This collection of traditional stories and tales, many of which are published for the first time, will delight lovers of Devonshire folklore. Some of the stories have been gleaned from residents of the county, whilst others have been developed by the author and have evolved through countless tellings. All the tales within represent this large and diverse county throughout its long and distinguished history, from the founding of Britain itself by Brute the Trojan at Totnes, to recent reports of haunted roads and phantom hairy hands. Also included are giants, devils, witches, ghosts, fairies, spectral black dogs and a wide range of other supernatural phenomena, all exemplifying the vigorous and earthy nature of the Devon imagination down through the ages. It is a book of wonders, to terrify and intrigue, and leads the reader around this beautiful and fascinating county.
This collection of five tales and one play contains the definitive Robin Hood. They are the earliest ballads and play and still the best of the bunch. 'Robin Hood and the Monk' is the earliest surviving manuscript, dated c.1450, and is considered the greatest of the ballads, though it was probably not sung, being described as a 'talkyng'; 'Robin Hood's Death' is one of the most satisfying tragedies in the English language; while 'A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode' is a comprehensive account of the famous English outlaw - complete, unified and pointing quite clearly to the reign of Edward II as a probable time for an historical Robin Hood, despite the opinions of most of the experts.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) was one of the most important political figures in 19th century Britain. However, before rising to political prominence he had established himself as a major literary figure. This set takes a critical look at Disraeli's early work. Volume 2 includes The Young Duke (1831.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) was one of the most important political figures in 19th century Britain. However, before rising to political prominence he had established himself as a major literary figure. This set takes a critical look at Disraeli's early work. Volume 2 includes The Young Duke (1831.
When portrait-painter and occasional detective, Charles Honeybath, pays a visit to his old friend Edwin Lightfoot, there are a few surprises in store. Edwin's irksome wife is packing her bags, while Edwin is indulging in an eccentric game of pretence - acting the part of a long-dead petty criminal named Flannel Foot.
Wildlife Toxicity Assessments for Chemicals of Military Concern is a compendium of chemical-specific toxicity information with discussions on the rationale and development of Wildlife Toxicity Reference Values (TRVs) intended for use on terrestrial wildlife for risk assessment applications. Substances covered include military-related chemicals including explosives, propellants, pesticides and metals. Wildlife Toxicity Assessments for Chemicals of Military Concern is a much-needed resource designed to meet the needs of those seeking toxicological information for ecological risk assessment purposes. Each chapter targets a specific chemical and considers the current knowledge of the toxicological impacts of chemicals to terrestrial wildlife including mammalian, avian, amphibian and reptilian species. Provides detailed information on how Wildlife Toxicity Values (TRVs) for military chemicals of concern are derived and evaluated. Covers wildlife toxicity assessments of explosives, metals and environmental chemicals. Compiles relevant information on the environmental effects of chemicals on wildlife in relation to public and environmental health.
This text explores the theme of gambling in a range of 19th-century English novels. It examines the representation of gambling in the novels, the role that gambling played in the lives of the novelists, and gambling in the novels within the context of the development of Victorian society.
America’s Songs II: Songs from the 1890's to the Post-War Years continues to tell the stories behind popular songs in our country’s history, serving as a sequel to the bestselling America’s Songs: Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley. Beginning in 1890 and ending in post-war America, America's Songs II is a testament to the richness of popular music in the first half of the 20th century. This volume builds on the unique features of the first volume, delving deeper into the nature of the collaboration between well-known songwriters of the time but also shedding light on some of the early performers to turn songs into hits. The book’s structure – a collection of short easy-to-read essays – allows the author to provide historical context to certain songs, but also to demonstrate how individual songs facilitated the popularity of specific genres, including ragtime, jazz, and blues, which subsequently reshaped the landscape of American popular music. America’s Songs II: Songs from the 1890's to the Post-War Years will appeal to American popular music enthusiasts but will also serve as an ideal reference guide for students or as a supplement in American music courses.
If you can judge a book by its enemies, Too Famous could be an instant classic. Bestselling author of Fire and Fury and chronicler of the Trump White House Michael Wolff dissects more of the major monsters, media whores, and vainglorious figures of our time. His scalpel opens their lives, careers, and always equivocal endgames with the same vividness and wit he brought to his disemboweling of the former president. These brilliant and biting profiles form a mesmerizing portrait of the hubris, overreach, and nearly inevitable self-destruction of some of the most famous faces from the Clinton era through the Trump years. When the mighty fall, they do it with drama and with a dust cloud of gossip. This collection pulls from new and unpublished work—recent reporting about Tucker Carlson, Jared Kushner, Harvey Weinstein, Ronan Farrow, and Jeffrey Epstein—and twenty years of coverage of the most notable egomaniacs of the time—among them, Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo, Rudy Giuliani, Arianna Huffington, Roger Ailes, Boris Johnson, and Rupert Murdoch—creating a lasting statement on the corrosive influence of fame. Ultimately, this is an examination of how the quest for fame, notoriety, and power became the driving force of culture and politics, the drug that alters all public personalities. And how their need, their desperation, and their ruthlessness became the toxic grease that keeps the world spinning. You know the people here by name and reputation, but it’s guaranteed that after this book you will never see them the same way again or fail to recognize the scorched earth the famous leave behind them.
Dynastic Politics and the British Reformations, 1558-1630 revisits what used to be regarded as an entirely 'mainstream' topic in the historiography of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries - namely, the link between royal dynastic politics and the outcome of the process usually referred to as 'the Reformation'. As everyone knows, the principal mode of transacting so much of what constituted public political activity in the early modern period, and especially of securing something like political obedience if not exactly stability, was through the often distinctly un-modern management of the crown's dynastic rights, via the line of royal succession and in particular through matching into other royal and princely families. Dynastically, the states of Europe resembled a vast sexual chess board on which the trick was to preserve, advance, and then match (to advantage) one's own most powerful pieces. This process and practice were, obviously, not unique to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the changes in religion generated by the discontents of western Christendom in the Reformation period made dynastic politics ideologically fraught in a way which had not been the case previously, in that certain modes of religious thought were now taken to reflect on, critique, and hinder this mode of exercising monarchical authority, sometimes even to the extent of defining who had the right to be king or queen.
George III was one of the longest reigning British monarchs, ruling over most of the English speaking world from 1760 to 1820. Despite his longevity, George’s reign was one of turmoil. Britain lost its colonies in the War of American Independence and the European political system changed dramatically in the wake of the French Revolution. Closer to home, problems with the King’s health led to a constitutional crisis. Charlotte Papendiek’s memoirs cover the first thirty years of George III’s reign, while Mary Delany’s letters provide a vivid portrait of her years at Windsor. Lucy Kennedy was another long-serving member of court whose previously unpublished diary provides a great deal of new detail about the King’s illness. Finally, the Queen herself provides further insights in the only two extant volumes of her diaries, published here for the first time. The edition will be invaluable to scholars of Georgian England as well as those researching the French and American Revolutions and the history and politics of the Regency period more widely.
Updated with the latest archaeological research new chapters on the most influential yet widely unrecognised people of the British isles, In Search of the Dark Ages illuminates the fascinating and mysterious centuries between the Romans and the Norman Conquest of 1066. In this new edition, Michael Wood vividly conjures some of the most important people in British history such as Hadrian, a Libyan refugee from the Arab conquests and arguably the most important person of African origin in British history, to Queen Boadicea, the leader of a terrible war of resistance against the Romans. Here too, warts and all, are the Saxon, Viking and Norman kings who laid the political foundations of England: Offa of Mercia, Alfred the Great, Athelstan, and William the Conqueror, whose victory at Hastings in 1066 marked the end of Anglo-Saxon England. Reflecting the latest historical, textual and archaeological research, this revised and updated edition of Michael Wood's classic book overturns preconceptions of the Dark Ages as a shadowy and brutal era, showing them to be a richly exciting and formative period in the history of Britain.
In As the Broken White Lines Become One, Michael Gehring recounts his spiritual journey through the landscape of late-twentieth-century southern American Christianity. This account depicts how and why he drifted away from the Roman Catholic Church, fellowshipped for a while with the Assemblies of God, sojourned for a prolonged time as an outsider to the institutional church, and eventually found a theological home within United Methodism. What follows is a spiritual journey with a lot of turns. The work is not intended to be a complete autobiography. Significant biographical details and relationships are not included as this narrative focuses on the shifting and sifting grounds of American Christian denominations. This chronicle primarily concerns the spiritual journey that led him to United Methodism and what it was like, not only to choose it, but also to inhabit it.
The essays collected in the second volume are concerned principally with the tenth-century renaissance of English learning, largely in response to the initiatives of a small number of energetic scholars and teachers, such as Dunstan and Ethelwold. In combination these studies illustrate the idiosyncratic, but advanced, state of Anglo-Saxon learning.
The keystone of Christianity is Jesus’s physical, bodily resurrection. Present-day scholars can be significantly challenged as they forage through voluminous documents on the resurrection of Jesus. The literature measures well over seven thousand sources in English-language books alone. This makes finding specific sources that are most relevant for specific scholarly purposes an arduous task. Even when a specific book is relevant, finding the parts of the book that are most relevant to the resurrection rather than other topics often requires additional effort. A Thematic Access-Oriented Bibliography of Jesus’s Resurrection addresses these challenges in several ways. First, the bibliography organizes more than seven thousand English sources into twelve main categories and then thirty-four subcategories, which are designed to help you find the most relevant literature quickly and efficiently. Embedded are pro and con arguments which support efficient access through brief annotations and then annotate the diversity and complexity of the field of religion by including sources that represent a diverse range of views: theistic (e.g., Christian, Jewish, Muslim, etc.), agnostic, and nontheistic. The objective of this bibliography is to provide convenient access to relevant sources from a variety of perspectives, allowing you to browse or find the one source accurately and with ease.
This excellent short survey looks at the workings of parliament under the first four Tudor monarchs. After an introductory first section which looks at parliament's medieval origins, the author then considers all aspects of early parliamentary history - including the historiography of the early Tudor parliaments, membership and attendance, the legislative roles of the Lords and Commons and the specific parliaments themselves.
She is the best of the modern chroniclers of these mediaeval wars . . . beautifully written, politically astute and full of insight into the moments when great history meets fragile human hearts.' The Times Margaret Beaufort and Margaret of Anjou - two women who have fought to the bitter end to see their sons take the English throne. But with her son Edward killed in battle, and imprisoned herself, what next for Margaret of Anjou? And will Margaret Beaufort live to see Richard III deposed, and her son Henry Tudor finally ascend the throne? In this powerful and dramatic conclusion to Livi Michael's Wars of the Roses trilogy, the stakes are higher than ever, the sides are ever-changing, and all will be decided at the Battle of Bosworth . . .
Airpower Over Gallipoli, 1915–1916, focuses on the men and machines in the skies over the Gallipoli Peninsula, their contributions to the campaign, and the ultimate outcomes of the role of airpower in the early stages of World War I. Based on extensive archival research, Sterling Michael Pavelec recounts the exploits of the handful of aviators during the Gallipoli campaign. As the contest for the Dardanelles Straits and the Gallipoli Peninsula raged, three Allied seaplane tenders and three land-based squadrons (two UK and one French) flew and fought against two mixed German and Ottoman squadrons (one land-based, one seaplane), the elements, and the fledgling technology. The contest was marked by experimentation, bravado, and airborne carnage as the men and machines plied the air to gain a strategic advantage in the new medium. As roles developed and missions expanded, the airmen on both sides tried to gain an advantage over their enemies. The nine-month aerial contest did not determine the outcome of the Gallipoli campaign, but the bravery of the pilots and new tactics employed foreshadowed the importance of airpower in battles to come. This book tells the lost story of the aviators and machines that opened a new domain for modern joint warfare. The dashing, adventurous, and frequently insouciant air commanders were misunderstood, misused, and neglected at the time, but they played an important role in the campaign and set the stage for joint military operations into the future. Their efforts and courage paved the way for modern joint operations at the birth of airpower.
Five centuries have passed since Richard III was King of England. He reigned for just two years. Then retribution swept away his throne, his life, his dynasty and, above all, his reputation. He has been vilified as a murderer and a monster. It is through Shakespeare's portrayal that subsequent generations knew Richard III as an evil king. Then, in this century, Richard III has found his advocates: those who regard him as more sinned against than sinning. The process of rehabilitation has begun. This study by an acclaimed scholar of Richard III strips away the legends, propaganda and the posturing of the centuries and rescues Richard from his critics and supporters alike and, by revealing contemporary evidence and attitudes, recreates the world of Ricardian politics and ideological warfare, and seeks to explain Richard's bewildering transformation in his own lifetime from the model of nobility, via kingship, to tyrant and monster.
The Pilgrimage of Grace, a popular uprising in the north of England against Henry VIII's religious policies, has long been recognised as a crucial point in the fortunes of the English Reformation. Historians have long debated the motives of the rebels and what effects they had on government policy. In this new study, however, Michael Bush takes a fresh approach, examining the wealth of textual evidence left by the pilgrimage of grace to reconstruct the wider social, political and religious attitudes of northern society in the early Tudor period. More than simply a reassessment of the events of October 1536, the book examines the mass of surviving evidence - the rebels' proclamations, rumour-mongering bills, oaths, manifestos, petitions, songs, prophetic rhymes, eye-witness accounts and confessions - in order to illuminate and explore the kind of grass-roots feelings that are often so hard to pin down. He concludes that the evidence points to a much more complex situation than has often been assumed, revealing much more than simply a desire for the country to return to the old religion and familiar ways. Rather, this book demonstrates how the rebels sought to use the language of custom and tradition to bolster their own political and economic positions in a rapidly changing world. It reveals a populace at once conservative and radical, able to judge innovation and change in relation to its own benefit and ultimately able to advance a coherent programme of reform. Whilst this programme was carefully couched in language supportive of the traditional orderly society, it nevertheless carried within it more radical proposals, which proved extremely challenging to the monarchy, government and church, who eventually closed ranks to bring the uprising to an end. As both an exploration of the causes and aims of the pilgrimage of grace, and the wider religious, social and political attitudes of northern England, this book has much to offer the student of the period.
In the first major national history of Aotearoa New Zealand to be published for 20 years, Professor Michael Belgrave advances the notion that New Zealand's two peoples — tangata whenua and subsequent migrants — have together built an open, liberal society based on a series of social contracts. Frayed though they may sometimes be, these contracts have created a country that is distinct. This engaging new look at our history examines how.
This is the first full-length study to examine the links between high Romantic literature and what has often been thought of as a merely popular genre - the Gothic. Michael Gamer offers a sharply focused analysis of how and why Romantic writers drew on Gothic conventions whilst, at the same time, denying their influence in order to claim critical respectability. He shows how the reception of Gothic literature, including its institutional and commercial recognition as a form of literature, played a fundamental role in the development of Romanticism as an ideology. In doing so he examines the early history of the Romantic movement and its assumptions about literary value, and the politics of reading, writing and reception at the end of the eighteenth century. As a whole the book makes an original contribution to our understanding of genre, tracing the impact of reception, marketing and audience on its formation.
No one has done more than Michael Livingston to revive memories of the battle, and you could not hope for a better guide.' BERNARD CORNWELL Bestselling author of The Last Kingdom series Late in AD 937, four armies met in a place called Brunanburh. On one side stood the shield-wall of the expanding kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons. On the other side stood a remarkable alliance of rival kings – at least two from across the sea – who'd come together to destroy them once and for all. The stakes were no less than the survival of the dream that would become England. The armies were massive. The violence, when it began, was enough to shock a violent age. Brunanburh may not today have the fame of Hastings, Crécy or Agincourt, but those later battles, fought for England, would not exist were it not for the blood spilled this day. Generations later it was still called, quite simply, the 'great battle'. But for centuries, its location has been lost. Today, an extraordinary effort, uniting enthusiasts, historians, archaeologists, linguists, and other researchers – amateurs and professionals, experienced and inexperienced alike – may well have found the site of the long-lost battle of Brunanburh, over a thousand years after its bloodied fields witnessed history. This groundbreaking new book tells the story of this remarkable discovery and delves into why and how the battle happened. Most importantly, though, it is about the men who fought and died at Brunanburh, and how much this forgotten struggle can tell us about who we are and how we relate to our past.
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