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When her mother Celia Paget died, Ariane Bankes inherited a trunk stuffed with letters and diaries belonging to Celia and her twin Mamaine, which charted the remarkable lives of the Paget sisters and their famous friends and lovers.
For fans of Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, this is the real-life story of Celia and Mamaine Paget: "devoted twins, whose lives and loves traversed the intellectual currents and crises of mid-twentieth century Europe" (Rupert Christiansen). After Celia Goodman née Paget died in 2002, her daughter, Ariane Bankes, inherited a battered trunk stuffed with letters and diaries that belonged to Celia and her identical twin sister, Mamaine. This correspondence charted two remarkable lives spent amongst a dazzling cast of characters who were at the heart of their age, including Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and George Orwell. Throughout a secluded childhoo...
This book offers a concise and highly readable account of the visual art of David Jones (1895-1974). It challenges the simplistic view of Jones as an outsider or an eccentric, exploring his work instead in relation to the wider cultural and intellectual climate of his times.
Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923-2014) wrote brilliant novels about what love can do to people, but in her own life the lasting relationship she sought so ardently always eluded her. She grew up yearning to be an actress; but when that ambition was thwarted by marriage and the war, she turned to fiction. Her first novel, The Beautiful Visit, won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize - she went on to write fourteen more, of which the best-loved were the five volumes of The Cazalet Chronicle. Following her divorce from her first husband, the celebrated naturalist Peter Scott, Jane embarked on a string of high-profile affairs with Cecil Day-Lewis, Arthur Koestler and Laurie Lee, which turned her into a lite...
Island of Dreams is about Boothby's time living there, and about the natural and human history that surrounded him; it's about the people he meets and the stories they tell, and about his engagement with this remote landscape, including the otters that inhabit it. Interspersed with Boothby's own story is a quest to better understand the mysterious Gavin Maxwell.
The first cultural history of English Welsh duality - an identification with two constituent nations at once - that explores how 'Welshness' was imagined, performed, and mobilised in England during and between the two world wars.
A highly original hybrid of literary criticism and political history, telling of the enduring, surprising and ever-evolving relevance of Milton’s epic poem through the scandalous life of its creator and the revolutionary lives that were influenced by it. What in Me Is Dark tells the unlikely story of how Milton’s epic poem came to haunt political struggles over the past four centuries, including the many different, unexpected, often contradictory ways in which it has been read, interpreted, and appropriated through time and across the world, and to revolutionary ends. The book focuses on twelve readers—including Malcolm X, Thomas Jefferson, George Eliot, Hannah Arendt, and C.L.R Jamesâ...
Comparative Literature is changing fast with methodologies, topics, and research interests emerging and remerging. The fifth volume of ICLA 2016 proceedings, Dialogues between Media, focuses on the current interest in inter-arts studies, as well as papers on comics studies, further testimony to the fact that comics have truly arrived in mainstream academic discourse. "Adaptation" is a key term for the studies presented in this volume; various articles discuss the adaptation of literary source texts in different target media - cinematic versions, comics adaptations, TV series, theatre, and opera. Essays on the interplay of media beyond adaptation further show many of the strands that are woven into dialogues between media, and thus the expanding range of comparative literature.
A fascinating exploration of George Orwell—and his body of work—by an award-winning Orwellian biographer and scholar, presenting the author anew to twenty-first-century readers. We find ourselves in an era when the moment is ripe for a reevaluation of the life and the works of one of the twentieth century’s greatest authors. This is the first twenty-first-century biography on George Orwell, with special recognition to D. J. Taylor's stature as an award-winning biographer and Orwellian. Using new sources that are now available for the first time, we are tantalizingly at the end of the lifespan of Orwell's last few contemporaries, whose final reflections are caught in this book. The way we look at a writer and his canon has changed even over the course of the last two decades; there is a post-millennial prism through which we must now look for such a biography to be fresh and relevant. This is what Orwell: The New Life achieves.