Arthur Ransome, best known for the Swallows and Amazons series, led a double, and often tortured, life. Before his fame as an author, he was notorious for very different reasons: between 1917 and 1924, he was the Russian correspondent for the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian, and his sympathy for the Bolshevik regime gave him access to its leaders, politics, and plots. He was friends with Karl Radek, the Bolshevik's Chief of Propaganda, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the secret police. In this biography, Chambers explores the tensions Ransome felt between his allegiance to England's decencies and the egalitarian Bolshevik vision, between the Lake Country he loved and always considered home and the lure of the Russian steppes to which he repeatedly returned. What emerges is not only history, but also the story of an immensely troubled man not entirely at home in either culture or country.
A new adventure series about the pivotal moments of discovery through the ages, bringing the past to life with a generous helping of fantasy, humour and delightful, black and white illustrations. Shaman by name and shaman by nature – Billy just hasn't found his magic ... yet. His selfish, globetrotting parents abandon him for yet another summer in Charles Darwin's strange, museum-like house, where Billy stumbles across a 200-year-old giant talking tortoise named Charles Darwin, by the famous man himself. Charles D, the tortoise, knows every inch of the house and every artefact in it, and he's keen to help Billy realise his powers and set him on the path to adventure. A beautifully carved Inuit ivory necklace is the first object that whisks him back in time to the shrieking chaos of an Arctic blizzard to meet its rightful owner, a girl called Ahnah, her shape-shifting grandmother and the mysterious explorer Pytheas.
A new adventure series about the pivotal moments of discovery through the ages, bringing the past to life with a generous helping of fantasy, humour and delightful, black and white illustrations. Shaman by name and shaman by nature... Billy just hasn't found his magic yet... but he is learning fast. No one is more surprised than Billy when he wakes up on a Chinese battlefield. Scooped from the jaws of death by a boy called Han, Billy's far from rescued. Taking refuge in the royal stables, the boys are soon held hostage by the Emperor Wudi. He's at war with the Horse King whose powerful and magical herd of horses, the heavenly horses of Ferghana, he wants for his own. It takes all Billy's skills and a very special spirit horse to get Han to safety and Billy back to his friend Charles Darwin, a two-hundred-year-old talking tortoise. Join Billy, a new kind of explorer who sets out to return artefacts to their original home.
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Political parties are an essential ingredient in a modern democracy. They are also seen as the least trusted and most problematic institution in most democratic systems. While there have been attempts to strengthen parties through institutional design and capacity building, a new strategy has been to quarantine them from parts of parliament. Within the space of a few years the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia implemented designs for parliamentary representation that proscribed the established political parties from a parliamentary chamber or part thereof. Using these three countries as case studies, this book traces the historical context for institutional designs, the intentions behind them and their implementation through at least one full parliamentary term. It investigates the conceptual architecture of the non-partisan designs, identifying corporatism as one (discredited) alternative and "championship" as another. While there is a yearning for exemplary people as representatives, the designers have struggled to find a successful means of having these champions elected to office. The book concludes that non-partisan chambers, based on the evidence to date, are not viable. This book is of interest to scholars of Southeast Asian Politics, Party Politics, Governance Institutions and Democracy.
Presents a theoretically informed reading of Racine's nine secular tragedies, from La Thebaide (1664) to Phedre (1677). This study focuses on literary/theatrical constructions of space, time, and identity.
From bridges and tunnels to nuclear waste repositories, structures require that soils maintain their design engineering properties if the structures are to reach their projected life spans. The same is true for earth dams, levees, buffers, barriers for landfills, and other structures that use soils as engineered materials. Yet soil, a natural resource, continues to change as a result of natural and anthropogenic stresses. As the discipline of soil properties and behaviours matures, new tools and techniques are making it possible to study these properties and behaviours in more depth. What Happens to Soil Under Weathering, Aging, and Chemical Stress? Environmental Soil Properties and Behaviour examines changes in soil properties and behaviour caused by short- and long-term stresses from anthropogenic activities and environmental forces. Introducing new concepts of soil behaviour, soil maturation, and soil functionality, it integrates soil physics, soil chemistry, and soil mechanics as vital factors in soil engineering. The book focuses on environmental soil behaviour, with particular attention to two main inter-related groups of soil–environment issues. The first is the use of soil as an environmental tool for management and containment of toxic and hazardous waste materials. The second is the impact of ageing and weathering processes and soil contamination on the properties and behaviour of soils, especially those used in geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering projects. A Transdisciplinary Look at Soil-Changing Processes To determine short- and long-term soil quality and soil functionality, the authors emphasize the need to be aware of the nature of the stressors involved as well as the kinds of soil-changing processes that are evoked. This book takes a first step toward a much-needed transdisciplinary effort to develop a broader and deeper understanding of what happens to soil and how we can determine and quantify the effect of biogeochemical processes. It offers a timely resource for the study of soil properties and behaviours, effects of environmental changes, and remediation of contaminated soil.
The Naked Communist argues that the political ideologies of modernity were fundamentally determined by four basic figures: the world, the enemy, the secret, and the catastrophe. While the "world" names the totality that functioned as the ultimate horizon of modern political imagination, the three other figures define the necessary limits of this totality by reflecting on the limits of representation. The book highlights the enduring presence of these figures in the modern imagination through detailed analysis of a concrete historical example: American anti-Communist politics of the 1950s. Its primary objective is to describe the internal mechanisms of what we could call an anti-Communist "aesthetic ideology." The book thus traces the way anti-Communist popular culture emerged in the discourse of Cold War liberalism as a political symptom of modernism. Based on a discursive analysis of American anti-Communist politics, the book presents parallel readings of modernism and popular fiction from the 1950s (nuclear holocaust novels, spy novels, and popular political novels) in order to show that, despite the radical separation of the two cultural fields, they both participated in a common ideological program.
The most damaging spy network of the Cold War, the infamous Cambridge Spy Ring, comprised several influential British citizens-and one American, Michael Straight. While a student at Cambridge University in the 1930s, Straight fell in with the circle of notorious spies, including the infamous Kim Philby. For the next several decades, Michael Straight led the secret life of a secret agent: While working at the State Department, he passed intelligence reports to a Russian agent; while running his family's magazine, The New Republic, he funded several Communist fronts; and while serving U.S. presidents, he continued to meet with Soviet agents around the world. Despite Straight's 1963 "confession" to the F.B.I. that his covert activity ceased in 1941, investigative journalist and author Roland Perry has unearthed a different story-the full and complete portrait of Michael Straight, last of the Cold War spies.
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