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Ronald Fraser, the internationally renowned oral historian, turns his attention to his own origins in this remarkable memoir. In Search of a Past gathers the recollections of the servants who worked at the manor house outside London where Fraser grew up. It was the place where his parents-one American, the other Scottish-learned to embrace the lifestyle of the idle local gentry. Fraser paints a vivid picture of a vanished interwar world. Sensitively recorded, the words of his family's former employees capture the texture of English "county" life as seen from below, woven into a background of their personal lives, their work and the social antagonisms they experienced. Beneath their stories, however, the author glimpses another unspoken narrative-that of his own childhood. He submits to a course of psychoanalysis and delves into a past riven by confusing emotions and conflicting class allegiances. The result is an innovative, honest, and beautifully written account of the search for lost time, one that defies literary categorization.
In Hiding is the spellbinding story of a man who spent thirty years holed up in his own home to escape execution. Manuel Cortés was a Socialist Party member, an activist in the Republic’s land reform movement, and an organizer in the farm workers’ unionization struggles. As Mayor of Mijas in Andalusia, he became caught up in the ferment of revolutionary Spain in the late 1930s. A marked man, he evaded Franco’s execution squads to survive in hiding through a generation of persecution and terror until amnesty was decreed in 1969—a period of thirty years. With his wife and daughter, he attempted to escape to France, but failed. In this absorbing narrative, based on numerous interviews with the mayor conducted by Ronald Fraser, a master of oral history, Cortés’s truly awe-inspiring ordeal is supplemented by his family’s life histories and experiences during the Civil War. A haunting tale and a monument to the art of the oral historian, In Hiding reminds us what the Spanish Civil War was really about.
We discover what civil war, revolution and counter-revolution actually felt like from inside both camps. The contours of the war take shape through the words of the eyewitnesses. The atmosphere of events is vividly recaptured. And though the lived experience of the participants is revealed the uniquely tragic essence of all civil war. 'Fascinating and brilliantly unorthodox. ' Hugh Thomas, author of THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO.
" P]robably the most distinguished writer of English prose in the novel form at present living. He cannot do other than write beautifully." - Humbert Wolfe "The book abounds in glowing experiences of a world of colour and sensation, minutely imagined. . . . The description of dawn at Kew Gardens is so lovely that the reader will be tempted to endanger his respectability by emulating Judy and climbing the wall." - Times Literary Supplement "Among the few highly important and significant novelists of the day." - The Observer "There is poetry beneath Mr. Fraser's fantastic humour as there is a cunning grace in his prose." - The Times "The erotic awakening of a young woman . . . Judy, a student ...
A magisterial history of “Napoleon’s Vietnam”, by the highly acclaimed historian of Spain In this definitive account of the Peninsular War (1808–14), Napoleon’s six-year war against Spain, Ronald Fraser examines what led to the emperor’s devastating defeat against the popular opposition—the guerrillas—and their British and Portuguese allies. As well as relating the histories of the great political and military figures of the war, Fraser brings to life the anonymous masses—the artisans, peasants and women who fought, suffered and died—and restores their role in this barbaric war to its rightful place while overturning the view that this was a straightforward military campaign. This vivid, meticulously researched book offers a distinct and profound vision of “Napoleon’s Vietnam” and shows the reality of the disasters of war: the suffering, discontents and social upheaval that accompanied the fighting. With a new Introduction by Tariq Ali.
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This book is the new title chosen for the latest revision of the author's classic text Draughtmanship: Architectural and Building Graphics. The original aim of introducing beginners to a wide range of traditional techniques remains faithful.
Paul John Eakin's earlier work Fictions in Autobiography is a key text in autobiography studies. In it he proposed that the self that finds expression in autobiography is in fundamental ways a kind of fictive construct, a fiction articulated in a fiction. In this new book Eakin turns his attention to what he sees as the defining assumption of autobiography: that the story of the self does refer to a world of biographical and historical fact. Here he shows that people write autobiography not in some private realm of the autonomous self but rather in strenuous engagement with the pressures that life in culture entails. In so demonstrating, he offers fresh readings of autobiographies by Roland ...
Marshaling evidence from a wide array of international sources, including the black presses of the time, Penny M. Von Eschen offers a vivid portrayal of the African diaspora in its international heyday, from the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress to early cooperation with the United Nations. Tracing the relationship between transformations in anti-colonial politics and the history of the United States during its emergence as the dominant world power, she challenges bipolar Cold War paradigms. She documents the efforts of African-American political leaders, intellectuals, and journalists who forcefully promoted anti-colonial politics and critiqued U.S. foreign policy. The eclipse of anti-co...
This book details the effects of the Nazi regime on the German Physical Society.