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Min works at the BBC as a sound engineer, and in theory she's married, but her husband George is so invisible that she accidentally turns the lights off even when he's still in the room. Luckily, she has her friends and lovers to distract her: in Min's self-lacerating, bracingly opinionated voice, life boils down to sex appeal--and of late she's being courted by an internationally renowned opera singer whom she refers to as The Bloater (a swelled, salted herring). Disgusted by and attracted to him in equal measure, her dilemma--which reaches a hysterical, hilarious pitch--is whether to sleep with him or not.
Rosemary Tonks--the salt and pepper of the earth--is a writer who gets her claws into the reader with all the joy of a cat and a mouse. Vain and materialistic, tender and savage, narrated in brilliant, sparkling prose, The Bloater is the perfect snapshot of London in the 1960s.
Sixteen-year-old Joe Hawkins is the anti-hero's anti-hero. His life is ruled by clothes, beer, football and above all violence - violence against hippies, authority, racial minorities and anyone else unfortunate enough to get in his way.
Joe is a London skinhead - a member of a uniquely British subculture which arose rapidly in the late 1960's. While other skins were driven mainly by music, fashion and working-class pride, Joe and his mob use their formidable street style as a badge of aggressive rage, even while Joe dreams of making a better life for himself.
Lacerating in its depiction of violence and sex, often shocking by today's standards, Skinhead is also a provocative cross-section of urban British society. It doesn't spare the hypocrisy, corruption or excessive permissiveness which, the author believed, allowed the extremist wing of skinhead culture to flourish.
Skinhead, first published in 1970 and a huge cult bestseller, is now available for the first time in ebook form, with a new introduction by Andrew Stevens. Nearly fifty years on, it remains one of the most potent artefacts of British popular culture ever committed to print.
I did happen to read the book when it came out and I was quite interested in the whole Richard Allen cult... suedeheads and skinheads and smoothies were very much part of daily life. There was a tremendous air of intensity... something interesting grabbed me about the whole thing. Morrissey
(Richard Allen's) work shouldn't require a theoretical summing up, once enough of those to whom it appeals understand its attraction we will have superceded this society. Stewart Home
In this third collection of essays and investigations into 'The Criminal World of Sherlock Holmes, ' Kelvin I. Jones shows just why the Holmes stories were so convincingly original. He reveals not only that Conan Doyle was an expert in the subject of criminalistics, but that he knew the identity of Jack the Ripper. The book provides a wide survey of the criminals of the period, including accounts of its vicious garrotters, cunning coiners and safe breakers, and contains a biography of the king of burglars, Charles Peace. Jones considers the literary antecedents of the crime story which Doyle perfected with his character, the forensic consulting detective. This last volume is unique in its depth of research, providing the reader with a fascinating insight into the dark shadow world of Victorian society, and featuring long forgotten accounts of its methods, murders and bloody mayhem.
A shocking account of the savage world in which Sherlock Holmes operated. The crimes of The Ripper; Conan Doyle's knowledge of the killer's identity; the methods employed by criminals, and of their pursuers; the harrowing truth about Holmes' drug abuse, and of his gang of 'street arabs', the long-lost crime monographs by the Baker Street sleuth; and much more, this book tells the true story of Holmes' gas-lit and sinister criminal world.
Victorian society was violent & exploitive..., footpads and garrotters stalked the streets of the City...beggars were rife..
Kelvin is the author of many books about Holmes, the definitive biography of Doyle as a spiritualist & the 3 volume edition of the author's spiritualist writings. A distinguished life member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, he has published contemporary crime novels and poetry, and is a member of the Crime Writers' Association. The almost legendary Mr Jones...- Roger Johnson, commissioning ed. of The Sherlock Holmes Journal.
Kelvin Jones takes the reader into Victorian England, walking side by side with the Great Detective..., an all-round, relentless researcher... - Mark Alberstaat, ed. of Canadian Holmes.
Major Mark Hankisson has retired to Pottlecombe, a tiny fishing village on the Devon coast. As the nineteenth century has wound to a close, and he has entered late middle age, the locale has been seeing significant development. Now, in an elegant strip along the brow of the hills which line the coast toward the big town of Twistmouth, there stretches a lovely new white road along which he can walk in all weathers. It recalls the splendours of the Amalfi coast, and has been named in their honour 'the Cornice'.
Whilst walking the new road, he spies a beautiful older woman who seems to enjoy the walk as much as he does. They often pass each other, but, true to the reservations of the times, and to their own retiring natures, they don't speak, and acknowledge each other barely. He is curious though, and makes discreet enquiries through his landlady. He discovers that her name is Agnes Lamb, and that she cares for a bedridden elder sister with whom she lives in seclusion.
As their first winter comes, he misses seeing her out walking, and finds out that the sisters have gone away to warmer climes for the season, and let their house. His feelings intensify in her absence, and when she finally returns after a long five months, he summons sufficient will to make hesitant contact in a few words only, simply in passing, which she reciprocates. But she appears equally shy and uncertain.
With the oncoming of another winter, again Agnes disappears from the Cornice. But this time, it will require a fracturing of the established codes for Mark to find out why. What he discovers breaks his heart.
On the Pottlecombe Cornice was the last fiction written by Howard Sturgis, and has never before been published in book form. This handsome and elegiac novella appeared originally in the Fortnightly Review in March 1908, four years after the publication of his masterpiece Belchamber.
Pompey Casmilus, Stevie Smith's loquacious alter ego, works as a secretary and writes down on yellow office paper this wickedly amusing novel. Dear Reader, she addresses us politely in the whirlwind of her opinions on death, sex, anti-Semitism, art, Greek tragedy, friendship, marriage, Nazism, gossip, and the suburbs. But most of all Pompey talks about love.
When Smith first tried to get her poems published in 1935, she was told by a publisher to go away and write a novel. Novel on Yellow Paper, the happy result of this advice, made its author an instant celebrity and was acclaimed as a curious, amusing, provocative and very serious piece of work (The London Times Literary Supplement, 1936).
In William Blissett's masterful study The Porpoise and the Otter, we encounter dapper, choosy Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) and the massive untidy G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), together again in the great age of verbal parody, penetrating caricature, and the writer as personality. In considering their life and works, Professor Blissett discloses a host of new details bearing on how the two essayist-cartoonists viewed their Edwardian world with its roots in Victorian grandeur and facing a troubled new century.
In the wake of protest and revolution, Mario lands in London with a bag full of South American jewellery and trinkets. Will he make ends meet on the markets of Camden and Portobello? Will he find love and romance among the bartering locals? How will he fare with the emigres and the forgotten social elites of his own society? - How will he navigate the complex world of 90s London? - A world that seems to be on the tip of its own iceberg: protest, riot, petty thievery, scam and shenanigan.
Será posible el amor en Londres? O quizás en Ibiza, o más allá?
Podrán Danilo, Mario, y demás, sobrevivir en la gran ciudad vendiendo sus artesanías en las ferias de Camden y Portobello?
Cómo será su relación con los locatarios, y con la variada comunidad Latina?
Cómo navegarán los complejos tiempos de la década de los noventa: protesta, agitación, fiestas clandestinas, conflictos, romance y travesura...
Anibal Buonomo describes San London thus: El libro consta de catorce relatos diferentes que están interconectados a través de personajes, tiempos y lugares. Siete de ellos están escritos en inglés (Proctor) y otros siete en castellano (Buonomo).
The book is a mesh of interconnecting relations across time, place and character. Seven stories are written in English (Proctor) and seven more in Spanish (Buonomo).
Here is a short extract from one of the Spanish stories, Poll Tax, which describes a demonstration in central London against the Thatcher Government's unpopular tax in the late nineteen eighties:
Interminables columnas de gentes se dirigían hacia Trafalgar Square. Y policías, muchos cops, cientos y cientos de cops. En las escalinatas de la National Gallery habían formado un cordón... miró hacia el lugar donde siempre estaba el hombre que vendía salchichas, aquel hombre tosco, lacónico, que permanecía hasta la medianoche parado detrás de su prolijo carrito. (Él lo observaba cuando esperaba el bus nocturno, observaba cómo pasaba parte de su tiempo cocinando las rebanadas de cebolla, las movía sobre la plancha de aquí para allá, pedacito por pedacito y las miraba fijamente largo rato mientras quién sabe qué pensaba debajo de su boina). El hombre no estaba aquella tarde.
Los cops llevaban caras rígidas, tensas, sus ojos con agresividad. Lejos de la imagen de la postal donde el policía amablemente sonríe a los turistas, estos me recordaban a los de Sudamérica en tiempos de la dictadura- el sombrero aparte, claro.
Danilo is suddenly trapped by the police advance. What will he do? Will he escape?
El saxofonista se había ido de la entrada de Charing Cross Station. Ahora la música que se escuchaba eran las voces de protesta. Muchos manifestantes portaban carteles no muy grandes y bien prolijos que decían simplemente en blanco y negro NO POLL TAX. Danilo pidió uno y lo colocó al costado de su puesto. Algunos en el mercado hicieron una mueca de reprobación como no queriendo mezclar el business con la protesta. A Danilo le importó poco. Y de hecho eso era una gota en el océano porque muy pronto eran miles y miles de protestantes y miles de cops. Justo a un costado de la plazoleta, por St. Martins Lane, los canas bloquearon el paso a la muchedumbre y, a los pocos segundos el volumen de los cánticos se elevó; la tensión se elevó. Danilo y otros comenzaron a levantar el puesto, a guardar las mercancías. En aquel momento vio cómo una lata de cerveza levantaba vuelo por el aire, giraba un par de vueltas, se dirigía hacia la barrera policial, y ... Pum cayó con fuerza sobre la barrera. La reacción fue inmediata, una camioneta blindada de la policía arremetió contra la muchedumbre, y ese fue el comienzo.
This colorful novel of adventure, family, and courage shows young Billy McTaggart coming of age as a tapper in a British railyard during the bitter years following World War II. Bullied for his small stature but endowed with a sharp mind, the fierce ambition of his sweetheart Meg, and the love of his Mam, Billy navigates a rapidly changing world where steam engines give way to rock and roll, Elvis, and the Beatles.
Everything changes for Billy in one breathtaking moment when he uncovers a wartime secret hidden inside a rail car. Romance, loss, intimacy, and elation follow his path up and out of England's rigid class system. Inspired by the vibrant music and allure of America, Billy's ambition is driven to escape mediocrity. Through it all, Billy maintains his generous spirit, belief in possibilities and that the greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
Billy Tapper Zillionaire captures the humanity of simple relationships for an accidental bystander to history growing up in the 1950s and 60s.
Adolescence has been codified as an unpredictable, experimental and liminal time. Teenage Time reads this phase as queer in its framing and disruption of developmental narratives of modernity, showing that the identity of the teenager, as it has been culturally perceived in different epochs developing since the 1940s, has shaped the temporal imaginary of the 20th and 21st century. From the conception of the teenager after the Second World War, through notions of rebellion and consumption peaking in the 1980s and 1990s, to representations of their precarious futures amidst the political, social, economic and environmental uncertainties of today, Pamela Thurschwell exposes British and American representations of the adolescent as both destructive and recursive in their disturbance of narrative and teleology in literature, film and sub-cultural history. Calling on theories of queer temporality, time studies, psychoanalysis and Marxist accounts of modernity, this book traces how the teenager is 'out of time' and time-travelling, commodified, anarchic, futureless, precarious with an uneven distribution of time in relation to race, and how they confront dystopias in Young Adult catastrophe literature.
Covering a wide range of works, this book features contemporary and YA fiction such as The Member of the Wedding, American Pastoral, Sula, The Hate U Give, The Fault in Our Stars, How I Live Now, Never Let Me Go, The Hunger Games and They Both Die at the End, and films including Donnie Darko, The Breakfast Club, Back to the Future, Say Anything and Ghost World. Original and conceptually sophisticated, Thurschwell demonstrates how adolescence is formed in dialogue with a crisis in and of historical time, revealing the promise and destruction of the modern teenager.
England, 1940s.
Minnie has spent most of her life feeling like a plain Jane, watching things happen around her, waiting for something - just something - to once happen to her. When her old best friend, the beautiful and callous Junie, unexpectedly returns to Sixteen Streets, Minnie's not quite sure how to feel. Once inseparable, the two now find themselves at odds. And when Junie strikes up a romance with Minnie's brother Derek, Minnie can't help but feel lonelier than ever...
It is 1941 and Lil, a young working-class woman from West London, and Margaret, a daring socialite from a well-to-do family, embark on a secret affair. Working side-by-side in a typing pool during the day, at night the two women makelove in toilet cubicles, unlit alleyways, secluded bomb sites, and Margaret's dreary digs when the landlady is out. But when Margaret ends their affair to marry a flight lieutenant, Lil feels she has no choice but to follow suit and marry Alfie Edwards, an old childhood acquaintance.
Alfie goes to war and Lil is left struggling with a heterosexual relationship, two small children, Harry and Maggie, and the loss of her lover, Margaret. Meanwhile, Alfie is taken prisoner of war and sent to a labour camp in Germany. Following the firebombing of Dresden by Allied forces, Alfie is forced to assist with the clean-up operation and is left traumatised for the remainder of his life.
Reunited at the end of the war, Lil and Alfie are forced to build a life together but Alfie can't touch people and Lil can't love people, including her own children. As they grapple with their separate traumas the effects travel beyond them to shape the lives of the generations that follow, to Harry and Maggie, and later, to their grandson, LJ.
