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On September 7, 1940, the Blitz began. The bombing of London, by over one thousand planes on that night alone, was recognised at the time as being a direct measure to break the country's resistance. This book tells of the impact that this terror from the skies had on British people and the course of war.
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For the first time, these two essential books on George Orwell have been brought together under one cover. The Unknown Orwell describes the first thirty years of Orwell's lifeāhis childhood, the years at Eton and in Burma, and the struggles to become a writer. Orwell: The Transformation carries us forward into the crucial years 1933 to 1937 in which Eric Blair, minor novelist, became George Orwell, a powerful writer with a view, a mission, and a message.
The novelist and short story writer Edward Upward (1903-2009) is famous for being the unknown member of the W. H. Auden circle, though he was revered by his peers - Auden, Day Lewis, Isherwood and Spender - for his intellect, high literary gifts and unswerving political commitment. His lifelong friendship with Christopher Isherwood was forged at school and university, with each regarding the other as the first reader of his work. At Cambridge they invented the bizarre village of Mortmere, which with its combination of reality and fantasy had an important role in shaping the dominant British literary culture of the 1930s.
Using the lives of the Sassoon siblings as a lens through which to view English life, particularly in its highest reaches, Stansky offers new insights into British attitudes toward power, politics, old versus new money, homosexuality, war, Jews, taste and style."--BOOK JACKET.
Julian Bell explores the life of a younger member, and sole poet, of the Bloomsbury Group, the most important community of British writers and intellectuals in the twentieth century, which includes Virginia Woolf (Julian's aunt), E. M. Forster, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the art critic Roger Fry. This biography draws upon the expanding archives on Bloomsbury to present Julian's life more completely and more personally than has been done previously. It is an intense and profound exploration of personal, sexual, intellectual, political, and literary life in England between the two world wars. Through Julian, the book provides important insights on Virginia Woolf, his mother Vanessa Bell, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group. Taking us from London to China to Spain during its civil war, the book is also the ultimately heartbreaking story of one young man's life.
Peter Stansky paints a picture of the changing world in which the Bloomsbury set moved as the watershed to a new and more open society where for example E.M. Forster could write about love between men, and new artforms were in full bloom.
Socialist, philosopher, and poet, William Morris (1834-1896) was at the center of the design renaissance of the 1880's, not only because of his celebrated hostility to aspects of machine culture but because of his success as a designer and businessman whose work had enormous influence on the next generation of artists, craftssmen, and designers. "A very readable and enjoyable book. It is not so much a biography of William Morris as a consideration of him as a political and esthetic phenomenon and as the founder of a number of organizations--the Century Guild, the Arts Workers Guild and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. Mr. Stansky examines them with a learning that is never pedantic, frequently humorous and always intelligent."--New York Times Book Review. Peter Stansky is professor of history at Stanford University and the author of numerous works on British history
The British Empire, wrote Adam Smith, 'has hitherto been not an empire, but the project of an empire' and John Darwin offers a magisterial global history of the rise and fall of that great imperial project. The British Empire, he argues, was much more than a group of colonies ruled over by a scattering of British expatriates until eventual independence. It was, above all, a global phenomenon. Its power derived rather less from the assertion of imperial authority than from the fusing together of three different kinds of empire: the settler empire of the 'white dominions'; the commercial empire of the City of London; and 'Greater India' which contributed markets, manpower and military muscle. This unprecedented history charts how this intricate imperial web was first strengthened, then weakened and finally severed on the rollercoaster of global economic, political and geostrategic upheaval on which it rode from beginning to end.