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A laugh-out-loud visual history of the strangest piece of men’s clothing ever created: the codpiece. The codpiece was fashioned in the Middle Ages to close a revealing gap between two separate pieces of men’s tights. By the sixteenth century, it had become an upscale must-have accessory. This lighthearted, illustrated examination of its history pulls in writers from Rabelais to Shakespeare and figures from Henry VIII to Alice Cooper. Glover’s witty and entertaining prose reveals how male vanity turned a piece of cloth into a bulging and absurd representation of masculinity itself. The codpiece, painted again and again by masters such as Titian, Holbein, Giorgione, and Bruegel, became a symbol of royalty, debauchery, virility, and religious seriousness—all in one. Centuries of male self-importance and delusion are on display in this highly enjoyably new title. Glover’s book moves from paintings to contemporary culture and back again as it charts the growing popularity of the codpiece and its eventual decline. The first history of its kind, this book is a must-read for art historians, anthropologists, fashion aficionados, and readers looking for a good, long laugh.
Drawing on lively accounts of privates, sergeants, officers and Wellington himself, with unrivalled descriptions of strategy, weapons and formations, it takes us right into the heart of the battlefield."--BOOK JACKET.
Explores the relationship between Napolean Bonaparte and his brother, Joseph, against an historical backdrop of French military disasters in Spain.
Celebrated British painter Rose Wylie—whose works are at once tactile, cerebral, and humorous—often draws her influence from a wide range of popular culture. Here her newest body of work references memories from her own life and mimics the way memories evolve and change over time. Wylie’s source material is culled from the vast visual world around her, ranging from sixteenth-century British estates to Serena Williams and the French Open. While initially these may seem random or aesthetically simplistic, through the nuanced use of humor, language, and compositional structure, Wylie creates wittily observed and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of memory, and visual represen...
My Soul Speaks Wisdom is a powerful collection of life, love, and inspirational poems used for everyday living. This book will provide insights on life, love, and also offer solid words of encouragement when you feel you can't go on. Whether you have or haven't experienced much about life, love, this is a great book of poetry for inquiring minds to read and absorb knowledge. My Soul Speaks Wisdom is a must read.
George Hennell, born about 1785 the son of a Coventry ribbon manufacturer and tradesman, joined Wellington's army in the Peninsula as a Volunteer, was commissioned in the field in the Forty-third Light Infantry, and served through the campaigns of 1812-12. Of his letters home twenty-six (all but two of them unpublished) survive, and these have been edited by the historian Michael Glover with a general introduction, summaries of the events in the campaign covered by the letters, notes and appendices. The discovery of the letters represents a considerable find. Hennell is particularly good at conveying the detail of everyday life in the field and camp and from his vivid pen the reader can gain...
Flickering Empire tells the fascinating yet little-known story of how Chicago served as the unlikely capital of American film production in the years before the rise of Hollywood (1907–1913). As entertaining as it is informative, Flickering Empire straddles the worlds of academic and popular nonfiction in its vivid illustration of the rise and fall of the major Chicago movie studios in the mid-silent era (principally Essanay and Selig Polyscope). Colorful, larger-than-life historical figures, including Thomas Edison, Charlie Chaplin, Oscar Micheaux, and Orson Welles, are major players in the narrative—in addition to important though forgotten industry titans, such as "Colonel" William Selig, George Spoor, and Gilbert "Broncho Billy" Anderson.
During the eighteenth century there was no love lost between Britain and her army. Edmund Burke had laid down that 'an armed and disciplined body is, in its essence, dangerous to liberty.' Admitting, without enthusiasm, that they had to have some kind of army, it was provided with a system of control ostensibly designed to ensure that it could not menace civil liberty -- a complex system which led to Wellington's victory over the French because he was able to manage the administrative hydra in England. His self-set task was 'to do the best I can with the instruments that have been sent to assist me.' Michael Glover unravels the web of complexity over which the commander and his forces won a notable victory -- as well as the French. He describes the recruiting of officers and other ranks, the achievement of advance by purchase, all the services, and how these component parts worked in together. He demonstrates how this machine operated in action and rounds off his account with a portrait of Wellington himself.
The Royal Welch Fusiliers were present at all Marlborough's great victories; they were one of the six Minden regiments; they fought throughout the Peninsula and were present at Wellington's final glorious victory at Waterloo. In The Great War their officers included the writer poets Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves; their 22 battalions fought not just on the Western Front but at Gallipoli, in Egypt, Palestine, Salonika, Mesopotamia and Italy. In WW2 they won battle honours from the Reichswald to Kohima. More recently they have served with distinction in the war against terror in the Middle East. Like so many famous regiments the RWF are no longer in the British Army's order of battle having been amalgamated into the Royal Regiment of Wales. But this fine book is the lasting memorial to a fiercely proud and greatly admired regiment.
This volume provides a fascinating insight into what it was like to march and fight, to eat and be wounded, to command and be commanded at the start of the 19th century. Stress is laid on the technological limitations of warfare at that time.