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In today's world, many believe that everyday life has become selfish and atomised--that individuals live only to consume. Jon Lawrence argues that they are wrong, and that whilst community has changed, it is far from dead. It is time to embrace new communities, and let go of nostalgia for the past.
The Pastoral is the semi-fictional account of British composers Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth during the First World War. Both saw active service and witnessed the horrors of trench warfare; Vaughan Williams as a member of the medical corp, while Butterworth fought at the Battle of The Somme. Following the events and timeline that we know to be true, Jon Lawrence offers a hypothesis of what might have happened and considers how the unimaginable terrors of war in France might affect the creative mind. Although the book addresses the violent truth of conflict The Pastoral is also a powerful story of friendship, courage and the power of hope. Jon Lawrence lectures in music at City College Norwich in the UK.
Margaret Thatcher was prime minister from 1979 to 1990, during which time her Conservative administration transformed the political landscape of Britain. Science Policy under Thatcher is the first book to examine systematically the interplay of science and government under her leadership. Thatcher was a working scientist before she became a professional politician, and she maintained a close watch on science matters as prime minister. Scientific knowledge and advice were important to many urgent issues of the 1980s, from late Cold War questions of defence to emerging environmental problems such as acid rain and climate change. Drawing on newly released primary sources, Jon Agar explores h...
Speaking for the People, first published in 1998, draws our attention to the problematic nature of politicians' claims to represent others, and in doing so it challenges conventional ideas about both the rise of class politics, and the triumph of party between 1867 and 1914. The book emphasises the strongly gendered nature of party politics before the First World War, and suggests that historians have greatly underestimated the continuing importance of the 'politics of place'. Most importantly, however, Speaking for the People argues that we must break away from teleological notions such as the 'modernisation' of politics, the taming of the 'popular', or the rise of class. Only then will we understand the shifting currents of popular politics. Speaking for the People represents a major challenge to the ways in which historians and political scientists have studied the interaction between party politics and popular political cultures.
An engaging history of electioneering in Britain from the eighteenth century to the present, highlighting how the television age has altered the interaction of politicians and public and asking what the media must now do to reinvigorate public politics.
This book situates the controversial Thatcher era in the political, social, cultural and economic history of modern Britain.
Bella is an agoraphobic young woman who, obsessed with books since a child, has searched for romance and love in the written word. Then one day a man enters her life at The Wallflower Café. Is he the man who can make love real? Or has love been there all along?The Wallflower Café is the fifth play from Jon Lawrence and considers mental illness, love, grief and books.
Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technologies are modified environments, just as nature is to varying extents engineered. Furthermore, technologies and our living and non-living environment are both predominant material forms of organisation – and self-organisation – that surround and make us. Both have changed over time, in intersecting ways. Technologies discussed in the collection include bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays and biotechnologies. Environments investigated include bogs, cities, farms, places of natural beauty and pollution, land and sea. The book explores this diversity but also offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.
As Europe prepares for the din of battle in The Great War, a British cartographer roams the silent dunes of The Empty Quarter in the Arabian Desert. Following a violent sandstorm which leaves him lost and close to death, Peter Carter is rescued by a tribe of Bedouin nomads. While in their care he befriends chief Ghalib, but falls in love with his daughter, Farra. Truth, trust and friendship are put to the test in a brutal form of traditional lie detection - The Bisha. The latest novella from acclaimed author Jon Lawrence (Playing Beneath the Havelock House, Albatross Bay, The Pastoral, The Wallflower Cafe), Bisha is a tale of passion, friendship, betrayal and a love which crosses cultures and the lines on maps. Jon Lawrence is a Welsh author living in the Norfolk.
This ambitious volume marks a huge step in our understanding of the social history of the Great War. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert have gathered a group of scholars of London, Paris and Berlin, who collectively have drawn a coherent and original study of cities at war. The contributors explore notions of well-being in wartime cities - relating to the economy and the question of whether the state of the capitals contributed to victory or defeat. Expert contributors in fields stretching from history, demography, anthropology, economics, and sociology to the history of medicine, bring an interdisciplinary approach to the book, as well as representing the best of recent research in their own fields. Capital Cities at War, one of the few truly comparative works on the Great War, will transform studies of the conflict, and is likely to become a paradigm for research on other wars.