United Kingdom Books

very comprehensive especially for shopping. needs an updated edition. tells you where everything is.

I used this book extensively when visiting London during a study-abroad in 1995. I was hoping to find a newer, updated version, as I am planning to return to London this year. Instead, I will drag out my well-worn copy and use it!

Nearly eight years after its publication, and almost five since the (relatively) highly observed centenary of Noël Coward's birth, I'm amazed to see that I'm apparently the first person to review this biography on Amazon.com. When I first read it several years ago, I was struck by Hoare's thoroughness, his dispassion, and his wide-ranging research. While this book may not be flawless, it's certainly good enough, I believe, to be the current standard biography of the man.

Despite Coward's reputation as the quintessence of high-class sophistication and airy panache, Hoare shows how the man was shaped by his distinctly unglamorous childhood. His days as a hard-working child actor are thoroughly explored, as are his relationships with colleagues, lovers, competitors, and friends. While not prurient, Hoare clearly loves a good story, and doesn't mind dealing dish (as they say) on his subject when he has one to tell.

Though not really a devotee of theater generally, I am a fan of Coward's. Having read a few titles about the man, I don't hesitate to say this is the best of the lot. Whether you're a student of the man or a casual acquaintance who wants to know more about one of the outstanding talents of the last century, Philip Hoare's biography is a resource to read, enjoy, and keep close to hand.

Philip Hoare has compiled the most complete of all the Coward biographies and I think I have read them all save Cole Lesley's. Hoare points out dramatically what a complicated personality Coward was and how his sexual orientation impacted his talent and his fame.
I worked with Coward late in his life (1960/61) and knew only his celebrity. His autobiographies and most of the other bios dealt only on that level. It took Hoare and the passage of time to reveal the more complicated and private side of his amazing life.
I will always cherish my brief encounter with the Master.

This is a superb book. If you are looking for a general and strictly Norman survey, this book isn't for you. I only read up through the chapters on William, so I can't speak for the rest of the book. BUT - from what I have read the author means to describe the story of the dynastic line... not Norman adventures and antics in the 11th century. The book focuses on the development of the Counts of Rouen and Dukes of Normandy, and their ultimate conquest of England.

So if you are in need of a short introduction into Norman ducal growth and its relationship with England, then I highly suggest this book. I suggest it even if you aren't looking for that, it's a great read either way.

The Normans, like their Viking relations, were adventurers par excellence. David Crouch also reveals cool headed calculation and organised government to be the underlying pattern of their success; illuminating this early period through sensible reconstruction, Crouch shows `how quickly complete outsiders could take possession of and transform the structures of power within a region'.

Nevertheless, fortune could tip either way in this precarious world of flux. At the close of the first millennium Wessex is `systematically plundered' by Vikings, spurring the King of England, Ethelred the Unready, into a marriage alliance with Emma, sister to Duke Richard II of Normandy...`The Normans could conceivably have closed their ports to the Vikings, as the English had wanted, but the retaliation might have been dreadful. If the Normans had refused to be Viking collaborators, they would then have been potential victims. This fear alone guaranteed a reception for Viking ships in Normandy'...The astute Duke Richard II steered his realm between the shoals of Viking freebooters and firmly entrenched Frankish mainlanders.

Meanwhile Ethelred recklessly massacres a Danish population in the south east of England bringing an `aggressive and expansionist Danish kingdom towards the shores of England.' William the Conqueror would soon enter the fray of this viscous Nordic cockpit, tipping England's fortune Normandy's way. The rest, as they say, is history. The entire story of these incredible events is impeccable history when told by David Crouch. This is one modest volume well worth its shelf space.

This book should be required reading for all high school seniors. A course should be taught on the follies and horrors of war, with this book at the core. A course that teaches that all men are brothers in the end. Gibbs has done an amazing job here of describing World War I. Everything, from the mud and slime, bits of decomposed bodies, stupidity of G.H.Q. and those who ran the war, misguided patriotism, to the questioning of the Christianity of both sides, that could lead to such butchering of young men. 900,000 in England alone! And only 20 years later . . . . Giibbs knew it would happen. How?

I recommend this book for anyone who can read. I knew very little about WW1 other than vague impressions about "trenches" etc. This book prompted me to read other books on the subject. It is very hard to put down, and it will change you forever once you read it. I think it should be mandatory reading for students.

One of the problems of so many texts aimed at E.S.L. students is that they use only material from the country of publication. This book draws on so many diverse sources for its passages, including some from the countries of origin of many of those students. What could be better? Although many of the passages are just parts of the overall work (e.g., not all of a Shakespearean play), they are wonderful selections showing a great diversity of literature. Bravo to McRae and Vethamani for coming up with such a brilliant idea (in the British sense of brilliant) and producing this most interesting book.

A must read for students of ELT. Provides great hints and techniques for teaching of literature. A major difference from other books and definately a plus point is the extensive use of Asian literature in the book.

This book is one of the best sports reference books ever written. Byron Butler has assembled a season-by-season analysis of the Football Association Challenge Cup, dating right from the start(1871). Every final(and replay) gets covered with team-listings, attendance figures, photographs, and statistics. There are also lots of photogarphs and advertisements from down the years, lots of interesting related material(info on star playes, the men who founded the competition, the giant killers etc. etc.) This, added to the fact that Mr Butler is obviously a devout fan, passionate about the game, make this a must buy for any fan of football("soccer" to Americams).

This book is one of the best sports reference books ever written. Byron Butler has assembled a season-by-season analysis of the Football Association Challenge Cup, dating right from the start(1871). Every final(and replay) gets covered with team-listings, attendance figures, photographs, and statistics. There are also lots of photogarphs and advertisements from down the years, lots of interesting related material(info on star playes, the men who founded the competition, the giant killers etc. etc.) This, added to the fact that Mr Butler is obviously a devout fan, passionate about the game, make this a must buy for any fan of football("soccer" to Americams).

A.L.F. Schaumann's "On the Road with Wellington" is a delightful memoir of his service as a deputy assistant commissary officer during the Peninsular War. Schaumann's duties as a civilian supply officer for various units took him everywhere the Anglo-Portuguese Army went on campaign during the period 1808-1812. As a non-combatant, Schaumann's story focuses on the mundane tasks required to keep an army quartered and fed, but his eye for detail captures vignettes of the soldiers and civilians with whom he dealt. His gift for narrative provides the reader with a strong of sense of what it was like to be on campaign in that era. His account of the retreat of the British Army under Sir John Moore to Corunna under horrendous conditions in the winter of 1808-1809 is particularly vivid (and heartbreaking).

This is not a battlefield account, although Schaumann was close enough to the fighting to pass on some accounts of battles. Nor is this in any sense a history of the Peninsular War. Strategy and politics are played out well above Schaumann's head, and even Wellington is glimpsed only in passing. The average reader will sometimes be dependent on the footnotes to understand what is happening in the larger war. What Schaumann does provide is the human level detail that makes such a distant conflict real for the modern reader. It is no wonder that writers such as Bernard Cornwell of the Sharps series happily mined Schaumann's memoir for material. Cornwell provides an introduction to complement the translater's preface and the author's own introduction, all well worth reading for the context of Schaumann's story.

This book is highly recommended to students of the Peninsular War. It may also be of interest to the casual reader with some background in the Napoleonic Wars.

Greenhill Books has done students of the Peninsular War a great favor with this addition to their Napoleonic Library. August Schaumann, a 30-year old Hanoverian served as a commissary for the King's German Legion, paints an incredible picture of Britain's war in Iberia while maintaining a running travelog with wry humor and succint observations. Whether describing the horrendous retreat to Corunna, his cook (the Witch of Endor), the small kissable feet of a young lady, or the peculiarities of the English, French, Spainish and Portugese his insightful pen entertains and educates without stopping. His small book will make you roar with laughter and sigh sadly at man's inhumanity to man.

Orwell's life was not very mysterious. He left ample traces in his early novels, his essays, journalism and published letters. Still, if you want it as a coherent story instead of a jigsaw puzzle, this book is the place to go. And you get some surprises into the bargain.
Like: I had not realized that what Eric's father did as a professional in the India colonial service throughout his life was the most obnoxious work that he could possibly have done: he was a minor official in the opium authority, which was in charge of maintaining the official opium cultivation and exportation to China.
That, combined with Eric's own 5 years as a policeman in Burma must have put a heavy load of guilt on the young man's mind and conditioned him towards his urge for self-destructiveness that led him to live as a bum and to volunteer for a civil war. Shelden writes that Blair/Orwell had a deep sense of inadequacy throughout his life. Sounds about right.
As an admirer of Orwell's prose, I found the tales of Blair's poetic struggles in young life quite enlightening. Orwell was a man who loved the sound of words. Much of his criticism was about poetry. May that be the foundation for the clarity and simplicity of his writing?
A nice little anecdote (not that many of them in the book): Shelden says Blair was always an aggressive critic, as demonstrated by his habit of using disliked books for target practice as a police officer in Burma.
This bio is the 3rd attempt to write a complete one (i.e. other than the ex-girlfriend's or younger sister's partial view). The first one was seriously hampered by Sonia's refusal to cooperate and even to let the authors (Stansky/Abrahams) quote Orwell's work. The second one (Crick) was 'official', i.e. approved by Sonia, but then it displeased her strongly. Shelden's was written after Sonia's death and with approval by the literary executor.
I am not sure it is the last word, it came out in 91, but it is not a waste of time.

Professor Shelden's biography of Orwell is outstanding and well-researched. Prof. Shelden provides the important details of the molding of Eric Blair- boyhood, school, service in Burma for the Empire- and explains how each experience influenced young Blair yet he doesn't try to feed the reader psychobabble hogwash. Orwell's fitful rise as a writer is especially interesting. Prof. Shelden explains Orwell's various ideological wars and paints a portrait of a non-doctrinaire, humanist socialist who was a more astute critic of Stalinism or ideological socialism than anyone to his right. What I found refreshing about Prof. Shelden's account is that the reader finishes the bio without really knowing the writer's own politics. He allows Orwell to speak for himself.

Marcus' study of the underbelly of the staid and proper Victorian era is a fascinating look at the rampant pornography, prositution, and licentiousness that bubbled up behind the scenes. Quoting liberally from the writings of Henry Spencer Ashbee (generally ceded to be the author of "My Secret Life"-- Marcus has his doubts) and others, he exposes the boisterous and life-affirming erotic life that sprang up in spite of (because of?) the deeply inhibited society of the time. For those with an interest in Victorian sociology or literature, this will prove a valuable read.

This is a study of pornography in Victorian England. It gave rise to considerable comment when it was first published 40 years ago. It seems to be largely forgotten now, and while I was surprised to find it had not been given a previous notice here I reflected that if my eye had not lit on it by chance in a second-hand bookshop a couple of weeks ago I myself would never have read it to this day. Steven Marcus is or was a professor of English at Columbia. He has written a book on Dickens, but his area of specialisation also includes Freud. Equipped, therefore, with this eminently relevant background he acceded to persuasion, he tells us, to illuminate a murky chapter in English letters, and it seems to me that he has made rather a good job of it.

I trust it hardly needs saying that this is a serious work of scholarship and analysis, not some nudge-nudge production. By `serious' I don't mean or imply that it is solemn. Marcus has a very nice turn of academic sarcasm at times, and I treasure a few gems such as `There is about as little truth in this description as is compatible with the laws of probability'. A sense of humour and a sense of the ridiculous are needed to deal with a topic like this in a satisfactory way, and the author either is or puts up a good show of being a well-adjusted, emotionally balanced and admirably rational human being who has been able to evaluate what the human, or at least the human male, sexual experience amounts to. Pornography seems to be almost entirely written by men for men. A certain amount of the material that Marcus uses as illustration is written in a female persona, but this is usually a pretext for male self-reassurance with the putative women thrilled and amazed at the wondrous male body. A certain amount more is written from the male perspective, but again this seems to be largely concerned with the pornographer's concern to reinforce his estimate, be it actual or hopeful, of his own effectiveness. Such writers claim intimate acquaintance with far more female bodies than it has been my own good fortune to experience, but one really striking feature seems to be basic ignorance of some of the elements of female anatomy - indeed also of their own male anatomy it sometimes seemed to me. Such is the mesmeric power of fantasy, it would appear.

The book is very well put together, and very clear about what topics it wants to address. Marcus begins with three particular works that deserve detailed comment in their own right, and he proceeds via some minor efforts that typify other aspects of the genre to the sort of thing one expects and demands in a serious and professional study - the origins of this kind of writing, its style and the significance of its vocabulary and idiom, the light it sheds on the world it took place in, its relevance to his own era, and, finally and very properly, some generalised reflections of his own regarding sexuality. The obvious place to begin was with Dr William Acton. From what Marcus tells me, Acton's study of prostitution seems surprisingly sympathetic and perceptive. His more generalised study of sexuality is, sadly, something else. In the first place it more or less ignores the entire female sex, and in the second it invites mockery and ridicule for its Victorian attitudes and myths. Masturbation was a cause of not only blindness and madness, one gathers, but also potentially of bankruptcy, so the wonder is not only how the human race survived at all but also how a modern economy can have developed. However behind this absurdity what stares out at us is fear of and disgust at the sexual process in general. This, as I read the book, is the distinctively Victorian side of things. Part of the Zeitgeist was an official culture of cant and hypocrisy, and one does not have to be a professor of English at Columbia to read that loud and clear in Dickens and Thackeray. As a reaction, a subversive counter-culture arose, created and exploited by those with enough money, but with elements of downright courage and defiance too. If the culture demanded official reticence on matters sexual, those matters didn't go away, they went underground and they developed a thrill of the forbidden in the process. Writing in the 60's Marcus is still able to see this continuing into his own time, but in the 50's his depiction of the Victorian scene was virtually unchanged in some quarters. One might be taught by celibate prelates in a claustrophobic atmosphere of guilt-trips and threats of damnation, and even teenagers commonly got the idea was sex per se was best avoided, at least until marriage, in which approved state it was permissible only for procreation. These days the prelates have lost much of their authority and not only because of lapses in celibacy, as much because a lot of what they taught seems mediaeval nonsense, but the awkwardness and embarrassment surrounding sexual matters was far from neutralised by the liberated 60's. In Arthur C Clarke's The City and the Stars human beings are not reproduced sexually but by a computer, and the sexual act remains only as recreation not procreation. It may be some ultimately desirable goal, but it is a thousand million years off.

In his more general observations Marcus strikes me as sound and perceptive, at least in those where I have any interest in what he is saying. He quotes D H Lawrence as saying that pornography is never entirely pornographic, which may be true for all I would know. However Marcus quotes several works in extenso, and these entirely pornographic sequences confirm for me his interesting remarks about the vocabulary - it is only minimally verbal, more a speech-act as the linguistic philosophers used to say, until it has latterly lost even that functionality as the 4-letter words have degenerated into mere punctuation in vulgar utterance. I shall not even try to assess the professor's learned forays into either psychoanalysis or literary criticism, because these are both fields where my attention wanders more than somewhat - I genuinely pick up some perceptions that strike me as valid and significant, others seem contrived to me, and most often of all I just wouldn't be knowing one way or the other. On the other hand my own limitations do not prevent me from agreeing thoroughly with his finding that with Freud, for the first time in human history, it became possible to discuss sexuality in a neutral way. As for his intriguing conclusion of his own, namely that society, like individuals, may be passing through an adolescent phase - well, you never know. I don't understand how this book has lapsed into obscurity as it has.

Evening Standard, 14 March 2005
A fascinating book...a splendid piece of social history...Mann's witness deserves a distinguished place in 20th-century history

Literary Review, March 5, 2005
'this splendid account of...children in the Second World War provides us with a unique and valuable historical document'

Glasgow Herald
'Mann's book makes for a read that is illuminating and sobering, riveting and sad.'

The Telegraph
'Neither the evacuees nor the reader could ask for a better chronicler than Mann.'

The author, Jessica Mann, was herself an evacuee as a young child. Her parents, as immigrant German Jews, were themselves refugees from the death camps of Germany. When England suffered military disaster after military disaster, invasion seemed imminent. Jessica's parents were almost resigned to their own eventual murder by the Nazis, but hoped to spare their children the fate of many of their uncles, aunts, and cousins who did not manage to get out of Germany in time.
There was an extensive internal evacuation program within the United Kingdom during the war. Many children and some of their parents were relocated to rural areas where the risk of air raids was much less than the major cities. This aspect of the war and some of the effects on postwar British policy are mentioned in this book.
There was a tendency for the upper class to tap their social and family connections to their peers in the British Dominions and in the United States to arrange for the evacuation of their children. This caused such an outbreak of discontent among the lower classes that arrangements were made for the evacuation of some of their children as well. The evacuation mostly ground to a halt after the loss of many evacuee children when their ship was torpedoed.
This book covers some example experiences from children evacuated to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States. Details of various evacuee experiences from departure from home to their evental return to their families is detailed. The political, diplomatic, and social environment in which the evacuees lived is covered in some detail. Some limited discussion about the long-term effects on the children is includes as well.
This book was obviously thoroughly researched and professionally written, as evidenced by the extensive bibliography provided. My only complaint is that the book was written to a required length and many fascinating accounts were omitted to that end. Perhaps the author can remedy this situation with an expanded revision of the book.