The Royal Court Theatre is one of the primary forums in the development of post-war drama. Under the title of the English Stage Company the theatre's house actors and dramatists commissioned and produced some of the most influential plays in modern theatre history, including the works of Brenton, Churchill, Bond and Osborne. The story of the Royal Court is also the history of the contemporary stage. In this absorbing account of the theatre's history from 1956 to 1998, Philip Roberts draws on previously unpublished archives in both public and private collections and a series of interviews with people prominent in the Court's life. The book also includes a Foreword by the former Director of the Royal Court, Max Stafford-Clark. The result is an intimate account of the working of the foremost house of modern drama and its relationships to the world of the theatre in Britain and abroad.
This book is an in-depth exploration of the Popular Front and United Front campaigns in Britain in the late 1930s. Dr Blaazer aims to dispel the myth that these campaigns can be understood largely as a ruse engineered by the Communists into which non-Communists were blindly drawn. Instead he searches for the idea of 'progressive unity' in earlier episodes in the history of the British progressive tradition. By re-assessing the significance of these episodes, and by reconsidering the role of seminal progressive thinkers, he shows that the relationships between liberals and socialists, reformists and revolutionaries, had long been both intimate and fluid. Indeed, the reasons and assumptions behind individual decisions to support the struggle for progressive unity show that the Popular Front was a reasoned and culturally familiar response to a major political crisis.
“[An] exceptionally interesting and intimate oral history . . . Against a background of motels and all-night caf?s and strikes, the high relief in which the characters stand out is truly fascin
This is a fully edited translation of a series of essays by the great Swedish dramatist August Strindberg. The essays, edited and translated by Michael Robinson, have been selected for the light they shed, both directly and indirectly, on Strindberg's contribution to the European theatre, firstly in such masterpieces of psychological realism as The Father and Miss Julie, and subsequently in those works, including A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata, with which he largely established a basis for theatrical modernism. Together with the accompanying notes and commentary, these essays on psychology, history, painting, natural history and alchemy as well as the theatre, help to clarify the multifaceted nature of Strindberg's project. Idiosyncratic and lively, they offer crucial insights into the intellectual history of the late nineteenth century, while their personal nature draws the reader into an intimate relationship with the writer and his wide range of interests.
Stories of Art is James Elkins's intimate history of art. Concise and original, this engaging book is an antidote to the behemoth art history textbooks from which we were all taught. As he demonstrate
Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, played at the Globe, and also in an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars. The year 2014 witnessed the opening of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, based on seventeenth-century designs of an indoor London theatre and built within the precincts of the current Globe on Bankside. This volume, edited by Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, asks what prompted the move to indoor theatres, and considers the effects that more intimate staging, lighting and music had on performance and repertory. It discusses what knowledge is required when attempting to build an archetype of such a theatre, and looks at the effects of the theatre on audience behaviour and reception. Exploring the ways in which indoor theatre shaped the writing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the late Jacobean and early Caroline periods, this book will find a substantial readership among scholars of Shakespeare and Jacobean theatre history.
Here is an intimate pictorial history featuring rare and many unpublished color photographs of the Yankees from the golden age of the celebrated baseball team. Yankee Colors tells the story of the leg
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MARIE CLAIRE AND ESQUIRE“One of our major novelists” (Salman Rushdie) tells the story of a woman reflecting on her uncompromising life, and the life of a former lover, in this provocative novel.“Yiyun Li is one of my favorite writers, and Must I Go is an extraordinary book.”—Meg Wolitzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion and The InterestingsLilia Liska has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair.Increasingly obsessed with Roland's intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events, revealing the surprising, long-held secrets of her past. She returns inexorably to the memory of her daughter Lucy. This is a novel about life
Medicine is concerned with the most intimate aspects of private life. Yet it is also a focus for diverse forms of public organization and action. In this volume, an international team of scholars use
The Ayyubid and Mamluk periods were two of the most intellectually vibrant in Islamic history. Megan H. Reid's book, which traverses three centuries from 1170 to 1500, recovers the stories of medieval men and women who were renowned not only for their intellectual prowess but also for their devotional piety. Through these stories, the book examines trends in voluntary religious practice that have been largely overlooked in modern scholarship. This type of piety was distinguished by the pursuit of God's favor through additional rituals, which emphasized the body as an instrument of worship, and through the rejection of worldly pleasures, and even society itself. Using an array of sources including manuals of law, fatwa collections, chronicles, and obituaries, the book shows what it meant to be a good Muslim in the medieval period and how Islamic law helped to define holy behavior. In its concentration on personal piety, ritual, and ethics the book offers an intimate perspective on medie
European art cinema includes some of the most famous films in cinema history. It is elite filmmaking that stands in direct opposition to popular cinema; and yet, it also has an intimate relationship w
Stories of Art is James Elkins's intimate history of art. Concise and original, this engaging book is an antidote to the behemoth art history textbooks from which we were all taught. As he demonstrate
Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, played at the Globe, and also in an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars. The year 2014 witnessed the opening of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, based on seventeenth-century designs of an indoor London theatre and built within the precincts of the current Globe on Bankside. This volume, edited by Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, asks what prompted the move to indoor theatres, and considers the effects that more intimate staging, lighting and music had on performance and repertory. It discusses what knowledge is required when attempting to build an archetype of such a theatre, and looks at the effects of the theatre on audience behaviour and reception. Exploring the ways in which indoor theatre shaped the writing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the late Jacobean and early Caroline periods, this book will find a substantial readership among scholars of Shakespeare and Jacobean theatre history.
A study of the lived history of nineteenth-century British imperialism through the lives of one extended family in North America, the Caribbean and the United Kingdom. The prominent colonial governor James Douglas was born in 1803 in what is now Guyana, probably to a free woman of colour and an itinerant Scottish father. In the North American fur trade, he married Amelia Connolly, the daughter of a Cree mother and an Irish-Canadian father. Adele Perry traces their family and friends over the course of the 'long' nineteenth-century, using careful archival research to offer an analysis of the imperial world that is at once intimate and critical, wide-ranging and sharply focused. Perry engages feminist scholarship on gender and intimacy, critical analyses about colonial archives, transnational and postcolonial history and the 'new imperial history' to suggest how this period might be rethought through one powerful family located at the British Empire's margins.
The push for independence in African nations was ultimately an incomplete process, with the people often left to wrestle with a partial, imperfect legacy. Rather than settle for liberation in name alone, the people engaged in an ongoing struggle for meaningful freedom. Phyllis Taoua shows how the idea of freedom in Africa today evolved from this complex history. With a pan-African, interdisciplinary approach, she synthesizes the most significant issues into a clear, compelling narrative. Tracing the evolution of a conversation about freedom since the 1960s, she defines three types and shows how they are interdependent. Taoua investigates their importance in key areas of narrative interest: the intimate self, gender identity, the nation, global capital, and the spiritual realm. Allowing us to hear the voices of African artists and activists, this compelling study makes sense of their struggle and the broad importance of the idea of freedom in contemporary African culture.
This book examines the interplay between astronomy and dynastic power in the course of ancient Egyptian history, focusing on the fundamental role of astronomy in the creation of the pyramids and the monumental temple and burial complexes. Bringing to bear the analytical tools of archaeoastronomy, a set of techniques and methods that enable modern scholars to better understand the thought, religion and science of early civilizations, Giulio Magli provides in-depth analyses of the pyramid complexes at Giza, Abusir, Saqqara and Dahshur, as well as of the Early Dynastic necropolis at Abydos and the magnificent new Kingdom Theban temples. Using a variety of data retrieved from study of the sky and measurements of the buildings, he reconstructs the visual, symbolic and spiritual world of the ancient Egyptians and thereby establishes an intimate relationship among celestial cycles, topography and architecture. He also shows how they were deployed in the ideology of the pharaoh's power in the
""My father was born into war," begins this remarkable saga in Alisse Waterston's intimate ethnography, a story that is also twentieth century social history. This is an anthropologist's vivid account
The push for independence in African nations was ultimately an incomplete process, with the people often left to wrestle with a partial, imperfect legacy. Rather than settle for liberation in name alone, the people engaged in an ongoing struggle for meaningful freedom. Phyllis Taoua shows how the idea of freedom in Africa today evolved from this complex history. With a pan-African, interdisciplinary approach, she synthesizes the most significant issues into a clear, compelling narrative. Tracing the evolution of a conversation about freedom since the 1960s, she defines three types and shows how they are interdependent. Taoua investigates their importance in key areas of narrative interest: the intimate self, gender identity, the nation, global capital, and the spiritual realm. Allowing us to hear the voices of African artists and activists, this compelling study makes sense of their struggle and the broad importance of the idea of freedom in contemporary African culture.
An intimate memoir from international pop star Melanie Chisholm--better known as Mel C. or Sporty Spice--chronicling her trajectory from small-town girl to overnight icon as part of the Spice Girls.I never told my story before because I wasn't ready. Now, finally, I am.25 years ago, The Spice Girls, a girl band that began after five women answered an ad in the paper, released their first single. 'Wannabe' became a hit and from that moment, Melanie Chisholm’s life changed forever.Almost overnight, Melanie went from small town girl to Sporty Spice, part of one of the biggest music groups in history, releasing hit after hit, performing in packed arenas, and spreading the message of Girl Power to the world. It was everything Mel had dreamed of growing up: The BRITs! A movie! Travelling the world playing iconic venues like Madison Square Garden, Wembley Stadium and the London 2012 Olympics!When you're a woman, though, that power can be easily taken away by those around you, whether by press
