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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2025

        The Strand

        A biography

        by Geoff Browell, Eileen Chanin

        The first history of one of London's most extraordinary streets. Running along the Thames's northern shore and spanning three-quarters of a mile from Trafalgar Square to Temple Bar, the Strand has been a witness to London's growth and change from the earliest years of the city's existence. In The Strand: A biography, Geoff Browell and Eileen Chanin uncover the deep history of this remarkable street. Tracing its origins in the Roman era, they reveal how it grew in importance as authority shifted from church to aristocracy, then to commerce, media and law. Over time, everything that mattered converged on the Strand: tradition and ceremony clashed with rebellion and destitution. By 1910, the street was known as the 'centre of the world'. Drawing on remarkable archival discoveries, Browell and Chanin present the most complete and compelling history of the Strand ever written. Filled with surprising, untold stories, The Strand: A biography is a must-read for lovers of one of the world's greatest cities.

      • Trusted Partner
        Children's & YA

        The Sparkling Ponies (3). Luna and the Moonstones

        by Emily Palmer/ Josephine Llobet

        The four friends Fiona, Aurelia, Jana and Leni thoroughly enjoy their friendship with their sparkling ponies and they’re looking forward to the festival that’s about to take place at Funfield Pony Farm. But there’s a lot to be done first. Only Aurelia can’t really enjoy the prospect because the problem she has to solve with the mare Luna is really giving her a tough time. Suddenly Fiona and Sunny are also given a tricky task. And when the secret of the sparkling ponies is then in danger of being exposed, everything goes topsy-turvy. Will the friends end up enjoying the pony festival or not?

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        October 2007

        Merry Christmas!

        Die schönsten Weihnachtsgeschichten aus England

        by Ria Blaicher, Günther Blaicher

        Merry Christmas! Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, G.K. Chesterton, Dylan Thomas, Angus Wilson, Muriel Spark u.v.a. erzählen Weihnachtsgeschichten aus zwei Jahrhunderten. Da geht es um folgenreiche Geständnisse, geheimnisvolle Verwandlungen, mißglückte Einbrüche und heimliche Liebschaften. Mit angelsächsischem Humor und Feingefühl zeigen diese fünfzehn, zum Großteil erstmals ins Deutsche übersetzten Geschichten, wie selbst kleinere Widrigkeiten die Festtagsstimmung nicht zu trüben vermögen.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2014

        Theorising Media

        Power, form and subjectivity

        by John Corner

        In this book, John Corner explores how issues of power, form and subjectivity feature at the core of all serious thinking about the media, including appreciations of their creativity as well as anxiety about the risks they pose. Drawing widely on an interdisciplinary literature, he connects his exposition to examples from film, television, radio, photography, painting, web practice, music and writing in order to bring in topics as diverse as reporting the war in Afghanistan, the televising of football, documentary portrayals of 9/11, reality television, the diversity of taste in the arts and the construction of civic identity. Theorising media brings together concepts both from social studies and the arts and humanities, addressing a readership wider than the sub-specialisms of media research. It refreshes ideas about why the media matter and how understanding them better remains a key aim of cultural inquiry and a continuing requirement for public policy. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2026

        AIDS in Soviet Russia

        A story of deception, despair and hope

        by Rustam Alexander

        The first book to tell the shocking story of the AIDS crisis in Soviet Russia. Throughout the 1980s, as the world was grappling with the escalating crisis of AIDS, Soviet Russia continued to deny there was a problem. Arguing that the disease was limited to foreigners and 'immoral' groups, the government failed to take meaningful action, long past the point other countries had begun to recognise the full scale of the threat. In this ground-breaking book, Rustam Alexander tells the story of AIDS in Soviet Russia. Fixated on disinformation, censorship and the persecution of marginalised communities, the Soviet authorities wasted precious time, allowing the epidemic to strike at the very heart of the nation: its children. Yet, despite the government's failure, a number of brave journalists, doctors and nascent gay groups decided to take matters into their own hands and engage in full-fledged AIDS activism. Tracing the political and social response to AIDS in the final years of the Soviet era, Alexander sheds light on the devastating consequences of government inaction. He draws on personal stories, media reports and archival materials to provide a riveting account of the Russian people's fight against AIDS amid the tumultuous transformations of Gorbachev's perestroika.

      • Trusted Partner
        February 2023

        Das Festival der Magie. Hüte dich vor falschen Zaubern!

        Turbulentes Fantasy-Abenteuer in einer verzauberten Stadt ab 10 Jahren

        by Mara Peters, Bente Schlick

        Echte Freundschaft oder falscher Zauber? Ein Festival der Magie in Starfalls! Penny und ihre beste Freundin Becca können es kaum erwarten, dass all die Zauberkünstler, Fakire und Wahrsager wieder ihre Heimatstadt besuchen. Doch dann geht ein klitzekleiner Wunsch von Penny tatsächlich in Erfüllung - und mächtig nach hinten los! Die zaghafte Becca ist mit einem Mal wie ausgewechselt und auf Streit gebürstet. Dabei hatte Penny sie sich doch nur ein bisschen mutiger gewünscht. Und echte Magie gibt es doch gar nicht! Oder doch? Bald steht ganz Starfalls auf dem Kopf und nur eine kann Penny helfen, um das Chaos wieder geradezubiegen: Becca. Zu blöd nur, dass die genau das Gegenteil im Sinn hat … Rasant und spannend bis zu letzten Seite - dieses magische-Abenteuer über die Macht der Freundschaft ist unvergesslich zauberhaft! Eine packende Geschichte über eine starke Heldin, die für Freundschaft, Fantasie und Freiheit kämpft. Für alle ab 10 Jahren, mit besonderer Lese-Empfehlung für Leser*innen von „Land of Stories“ und „Mitternachtsstunde“.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        September 2019

        Queer Objects

        by Chris Brickell, Judith Collard

        Queer lives give rise to a vast array of objects: the things we fill our houses with, the gifts we share with our friends, the commodities we consume at work and at play, the clothes and accessories we wear, and the analogue and digital technologies we use to communicate with one another. But what makes an object queer? The sixty-three chapters in Queer Objects consider this question in relation to lesbian, gay and transgender communities across time, cultures and space. In this unique international collaboration, well-known and newer writers traverse world history to write about items ranging from ancient Egyptian tomb paintings and Roman artefacts to political placards, snapshots, sex toys and the smartphone. Fabulous, captivating, transgressive.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2007

        Public issue television

        World in Action' 1963–98

        by Peter Goddard, John Corner, Kay Richardson

        Public issue television is a major contribution to understanding the relationship between television, politics and society. Based on full access to the archives, it offers a fascinating historical account of how one television series, Granada's World in Action, celebrated for its tough journalism, visual directness and public impact, functioned and developed over its run across 35 years between 1963 and 1998. In a succession of chapters looking at different periods in the series' development and at key dimensions of its distinctive identity, it gets deep inside the making of factual television and examines how a particular culture of production works within broader conditions of possibility and constraint. In particular, it charts the interwoven processes of change - technological, professional, aesthetic, institutional, economic, social and political. As well as discussing achievement and success, it examines the tensions, the debates and open conflicts that formed part of the context within which the series was made and transmitted across four decades. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        October 2024

        Queer cinema in contemporary France

        Five directors

        by Todd Reeser

        Jacques Martineau, Olivier Ducastel, Alain Guiraudie, Sébastien Lifshitz and Céline Sciamma. The films of these five major French directors exemplify queer cinema in the twenty-first century. Comprehensive in scope, Queer cinema in contemporary France traces the development of the meaning of queer across these directors' careers, from their earliest, often unknown films to their later, major films with wide international release. Whether having sex on the beach or kissing in the high school swimming pool, these cinematic characters create or embody forward-looking, open-ended and optimistic forms of queerness and modes of living, loving and desiring. Whether they are white, beur or black, whether they are lesbian, gay, trans* or queer, they open up hetero- and cisnormativity to new ways of being a gendered subject.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        September 2005

        Staging the UK

        by Jen Harvie

        'Staging the UK' examines some of the most important performance in Britain from the mid-1980s into the new millennium. In a timely new critical approach, it considers contemporary British theatre in relation to national and supranational identities, critical concepts like globalisation and diaspora, and contemporary contexts such as the election of New Labour, devolution and European unification. It makes a significant contribution to the study of contemporary theatre by elucidating the relationships between performance, cultural identities and cultural power, and will be an invaluable textbook for courses on British theatre and culture. 'Staging the UK' takes a de-centred materialist approach. It looks at theatre in a range of institutions, practices and forms such as play texts, musicals, festivals, installation art, site-specific and physical theatre. It examines events such as the Edinburgh festivals, and significant companies, including the Scottish National Theatre, Brith Gof, Tinderbox Theatre Company, Complicite, Tamasha Theatre Company, DV8 Physical Theatre, Artangel, and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group. This book makes a significant contribution to the study of contemporary theatre by elucidating the relationships between performance, cultural identities and cultural power, and will be an invaluable textbook for courses on British theatre and culture. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2020

        Race talk

        Languages of racism and resistance in Neapolitan street markets

        by Antonia Lucia Dawes

        This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Race talk is about language use as an anti-racist practice in multicultural city spaces. The book contends that attention to talk reveals the relations of domination and subordination in heterogeneous, ethnically diverse and multilingual contexts, while also helping us to understand how transcultural solidarity might be expressed. Drawing on original ethnographic research conducted on licensed and unlicensed market stalls in in heterogeneous, ethnically diverse and multilingual contexts, this book examines the centrality of multilingual talk to everyday struggles about difference, positionality and entitlement. In these street markets, Neapolitan street vendors work alongside documented and undocumented migrants from Bangladesh, China, Guinea Conakry, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal as part of an ambivalent, cooperative and unequal quest to survive and prosper. As austerity, anti-immigration politics and urban regeneration projects encroached upon the possibilities of street vending, talk across linguistic, cultural, national and religious boundaries underpinned the collective action of street vendors struggling to keep their markets open. The edginess of their multilingual organisation offered useful insights into the kinds of imaginaries that will be needed to overcome the politics of borders, nationalism and radical incommunicability.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner

        Corner, Offside and Breathlessness

        by Saeideh Keshavarz, Khaula Ayaz, Tara Helene Röder, Anna Wachter

        Fine, Sina and Kasim were looking forward to the summer holidays. At last they would have plenty of time for outdoor adventures. But during a soccer game, Fine has a severe asthma attack just before the decisive goal. After that, she rarely leaves the house for fear of another attack, and she withdraws further and further from her friends. She is now only concerned with the big ball of anxiety in her tummy. And then the summer break is nearly over and Fine must summon up all her courage... This story is intended to help affected children understand their asthma and show them that they are not alone with it. For:• children of elementary school age(between 6 and 12 years) who sufferfrom asthma• parents and relatives• teachers• therapists

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        May 2026

        Reframing Margaret Thatcher

        Genre, form, and the making of post-Thatcherism in British film and TV

        by Felipe Espinoza Garrido

        Against the backdrop of Britain's historically anti-Thatcherite films of the 1980s and 1990s, Reframing Margaret Thatcher outlines a decisive shift in the collective imagination of Thatcher. Drawing on genre, trauma, and queer studies, it demonstrates how post-Thatcherite films reflect upon their own entanglement in the polarization of the Thatcher years but also rewrite the clichéd Iron Lady. Chapters on The Iron Lady, This is England, Doomsday, 9 Dead Gay Guys, and the Sherlock TV series investigate various Thatcher imaginations, ranging from Thatcher as a lesbian mob boss, as prime minister in apocalyptic England, to Thatcher as an empty bust. This innovative study shows how the apparent depoliticization of British film makes visible new relations between genre, cinematic form, and imaginations of the past and offers fresh perspectives that both critique and reinterpret Thatcher's enduring impact.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        The new pornographies

        Explicit sex in recent French fiction and film

        by Victoria Best, Martin Crowley

        The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed the striking advance of pornography into the Western cultural mainstream. Symptomatic of this development has been the use by writers, artists, and film-makers of the imagery and aesthetics of pornography, in works which have, often on this basis, achieved considerable international success. Amongst these artists are a number of French authors and directors - such as Michel Houellebecq, Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes, or Catherine Millet - whose work has often been dismissed as trashy or exploitative, but whose use of pornographic material may in fact be indicative of important contemporary concerns. In this, the first study of this significant trend, the authors explore how the reference to pornography encodes diverse political, cultural, and existential questions, including relations between the sexes, the collapse of avant-garde politics, gay sexualities in the time of AIDS, the anti-feminist backlash, the relation to the body and illness, the place of fantasy, and the sexualisation of children. It will be of interest to undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in the fields of French culture, gender, film and media studies.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2021

        The new pornographies

        Explicit sex in recent French fiction and film

        by Victoria Best, Martin Crowley

        The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed the striking advance of pornography into the Western cultural mainstream. Symptomatic of this development has been the use by writers, artists, and film-makers of the imagery and aesthetics of pornography, in works which have, often on this basis, achieved considerable international success. Amongst these artists are a number of French authors and directors - such as Michel Houellebecq, Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes, or Catherine Millet - whose work has often been dismissed as trashy or exploitative, but whose use of pornographic material may in fact be indicative of important contemporary concerns. In this study of a very significant trend, the authors explore how the reference to pornography encodes diverse political, cultural, and existential questions, including relations between the sexes, the collapse of avant-garde politics, gay sexualities in the time of AIDS, the anti-feminist backlash, the relation to the body and illness, the place of fantasy, and the sexualisation of children. It will be of interest to undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in the fields of French culture, gender, film and media studies.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2025

        Songs of Seven Dials

        An intimate history of 1920s and 1930s London

        by Matt Houlbrook

        The untold story of a remarkable neighbourhood and the battle to define modern London. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Seven Dials was one of London's most diverse neighbourhoods, home to migrant and working-class communities, bohemian clubs and cafes. But business leaders and city planners had other ideas. Beginning with a rancorous libel trial of 1927, in which a Sierra Leonean café owner and his wife confronted the racist newspaper that destroyed their business, Matt Houlbrook reveals the surprising history of this remarkable neighbourhood. He traces how tensions that simmered on the streets and finally exploded in court betrayed the politics of urban 'improvement' and the 'colour bar'. Underlying the trial was a series of troubling questions that would define Britain in the twentieth century - about race, class and the boundaries of belonging, gentrification and the kind of city London would become. Imaginative, powerful and deeply moving, Songs of Seven Dials is an important new history of London in the 1920s and 1930s.

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