Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Last Englishmen PDF full book. Access full book title The Last Englishmen by Deborah Baker. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Deborah Baker Publisher: Graywolf Press ISBN: 1555979947 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
A sumptuous biographical saga, both intimate and epic, about the waning of the British Empire in India John Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalaya. Michael Spender was the first to draw a detailed map of the North Face of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers—W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender—achieved literary fame, they vied to be included on an expedition that would deliver Everest’s summit to an Englishman, a quest that had become a metaphor for Britain’s struggle to maintain power over India. To this rivalry was added another: in the summer of 1938 both men fell in love with a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine where each man’s wartime loyalties would lie. Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and on Everest itself, The Last Englishmen is also the story of a generation. The cast of this exhilarating drama includes Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and Communist spies, Die Hards and Indian nationalists, political rogues and police informers. Key among them is a highborn Bengali poet named Sudhin Datta, a melancholy soul torn, like many of his generation, between hatred of the British Empire and a deep love of European literature, whose life would be upended by the arrival of war on his Calcutta doorstep. Dense with romance and intrigue, and of startling relevance for the great power games of our own day, Deborah Baker’s The Last Englishmen is an engrossing story that traces the end of empire and the stirring of a new world order.
Author: Deborah Baker Publisher: Graywolf Press ISBN: 1555979947 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
A sumptuous biographical saga, both intimate and epic, about the waning of the British Empire in India John Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalaya. Michael Spender was the first to draw a detailed map of the North Face of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers—W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender—achieved literary fame, they vied to be included on an expedition that would deliver Everest’s summit to an Englishman, a quest that had become a metaphor for Britain’s struggle to maintain power over India. To this rivalry was added another: in the summer of 1938 both men fell in love with a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine where each man’s wartime loyalties would lie. Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and on Everest itself, The Last Englishmen is also the story of a generation. The cast of this exhilarating drama includes Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and Communist spies, Die Hards and Indian nationalists, political rogues and police informers. Key among them is a highborn Bengali poet named Sudhin Datta, a melancholy soul torn, like many of his generation, between hatred of the British Empire and a deep love of European literature, whose life would be upended by the arrival of war on his Calcutta doorstep. Dense with romance and intrigue, and of startling relevance for the great power games of our own day, Deborah Baker’s The Last Englishmen is an engrossing story that traces the end of empire and the stirring of a new world order.
Author: Sebastian Faulks Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0307523608 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
In The Fatal Englishman, his first work of nonfiction, Sebastian Faulks explores the lives of three remarkable men. Each had the seeds of greatness; each was a beacon to his generation and left something of value behind; yet each one died tragically young. Christopher Wood, only twenty-nine when he killed himself, was a painter who lived most of his short life in the beau monde of 1920s Paris, where his charm, good looks, and the dissolute life that followed them sometimes frustrated his ambition and achievement as an artist. Richard Hillary was a WWII fighter pilot who wrote a classic account of his experiences, The Last Enemy, but died in a mysterious training accident while defying doctor’s orders to stay grounded after horrific burn injuries; he was twenty-three. Jeremy Wolfenden, hailed by his contemporaries as the brightest Englishman of his generation, rejected the call of academia to become a hack journalist in Cold War Moscow. A spy, alcoholic, and open homosexual at a time when such activity was still illegal, he died at the age of thirty-one, a victim of his own recklessness and of the peculiar pressures of his time. Through the lives of these doomed young men, Faulks paints an oblique portrait of English society as it changed in the twentieth century, from the Victorian era to the modern world.
Author: Roland Chambers Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher ISBN: 1567924174 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 410
Book Description
Arthur Ransome, best known for the Swallows and Amazons series, led a double, and often tortured, life. Before his fame as an author, he was notorious for very different reasons: between 1917 and 1924, he was the Russian correspondent for the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian, and his sympathy for the Bolshevik regime gave him access to its leaders, politics, and plots. He was friends with Karl Radek, the Bolshevik's Chief of Propaganda, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the secret police. In this biography, Chambers explores the tensions Ransome felt between his allegiance to England's decencies and the egalitarian Bolshevik vision, between the Lake Country he loved and always considered home and the lure of the Russian steppes to which he repeatedly returned. What emerges is not only history, but also the story of an immensely troubled man not entirely at home in either culture or country.
Author: Keith Foskett Publisher: ISBN: 9781916487901 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
A 2,640-mile hiking adventure on the Pacific Crest Trail. Short-listed for Outdoor Book of the Year by The Great Outdoors magazine. New edition includes bonus chapter - What Happened to Rockets?
Author: Tom Lawson Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0857734725 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 186
Book Description
Little more than seventy years after the British settled Van Diemen's Land (later Tasmania) in 1803, the indigenous community had been virtually wiped out. Yet this genocide at the hands of the British is virtually forgotten today. The Last Man is the first book specifically to explore the role of the British government and wider British society in this genocide. It positions the destruction as a consequence of British policy, and ideology in the region. Tom Lawson shows how Britain practised cultural destruction and then came to terms with and evaded its genocidal imperial past. Although the introduction of European diseases undoubtedly contributed to the decline in the indigenous population, Lawson shows that the British government supported what was effectively the ethnic cleansing of Tasmania - particularly in the period of martial law in 1828-1832. By 1835 the vast majority of the surviving indigenous community had been deported to Flinders Island, where the British government took a keen interest in the attempt to transform them into Christians and Englishmen in a campaign of cultural genocide. Lawson also illustrates the ways in which the destruction of indigenous Tasmanians was reflected in British culture - both at the time and since - and how it came to play a key part in forging particular versions of British imperial identity. Laments for the lost Tasmanians were a common theme in literary and museum culture, and the mistaken assumption that Tasmanians were doomed to complete extinction was an important part of the emerging science of human origins. By exploring the memory of destruction, The Last Man provides the first comprehensive picture of the British role in the destruction of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population.
Author: Robert Tombs Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 1101873361 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1106
Book Description
Named a Book of the Year by the Daily Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement, The Times, Spectator, and The Economist The English first materialized as an idea, before they had a common ruler and before the country they lived in even had a name. From the armed Saxon bands that descended onto Roman-controlled Britain in the fifth century to the travails of the Eurozone plaguing the prime-ministership of today's multicultural England, acclaimed historian Robert Tombs presents a momentous and challenging history of a people who have a claim to be the oldest nation in existence. Drawing on a wealth of recent scholarship, Tombs sheds light on the strength and resilience of English governance, the deep patterns of division among the people who have populated the British Isles, the persistent capacity of the English to come together in the face of danger, and not the least the ways the English have understood their own history, have argued about it, forgotten it and yet been shaped by it. Momentous and definitive, The English and Their History is the first single-volume work on this scale for more than half a century.
Author: Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Publisher: Beyond The Page ISBN: 1946069175 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 180
Book Description
Fans of Louise Penny will love the Emily Kincaid mysteries by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli! A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2011! “Emily is a detective for our times: She can’t afford health care, but she can make flour out of cattails and work three jobs at once.” —Christian Science Monitor Nothing could have prepared part-time journalist Emily Kincaid for the sight of a brutally slain woman left in an abandoned farmhouse, but when she and brooding Deputy Dolly link the execution-style murder to a rash of dead dogs being left on the doorsteps of migrant farm workers, she knows a new form of darkness has descended on her quiet northern Michigan town. Unsure whether the events are acts of retribution, warnings to silence potential witnesses, or omens of even more sinister deeds to come, Emily discovers an alarming string of clues in a book she’s editing for an eccentric Englishman. The flamboyant author hardly seems the type for such gruesome acts, but the eerie plot seems too similar to be coincidental, and too ghastly to ignore. When another macabre murder takes a life at the Englishman’s own home, an investigation already laced with fear becomes downright terrifying. Drawing on the strength of a friendship that’s been tested to the limits, Emily and Dolly will have to put all their squabbles aside to protect each other and catch a killer, because life can be cruel, but fiction can be fatal. Rave reviews for the Emily Kincaid Mysteries: Dead Dancing Women “Every woman who’s ever struggled with saying no, fitting in, and balancing independence against loneliness will adore first-timer Emily.” —Kirkus Reviews Dead Floating Lovers “A mystery that keeps you guessing, together with the story of a woman slowly finding her voice” —Kirkus Reviews Dead Sleeping Shaman “Buzzelli’s well-crafted third Emily Kincaid . . . [features] sharp prose and spirited characterizations.” —Publishers Weekly Praise for A Most Curious Murder: “Fans of [Lewis] Carroll will delight in Zoe’s flights of fancy, and the northern Michigan setting in all its splendor is a charmer . . . an entertaining series with a quirky premise and captivating characters.” —Library Journal “This quirky, clever cozy series launch . . . [is] hard to resist.” —Publishers Weekly “Quirky main characters, lyrical dialogue and a story sure to appeal to bookworms as well as cozy mystery fans are all elements that give this novel a distinctive voice. A clever mystery and intriguing supporting cast round out the mix.” —RT Book Reviews (four star review)
Author: Byron Rogers Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group USA ISBN: 1845138139 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
A biography of the English educator, dictionary writer, and celebrated author of A Month in the Country. J.L. Carr was the most English of Englishmen: headmaster of a Northamptonshire school, cricket enthusiast and campaigner for the conservation of country churches. But he was also the author of half a dozen utterly unique novels, including his masterpiece, A Month in the Country, and a publisher of some of the most eccentric—and smallest—books ever printed. Byron Roger’s acclaimed biography reveals an elusive, quixotic and civic-minded individual with an unswerving sympathy for the underdog, who led his schoolchildren through the streets to hymn the beauty of the cherry trees and paved his garden path with the printing plates for his hand-drawn maps, and whose fiction is quite remarkably autobiographical. Much more than the life of a thoroughly decent man, The Last Englishman is a comic and touching anatomy of the best kind of Englishness. Praise for The Last Englishman “A miniature masterpiece of social history.” —Simon Jenkins, The Times (UK) “A fine biography. . . . Rogers has done a wonderful job.” —Daily Telegraph (UK) “Conveying the significance of the author of Carr’s Dictionary of Extraordinary Cricketers to anyone unfamiliar with his books, or what may now fairly be called his myth, was always going to be difficult. Somehow, Roger’s has managed it.” —D. J. Taylor, Sunday Times (UK) “A great success, and more life-affirming than F. R. Leavis’s entire output.” —Independent on Sunday (UK)
Author: Ben Macintyre Publisher: Delta ISBN: 0385336799 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
In the first terrifying days of World War I, four British soldiers found themselves trapped behind enemy lines on the western front. They were forced to hide in the tiny French village of Villeret, whose inhabitants made the courageous decision to shelter the fugitives until they could pass as Picard peasants. The Englishman’s Daughter is the never-before-told story of these extraordinary men, their protectors, and of the haunting love affair between Private Robert Digby and Claire Dessenne, the most beautiful woman in Villeret. Their passion would result in the birth of a child known as “The Englishman’s Daughter,” and in an act of unspeakable betrayal, a tragic legacy that would haunt the village for generations to come. Through the testimonies of the villagers and the last letters of the soldiers, acclaimed journalist Ben Macintyre has pieced together a harrowing account of how life was lived behind enemy lines during the Great War, and offers a compelling solution to a gripping mystery that reverberates to this day.
Author: H. W. Crocker Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1596982837 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 418
Book Description
The British Empire, ”the biggest empire in history”once ruled a quarter of the globe. It was built by an incredible array of swashbuckling soldiers and sailors, pirates and adventurers who finally get their due in H. W. Crocker III's panoramic and provocative view of four hundred years of history that will delight and amuse, educate and entertain. Strap on your pith helmet for a rollicking ride through some of history's most colorful events. Bet your teacher never told you: The Founding Fathers didn't rebel against British imperialism; they looked forward to the transfer of the great seat of Empire to America. The original Norman English invasion of Ireland was approved by the pope. Sir Charles Napier, commander in chief of the British Army in India, abolished the Hindu custom of widow-burning. Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer's hearts and minds counter- insurgency strategy was instrumental in defeating the Communists in Malaya. The breakup of the British Empire led Winston Churchill to conclude that he had achieved nothing in his life.
Author: Deborah Baker
Author: Deborah Baker
Author: Sebastian Faulks
Author: Roland Chambers
Author: Keith Foskett
Author: Tom Lawson
Author: Robert Tombs
Author: Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli
Author: Byron Rogers
Author: Ben Macintyre
Author: H. W. Crocker