United Kingdom Books

Duncan Bruce has done it again! I really enjoyed his first book, The Mark Of The Scots. It appears that Bruce is establishing himself as a leading authority in Scottish achievements. This new book consists of an elegantly written and remarkably well researched collection of essays. The Scottish 100 is definitely a must have for history buffs and Scottish enthusiasts alike!

a highly informative, entertainingly and elegantly written overview of some notable Scots. In the age of "Black" centered television, minority based social programs and other unabashed celebrations of racial or genetic pride, it is refreshing to those of us from Scottish stock to read pridefully of our own rich heritage. For the record, I'm for celebrating all cultures deemed worthy of exceptional accomplishments.

Anglo and Celtic-phobes BEWARE! Our little nation has generated quite a few feisty geniuses and raucous rebels.

Alexander Broadie is Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at Glasgow University- a chair once occupied by Adam Smith author of "Wealth of Nations". This book, "The Scottish Enlightenment", written for the general reader, is a great treatise on a most astonishing period of Scottish history during the 18th century. Broadie writes; "that what gave the Scottish Enlightenment its character as a distinct historical movement was the complex set of relations with a group of geniuses and other immensely creative people living in each others intellectual pockets. Broadie writes about the leading Scottish luminaries in the fields of science, philosophy, history, economics, and the arts. Men such as Hume, Smith, Reid, Ferguson and others ideas had an immense influence on the great thinkers of Europe as well as our founding fathers here in America.

The term "Enlightenment" suggests emergence from darkness. There are two essential features of the enlightenment. First, a demand that people think for themselves. You do not take ideas on faith but you inquire study and observe for yourself. Second, social virtue of tolerance of ideas. The state and church cannot punish one for their ideas. This allows literati of men to meet and exchange ideas on a plethora of subjects and to spread these ideas through their writings so that other literati in Europe can comment and react to them. Thinking becomes a civil activity with ideas in the public domain. These men love liberty and are looking to build a better society for humanity. They believe that if morality is about anything it is about - protecting the civilized values vested in society. No wonder these men had a great influence on our founding fathers!

If you are truly interested in a classical education put this book on the top of your reading list! I recommend this book for anyone interested in philosophy, history, political science, and history of America's founding era.

As a person of mildly above average intelligence and a very broad range of interests, I often have friends suggest that I should try out for Jeopardy. My standard [and honest] response [regardless of whether the comment was meant as a compliment or an insult] is that I have incredibly large gaps in my knowledge and I'd probably stink at Jeopardy. Alexander Broadie and his scholarly AND entertaining book The Scottish Enlightenment came to rescue me from one of my more embarrassing knowledge gaps. You'd've figured a person with some Scottish blood in his veins and who teaches at a high school that has a Scottish theme and a Highlander as a mascot would know a whole bunch about the pivotal period in history know as the Scottish Enlightenment?! The knowledge gap surfaced when I read Jack Repcheck's recent biography of James Hutton [The Man Who Found Time]. I researched the available literature on the Scottish Enlightenment and Broadie's book appeared to have the qualities needed to plug my knowledge gap. Written for the interested reader, The Scottish Enlightenment was scholarly enough to give me the short course that I wanted, but interesting and idiosyncratic enough to avoid reading like a textbook. It left me feeling quite satisfied about my knowledge of the Scottish Enlightenment and, like any good book, left me with a few questions to explore further [the connection between the Scottish Enlightenment and the American Revolution - enquiring minds want to know!]. I highly recommend Alexander Broadie's book to anyone with an interest in history, Scotland, the Enlightenment, or the Scottish Enlightenment.

I found this book extremely useful in better understanding the screenwriting process. Even though I have no interest in being a screenwriter, as a film/television buff, I found the book very informative in anaylizing script construction, the ingredients of a quality script, and understanding the relationship of the scriptwriter to the producer, the director, cast, etc. I took a screenwriting course in college, and the text book used in the class was totally useless compared to what Pat Silver-Lasky has written. Every aspect of the scriptwriting process is covered in this book, and the material is logically presented in language that is understandable to even the novice scriptwriter. Nevertheless, even season scriptwriters will find this book useful as well. Ms. Silver-Lasky draws from her personal experience as a successful scriptwriter, instructor, and film enthuasist to create this must have read. At less than $15, one cannot go wrong purchasing this book.

This is a great book for anyone who is interested in screenwriting either as a hobby or as a professional. It gives a straightforward and easy to understand explanation of how to develop your initial idea into a fully blown screenplay. It also includes antidotes, stories and references by the author who has an excellent insight into writing for this medium from her own experience. Pat Silver-Lasky makes you feel that you are being taught on a one-to-one basis, which is something that is rarely achieved from books in this category. Go out, buy it, read it, then start to write that screenplay you have always had at the back of your mind.

A sly fictional account of the good queen's holiday in Jamaica and her improbable adventures there. Lavishly illustrated with whimsical drawings of the black-clad queen kicking up her heels. A delight.

I was intrigued to read an obituary of Routh in the Economist (June 17th, 2008) and wasn't surprised to learn of his reputation as a eternal prankster. He was, it seems, star of the British version of Candid Camera in the UK. In later years he moved to Jamaica and took up painting. The Economist obit described his style thus:

"He painted nuns driving racing cars and flying balloons, the pope windsurfing, Mona Lisa naked or smoking. His favourite subject was the aged Queen Victoria, on an imaginary trip to Jamaica in 1871, doing the hula-hoop or the limbo dance, riding a zebra and driving dodgem cars. He could have found a more prosaic explanation for the missing three months of her reign. But he preferred, as ever, the shock of the absurd, and the sense of the detached voyeur intruding on private space."

Endearing illustrations of a tiny, white veiled Queen Victoria cavorting with courtiers the color of midnight accompany a tongue-in-cheek description of a monarch on a risque holiday adventure. This charming picture book is a wonderful addition for anyone who collects memorabilia from Jamaica.

This book is a well-written, well-informed esoteric guide to the stories of Arthur, his Round Table companions, and the Holy Grail in British and Celtic legend. I found it a beautiful combination of scholarship, psychological and spiritual insight, and intelligent speculation about some of the more ancient origins and meanings of the many stories we have inherited that form part of the Arthurian romances. Anyone who is interested in this tradition, and the mysteries that lie behind it, will find this a fascinating and illuminating commentary. Interpreting ancient myth is a high art because symbolic images reveal their meanings only to those who are prepared to personally engage with the symbols and the entire mystical tradition that supports them. Gareth Knight is an able guide.

This is absolutley one of the best books of its kind available today!Maybe the best book of all times!This book covers a huge amount of esoteric material that is extremely purposeful in todays fast changing times.If you are serious seeker of esoteric wisdom then stick with this book and you will learn lots.The arthurian legends truly are works of faery art to show us our evolutionary way forward as individuals and as a group.These legends show us the proper way of evolutionary developement and they show us what happens when we lose our way.The information in this book along with serious study of the arthurian legends will lead to the rememberance of who you really are and you will be amazed at what you find.The information contained within these pages is priceless and you could spend lifetimes integrating the wisdom and knowledge found within.

My decision to publish Satow's outgoing semi-official letters back to his political masters in London from both Japan and China together was deliberate in that I feel they should be viewed as a continuum, even though it makes for quite a weighty tome. There certainly are numerous references to China in the letters from Japan, and vice versa. Indeed the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) went on while Satow was serving as Britain's envoy in China.

The importance of these letters is that they included private observations which Satow himself deemed inappropriate for the official despatches. For example: "Okuma [Shigenobu]'s resignation is a misfortune. All his ideas were Engl. [English] & he was very well disposed. I was on the point of settling with him several outstanding questions, & now I shall have to begin all over again." (Satow to Lord Salisbury, 3 November 1898) The frustration is clear enough!

Ian Ruxton, editor of The Diaries of Sir Ernest Satow, British Envoy in Peking (1900-06), Vol. 1, The Correspondence of Sir Ernest Satow, British Minister in Japan, 1895-1900 - Volume One and several other books related to Sir Ernest Satow. (For the full list click on my name under the title at the top of this page.)

Diplomats are rather like policemen, they are never truly off-duty, as their private lives are so entwined in their official public duties. An invite to tea was and is often only ostensibly to do with seed cake and Earl Gray, and was and is in reality, a chance to talk business, but informally. On occasions, one of the parties may hope to glean and gain and win leverage through catching their opposite number unawares, much the way an off duty detective will play pool and darts with the local most wanted. This latest installment of the written letters, memos, notes, diary entries and even minor musings, show that ( as the title suggests ) diplomats do have a life away from officialdom; but not that far - and so decorum in the main, has to be maintained, even in the written word. This collection of letters lets us in on the private thoughts of Satow, on his colleagues, on opposite numbers, whether friendly or hostile, and even his surprisingly less than flattering opinions on the wives of some colleagues. This volume, together with Ian Ruxton's other works on this great man, show the man in both suit and plus fours, in pinstripe and flannel, and does so here via the comparatively freer, less shackled semi-official writings therein. Another great installment from a foremost expert ( perhaps the foremost expert ) on Anglo-Asian diplomacy in the late Victorian / Edwardian eras in general, and Sir Ernest Satow in particular. Very well done yet again. John Haines

If you are a fan of the British Invasion or early rock music and gear this book is for you. Dozens of great stories from the early pioneers of British rock. But this book also includes a healthy dose of info about many of Britain's top session aces-including one Jimmy Page. Bass players aren't ignored either. This book is alot of fun to read and is loaded with many great photos as well.

Fantastic book with tales stories and information on early British Rock Bands and their original sound.Great forword by Hank Marvin of The Shadows,stories of Big Jim Sullivan,Vic Flick "James Bond Theme" Paul Kossoff. Highly recommended by my PALS,Elliot Easton and Charlie Watkins.

Pepys's complete diaries are probably the closest thing to time travel that I will ever experience. This condensed edition takes the meat off the bones and serves it up with most of the flavor of the full Latham-edited version.

The passion for women and for books, the details noticed at the Whitehall court of Charles II -- like the king's mistress's freshly-washed underwear hanging on a hedge in the privy garden to dry in the sun! -- and the layered record of the daily routine of a London man living in a time of immense change are fascinating.

Note that this is a fine book for those who enjoy the Patrick O'Brian Aubry and Maturin series too. Pepys was instrumental in taking the British Navy from a ragged mix of merchant ships mixed in with war ships, haphazardly provisioned and manned by politically appointed (i.e. unexamined) officers to the fleet that brought Nelson to victory.

This book is an excellent introduction to Pepys; I recommend it

This diary in this abridged version, has given me more sheer pleasure than any other book I have ever read. Writing for himself alone, Pepys selected things for inclusion in the diary purely on the basis of how they struck him. This grand subjectivity would be fatal in a dull or passive or insensitive writer, but in Pepys it makes the work fresh and vibrant, constantly surprising, unlike anything else in literature. Even when describing an "important" scene, he is still his natural self and gives touches of his own behaviour, like this at the King's coronation: "But so great a noise, that I could make but little of the Musique; and endeed, it was lost to everybody. But I had so great a list to pissse, that I went out a little while before the King had done all his ceremonies...." Not just his behavior, but also his reactions: "As it grew darker, [the fire] appeared more and more, and in Corners and upon steeples and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire." That is from Pepys's stunning account of the first day of the great fire of London. It has no conscious artifice: Pepys's descriptions owe their power to his uncanny knack for expressing how the events struck him. So he gives details which a more "responsible" writer would have overlooked: "Among other things, the poor pigeons I perceive were loath to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies till they were some of them burned, their wings, and fell down." The diary gives us the texture of Pepys's daily life - what he wore, what he ate, what skirts he lifted, and what he paid in hard cash for all this; the plays he saw, how the audiences behaved, the doorman who swindled him out of a shilling; his book collection, his musical instruments, the improvements to his apartment; his growing wealth, from sources bright and shady; his bowels and his testicles; the list is endless. Along with stories that are variously amusing, touching, shocking, there are episodes like this: "Before going to bed, I stood writing of this day its passages - while a drum came by, beating of a strange manner of beat, now and then a single stroke; which my wife and I wondered at, what the meaning of it should be." And this: "I sat up till the bell-man came by with his bell, just under my window as I was writing of this very line, and cried 'Past one of the clock, and a cold, frosty, windy morning.' One of the topics is Pepys himself - his thoughts, feelings and actions, and his thoughts and feelings about these. He had a lively inner life, was intimately in touch with it, and had the ability to know at any given moment how he felt and to write about it clearly and purely. We get Pepys warts and all. He does not pose for his self-portrait. When a stranger importunes his wife, he records, "I did give him a good cuff or two on the chops; and seeing him not oppose me, I did give him another". This is not the writing of someone who wants to be a hero to his diary! He freely criticizes himself, particularly for his capacity - amazing in one so able and successful - for neglecting work and career in the pursuit of pleasure. After a bout with one of his mistresses, he went to see another but found that she was away: "So I back again to my office, where I did with great content faire a vow to mind my business and laisser aller les femmes for a month; and am with all my heart glad to find myself able to come to so good a resolution, that thereby I may follow my business, which, and my honour thereby, lies a-bleeding." (Where sex is the topic, Pepys usually scatters French and Spanish words through his text.) Sometimes he scolds himself for his feelings. After appearing before a tribunal of inquiry, and concluding that he is not in much trouble, he writes: "And yet though this be all, yet I do find so poor a spirit within me, that it makes me almost out of my wits, and puts me to so much pain that I...vex and fret and imagine myself undone - so that I am ashamed of myself to myself, and do fear what would become of me if any real affliction should come upon me." He later remarks that the tribunal had treated him "as a Criminall", kept him waiting and made him stand; but he seems not to have reflected that that is why he was so depressed. He is always interested in his inner life and willing to respond to it, judge it, lament it, rejoice in it; but as a child of his times he is not challenged to try to understand it. The Navy Board, and therefore Pepys himself, were potentially in much greater trouble only a month later. He did not collapse. His three-hour speech to Parliament was a triumph, though he describes it in less than a sentence: "I begin our defence most acceptably and smoothly, and continued at it without any hesitation or losse but with full scope and all my reason free about me, as if it had been at my own table...". Pepys was able to enjoy HIMSELF, to take his triumphs without vainglory and his reverses without self-deception. He had, as Robert Latham puts it, "a gift for happiness that amounts to genius".

Having first discovered Vanessa Bell through an interest in her sister, Virginia Woolf, I consider myself entirely unqualified to judge her status as a painter. The woman who emerges from these short pieces, however, is witty, honest, and deeply intelligent. The memoirs of her childhood, which comprise the first three selections, are filled with humor and warmth, with the sharper side of her wit directed chiefly at her elder half-brother, George Duckworth. George is also the primary subject of the fourth essay, and it says much of Bell's writing that he comes across as ludicrous (at best) and yet utterly believable. The remaining memoirs are more generous and less acerbic, particularly one about Bell's friend and former lover Roger Fry, recalling the ways in which their love converged with the expansion and evolution of Vanessa's painting. The portrait of Fry is that of a kind, open-handed man, brilliant as a teacher if not as a painter; Vanessa, despite being "not a writer," manages to convey deep emotion with dignity and a wonderful lack of sentimentality.

Perhaps my favorite piece is the final one, a lecture Vanessa gave to students at her son's school. In addition to being hugely amusing, it's one of the clearest and least pretentious discussions I've yet seen on what it means to be a painter.

Read this book--not for the sake of Bloomsbury hype, or for the gossip-value of Bell's unconventional personal life; read it because she was an exceptional woman and artist in her own right and this is as close as we can come now to knowing her.

Having first discovered Vanessa Bell through an interest in her sister, Virginia Woolf, I consider myself entirely unqualified to judge her status as a painter. The woman who emerges from these short pieces, however, is witty, honest, and deeply intelligent. The memoirs of her childhood, which comprise the first three selections, are filled with humor and warmth, with the sharper side of her wit directed chiefly at her elder half-brother, George Duckworth. George is also the primary subject of the fourth essay, and it says much of Bell's writing that he comes across as ludicrous (at best) and yet utterly believable. The remaining memoirs are more generous and less acerbic, particularly one about Bell's friend and former lover Roger Fry, recalling the ways in which their love converged with the expansion and evolution of Vanessa's painting. The portrait of Fry is that of a kind, open-handed man, brilliant as a teacher if not as a painter; Vanessa, despite being "not a writer," manages to convey deep emotion with dignity and a wonderful lack of sentimentality.

Perhaps my favorite piece is the final one, a lecture Vanessa gave to students at her son's school. In addition to being hugely amusing, it's one of the clearest and least pretentious discussions I've yet seen on what it means to be a painter.

Read this book--not for the sake of Bloomsbury hype, or for the gossip-value of Bell's unconventional personal life; read it because she was an exceptional woman and artist in her own right and this is as close as we can come now to knowing her.

This is probably the best book I've read all year. As an English teacher, I appreciate Bate's literary sensibility, and as a citizen of the earth, I value his insights into our environment. I have recommended this book to every intelligent person I know.

Jonathan Bate's short book, 'Romantic Ecology'(1991) was a landmark in literary ecocriticism. In 'The Song of the Earth' Bate has developed his theme further and in doing so has produced an instant classic.

The purpose of the book is to show how poetry is not only relevant but necessary in an age of increasing environmental unease. It is a manifesto for the urgency of 'ecopoetics'. Bate writes: 'This is a book about why poetry continues to matter as we enter a new millennium that will be ruled by technology. It is a book about modern western man's alienation from nature. It is about the capacity of the writer to restore us to the earth which is our home' (vii)

Chapters are as follows: 1. Going, Going 2. The State of Nature 3. A Voice for Ariel 4. Major Weather 5. The Picturesque Environment 6. Nests, Shell, Landmarks 7. Poets, Apes and Other Animals 8. The Place of Poetry 9. What are Poets For?

My favourite chapter is 'Major Weather' which, in some quite startling and original ways, charts the influence of climate on writing . The centre piece of the chapter is a reading of Keat's 'Ode to Autumn' as a 'weather poem', resembling 'a well-regulated ecosystem'. For Bate, the ode 'is not an escapist fantasy which turns its back on the ruptures of Regency culture, as late twentieth century criticism tended to suggest. No: it is a meditation on how human culture can only function through links and reciprocal relations with nature.'(103-4). I learned 'Ode to Autumn' as a schoolchild, and it has always stayed with me. Now I see eloquently expressed the reasons for its significance to me.

Bate has set himself a difficult but worthy task, to argue for poetry as 'the place where we save the earth', that if culture is the cause of environmental destruction it can also be its remedy. This, then, is a book that should be read by everyone with an interest in literature, by everyone with an interest in the continuation of life on the planet.