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The lyric perfection of the works of Alfred Tennyson, one of the greatest Victorian poets, and the apparent ease with which he wrote them, long obscured the disparity between the unruffled surface of many of his poems and his deeply disturbed life. Somersby Rectory, where Tennyson was born, was made miserable by drunkenness, drug addiction, threats of violence, melodramatic disinheritances, and above all by the fear of madness. He found an anodyne for his unhappiness in the composition of poetry, and was so successful in this refuge from the bewildering complexities of his life that he eventually became Poet Laureate and the most famous of living writers. Until he was forty years old the bel...
'[Edward] FitzGerald (1809-1883) won a small piece of immortality with his translation-adaptation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam... but in every other way he seems to have successfully avoided fulfilment. A godless Epicurean, he lived in permanent virginity, never pressing his homosexual desires beyond a number of sentimental crushes... The son of a fabulously rich heiress, he rarely travelled... Though he had many friends he also had a perverse penchant for alienating them... [Robert Bernard] Martin argues that FitzGerald's greatest achievement, outside the Rubaiyat, is his letters, which certainly have grace and a wistful charm.' Kirkus Review 'There is [] something sad about the life of this loving and never quite satisfied man... Mr. Martin's biography is splendid reading, and it is a real credit to it that he makes us feel the sadness.' New York Times
'Will surely rank as one of the foremost literary biographies of our time.' John Carey, Sunday Times In his lifetime Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) published just a single poem - only a few close friends were aware he wrote. Much of his work was burnt by fellow Jesuits on his death. And yet Hopkins is today a huge figure in English literature. Homosexual but terribly repressed, he channeled his emotions toward nature and God, with profound results. Princeton emeritus professor Martin, the only biographer to have unrestricted use of Hopkins' private papers, tells this extraordinary story from Hopkins' early life and studies at Oxford, through his tortuous conversion from Anglicanism to Cat...
First published in 1966, Robert Bernard Martin's The Accents of Persuasion is a consummate critical study of Charlotte Brontë's four novels: The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette. 'The bare facts are so literally improbable as to tease one into considering the lives of the Brontes themselves as some wild metaphorical statement of the Romantic conception of the world...Even the best of biography, however, may tend to serve history rather than literature, and one may be forgiven for wishing to return from their lives to the works of the sisters Bronte... The following study, then, is an attempt to search out the themes that occupied [Charlotte] Bronte in her novels and to demonstrate how they are given artistic life; in short, to show how Charlotte Brontë attempted to speak 'the language of conviction' in the 'accents of persuasion'.' (Robert Bernard Martin, from his Introduction.)
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While the birth of global economic governance is conventionally dated to the end of World War II, Jamie Martin shows how its roots lie in World War I and its aftermath. The Meddlers explores the intense political struggles about sovereignty and self-governance provoked by the first attempts to govern global capitalism.
The No.1 bestseller in France, NIGHT is the thrilling new novel from award-winner Bernard Minier. The Commandant Servaz series The Frozen Dead is available now on Netflix. A woman murdered in a church in Norway. A collection of photographs on an oil rig in the North Sea. A young boy in a picturesque Austrian village. The three clues that suggest a serial killer has returned . . . Detective Kirsten Nigaard believes the signs point to none other than Julian Hirtmann, a serial murderer on the run. She turns to Toulouse cop Martin Servaz, who has a painful personal history with Hirtmann. Servaz hunted the elusive killer for many years until the trail went cold. Now they have a chance to bring hi...
Novels by Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov have been read as expressions of a desire to transcend time. Hägglund gives them another reading entirely: fear of time and death is generated by investment in temporal life. Engaging with Freud and Lacan, he opens a new way of reading the dramas of desire as they are staged in both philosophy and literature.
This book surveys popular culture in Britain from the early nineteenth-century to the present.
The Me Too movement (or #MeToo movement) is a movement against sexual harassment and sexual assault.