Books by Stephen Murray

Staying Strong is an immensely human story of how a working-class boy from Tyneside in the north of England became a world champion BMX dirt rider in America then went downhill through partying and drugs and alcohol, until he hit rock bottom. But, with determination and hard work, Stephen Murray had the tenacity to fight his way back to the top of his sport and, in 2007, he was once again riding in a world championship final. Then tragedy struck he crashed and broke his neck, flat-lined three times, and ended up paralysed from the shoulders down. Though he lost the use of most of his body, Stephen never lost the fighting spirit that made him world champion and saved his life. Now he fights on a different front, staying strong in the face of everyday adversities, with a super-human mental resilience that inspires quadriplegics and action sports athletes the world over. His story is inspirational and his book is a triumph of the soul. The limited edition collectors hardback is personally signed by Stephen Murray (only from www.stysrg.com) available on Amazon.

Presents a new way of understanding the great Gothic churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: as rhetorical constructs. The author traces common analogies between rhetoric and architectural space that date back to late antiquity, and then shows how those links were translated into wood, stone, and space under specific local conditions.

In this groundbreaking work, Stephen Murray seizes a rare opportunity to explore the relationship between verbal and visual culture by presenting a sermon that may have been preached during the second half of the thirteenth century in or near the cathedral of Notre-Dame of Amiens, whose sculptural program was completed at about the same time. In addition to providing a complete transcription and translation of the text, Murray examines the historical context of the sermon and draws comparisons between its underlying structure and the Gothic portals of the cathedral. In the sermon, as in the cathedral, he finds a powerful motivational mechanism that invites the repentant sinner to enter into a new contract with the Virgin Mary. The correlation between elements of the sermon's text and the sculptural components of the cathedral leads to an exploration of the socioeconomic conditions in Picardy at the time and a vivid sketch of how the cathedral and its images were used by ordinary people. The author finds parallels in the rhetorical tools used in the sermon, on the one hand, and stylistic and compositional tools used in the sculpture, on the other. In addition to providing a fascinating and cogent consideration of medieval beliefs about salvation and redemption, this book also lays the groundwork for a long overdue examination of the performative and textual in relationship to sculpture.

This work provides an examination of the construction of male and female homosexualities. Although the variety of behaviours, subcategories, and meanings of same-sex sex is considerable, Murray argues that there are a few recurring types. He relates the patterns to other sociological institutions.