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As a girl in the 1930s and 1940s, television interviewer Mavis Nicholson lived in a small terraced house crammed with grandparents, parents, a brother, and a sister. In this memoir, she describes the daily round, the weekly highlight of the Kinema, Jerusalem Chapel, the boys, and the gradual awakening to life beyond the Ferry. And, above all, the bittersweet memories of the possessive, baleful, increasingly bitter Martha Jane, her grandmother and the dominant figure in Mavis' young life.
As a girl in South Wales, Mavis Nicholson dreaded her friends finding out how closely she rubbed shoulders with Martha Jane, the grandmother whose large feather bed she had to share until she left home. Mavis's childhood memoir conjures up her vanished world at briton Ferry, the small house crammed with grandparents, parents, brother and sister. She describes the street games with her friends, outings with the flamboyant Matha Jane, visits from the vegtable cart and the cockle lady, her grandfather's drunken exploits, as well as the weekly highlights of the Kinema and Jerusalem Chapel. dates with the boys, and the gradual awakening of the world beyond the Ferry. . . . Above all she recalls the bittersweet memoirs of her possessive, baleful, increasingly jealous grandmother, who fed Pop, her husband, separate meals, surreptitiously sold her daughter's piano and regularly drove her son-in-law to seething exile in his garden shed - Martha Jane, the dominant influence in Mavis's young life. An enchanting account of the joys and agonies of girlhood. . . . . .
In this authorised biography, Zachary Leader argues that Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation, but a dominant figure in post-war British writing, as novelist, poet, critic and polemicist. Drawing not only on interviews with a range of Amis's friends, relatives, fellow writers, students and colleagues, many of them never before consulted, but also on hundreds of previously unpublished letters, Leader's biography will for the first time give a full picture of Amis's childhood, school days, life as a teacher, critic, political and cultural commentator, professional author, husband, father and lover. He explores Amis's fears and phobias, and the role that drink played in his life. And of course he pays due attention to Amis's work. As the editor of The Letters of Kingsley Amis, hailed in The Sunday Telegraph as 'one of the last major monuments to the epistolary art', Leader is more than qualified to be his authorised biographer. His book will surprise, entertain and illuminate.
Born Eileen Mary Challans in London in 1905, Mary Renault wrote six successful contemporary novels before turning to the historical fiction about ancient Greece for which she is best known. While Renault's novels are still highly regarded, her life and work have never been completely examined. Caroline Zilboorg seeks to remedy this in The Masks of Mary Renault by exploring Renault's identity as a gifted writer and a sexual woman in a society in which neither of these identities was clear or easy. Although Renault's life was anything but ordinary, this fact has often been obscured by her writing. The daughter of a doctor, she grew up comfortably and attended a boarding school in Bristol. She ...
"Friedman reexamines the stories surrounding the influx of British war brides brought back to the United States by American GIs after WWII with a focus on media representations of sexuality and marriage in wartime, showing how mass media interpretations turned from public suspicion of war brides to popular acceptance"--Provided by publisher.
Channel 4 had been a matter of controversy for years even before it came on the air in November 1982. There were lengthy debates about what its role would be and the part to be played by the ITV companies and the growing number of independent television producers. There was also political controversy over the profile of the new channel, some wishing to see it as "their" channel in response to the apparent political hegemony of Margaret Thatcher. The result was sharp conflicts, not only over programming but, as the channel became established, over its relationships with the ITV companies and its regulatory body, the IBA. These controversies in the making of Channel 4 are revisited in this volume. The opening article by Edmund Dell, the channel's first chairman, describes and explains his sometimes stormy relationship with Jeremy Isaacs, the chief executive, while the witness seminar and the other articles offer the views of Channel 4 commissioning editors and representatives from the IBA, the ITV companies, the independent producers, the Home Office and the BBC.
In Ecotheology and Love: The Converging Poetics of Sohrab Sepehri and James Baldwin, Bahar Davary points to the interrelation of religion, poetry, and ecology from a comparative perspective with an emphasis on decoloniality. This work shows how authors Sohrab Seperhi and James Baldwin sought social justice by building their work on love and an authentic way of knowing the world based on an interconnected knowledge of the self. The layers of depth in Sepehri and Baldwin’s works and their immediacy for our time has yet to be fully understood, but through Ecotheology and Love, Davary takes a significant step towards achieving such a fuller understanding.
This book critically examines the experiences of racism encountered by academics of colour working within British universities. Situated within a critical race theory and postcolonial feminist framework, Sian thoughtfully centres the voices of the interviewed academics, and draws upon her own experiences and reflections through a critical auto-ethnography. Navigating Institutional Racism in British Universities unpacks a range of complex and challenging questions, and engages with the way in which racial politics in the academy interplay and intersect with gender. The book presents a textured narrative around the various barriers facing academics of colour, and enhances understandings of experiences around institutional racism in British universities. Alongside its conceptual and empirical contribution, it develops a series of practical recommendations to encourage and facilitate the active participation of academics of colour in British universities.
"A must read."—CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022 "Holds up a mirror to the unifying, braided futures underlying so-called 'Western' and 'Muslim' feminism that are both undermined by the power of capital, the world trade order, and cynical geopolitics."—2023 Association for Asian Studies Coomaraswamy Book Prize A crystal-clear account of the entangled history of Western and Muslim feminisms. Western feminists, pundits, and policymakers tend to portray the Muslim world as the last and most difficult frontier of global feminism. Challenging this view, Elora Shehabuddin presents a unique and engaging history of feminism as a story of colonial and postcolonial interactions between Weste...