The War of the Spanish succession 1701-1714

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Jacqueline Winspear

Maisie Dobbs must unravel a case of wartime love and death—an investigation that leads her to a long-hidden affair between a young cartographer and a mysterious nurse. August 1914. Michael Clifton is mapping the land he has just purchased in California's beautiful Santa Ynez Valley, certain that oil lies beneath its surface. But as the young cartographer prepares to return home to Boston, war is declared in Europe. Michael—the youngest son of an expatriate Englishman—puts duty first and sails for his father's native country to serve in the British army. Three years later, he is listed among those missing in action. April 1932. London psychologist and investigator Maisie Dobbs is retained by Michael's parents, who have recently learned that their son's remains have been unearthed in France. They want Maisie to find the unnamed nurse whose love letters were among Michael's belongings—a quest that takes Maisie back to her own bittersweet wartime love. Her inquiries, and the stunning discovery that Michael Clifton was murdered in his trench, unleash a web of intrigue and violence that threatens to engulf the soldier's family and even Maisie herself. Over the course of her investigation, Maisie must cope with the approaching loss of her mentor, and her growing awareness that she is once again falling in love.

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David Collings

According to David Collings, Wordsworth interpreted the outbreak of war between England and France in 1793 as a cataclysmic event, one whose utterly disfiguring effect he would trace in his work over the next decade. Expanding upon this extravagant interpretation of events, Collings argues, Wordsworth constructed a poetics of cultural dismemberment - a way for culture to imagine that it survives in the midst of its own destruction. In Wordsworthian Errancies, Collings challenges prevailing critical approaches to Romantic poetry by describing and critiquing this deconstructive account of culture in Wordsworth's poetry. Drawing ideas from deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and queer theory, Collings's reading reveals a radically new Wordsworth, one who is far more concerned with various "queer" modes of sexuality than previously suspected. In a provocative reading of The Prelude, for example, Collings argues that Wordsworth associated his poetic power with homoerotic masochistic fantasies and with his involuntary delight in traumatic events. He also redefines the debate concerning the politics of Wordsworth's poetry: disputing recent critics who claim that Wordsworth retreated from history into a poetry of the self, Collings argues instead that the very notion of the solitary, autobiographical subject derived from Wordsworth's sense of cultural trauma. The suspect dimension of Wordsworth's poetry, Collings concludes, is not its retreat from history but rather its claim that history is disaster.

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Alexis de Tocqueville

"Although Tocqueville never published a book-length study of French North Africa, his various writings on the subject provide as invaluable a portrait of French imperialism as Democracy in America does of the Early Republic period in American history. In Writings on Empire and Slavery, Jennifer Pitts has selected and translated nine of his most important dispatches on Algeria, which offer startling new insights into both Tocqueville's political thought and French liberalism's attitudes toward the political, military, and moral aspects of France's colonial expansion. Also included in this collection is Tocqueville's influential call for the abolition of slavery in the French West Indies, an action he felt would regain for France the moral high ground taken by Britain when it abolished slavery in its colonies - even as the conquest and settling of Algeria would unify the French nation and gain for it international respect."--BOOK JACKET.

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Xu Guoqi

"During World War I, Britain and France imported workers from their colonies to labor behind the front lines. The single largest group of support labor came not from imperial colonies, however, but from China. Xu Guoqi tells the remarkable story of the 140,000 Chinese men recruited for the Allied war effort. These laborers, mostly illiterate peasants from north China, came voluntarily and worked in Europe longer than any other group. Xu explores China's reasons for sending its citizens to help the British and French (and later, the Americans), the backgrounds of the workers, their difficult transit to Europe -- across the Pacific, through Canada, and over the Atlantic -- and their experiences with the Allied armies. It was the first encounter with Westerners for most of these Chinese peasants, and Xu also considers the story from their perspective: how they understood this distant war, the racism and suspicion they faced, and their attempts to hold on to their culture so far from home. In recovering this fascinating lost story, Xu highlights the Chinese contribution to World War I and illuminates the essential role these unsung laborers played in modern China's search for a new national identity on the global stage"--Jacket.