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The Life of Walter Scott
John Sutherland's new critical biography is an undertaking of major importance in which he penetrates into the darker areas of Scott's life in a sceptical (yet sympathetic) spirit,
Summer in the Islands
Imagine spending a carefree summer in the Italian sun, beachcombing, eating and drinking with abandon, drifting without restraint from island to island, from port to port. Summer in the Islands is the record of Matthew Fort doing just that in his third Italian voyage on a Vespa – first down the length of Italy in Eating Up Italy, then around Sicily in Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons, and now hopping between the Aeolian Islands, something he hadn’t done since his early 20s. Traveling by Vespa and by ferry, Fort tours the islands at his leisure. He takes us to Elba, where Napoleon was once imprisoned; to Salina, famous for its capers, just as Pantelleria is famous for its dessert wine; to Pianosa, where dangerous Mafia bosses were kept and which Joseph Heller used as the setting for Catch-22; to Capri, where Maxim Gorky ran a school for revolutionaries which was visited by Lenin and Stalin... ...to all of Italy’s 52 islands which he has never written about before. With 30 years of experience as a food critic, travel writer and adventurer, Fort is an excellent guide through the culinary and cultural history he encounters during his summer in the islands.
Swingin' London
Explore an illustrated guide to the key locations of 1960s London - the bars, clubs, boutiques and hangouts.
Spaghetti Tree
From culinary desert to gastro heaven: The Spaghetti Tree shows how the transformation of Britain's food culture was sparked by two extraordinary Italians. Mario and Franco opened La Trattoria Terrazza in London's Soho in 1959. It soon became the most famous and influential restaurant in London, launching a social and gastronomic revolution.
Literary Voices of the Italian Diaspora in Britain
This volume studies the literary voices of the Italian diaspora in Britain, including 21 authors and 34 pieces of prose, verse, and drama. This book shows how authors both recount the history of the migrant community in the period 1880-1980 while creatively experimenting with hybrid forms of expression and blending words with visuals. Literary Voices of the Italian Diaspora in Britain discusses topical issues like migration and social integration, cultures and foods in transition, as well as plurilingualism. The book pays special attention to discussions of the horrors of the Second World War – especially on the tragedy of the Arandora Star (2nd July 1940) – to show this literary community’s political commitments. More importantly, it will begin to fill the void left by a critical tradition which has only appreciated the northern American and Australian branches of Italian writing.
Nights Out
London's Soho district underwent a spectacular transformation between the late Victorian era and the end of the Second World War: its fin-de-siècle buildings and dark streets infamous for sex, crime, political disloyalty, and ethnic diversity became a center of culinary and cultural tourism servicing patrons of nearby shops and theaters. Indulgences for the privileged and the upwardly mobile edged a dangerous, transgressive space imagined to be "outside" the nation. Treating Soho as exceptional, but also representative of London's urban transformation, Judith Walkowitz shows how the area's foreignness, liminality, and porousness were key to the explosion of culture and development of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century. She draws on a vast and unusual range of sources to stitch together a rich patchwork quilt of vivid stories and unforgettable characters, revealing how Soho became a showcase for a new cosmopolitan identity.
Mockumentary Comedy
This book is the first to take comedy seriously as an important aspect of the popular mockumentary form of film and television fiction. It examines the ways in which mockumentary films and television programmes make visible—through comedy—the performances that underpin straight documentaries and many of our public figures. Mockumentary Comedy focuses on the rock star and the politician, two figures that regularly feature as mockumentary subjects. These public figures are explored through detailed textual analyses of a range of film and television comedies, including A Hard Day’s Night, This is Spinal Tap, The Thick of It, Veep and the works of Christopher Guest and Alison Jackson. This book broadens the scope of existing mockumentary scholarship by taking comedy seriously in a sustained way for the first time. It ultimately argues that the comedic performances—by performers and of documentary conventions—are central to the form’s critical significance and popular appeal.
Burying The Bones
Pearl Buck was raised in China by her American parents, Presbyterian missionaries from Virginia. Blonde and blue-eyed she looked startlingly foreign, but felt as at home as her Chinese companions. She ran free on the grave-littered grasslands behind her house, often stumbling across the tiny bones of baby girls who had been suffocated at birth. Buck's father was a terrifying figure, with a maniacal zeal for religious conversion - a passion rarely shared by the local communities he targeted. He drained the family's budget for his Chinese translation of the New Testament, while his aggrieved, long-suffering wife did her utmost to create a homely environment for her children, several of whom died tragically young. Pearl Buck would eventually rise to eminence in America as a bestselling author (her most renowned work, The Good Earth, re-entered the bestseller charts in 2004 when it was selected for Oprah's Book Club) but in this startlingly original biography, Spurling recounts with elegance and great insight her unspeakable upbringing in a China that was virtually unknown to the West.
How the Queen Can Make You Happy
A witty and passionately argued essay calling for a return to good manners, using the Queen (the mother of all Brits) as the ultimate example. Mary Killen is an expert on manners and social etiquette, and her humorous advice column in the Spectator provides original solutions to the problems of modern life. In a world currently ruled by reality TV, over-sharing through social media, and an increasingly fractious and fractured public space, we could all do with a lesson or two in from Her Royal Highness. Examining such under-rated virtues as discretion, politeness and kindness, My Queen is a humorous celebration of long-held British values in an age where discretion is not generally the better part of value. Never mind the curtsey, where's the courtesy?
Unstated
Over the past three decades, it is commonly argued, Scotland achieved 'a form of cultural autonomy in the absence of its political equivalent' (Murray Pittock) - a transformation led by its novelists, poets and dramatists. So why, then, is the debate over Scottish independence much less passionate and imaginative? This book sets the question of independence within the more radical horizons which inform the work of 27 writers and activists based in Scotland.
