You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
'Making Darkness Light is an illumination' Adam Phillips 'His sympathetic yet challenging account will undoubtedly win Milton new readers - and for that a chorus of Hallelujahs' Spectator For most of us John Milton has been consigned to the dusty pantheon of English literature, a grim puritan, sightlessly dictating his great work to an amanuensis, removed from the real world in his contemplation of higher things. But dig a little deeper and you find an extraordinary and complicated human being. Revolutionary and apologist for regicide, writer of propaganda for Cromwell's regime, defender of the English people and passionate European, scholar and lover of music and the arts - Milton was all o...
Feeling Pleasures argues that the sense of touch assumed a new and unique importance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and that the work of major poets of the period, including Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Milton, should be read alongside these developing ideas.
Taking its impetus from remarkable fact that holy things were given to children as toys in the early modern period as a way of destroying their power, this book rethinks the meaning of both iconoclasm and child's play then and now.
At the base camp - imagining -- First climb - wisdom -- First crossroad - knowledge -- Second climb - meaningful action -- Second crossroad - purchase -- Third climb - meaningless action -- Third crossroad - place -- Fourth climb - receiving -- Fourth crossroad - needs -- Fifth climb - gratitude -- Fifth crossroad - sin -- At the summit
This Companion rethinks food in literature from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to contemporary food blogs, and recovers cookbooks as literary texts.
The appearance of Galileo's Dialogue in a forgotten painting launches John Heilbron's exploration of science and culture in Stuart England, and its deep connections with continental Europe. Ranging across art history, politics, and religion, he unravels the painting's mysteries, setting its sitters and painter against their rich cultural backdrop.
Recasts the Reformation as a battleground over memory, in which new identities were formed through acts of commemoration, invention and repression.
*Chosen as a Book of the Year by The Times, History Today and the Sunday Telegraph* ‘Wonderfully entertaining, comprehensive and astute.’ The Times ‘Genuinely hard to put down.’ BBC History Magazine From murder to duelling, highway robbery to mugging: the darker side of English life explored. Spanning some seven centuries, A Fiery & Furious People traces the subtle shifts that have taken place both in the nature of violence and in people’s attitudes to it. How could football be regarded at one moment as a raucous pastime that should be banned, and the next as a respectable sport that should be encouraged? When did the serial killer first make an appearance? What gave rise to partic...
SHORTLISTED FOR THE POETRY PIGOTT PRIZE IN ASSOCIATION WITH LISTOWEL WRITERS' WEEK A 'howdie-skelp' is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It's a wake-up call. A call to action. The poems in Paul Muldoon's striking new collection include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an 'affront' to good taste. Paul Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture, but to hold our attention.
None