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      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2013

        Civvies

        Middle–class men on the English Home Front, 1914–18

        by Laura Ugolini, Bertrand Taithe, Penny Summerfield, Peter Gatrell, Max Jones, Ana Carden-Coyne

        The history of the First World War continues to attract enormous interest. However, most attention remains concentrated on combatants, creating a misleading picture of wartime Britain: one might be forgiven for assuming that by 1918, the country had become virtually denuded of civilian men and particularly of middle-class men who - or so it seems - volunteered en masse in the early months of war. In fact, the majority of middle-class (and other) men did not enlist, but we still know little about their wartime experiences. Civvies thus takes a different approach to the history of the war and focuses on those middle-class English men who did not join up, not because of moral objections to war, but for other (much more common) reasons, notably age, family responsibilities or physical unfitness. In particular, Civvies questions whether, if serviceman were the apex of manliness, were middle-class civilian men inevitably condemned to second-class, 'unmanly' status? ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2019

        Cinema and Radio in Britain and America, 1920–60

        by Jeffrey Richards

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        April 2010

        Humphrey Jennings

        by Keith Beattie, Brian McFarlane, Neil Sinyard

        Humphrey Jennings has been described as the only real poet that British cinema has produced. His documentary films are remarkable records of Britain at peace and war, and his range of representational approaches transcended accepted notions of wartime propaganda and revised the strict codes of British documentary film of the 1930s and 1940s. Poet, propagandist, surrealist and documentary filmmaker - Jennings' work embodies an outstanding mix of startling apprehension, personal expression and representational innovation. This book carefully examines and expertly explains the central components of Jennings' most significant films, and considers the relevance of his filmmaking to British cinema and contemporary experience. Films analysed include Spare Time, Words for Battle, Listen to Britain, Fires Were Started, The Silent Village, A Diary for Timothy and Family Portrait. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        May 2004

        The memory of catastrophe

        by Peter Gray, Kendrick Oliver

        Investigates the dynamic relationship between experiences of profound social and cultural disruption, and human memory. Critical comparisons are made across a wide variety of catastrophic experiences and memories; not just of war, but also of massacre, genocide, rebellion, famine, partition, shipwreck and fire. The book is an accessible showcase for a wide range of methodological approaches to the study of memory, including literary studies, cultural studies, participant-observation and historical studies, and uses a variety of oral, visual and written sources. Offers a diverse chronological and geographical range of catastrophic cases, from seventeenth-century England to the recent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, from Ireland to the Indian sub-continent, from Mexico to wartime Leningrad. Well-written and accessible - a fascinating read. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2019

        Europe on the move

        Refugees in the era of the Great War

        by Peter Gatrell, Liubov Zhvanko, Penny Summerfield

        Mass population displacement affected millions of Europe's civilians across the different theatres of war in 1914-18. At the end of the war, a senior Red Cross official wrote 'there were refugees everywhere. It was as if the entire world had to move or was waiting to move'. Europe on the move is the first attempt to understand their experiences as a whole and to establish the political, social and cultural significance and ramifications of the wartime refugee crisis. Drawing on original research by leading specialists from more than a dozen countries, it will become the definitive work on the subject and will appeal to anyone who wishes to understand how governments and public opinion responded to refugees a century ago.

      • Trusted Partner
        Medicine
        January 2025

        Nursing the English from plague to Peterloo, 1665-1820

        by Alannah Tomkins

        This book studies the negative stereotypes around the women who worked as sick nurses in this period and contrasts them with the lived experience of both domestic and institutional nursing staff. Furthermore, it integrates nursing by men into the broader history of care as a constant if little-recognised presence. It finds that women and men undertook caring work to the best of their ability, and often performed well, despite multiple threats to nurse reputations on the grounds of gender norms and social status. Chapters consider nursing in the home, in general hospitals, in specialist institutions like the Royal Chelsea Hospital and asylums, plus during wartime, illuminated by multiple accounts of individual nurses. In these settings, it employs the sociological concept of 'dirty work' to contextualise the challenges to nurses and nursing identities.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        April 2011

        Anthony Asquith

        by Tom Ryall, Brian McFarlane, Neil Sinyard

        This is the first comprehensive critical study of Anthony Asquith. Ryall sets the director's work in the context of British cinema from the silent period to the 1960s, examining the artistic and cultural influences which shaped his films. Asquith's silent films were compared favourably to those of his eminent contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, but his career faltered during the 1930s. However, the success of Pygmalion (1938) and French Without Tears (1939), based on plays by George Bernard Shaw and Terence Rattigan, together with his significant contributions to wartime British cinema, re-established him as a leading British film maker. Asquith's post-war career includes several pictures in collaboration with Terence Rattigan, and the definitive adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1951), but his versatility is demonstrated in a number of modest genre films including The Woman in Question (1950), The Young Lovers (1954) and Orders to Kill (1958). ;

      • Trusted Partner
        20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000
        October 2013

        Northern Ireland in the Second World War

        Politics, economic mobilisation and society, 1939–45

        by Philip Ollerenshaw

        This original and distinctive book surveys the political, economic and social history of Northern Ireland in the Second World War. Since its creation in 1920, Northern Ireland has been a deeply divided society and the book explores these divisions before and during the war. It examines rearmament, the relatively slow wartime mobilisation, the 1941 Blitz, labour and industrial relations, politics and social policy. Northern Ireland was the only part of the UK with a devolved government and no military conscription during the war. The absence of military conscription made the process of mobilisation, and the experience of men and women, very different from that in Britain. The book's conclusion considers how the government faced the domestic and international challenges of the postwar world. This study draws on a wide range of primary sources and will appeal to those interested in modern Irish and British history and in the Second World War.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        September 2013

        Launder and Gilliat

        by Bruce Babington, Brian McFarlane, Neil Sinyard

        Bruce Babington analyses the achievement of one of the central partnerships in British film history, the screenwriters of famous films by Hitchcock and Carol Reed, who became the producer-writer-directors of a succession of famous and well-loved films including Millions Like Us, Two Thousand Women, Waterloo Road, The Rake's Progress, I See a Dark Stranger, The Blue Lagoon and The Happiest Days of Your Life. This study of the pair is notable both for its contextualising of them within English and British culture over four decades, including British cinema's 'golden age' of the war and immediate post-war years, and for its close reading of films that have been critically neglected, despite their popularity. Scholarly but not pedantic, the book shows its subjects to be not ordinary mainstream practitioners but deceptively serious filmmakers registering the 'ideological weather' of wartime and post-war Britain in engaging and creative ways. ;

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        December 1991

        Réquiem por un Campesino Español

        by Ramon J. Sender, Patricia McDermott

        "equiem per un campesino espanol" was first published under the title Mosen Millan in Coleccion Aquelarre,Mexico, 1953. The present text follows the first Spanish edition published by Destino, Barcelona, 1974, which bears a few minor variants, mainly in paragraph structure. It has been reprinted a number of times and translated into many languages and is one of the most widely read Spanish texts in the 20th century. This edition is aimed primarily at sixth-formers and university undergraduates and the introduction and notes have been compiled in the light of recent socio-politial topic-based syllabuses and communication studies courses. The inclusion in the introduction of a substantial section on the now out-of-print "Contraataque" (1937), the wartime narrative which contains the germ of the post-war novel, is intended to provide the student with a context for the study of the process in Sender's writing inspired by the Civil War - from explicit militant propaganda penned in the heat of battle to implicit poetic parable, historical emotion recollected in the comparative tranquillity and distance of exile. It is hoped that such a juxtaposition will illuminate both the content and literary achievement of "Requiem". ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Fiction
        September 2017

        A Vision of Battlements

        by Anthony Burgess

        by Andrew Biswell, Paul Wake

        A Vision of Battlements is the first novel by the writer and composer Anthony Burgess, who was born in Manchester in 1917. Set in Gibraltar during the Second World War, the book follows the fortunes of Richard Ennis, an army sergeant and incipient composer who dreams of composing great music and building a new cultural world after the end of the war. Following the example of his literary hero, James Joyce, Burgess takes the structure of his book from Virgil's Aeneid. The result is, like Joyce's Ulysses, a comic rewriting of a classical epic, whose critique of the Army and the postwar settlement is sharp and assured. The Irwell Edition is the first publication of Burgess's forgotten masterpiece since 1965. This new edition includes an introduction and notes by Andrew Biswell, author of a prize-winning biography of Anthony Burgess.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2007

        Religion in Revolutionary England

        by Christopher Durston, Judith Maltby

        This book offers a collection of essays tightly focused around the issue of religion in England between 1640 and 1660, a time of upheaval and civil war in England. Edited by well-known scholars of the subject, topics include the toleration controversy, women's theological writing, observance of the Lord's Day and prayer books. To aid understanding, the essays are divided into three sections examining theology in revolutionary England, inside and outside the revolutionary National Church and local impacts of religious revolution. Carefully and thoughtfully presented, this book will be of great use for those seeking to better understand the practices and patterns of religious life in England in this important and fascinating period. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Film theory & criticism
        February 2014

        The Encyclopedia of British Film

        Fourth edition

        by Edited by Brian McFarlane

        With well over 6,300 articles, including over 500 new entries, this fourth edition of The Encyclopedia of British Film is a fully updated invaluable reference guide to the British film industry. It is the most authoritative volume yet, stretching from the inception of the industry to the present day, with detailed listings of the producers, directors, actors and studios behind a century or so of great British cinema. Brian McFarlane's meticulously researched guide is the definitive companion for anyone interested in the world of film. Previous editions have sold many thousands of copies and this fourth edition will be an essential work of reference for enthusiasts interested in the history of British cinema, and for universities and libraries.

      • Biography & True Stories
        January 2018

        Ordinary Heroes

        The Story of Civilian Volunteers in the First World War

        by Sally White

        Ordinary Heroes is the first book to focus on the staggering achievements of hundreds of thousands of civilian volunteers and charity workers, the majority of them women, during the First World War, both at home and abroad. It shows what a mass of untried and frequently untrained women and men from all backgrounds achieved through their innovation, adaptability, bravery and dogged commitment. As Lloyd George said, the war could not have been won without them. As the country was swept by patriotic fervour and a belief that it would all be over by Christmas, many women were as keen as the men to get involved. Organisations were all but overwhelmed by the initial tide of volunteers. They rushed to register for overseas service without knowing the devastating reality that would confront them. Others devoted their time to fundraising, collecting salvage, caring for refugees, working in canteens or helping in any other way they could. Conditions, particularly in the Balkans and Russia, were often appalling and yet the volunteers coped with and even relished the challenges. They came under fire, advanced or retreated with their respective armies, evacuated their patients through baking heat, mud or bitter cold, battled epidemics, performed operations by the light of a single candle, worked through the Russian Revolution and joined the Serbian Army on its Great Retreat. Several groups were taken prisoner. Wherever they worked, they were met with respect and gratitude −and sometimes incredulity that British people, especially gentlewomen, would help foreigners.

      • First World War

        A Township at War

        by Jonathan F. Vance

        A Township at War takes the reader from rural Canadian field and farm to the slopes of Vimy Ridge and the mud of Passchendaele, and shows how a tightly knit Ontario community was consumed and transformed by the trauma of war. In 1914, the southern Ontario township of East Flamborough was like a thousand other rural townships in Canada, broadly representative in its wartime experience. Author Jonathan Vance draws from rich narrative sources to reveal what rural people were like a century ago—how they saw the world, what they valued, and how they lived their lives. We see them coming to terms with global events that took their loved ones to distant battlefields, and dealing with the prosaic challenges of everyday life. Fall fairs, recruiting meetings, church services, school concerts—all are reimagined to understand how rural Canadians coped with war, modernism, and a world that was changing more quickly than they were. This is a story of resilience and idealism, of violence and small-mindedness, of a world that has long disappeared and one that remains with us to this day.

      • Peace studies & conflict resolution
        February 2013

        Wartime Sexual Violence

        Misconceptions, Implications, and Ways Forward

        by Dara Kay Cohen, Amelia Hoover Green, Elisabeth Jean Wood

        Under the collaborative leadership of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP); the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley; the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO); and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute North America (SIPRI North America), this special report is launched to mark the first convening of The Missing Peace Symposium on Sexual Violence in Conflict and Post-Conflict Settings. Over the past eighteen months, this core group of organizations along with others have developed a community of practice made up of scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and military and civil society actors to examine the issues of conflict-related sexual violence, to identify gaps in knowledge and reporting, and to explore how to increase the effectiveness of current responses to such violence. This report summarizes ten major misconceptions about wartime sexual violence, highlighting both advances and gaps in our knowledge. Drawing on social science research, it outlines for policymakers the current state of knowledge about wartime sexual violence, details gaps in existing knowledge, and explores the implications of these findings for policymaking.

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