A future arrived

Sample

Katherine Webb

De komst van een nieuwe dienstmeid in het huis van een dominee betekent in 1911 het begin van dramatische gebeurtenissen die uiteindelijk leiden tot moord en de vondst van brieven op het slagveld rond Ieper in 2011.

Sample

Jessica Dotta

London is said to be the glittering jewel of society, a world unto itself--but to Julia Elliston it is a city of shadows. Her life is swiftly dissolving into scandal. And in Victorian society, even a whisper of scandal--substantiated or not--can be the death of a young woman's reputation. Now under the watchful eye of Lord Roy Pierson, one of the most influential men in England, Julia begrudgingly accepts his protection. But Chance Macy's power is far-reaching as well, and he is eager to assert his claim over her. Thrust into society as the Emerald Heiress, Julia is the toast of London, a celebrated curiosity. But in reality she's trapped between the clutches of two powerful men. Aided only by a gentleman whose intentions she prays she can trust, Julia must finally take control of her own fate--but outwitting one's foe rarely goes according to plan.

Sample

Paul Davies

The conclusions reached in The Ideal Real are not the same as those reached by most commentary on Beckett's works. Most Beckett criticism seeks falsely to over-simplify or align Beckett's point of view with existentialism, the absurd, or the pessimistic nihilism underlying much postmodern thought. Beckett, though one of the century's leading intellects, was also an intuitive who realized the Western empirical mind was an out-dated program that had long ceased to be of any help in understanding the human situation. The "disintegration" of mind and body felt by his characters reflects the disastrous effect of the continued imposition of that "reason-ridden" consciousness. At the same time it opens the door to a new possibility. . The Beckett heroes, whose experiences are discussed in this book, were conditioned by a "humanistic" education much like Beckett's; but they come to find that the self they were taught to see as their own is nonexistent. Having nothing in their acquired personality to cope with this crisis, Murphy, Molloy, Moran, Malone, and all that follow find themselves dying to their old self, to everything a Western liberal education could think of as self. Early on, Beckett saw clues to the situation in the work of Jung, the "mind doctor" who represented the opposite of the empirical tradition. Jung, like the esoteric schools, saw a potential human whose development was sometimes delayed or prevented by the very system the claimed to "educate" and "civilize" the personality. The existence of this potential self has been doubted by many modern thinkers, but Beckett's stories show "a soul denied in vain" since it is the enabler of all speech, whether apparently denying or affirming. No knowledge can be considered apart from the knower. In The Ideal Real, Paul Davies argues that Beckett saw this potential self emerging in the world of imagination and symbol, especially in this age where language alone has come to be seen as the vehicle of education and the determiner of identity. He renders in prose the collapse of the illusive world of self to which the European cult of personality devoted three centuries, and witnesses its annihilation in the death before death - the white light of contemporary physics, the "void" of Zen - from which all trace of personality has fallen. From the 1920s to Beckett's last year, this study follows all the stages his fiction writing went through in order to face this matter uncompromisingly. The perspective taken by Davies sees the postmodern critical climate as an inadequate and reductive context within which to contemplate and comment on works of art. It seeks to recognize that creative imagination is a vital aspect of all mental activity that is not doomed to the inferno of Beckett's lost world.

Sample

Nicholas A. Lambert

For most of the twentieth century, historians thought that British naval policy was driven by the Anglo-German arms race. After examining a prodigious quantity of primary sources, Nicholas A. Lambert concludes that Admiralty decision-making was in fact driven by factors totally unrelated to the German building program. Sir John Fisher's Naval Revolution explores the intrigue and negotiations between the Admiralty and leading domestic reformers of the day, such as Herbert H. Asquith, David Lloyd George, and Winston Churchill, and shows how the politicians regarded the issues of naval strategy and finance as central to the success of their proposed social reforms. Lambert also explains how Great Britain's naval leaders responded to these challenges under the direction of Admiral Sir John Fisher, the service head of the Admiralty from 1904 to 1910.