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History World
With equal measures of wit and wisdom, the author of 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret draws a deeply original, hilarious, and telling portrait of the Queen herself.
She was the most famous person on earth; she first appeared on the cover of Time magazine at the age of three. When she died, few people were old enough to recall a time when she was not alive. Her likeness has been reproduced--in photographs, on stamps, on the notes and coins of thirty different currencies--more than any since Jesus. It is probable that, over the course of her ninety-six years, she was introduced to a greater number of different people than anyone else who has ever lived--likely well over half a million. Yet this most closely observed of all women rarely left any real impression on those she encountered beyond vague notions of her "radiance" and "sense of duty." A high proportion of those she met can remember what they said to her, but not a word of what she said to them. Up until now, the curious tactic employed by biographers of the Queen has been to ignore what is interesting and to concentrate on what is not. Craig Brown, the author of 150 Glimpses of the Beatles and Hello Goodbye Hello, rejects this formula, bringing his kaleidoscopic approach to the most famous--and most guarded-- woman on earth, examining the Queen through a succession of interlocking prisms. With Q, this fantastically funny, marvelously insightful journalist gives us an unforgettable portrait of the omnipresent, elusive Queen Elizabeth II.
Our story begins in 1920s London, at a time when women's rights were surging after the long battle for suffrage and nightclubs emerged as spaces where single women could socialise unchaperoned. This was the age of the dance craze and the gender-bending 'Flapper', who inspired the creation of the Gargoyle club, a nocturnal hunting ground for Femmes Fatales.
Meanwhile, London's Bohemia was ruled by the 'Queen of Clubs', Kate Meyrick; the taboo-breaking 'Tiger Woman', Betty May; the original 'Chelsea Girl', Viva King; the artist, Nina Hamnett; the 'Euston Road Venus', Sonia Orwell; and Isabel Rawsthorne, artist, spy, pornographer, model and muse ... to name but a few.
Using previously unpublished memoirs and interviews, Queens of Bohemia creates a soundscape of voices that gives the reader a taste of their world, so exotic and yet often wracked with despair. It offers a unique insight into a generation of women for whom ideals of duty and self-sacrifice had been debunked by the horrors of war and whose morality resided in being true to one's self, as they took their struggle for freedom into the wider world and learned to value their individuality along the way.
The clever peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost won his case, when a man with a wooden leg swaggered into the French courtroom, denounced du Tilh, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and wife of Martin Guerre. This book, by the noted historian who served as a consultant for the film, adds new dimensions to this famous legend.
A radical analysis of Palestinian resistance from one of their most influential voices.
Revisit Ghassan Kanafani's pivotal text in a new English edition. Kanafani presents a concrete analysis of the mass uprisings against Zionism, and for independence from British colonialism, taking place in Palestine from 1936 to 1939. With a methodical yet illustrative approach, Kanafani examines the economic, political, social, and cultural conditions that contributed to, and limited, the anti-colonial struggle in this period.
Translated by Hazem Jamjoum, with an introduction from Layan Sima Fuleihan and an afterword from Maher Charif
GHASSAN KANAFANI was a political activist, artist, and writer who gave his life for the Palestinian people. He took part in founding the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and is the accomplished author of many short stories, novels, plays, articles, and studies. Kanafani was assassinated in Beirut by the Israeli Mossad in 1972.
LAYAN SIMA FULEIHAN is a popular educator and organizer. She is the Education Director of The People's Forum and an editor of 1804 Books in New York City.
HAZEM JAMJOUM is a candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy in History and Middle Eastern Studies degree at New York University. His first literary translation of Maya Abu al-Hayyat's La Ahad Ya'rif Zumrat Damih received PEN America's nomination to the New York State Council for the Arts.
MAHER CHARIF is Head of the Research Department at the Institute for Palestine Studies, Associate Researcher at the French Institute for the Near East, and Lecturer at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences at Saint Joseph University.
How did the characters and events of Scottish history make the Scotland of today? These stories make sense of it all. How much do you know about Scottish history? We all know bits of it. This book by the authors of Scottish History: Strange but True sets out to show how these 'bits' fit together - how the characters and events of Scottish history made the country of Scotland. How did Scotland embrace kilts and tartan after it banned them?How was Robert the Bruce the real Braveheart?How are there more songs about Jacobites than anybody else?How did a King of Scots declare war on Scotland?How did a 'Merry Monarch' destroy the Covenanters?How did King David save Scotland AND give it away?How did John Knox have trouble with Marys?How did a Scottish King love fart jokes and write a bible?
What was medicine like in the time of Shakespeare and Oliver Cromwell? How did Charles I cure a headache, or Samuel Pepys get rid of kidney stones? Katherine Knight opens up the delights of the Stuart medicine cabinet in this fascinating romp through seventeenth-century medicine and cosmetics. Documenting the all-important use of household substances and do-it-yourself remedies, this book looks at the emergence of modern medicine from everyday cures such as herbs, oils and foods.
Offering solutions for all sorts of nasty afflictions, from digestive disturbances to sexually transmitted diseases, it also describes how our seventeenth-century counterparts enjoyed the benefits of soap, moisturiser and toothpaste. With insights into the lives of those who lived in this remarkable period, Secrets of the 17th Century Medicine Cabinet is more than a medical history - it is an intimate investigation into the private lives of the spirited Stuarts.
Explores the deployment of racial thinking and racial formations in the visual culture of the pre-modern world. The capacious visual archive studied in this volume includes a trove of materials such as annotated or illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance costume books and travel books, maps and cartographic volumes produced by Europeans as well as Indigenous peoples, mass-printed pamphlets, jewelry, decorative arts, religious iconography, paintings from around the world, ceremonial objects, festival books, and play texts intended for live performance. Contributors explore the deployment of what coeditor Noémie Ndiaye calls "the racial matrix" and its interconnected paradigms across the medieval and early modern chronological divide and across vast transnational and multilingual geographies. This volume uses items from the Fall 2023 exhibition "Seeing Race Before Race"--a collaboration between RaceB4Race and the Newberry Library--as a starting point for an ambitious theoretical conversation between premodern race studies, art history, performance studies, book history, and critical race theory.
The soundscape--a term coined by the author--is our sonic environment, the ever-present array of noises with which we all live. Beginning with the primordial sounds of nature, we have experienced an ever-increasing complexity of our sonic surroundings. As civilization develops, new noises rise up around us: from the creaking wheel, the clang of the blacksmith's hammer, and the distant chugging of steam trains to the "sound imperialism" of airports, city streets, and factories. The author contends that we now suffer from an overabundance of acoustic information and a proportionate diminishing of our ability to hear the nuances and subtleties of sound. Our task, he maintains, is to listen, analyze, and make distinctions. As a society we have become more aware of the toxic wastes that can enter our bodies through the air we breathe and the water we drink. In fact, the pollution of our sonic environment is no less real. Schafer emphasizes the importance of discerning the sounds that enrich and feed us and using them to create healthier environments. To this end, he explains how to classify sounds, appreciating their beauty or ugliness, and provides exercises and "soundwalks" to help us become more discriminating and sensitive to the sounds around us. This book is a pioneering exploration of our acoustic environment, past and present, and an attempt to imagine what it might become in the future.
Beginning July 8, 2014, Israel launched air strikes and a ground invasion of Gaza that lasted fifty-one days, leaving over 2,000 people dead, the vast majority of whom were civilians. During the assault, at least 10,000 homes were destroyed and, according to the United Nations, nearly 300,000 Palestinians were displaced. Max Blumenthal was on the ground during what he argues was an entirely avoidable catastrophe. In this explosive work of reportage, Blumenthal reveals the harrowing conditions and cynical deceptions that led to the ruinous war. Here, for the first time, Blumenthal unearths and presents shocking evidence of atrocities he gathered in the rubble of Gaza.
Illustrated with beautiful images from the British Library's collection, The British History Puzzle Book will provide hours of entertainment and delight readers with questions for history novices to experts alike. It also spans British history from the first Stone Age settlers to today's post-industrial country. A spectacular, puzzle-fueled, myth-busting journey through the hidden history of Britain in 500 questions. Britain's history is one of the richest and most complex in Europe. From the first Stone Age settlers, through the Roman occupation, the waves of Germanic and Viking invaders, the wars of the Middle Ages, the consolidation of the United Kingdom, the British Empire, the two World Wars and today's post- industrial country, its development is filled with well-known highpoints and lesser-known byways. The British History Puzzle Book poses fascinating and fiendish questions which will test your knowledge of the nation's history to the limit and reveal a treasure trove of astonishing facts. So if you've ever wondered where cricket was invented, how many husbands the reigning queens of England have had, or who the first recorded tourist to visit Britain was, then The British History Puzzle Book will provide all the answers.