Books by William Lewis

EVERYONE KNOWS OF THE ARTIFACTS of England's distant past from bones and fossils to jewellery and tools are buried beneath the soil of our country and regularly unearthed by archaeologists. Less appreciated is that there is a quite different historical trail which leads us back through many centuries of our country's history. However, this trail is not buried within the soil, but within our place-names. The earliest sounds of which were uttered by occupants of these islands over 2600 years ago and which have survived into many of the place-names we use today. Place-names have a special significance for a great many people, for their surnames are also names of English places: some will have local feature names such as Brook, Hill, Bridge, Wood and Field and some will have names recalling the village, town or district from which a mediæval ancestor originated. What's in an English Place-Name? offers a fascinating chance to trace the names within our localities back to their roots and to give an absorbing insight into our district's histories. Discussing the origins of hundreds of place-names in England this book provides a comprehensive understanding of how place-names arose.

This book tells the engaging story of when our surnames first came into use, why they were necessary and how people acquired them. At some point we all consider our surnames - many of us will wonder about the stories behind them, especially if they are unusual. Those of us with British surnames possess that magic thread which leads back nearly a thousand years to a time when surnames were a new idea on this side of the English Channel. There have been many books with surnames as their theme: dictionaries of surnames, books about unusual surnames, heraldry, researching family history and so forth, but there are few books which look at British history solely through surnames. Although the origins of the majority of British surnames lie in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, the author shows that the near-Continent, especially France, has contributed its share too. The author has provided accounts of over 2000 of our surnames. Within this book the reader will find the answers to many questions about our surnames and will perhaps encourage its reader to pursue the study further. CONTENTS: What are Surnames and how old are they? - Surnames from Occupations - Surnames from Places - Surnames from Local Features - Surnames from Relationships - Surnames from Words of Affection - Surnames from Nicknames - Surnames from Personal Names - Postscipt - References - General index - Index of surnames.

Throughout the course of the twentieth century communism has enjoyed direct competition with all other governmental and economic systems. Often, communist countries produced their own special brand of party intellectual. These figures rightly occupied their place within their own national context and within the context of the International. Some communist intellectuals, through the high level of erudition exhibited in their writing, have received a wider reception, despite their direct linkage to party politics e.g. Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, and, Victor Serge are good examples. After 1956, when Kruschev exposed Stalin's atrocities to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and, as a result, to the entire world, Marxist philosophy was widely discredited. It had been assumed that Stalin's excesses were somehow encouraged or supported through Marx's thought. When, in the mid 1960s, Louis Althusser first offered his re-readings of Marx's philosophy it, and communist political practice, were in ruin. However Althusser was in a unique cultural and historical position. Thinking and writing concomitant with the structuralists and poststructuralists in France and also having access to certain theoretical tools while, simultaneously, committing himself entirely to Marxist thought-Althusser was, conceivably the last of his tradition. He was a Marxist philosopher who, unlike Sartre at the end of his life, did not abandon communism to, for instance existentialism. In Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism William Lewis gives readers a striking example of intellectual biography and critical theory. His approach, considering the work and life of Althusser within French Marxism and French intellectual culture, fills a void in contemporary scholarship. But, much more importantly, Lewis is able to show how Althusser's thought is the result of and a response to specific French intellectual and political traditions of reading Marx. It is through this combination of concerns that Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism offers us a contemporary and poignant Althusser whose ideas, under the weight of Lewis's pen, can help us better understand what resources it may hold for philosophy, political thought, and cultural thought today.

An introduction to the life and work of one of the greatest Welsh dramatists of this century. John Gwilym Jones (1904-1988) was also a short-story writer, novelist and literary critic whose work was almost exclusively in the Welsh language.