This new study of Tudor international relations is the first in nearly thirty years. Adopting a fresh approach to the subject, this lively collection presents the work of a team of established and younger scholars who discuss how the Tudor monarchs made sense of the world beyond England's shores. Taking account of recent developments in cultural, gender and institutional history, the contributors analyse the important changes and continuities in England's foreign policy during the Tudor age. Tudor England and its Neighbours addresses key questions such as: - Did Henry VII break with the past by pursuing peace with France? - What was the impact of the break with Rome and the introduction of Protestantism on England's relations with other countries? - Was war between Elizabethan England and Spain inevitable? Using new evidence and reinterpreting traditional narratives, these essays illuminate the complexities and the sometimes surprising subtleties of England's international relations between 1485 and 1603.

What makes the English English? Is it their eccentricity, their passionate love (or, indeed, hatred) of Marmite - or is it something less easily defined? Beginning at the top of a muddy Gloucestershire slope at the Coopers Hill cheese-rolling contest and traversing a landscape of lawns and queues, coastlines and sporting arenas, Ben Fogle takes us on a journey through the peculiarly English: a country of wax jackets, cricket, boat races and jellied eels, by way of national treasures such as the shipping forecast, fish and chips and the Wellington boot. Not to mention the Dunkirk spirit of relentless optimism in the face of adversity, be it the heroic failure of Captain Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition, or simply the perennial hope for better weather. The archetypal Englishman - lover of labradors and Land Rovers yet holder of two passports - Ben applauds all things quintessentially English while also paying tribute to the history, culture and ideas adopted with such gusto that they have become part of the fabric of the country. Written with Ben's trademark warmth and wit, this is a light-hearted yet touching tribute to all things English.

"The House of Twenty Thousand Books is journalist Sasha Abramsky's elegy to the vanished intellectual world of his grandparents, Chimen and Miriam, and their vast library of socialist literature and Jewish history. A rare book dealer and self-educated polymath who would go on to teach at Oxford and consult for Sotheby's, Chimen Abramsky drew great writers and thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Eric Hobsbawm to his north London home; his library grew from his abiding passion for books and his search for an enduring ideology. The books, documents, and manuscripts that covered every shelf at 5 Hillway were testaments to Chimen's quest -- from the Jewish orthodoxy of his boyhood, to the Communism of his youth, to the liberalism of his mature years. The House of Twenty Thousand Books is at once the story of a fascinating family and chronicle of the embattled twentieth century. The House of Twenty Thousand Books includes 43 photos. "--

Larry Kramer has been described by Susan Sontag as "one of America's most valuable troublemakers." As Frank Rich writes in his Foreword to this new collection of writings for the screen and stage, "his plays are almost journalistic in their observation of the fine-grained documentary details of life ... that may well prove timeless." The title work, the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Women in Love, is a movie "as sensuous as anything you've probably ever seen on film" (The New York Times). The screenplay is accompanied by Kramer's reflections on the history of the production, sure to be of interest to any student of film. This volume also includes several early plays, Sissies' Scrapbook, A Minor Dark Age, and the political farce Just Say No, illuminating the development of one of our most important literary figures. "Since his screenplay for Women in Love, Kramer has been a prophet of psychic health and catastrophe among us." -- from The American Academy of Arts and Letters citation

It's 1913 and a young, carefree and recklessly innocent girl, Mina, goes out into the forest on the edge of the Baltic sea and meets a gang of rowdy young men with revolution on their minds. It sounds like a fairy tale but it's life. The adventure leads to flight, emigration and a new land, a new language and the pursuit of idealism or happiness - in Liverpool. But what of the stories from the old country; how do they shape and form the next generations who have heard the well-worn tales? --

Stephen Greenblatt has been at the center of a major shift in literary interpretation toward a critical method that situates cultural creation in history. Shakespearean Negotiations is a sustained and powerful exemplification of this innovative method, offering a new way of understanding the power of Shakespeare's achievement and, beyond this, an original analysis of cultural process.

One hundred years after the publication of Looking Backward, Bellamy remains a controversial figure in American literary and social history. The collection of essays in this volume, commemorating the novel's appearance in 1888, attests to his continued importance.

"An epic and beautifully written World War II family history that spans Europe, telling of two happy families uprooted by war, their incredible suffering in Hitler's and Stalin's camps, and the near-miraculous survival and rescue of the author's parents who met after the war. Daniel Finkelstein's grandfather Alfred Wiener was a German Jewish intellectual leader who tolled an early warning of the impending Holocaust and became an archivist of Nazi crimes. He relocated his family to safety in Amsterdam, where they became close with Anne Frank's family. But they were eventually separated, and Daniel's mother Mirjam was sent to Bergen-Belsen with her mother and sisters while Alfred worked feverishly to free them. Finkelstein's father, Ludwik, grew up in a prosperous Jewish family in Poland where his father was a patriotic hero of the Great War. But when Stalin took control, Finkelstein's grandfather was deported to Siberia, while Ludwik and his mother were sent to Kazahkstan, where they barely survived freezing winters and harrowing forced labor conditions. Love and Murder is a page-turning account of ingenuity, bravery and the almost unbelievable coincidences that brought Daniel's parents together. The story features secret archives, forgery and theft, and sweeps across Europe to show the expanse of the war. Moving, engrossing and inspiring, Love and Murder will profoundly touch all who read it"--

Stephen Greenblatt sets out to explain his longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father, and his daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory. It yields an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution--as well as a capacious new reading of the power of Hamlet. In the mid-sixteenth century, English authorities abruptly changed the relationship between the living and dead. Declaring that Purgatory was a false "poem," they abolished the institutions and banned the practices that Christians relied on to ease the passage to Heaven for themselves and their dead loved ones. Greenblatt explores the fantastic adventure narratives, ghost stories, pilgrimages, and imagery by which a belief in a grisly "prison house of souls" had been shaped and reinforced in the Middle Ages. He probes the psychological benefits as well as the high costs of this belief and of its demolition. With the doctrine of Purgatory and the elaborate practices that grew up around it, the church had provided a powerful method of negotiating with the dead. The Protestant attack on Purgatory destroyed this method for most people in England, but it did not eradicate the longings and fears that Catholic doctrine had for centuries focused and exploited. In his strikingly original interpretation, Greenblatt argues that the human desires to commune with, assist, and be rid of the dead were transformed by Shakespeare--consummate conjurer that he was--into the substance of several of his plays, above all the weirdly powerful Hamlet. Thus, the space of Purgatory became the stage haunted by literature's most famous ghost. This book constitutes an extraordinary feat that could have been accomplished by only Stephen Greenblatt. It is at once a deeply satisfying reading of medieval religion, an innovative interpretation of the apparitions that trouble Shakespeare's tragic heroes, and an exploration of how a culture can be inhabited by its own spectral leftovers.

Michael Meyer's translations of Strindberg and Ibsen have often been described as definitive, as have his biographies of both writers. His Strindberg translations made him the first Englishman to receive the Gold Medal of the Swedish Academy, and his life of Ibsen won the Whitbread Biography prize. He has now turned his attention to his own life and his friendships with some of this century's most famous literary and theatrical names.

Murder at Wrotham Hill takes the killing in October 1946 of Dagmar Petrzywalski as the catalyst for a compelling and unique meditation on murder and fate. Dagmar, a gentle, eccentric spinster, was the embodiment of Austerity Britain's prudence and thrift. Her murderer Harold Hagger's litany of petty crimes, abandoned wives, sloughed-off identities and desertion was its opposite. The texture of their lives and the impression their experiences made on their characters fated their meeting on that bleak autumn morning - and determined the manner in which both would meet their death. Featuring England's first celebrity policeman, Fabian of the Yard, the celebrated forensic scientist, Keith Simpson, and history's most famous and dedicated hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, this is a gripping and deeply moving book.

"Austerity Baby might best be described as an "oblique memoir". Janet Wolff's fascinating volume is a family history - but one that is digressive and consistently surprising. The central underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement; lives (and deaths) during the Third Reich; mother-daughter and sibling relationships; the generational transmission of trauma and experience; transatlantic reflections; and the struggle for creative expression. Stories mobilised, and people encountered, in the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in Britain during the Second World War; cultural life in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of colour(s); the industrialist and philanthropist, Henry Simon of Manchester, including his relationship with the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen; the liberal British campaigner and MP of the 1940s, Eleanor Rathbone; reflections on the lives and images of spinsters. The text is supplemented and interrupted throughout by images (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which serve to illustrate the story, others engaging indirectly with the written word."--Publisher's description.

This book traces the Jewish thread throughout English life between the Tudors and the beginnings of mass immigration in the mid-nineteenth century. The writing of English history has been very largely framed without taking note of the Jewish presence at all - here, for the first time, the Jewsare shown as an integral part of English religious and social history.David Katz explores completely new subjects in depth, such as the Jewish advocates of Henry VIII's divorce, and the Jewish conspirators of Elizabethan England, without neglecting themes such as the role of Jewish finance and the emergence of Anglo-Jewish institutions. This extensively researched andaccessible history of the Jews in England over almost four centuries will be essential reading for those interested in English and Jewish history.

Francis Bacon wrote in 1625 that judges must be lions, but lions under the throne. From that day to this, the tension within the state between parliamentary, judicial and executive power has remained unresolved. Lions under the Throne is the first systematic account of the origins and development of the great body of public law by which the state, both institutionally and in relation to the individual, is governed.

Tales tell of how Charles II, fearful of ancient legends that "Britain will fall" if the ravens at the Tower of London ever leave their abode, ordered that the wings of the six ravens be clipped.But the truth is that the ravens only arrived at the Tower in 1883, when they were brought in as props in tales of Gothic horror that were told to tourists. The legend itself originated from the summer of 1944, when ravens in London were used as unofficial spotters for enemy bombs and planes.