in the room he rents spook the locals. Speculation about his identity becomes horror and disbelief when the villagers discover that, beneath his disguise, he is invisible. Griffin, as the man is called, is an embittered scientist who is determined to exploit his extraordinary gifts, developed in the course of brutal self-experimentation, in order to conduct a Reign of Terror on the sleepy inhabitants of England. As the police close in on him, he becomes ever more desperate and violent. In this pioneering novella, subtitled 'A Grotesque Romance', Wells combines comedy, both farcical and satirical, and tragedy - to superbly unsettling effect. Since its publication in 1897, The Invisible Man has haunted not only popular culture (in particular cinema) but also the greatest and most experimental novels of the twentieth century.
From Charles Dickens’ London to today’s megacities, a fascinating exploration of what urban walking tells us about modern life—for fans of Rebecca Solnit, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, and literary history. “A labyrinthine journey into the literature of walking and thinking,” as seen in the lives and works of Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Ray Bradbury, and other literary greats (Guardian). There is no such thing as a false step. Every time we walk we are going somewhere. Especially if we are going nowhere. Moving around the modern city is not a way of getting from A to B, but of understanding who and where we are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont retraces episodes in the history of the walker since the mid-19th century. From Dickens’s insomniac night rambles to restless excursions through the faceless monuments of today’s neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of self-discovery and self-escape, of disappearances and secret subversions. Pacing stride for stride alongside literary amblers and thinkers such as Edgar Allan Poe, André Breton, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life. Through these writings, Beaumont asks: Can you get lost in a crowd? What are the consequences of using your smartphone in the street? What differentiates the nocturnal metropolis from the city of daylight? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? And can we save the city—or ourselves—by taking to the pavement?
Terry Eagleton occupies a unique position in the English-speaking world today. He is not only a productive literary theorist, but also a novelist and playwright. He remains a committed socialist deeply hostile to the zeitgeist. Over the last forty years his public interventions have enlivened an otherwise bland and conformist culture. His pen, as many colleagues in the academy—including Harold Bloom, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha—have learned, is merciless and unsparing. As a critic Eagleton has not shied away from confronting the high priests of native conformity as highlighted by his coruscating polemic against Martin Amis on the issue of civil liberties and religion. This comprehensive volume of interviews covers both his life and the development of his thought and politics. Lively and insightful, they will appeal not only to those with an interest in Eagleton himself, but to all those interested in the evolution of radical politics, modernism, cultural theory, the history of ideas, sociology, semantic inquiry and the state of Marxist theory.
Adventures in Realism offers an accessible introduction to realism as it has evolved since the 19th century. Though focused on literature and literary theory, the significance of technology and the visual arts is also addressed. Comprises 16 newly-commissioned essays written by a distinguished group of contributors, including Slavoj Zizek and Frederic Jameson Provides the historical, cultural, intellectual, and literary contexts necessary to understand developments in realism Addresses the artistic mediums and technologies such as painting and film that have helped shape the way we perceive reality Explores literary and pictorial sub-genres, such as naturalism and socialist realism Includes a brief bibliography and suggestions for further reading at the end of each section
This literary-historical account of late-nineteenth century utopianism offers a fascinating rereading of the fin de siècle in terms of the political futures that were produced in England during a period of cultural upheaval, and marks an original contribution to the Marxist critique of utopian ideology.
The Jewish philosopher Lev Shestov (1866-1938) is perhaps the great forgotten thinker of the twentieth century, but one whose revival seems timely and urgent in the twenty-first century. An important influence on Georges Bataille, Albert Camus, Gilles Deleuze and many others, Shestov developed a fascinating anti-Enlightenment philosophy that critiqued the limits of reason and triumphantly affirmed an ethics of hope in the face of hopelessness. In a wide-ranging reappraisal of his life and thought, which explores his ideas in relation to the history of literature and painting as well as philosophy, Matthew Beaumont restores Shestov to prominence as a thinker for turbulent times. In reconstructing Shestov's thought and asserting its continued relevance, the book's central theme is wakefulness. It argues that for Shestov, escape from the limits of rationalist Enlightenment thought comes from maintaining an insomniac vigilance in the face of the spiritual night to which his century appeared condemned. Shestov's engagement with the image of Christ remaining awake in the Garden of Gethsemane then, is at the core of his inspiring understanding of our ethical responsibilities after the horrors of the twentieth century.
Out of the ashes of doomed ad agency Miller Shanks has risen Meerkat 360, a very 21st century workplace. Staff include David Crutton, an MD with the worst email signature in history; Milton Keane, a definitely-straight PA with a yearning for reality tv fa
Small World' is the story of a group of men and women, living and working in a city, who are connected through love, work, friendship, or simply by virtue of proximity.
This novel follows one week in the making of a TV commercial for car tyres, in which a successful adman has to contend with the fact that the stars of his new commercial want to kill each other, his director has walked off the set and his client has turned up in the wrong T-shirt.
Most research and writing on railway history has been undertaken in a way that disconnects it from the wider cultural milieu. Authors have been very effective at constructing specialist histories of transport, but have failed to register the railway's central importance in the representation and understanding of modernity. This book brings together contributions from a range of established scholars in a variety of disciplines with the central purpose of exploring the railway less as a transport technology than as a key signifier of capitalist modernity. It examines the complex social relations in which the railway became historically embedded, identifying it as a central problematic in the cultural experience of modernity. It avoids the limitations of both the close-sighted empiricism typical of many transport historians and the long-sighted generalizations of cultural commentators who view the railway merely as a shorthand for the concept of progress over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book draws on a diverse range of materials, including literary and historical forms of representation. It is also informed by a creative application of various critical theories.
This study explores the role of fiction in the social production of the West Central district of London in the nineteenth century. It tells a new history of the novel from a local geographical perspective, tracing developments in the form as it engaged with Bloomsbury in the period it emerged as the city’s dominant literary zone. A neighbourhood that was subject simultaneously to socio-economic decline and cultural ascent, fiction set in Bloomsbury is shown to have reconceived the area’s marginality as potential autonomy. Drawing on sociological theory, this book critically historicizes Bloomsbury’s trajectory to show that its association with the intellectual “fraction” known as the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ at the beginning of the twentieth century was symptomatic rather than exceptional. From the 1820s onwards, writers positioned themselves socially within the metropolitan geography they projected through their fiction. As Bloomsbury became increasingly identified with the cultural capital of writers rather than the economic capital of established wealth, writers subtly affiliated themselves with the area, and the figure of the writer and Bloomsbury became symbolically conflated.
From the bestelling author of 'e' comes a hilarious novel of a very normal life becoming extraordinaryMurray's life is on the duller side of normal. His once-scintillating career has run into a dead end. His crusading girlfriend has left him for a hotshot lawyer. While he likes things safe and tidy, he dreams of more, getting in touch with his inner Jimi Hendrix. But finding a lump and discovering he has four months to live isn't what he had in mind. What would you do? Murray, to his great astonishment, is soon living with a burglar, mixing with supermodels, charged with murder and in massive debt to slipper-wearing gangsters. And he's finally said what he thinks in a meeting. So who cares? He's living life to the full. But what if it's all a mistake and he has to face the consequences...
The "Kentucky Tragedy" was early America's best known true crime story. In 1825, Jereboam O. Beauchamp assassinated Kentucky attorney general Solomon P. Sharp. The murder, trial, conviction, and execution of the killer, as well as the suicide of his wife, Anna Cooke Beauchamp -- fascinated Americans. The episode became the basis of dozens of novels and plays composed by some of the country's most esteemed literary talents, among them Edgar Allan Poe and William Gilmore Simms. In Murder and Madness, Matthew G. Schoenbachler peels away two centuries of myth to provide a more accurate account of the murder. Schoenbachler also reveals how Jereboam and Anna Beauchamp shaped the meaning and memory of the event by manipulating romantic ideals at the heart of early American society. Concocting a story in which Solomon Sharp had seduced and abandoned Anna, the couple transformed a sordid murder -- committed because the Beauchamps believed Sharp to be spreading a rumor that Anna had had an affair with a family slave -- into a maudlin tale of feminine virtue assailed, honor asserted, and a young rebel's revenge. Murder and Madness reveals the true story behind the murder and demonstrates enduring influence of Romanticism in early America.
Thorough revision of a comprehensive and highly readable textbook on veterinary anaesthesia A popular book amongst veterinary students and veterinary anaesthesia residents, the new edition of Veterinary Anaesthesia: Principles to Practice continues to be a comprehensive textbook covering the key principles of veterinary anaesthesia, encompassing a wide range of species. Fully revised, the information is summarised in a simple, accessible format to help readers navigate and locate relevant information quickly. Filled with technical and species-based chapters, it offers a quick reference guide to analgesic infusions, as well as emergency drug dose charts for canines, felines, and equines. Provides broad coverage of the basics of veterinary anaesthesia and how it is implemented in clinical practice Includes new information on mechanisms of general anaesthesia Features new and improved photographs and line illustrations, plus end of chapter questions to test your knowledge Covers veterinary anaesthesia for a wide range of species, including dogs, cats, horses, rabbits, donkeys, and pigs Expands example case material to increase relevance to day-to-day clinical practice Updated to contain the latest developments in the field, Veterinary Anaesthesia: Principles to Practice is designed specifically for veterinary students and those preparing to take advanced qualifications in veterinary anaesthesia. It is also a useful reference for veterinarians in practice and advanced veterinary nurses and technicians.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.