In the popular imagination the Special Air Service Regiment, or SAS, is perceived as both protector and avenger of the Crown and emblematic of staunch British individualism. In Dangerous Men, John Newsinger analyses the recent glut of popular books, magazines and films based on the activities of the SAS and assesses the aggressive masculinity, graphic violence and military prowess that are represented in many of the works, and their use in perpetuating myths of muscle-flexing nationalism. The book is divided into four parts covering the myth of the SAS analysed through historical works, and its representation in personal memoirs, fiction, survival manuals, TV documentaries and Hollywood film. Through the works examined, Newsinger deconstructs a range of real and imagined scenarios in which the SAS are pitted against an array of perceived enemies of the state, including the representation of the its role in the storming of the Iranian Embassy and in conflicts from the Falklands to the Gulf. Among the works examined are the bestselling memoirs by Michael Paul Kennedy, Andy McNab, Peter de la Billiere, Chris Ryan, and Jenny Simpson; fiction by James Follett, Terence Strong, Gerald Seymour and the Soldier A-Z series; key historical accounts by Philip Warner,Tony Geraghty, James Adams, and Mark Urban; and acclaimed films such as Who Dares Wins and The Rock .

"In The Damned Don't Cry -- They Just Disappear, literary historian and Lamba Award--winning novelist Harlan Greene has created a portrait of a nearly forgotten Southern writer, unearthing information from archives, rare books, film libraries, and small-town newspapers. Greene brings Harry Hervey (1900-1951) to life and explicates his works to reveal him as a hardworking writer and master of many genres, bravely unwilling to conform to conventional values. As Greene illustrates, Hervey's novels, short stories, nonfiction books, and film scripts contain complex mixtures of history and thinly disguised homoerotic situations and themes. They blend local color, naturalism, melodrama, and psychological and sexual truths that provide a view of the circles in which he moved. Living openly with his male lover in Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, Hervey set novels in these cities that scandalized the locals and critics as well. He challenged the sexual mores of his day, sometimes subtly and at other times brazenly presenting texts that told one story to gay male readers, while still courting a mainstream audience. His novels and nonfiction may have been coded and thus escaped detection in their day, but twenty-first-century readers can decipher them easily" --

"Part One examines New York from aristocracy (e.g. Henry James and Edith Wharton), immigrants (e.g. Mario Puzo), African Americans (e.g. Ralph Ellison), Jews (e.g. Daniel Fuchs). Part Two studies variations and themes in works of Stephen Crane, Tom Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Theodore Dreiser. Part Three covers New York theatre from Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller"--Provided by publisher.

Bound in the publisher's original maroon cloth with the spine stamped in gilt.

Derek Jarman worked for more than seven years to complete is feature film based on the life and work of Italian post-Renaissance painter, Caravaggio. This book interprets the film with photographs taken throughout the filming.

Available in paperback for the first time, Jenny Strauss Clay's landmark study of the Odyssey argues that Athena's wrath is central to both the structure and the theme of the epic poem. Clay demonstrates that an appreciation of the thematic role of Athena's anger elucidates the poem's complex narrative organization and its conception of the hierarchical relations between gods and men. This edition includes a new introduction by the author.

First published in 1950, Red Ribbon on a White Horse is Anzia Yezierska's autobiography, her life as she saw it, from the Polish ghetto to the sweatshops of New York's Lower East Side and then to Hollywood, where she was at the height of her success.

This book examines the far-reaching legacy of one of the great myths of classical antiquity. According to Greek legend, Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, secretly buried her brother in defiance of the orders of Creon, king of Thebes. Creon sentenced Antigone to death, but, before the order could be executed, she committed suicide. The theme of the conflict between Antigone and Creon--between the state and the individual, between young and old, between men and women--has captured the Western imagination for more than 2,000 years. Antigone and Creon are as alive in the politics and poetics of our own day as they were in ancient Athens. Here, Steiner examines the treatment of the Antigone theme in Western art, literature and thought, leading us to look again at the unique influence Greek myths exercise on twentieth-century culture. About the Author: George Steiner, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva and Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge

"William Shakespeare's Hamlet is probably the best-known and most commented upon work of literature in Western culture. The paradox is that it is at once utterly familiar and strangely elusive--very like our own selves, argues Gabriel Josipovici in this stimulating and original study. Moreover, our desire to master this elusiveness, to "pluck the heart out of its mystery," as Hamlet himself says, precisely mirrors what is going on in the play; and what Shakespeare's play demonstrates is that to conceive human character (and works of art) in this way is profoundly misguided. Rather than rushing to conclusions or setting out a theory of what Hamlet is "about," therefore, we should read and watch patiently and openly, allowing the play to unfold before us in its own time and trying to see each moment in the context of the whole. Josipovici's valuable book is thus an exercise in analysis which puts the physical experience of watching and reading at the heart of the critical process--at once a practical introduction to a great and much-loved play and a sophisticated intervention in some of the key questions of theory and aesthetics of our time"--

This collection of essays, although written over a period of almost 30 years, deals with one problem: who is the I in the odes of the most celebrated ancient Greek poet, Pindar?. since antiquity, the complex and allusive language of the first-person statements has provoked many different answers, Professor Lefkowitz describes the function and nature of Pindar's I statements and proposes a controversial solution that would cause some histories of Greek literature to be rewritten. Rather than accept the view that the identity of the speaker could be subject to instant and unannounced change, she proposes that the voice of the victory odes is the poet himself, in his most professional persona. Professor Lefkowitz also refutes the traditional belief that the odes were sung by a chorus. She shows that in most, if not all cases, they were sung as solos and that Pindar was continuing the tradition established by the Homeric bards.

For almost twenty years, Ilan Stavans—described by the Washington Post as "Latin America’s liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast"—has interviewed path-breaking intellectuals and artists in a wide range of media. As host of the critically acclaimed PBS series La Plaza, he interviews guests on pressing issues that affect the Western Hemisphere today, asking hard-hitting questions on immigration, religion, bilingualism, race, and democracy. This book collects for the first time in one volume Stavans’s most provocative and enlightening interviews with Hispanics from both sides of the Rio Grande. Spontaneous and surprising, these conversations reflect Latino life in the United States in all its facets. Among the more than two dozen selections, Edward James Olmos talks about Hispanics in Hollywood; John Leguizamo describes how he shapes a stage show; author Richard Rodriguez reflects on his gang background; Esmeralda Santiago takes on the Puerto Rican stereotype; and Piri Thomas shares thoughts on the writing of Down These Mean Streets. "A conversation is a tango," writes Stavans, "for it takes two to dance it." Conversations with Ilan Stavans invites readers to catch the rhythm and enjoy these unique meetings of minds.

Harold Fisch explores the biblical influence on the style and the structure of landmark novels by Fielding, Defoe, Gearge Eliot, Kafka, Dostoevsky and others. These turn out, again and again, to be re-readings of biblical stories. This echoing is sometimes explicit as in Joseph Andrews , where Fielding offers us a comic revision of the career of the biblical Joseph. But it can be inexplicit and even unconscious as in Kafka's The Trial , which, without mentioning Job, reads (as Northop Frye has noted) like a midrashic commentary on that book. In a study remarkable for its range and subtlety, the author develops the notion of the novel as midrash but argues that while the great novelists were held in thrall by the biblical patterns and stories, they were also regularly compelled to throw off this thraldom. They could not manage without the Bible but at the same time "it would not do." Fisch discusses the adversial realation to the biblical text with reference to two archetypal narratives: the Job story and the Dinding of Isaac. Of particluar interest are the chapters devoted to the Israeli novelist S.Y. Agnon and A.B. Yehoshua.

Small underlinings or marks on the side, see photo.

This commentary on the action and argument of Sophocles' Antigone is meant to be a reflection on and response to Hegel's interpretation in the Phenomenology (VI.A.a-b), and includes, in addition, two appendixes dealing with Aeschylus' Septem. It thus moves within the principles Hegel discovers in the play but reinserts them into the play as they show themselves across the eccentricities of its plot. Wherever plot and principles do not match, there is a glimmer of the argument: Haemon speaks up for the city and Tiresias for the divine law but neither for Antigone. The guard who reports the burial and presents Antigone to Creon is as important as Antigone or Creon for understanding Antigone. The Chorus too in their inconsistent thoughtfulness have to be taken into account, and in particular how their understanding of the canniness of man reveals Antigone in their very failure to count her as a sign of man's uncanniness: She who is below the horizon of their awareness is at the heart of their speech. Megareus, the older son of Creon, who sacrificed his life for the city, looms as large as Eurydice, whose suicide has nothing in common with Antigone's. She is "all-mother": Antigone is anti-generation.

Book by Raskin, Jonah