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In particular, it was the years during which he and his sister looked after their mother that shaped the writer we know so well: a number of poems written over this time are for her, and the mood of pain, shadow and despondency that characterises his later verse draws its strength from his experience of the long, lonely years of her senility.
"A vast treasury of ideas, observations and innovation." - Francis Ford Coppola The triple-Oscar winner of the Godfather films, Apocalypse Now and The English Patient presents a masterclass on movies and how they are made.Highly lauded film editor, director, writer and sound designer Walter Murch reflects on the six decades of cinematic history he has been a considerable contributor to - and on what makes great films great.Together with Francis Coppola and George Lucas, Murch abandoned Hollywood in 1969 and moved to San Francisco to create the Zoetrope studio. Their vision was of a new kind of cinema for a new generation of film-goers. Murch's subsequent contributions in film editing rooms and sound-mixing theatres were responsible for ground-breaking technical and creative innovations.In this book, Murch invites readers on a voyage of discovery through film, with a mixture of personal stories, meditations on his own creative tactics and strategies, and reminiscences from working on The Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, Lucas' American Graffiti, and Anthony Minghella's The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley.Suddenly Something Clicked is a book that will change the way you watch movies.
A master of elegy and eulogy who finds during lockdown the space to take stock. Many of the poems in The Missing Months occupy the strange hiatus afforded by lockdown. They look forward as well as back, toying with possible futures, enthused by utopian dreams or fearing cultural and bodily entropy. They celebrate and mourn the lives of friends and relatives, captivated by carefully tended images from the past. Lockdown's 'missing months' in the world of a four-year-old granddaughter are laid down and remembered for her. Familiar objects - a park bench, stones, grass, stars, windows - are reanimated. This poetry of imaginative journeying 'stretches/Banks on a slope of air and turns' like the heron it watches. Between the crackle of radio signals and rain, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and the American singer Miranda Lambert, here is a poet in search of points of reference, the 'bright fresh leaves' of sunlight among the ruins.
Indiana Bones is back for a second dogtastic detective escapade!Once again he and his bestest friend, Aisha, have to gather their wits, courage and plenty of snacks to sniff out clues and solve a twisty mystery.Still on the hunt for the Avenger's lost treasure, the intrepid travellers set off on another trek, this time to the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. But nothing is ever simple for our heroes, and the slippery Serpent and stinky Ringo are still hot on their tails, determined to thwart their every move.An irresistible comical adventure.'Funny and clever . . . A heartfelt adventure story.' Kirkus
The world is classic Jane Austen. The mystery is vintage P.D. James. The year is 1803, and Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet have been married for six years. There are now two handsome and healthy sons in the nursery, Elizabeth's beloved sister Jane and her husband Bingley live nearby and the orderly world of Pemberley seems unassailable. But all this is threatened when, on the eve of the annual autumn ball, the guests are preparing to retire for the night when a chaise appears, rocking down the path from Pemberley's wild woodland. As it pulls up, Lydia Wickham - Elizabeth Bennet's younger, unreliable sister - stumbles out screaming that her husband has been murdered. Two great literary minds - master of suspense P.D. James and literary icon Jane Austen - come together in Death Comes to Pemberley, a bestselling historical crime fiction tribute to Pride and Prejudice. Conjuring the world of Elizabeth Bennet and Mark Darcy and combining the trappings of Regency British society with a classic murder mystery, James creates a delightful mash-up that will intrigue any Janeite. From the bestselling author of The Murder Room, Children of Men and A Certain Justice, comes a wonderful mixture of the nation's greatest romance and best-loved crime fiction. In 2013, this novel was adapted as a miniseries by the BBC, starring Matthew Rhys as Darcy, Anna Maxwell Martin as Elizabeth Bennet and Jenna Coleman as Lydia Wickham.
But as Stephen Walsh - author of the highly praised Debussy: A Painter in Sound - points out in this intensely absorbing study, there is infinitely more to romantic music than meets the eye.
Far District, the transporting debut from the author of House of Lords and Commons, is structured as the spiritual journey of a poet-speaker caught between two cultures. As childhood memory is grafted to the world of imagination - shaped by books, art, music and travel - the two come together to develop a new vision of what 'home' might offer.'Far District is a classic, which is to say a rare and exemplary first book. This book is striking for the way Ishion Hutchinson's gorgeously textured language - shanty-zinc, asthmatic whirl, poincianas - stretches over far-reaching narratives of landscape and culture. With an ear "e;tuned to the blue above and below"e; he captures the physical rhythms of his native Jamaica as well as the broader, metaphysical rhythms of distance and displacement, "e;of [travelling] the narrow bridge separating"e; past and present.' PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry'At once biography and autobiography, generous with its thinking and observations . . . the poems are urgent, authentic, deeply felt, and beautifully shaped. It is rare to find such achievement in a first collection, where an author writes from a place of humility in the face of literary tradition. His work possesses high artistic merit; his love of world literature suffuses his lines and spurs his ambition. This collection is a true work of alchemy.' Whiting Awards
I'm a killer I told youI told you that all alongYou were the dummy to believeI could ever be anything elseTwo teenagers fall in love on Long Island. There's fun and dancing, sports and team spirit, there's the woods and beer and physical hard work. But it's 1938, the world is on the brink of war, and their wholesome summer camp is exclusively for American youth of German descent. As their mutual attraction deepens, so they become intoxicated by the Nazi ideology that fuels the camp, an ideology that will culminate in global atrocity and genocide.Inspired by the real Camp Siegfried, Bess Wohl's play premiered at the Old Vic Theatre, London, in September 2021.
The spellbinding stories of the scientists whose eureka! breakthroughs in modern physics reveal science's astonishing predictive power.'An excellent popular science book.'DARA O BRIAIN'A thoroughly informative and entertaining read.'ANNA BURNS, Booker Prize-winning author of Milkman'One of the best-written books about phsyics I have ever come across.'POPULAR SCIENCE'Highly entertaining and accessible.' IRISH TIMES'Fascinating, life enhancing entertainment.' PROSPECT'Thoroughly enjoyable . . . Chown has down it again.' BBC SKY AT NIGHTBreakthrough takes us on a breathtaking, mind-altering tour of the eureka! moments of modern physics. Charting the spellbinding stories of the scientists who predicted and discovered the existence of unknown planets, black holes, invisible force fields, ripples in the fabric of space-time, unsuspected subatomic particles and even antimatter, Marcus Chown reveals science's greatest mystery: its astonishing predictive power.***Breakthrough was previously published in 2020 in hardback under the title The Magicians.
The visionary masterpiece, tracing a riverboat crew's dreamlike jungle voyage ...'My new all time favourite book ... A magnificent, breathtaking and terrifying novel.' Tsitsi Dangarembga'An exhilarating experience ... Makes visions real and reality visions ... Genius.' Jamaica Kincaid'A masterpiece: I love this book for its language, adventure and wisdoms.' Monique Roffey'Revel in the inviolate, ever-deepening mystery of Wilson Harris's work.' Jeet Thayil'The Guyanese William Blake . Such poetic intensity.' Angela CarterI dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye ...A crew of men are embarking on a voyage up a turbulent river through the rainforests of Guyana. Their domineering leader, Donne, is the spirit of a conquistador, obsessed with hunting for a mysterious woman and exploiting indigenous people as plantation labour. But their expedition is plagued by tragedies, haunted by drowned ghosts: spectres of the crew themselves, inhabiting a blurred shadowland between life and death. As their journey into the interior - their own hearts of darkness - deepens, it assumes a spiritual dimension, guiding them towards a new destination: the Palace of the Peacock ...A modernist fever dream; prose poem; modern myth; elegy to victims of colonial conquest: Wilson Harris' masterpiece has defied definition for over sixty years, and is reissued for a new generation of readers.'One of the great originals ... Visionary ... Dazzlingly illuminating.' Guardian'Amazing ... Masterly ... Near-miraculous.' Observer'Staggering ... Both brilliant and terrifying.' The Times'The most inimitable [writer] produced in the English-speaking Caribbean.' Fred D'Aguiar'Extraordinary ... Courageous and visionary ... It speaks to us in tongues.' Pauline Melville
This volume covers the production of Eliot's play The Family Reunion; the publication of The Idea of a Christian Society; and the joyous versifying of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. After exhausting himself through nights of fire-watching in the London wartime blackout, he travels the country, attends meetings of The Moot, delivers talks, and advises a fresh generation of writers including Cyril Connolly, Keith Douglas, Kathleen Raine and Vernon Watkins. Major correspondents include W. H. Auden, George Barker, William Empson, Geoffrey Faber, John Hayward, James Laughlin, Hope Mirrlees, Mervyn Peake, Ezra Pound, Michael Roberts, Stephen Spender, Tambimuttu, Allen Tate, Michael Tippett, Charles Williams and Virginia Woolf. Four Quartets, Eliot's culminating masterpiece, is discussed in detail.
Alone in a cube that's glowing in the darkness, X is content within its little universe of infinite thought. This solitude is disturbed by the appearance of Y, who insists on exposing X to the richness of the physical world. Each begins to long for what the other has, luring them into a strange loop.In this play for two variables, Marcus du Sautoy and Victoria Gould use mathematics and theatre to navigate the furthest reaches of our world. Through a series of surreal episodes, X and Y tackle some of life's greatest questions: where did the universe come from, does time have an end, do we have free will?I is a Strange Loop was first performed by the authors at the Barbican Pit, London, in March 2019.'I is a Strange Loop is a play that plays... with ideas, concepts, abstractions and relationships that are, usually, hidden from the sight of ordinary mortals, articulating the ineffable, incarnating the incorporeal, revealing the inconceivable... it makes us feel we know a great deal more than we do.... and is also very funny, utterly compelling and marvellously human.' Simon McBurney
Big Brother is watching you . . .Under the all-seeing eye of Big Brother, Winston Smith spends his days in the Ministry of Truth, rewriting the past for the Party. Despite constant surveillance and the ever-present threat of repression, he starts to inwardly question the regime. A note from a colleague - 'I love you' - marks the beginning of a secret affair that breaks all the rules. But what will happen when they are found out?This classic dystopian novel is a vision of life under a totalitarian regime, where every thought or action could bring the Thought Police to the door . . .Now with a stunningly sinister cover by Nathan Burton.
Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) was one of the best-loved English poets of the twentieth century, his verse admired by contemporaries including Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot. This volume presents a new selection of de la Mare's finest poems, including perennial favourites such as 'Napoleon', 'Fare Well' and 'The Listeners', for a twenty-first-century audience. The poems are accompanied by commentaries by William Wootten, which build up a portrait of de la Mare's life, loves and friendships with the likes of Hardy, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas and Katherine Mansfield. They also point out the fascinating references to literature, folklore and the natural world that embroider the verse.
Indiana Bones is a shaggy dog with a difference. He's got superpowers and can sniff out criminals and - with his young friend and owner Aisha - solve mysteries that would flummox the world's more expert detectives!In their first case, they are on the trail of treasure hidden centuries ago by a legendary knight known as The Lonely Avenger, an adventure which takes them all the way to Egypt and the pyramids.A hugely inventive new series from one of the funniest author/illustrator teams in the business.
The perfect coming-of-age romance by the most spectacularly funny and original debut voice.My name is Ellie. Ellie Pillai . . . And I suppose I am a little bit weird, but then, aren't we all, just a little bit?Most days, Ellie Pillai is somewhere between invisible, and not very cool - and usually she's okay with that. But suddenly, Ellie feels different. Maybe it's the new boy at school who makes her brain explode into rainbows every time she sees him (and also happens to be going out with her best friend), or maybe it's her new drama teacher, the one who seems to have noticed she exists. Suddenly, her misfit style, her skin colour, her songwriting and all that getting lost in the music in her head seem to be okay too. Because maybe standing out isn't a bad thing after all.'I adored this.' Simon James Green, author of Alex in Wonderland'I loved the fresh and original voice.' Bookseller, Highlights of the Season'A hilarious and heart-warming story.' Aisha Bushby, author of A Pocketful of Stars'Warm, funny and hopeful.' A M Dassu, author of Boy, Everywhere'A fresh, funny, feel-good story.' Rashmi Sirdeshpande
As the Takács welcomes a new violist during the COVID-19 pandemic, Britten's string quartets shape the ensemble's experience of rehearsing at home. Combining travel writing with revealing and humorous insights into the working lives of string quartet musicians, Distant Melodies illuminates the relationship between music and home.
Introduced by Petina Gappah, a lost classic by a radical black South African author: as exiled African activists in post-war London plot to revolutionise their native countries, idealism and tragedy collide when they return home as political leaders ... Those men who are history now; did they feel like this? >Inspired by Peter Abrahams' befriending of future African heads of state in mid-century London, A Wreath for Udomo (1956) is a radical lost classic, unforgettably exploring the nature of freedom, power, leadership and love. 'The forerunner of an entire school of African literary art.' Sunday Times
Featuring essays from David Olusoga, Dawn Butler MP, Kit de Waal, Kwame Kwei-Armah, and many more.In response to the international outcry at George Floyd's death, Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder have commissioned this collection of essays to discuss how and why we need to fight for Black lives to matter - not just for Black people but for society as a whole.Recognising Black British experience within the Black Lives Matter movement, nineteen prominent Black figures explain why Black lives should be celebrated when too often they are undervalued. Drawing from personal experience, they stress how Black British people have unique perspectives and experiences that enrich British society and the world; how Black lives are far more interesting and important than the forces that try to limit it."e;We achieve everything not because we are superhuman. We achieve the things we achieve because we are human. Our strength does not come from not having any weaknesses, our strength comes from overcoming them"e; Doreen Lawrence."e;I always presumed racism would always be here, that it was a given. But the truth is, it was not always here, it was invented."e; David Olusoga"e;Our identity and experience will shape every story, bleed into every poem, inform every essay whether it's about Black 'issues' or not"e; Kit de Waal
A gripping investigation into one of Irish history's greatest mysteries, Great Hatred reveals the true story behind one of the most significant political assassinations to ever have been committed on British soil.'Heart-stopping . . . The book is both forensic and a page-turner, and ultimately deeply tragic, for Ireland as much as for the murder victim.'MICHAEL PORTILLO'Gripping from start to finish. McGreevy turns a forensic mind to a political assassination that changed the course of history, uncovering a trove of unseen evidence in the process.'ANITA ANAND, author of The Patient Assassin'Thoughtful and well-researched . . . an important and valuable addition to the library of the Irish Revolution.'PROFESSOR DIARMAID FERRITER, University College DublinOn 22 June 1922, Sir Henry Wilson - the former head of the British army and one of those credited with winning the First World War - was shot and killed by two veterans of that war turned IRA members in what was the most significant political murder to have taken place on British soil for more than a century. His assassins were well-educated and pious men. One had lost a leg during the Battle of Passchendaele. Shocking British society to the core, the shooting caused consternation in the government and almost restarted the conflict between Britain and Ireland that had ended with the Anglo-Irish Treaty just five months earlier. Wilson's assassination triggered the Irish Civil War, which cast the darkest of shadows over the new Irish State. Who ordered the killing? Why did two English-born Irish nationalists kill an Irish-born British imperialist? What was Wilson's role in the Northern Ireland government and the violence which matched the intensity of the Troubles fifty years later? Why would Michael Collins, who risked his life to sign a peace treaty with Great Britain, want one of its most famous soldiers dead, and how did the Wilson assassination lead to Collins' tragic death in an ambush two months later?Drawing upon newly released archival material and never-before-seen documentation, Great Hatred is a revelatory work that sheds light on a moment that changed the course of Irish and British history for ever.
What do doctors do all day?Meet Mr and Mrs Dr Doctor!Mrs Dr Doctor attends to Freddie Fox. Mr Dr Doctor rides in an ambulance . . . and Mrs Dr Doctor has a baby!Two enchanting stories outlining just how vital doctors are to our lives. Another classic from one of the founding fathers of children's illustration.'An awe-inspiring legacy.' Dapo Adeola'Treasure troves of detail.' Chris Mould'A delight.' Sara Ogilvie'What a talent.' David Tazzyman'The epitome of charm.' Sheena Dempsey'One of my favourite illustrators.' Allen Fatimaharan'So much fun.' Neal Layton'Zen-like chaos.' Rikin Parekh'Extraordinarily detailed illustrations.' Arthur Robins
Here is a story that everyone should know.It's the tale of a princess named Shiloh.She lived in a kingdom, not far from yours,in a grand house with a swimming pool and fourteen floors.I know that sounds too big but here's the thing:her mother and father were the Queen and King.Being a princess is a tough job for someone so small.It's even harder when you have a problem you can't solve at all.You see, every princess in the kingdom could sing.Yet Shiloh's voice could do no such thing . . .Shiloh might not be able to sing like her sisters, but she has other talents, and sometimes it's about embracing your differences and celebrating them!
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