Nick Rennison est un écrivain, éditeur et libraire dont le travail explore les mythes et légendes durables qui façonnent notre paysage culturel. Il examine comment les personnages emblématiques sont réinterprétés à travers l'histoire, explorant la résonance persistante de leurs récits dans la société contemporaine. Les analyses perspicaces de Rennison offrent aux lecteurs une appréciation plus profonde du pouvoir durable de ces figures archétypales.
Connecting people with places, London's distinctive Blue Plaque scheme highlights the buildings where some of the most remarkable men and women in our history and culture have lived and worked.
Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography blends what we already know of the great sleuth's career with carefully documented social history to answer the questions admirers have long puzzled over. Nick Rennison reveals for the first time Holmes's influence on the political events of late 19th-century England and his connections to the British criminal underworld. It also brings to light his close friendships with key figures of the day, including Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud, and exposes the truth about his cocaine use.
Was there ever a real Robin Hood? Nick Rennison looks at the candidates who have been proposed over the years, from petty thieves to Knights Templar, before moving on to examine the many ways in which Robin Hood has been portrayed in literature and on the screen. He began as the hero of dozens of late medieval ballad, and more recently has been portrayed as everything from proto-socialist man of the people to anarchist thug. As the twenty-first century nears the end of its second decade, Robin Hood is still very much with us.
Pocket Essentials is a dynamic series of books that are concise, lively, and easy to read. Packed with facts as well as expert opinions, each book has all the key information you need to know about such popular topics as film, television, cult fiction, history, and more. Freud was one of the giants of 20th century thought. His ideas have been hugely influential not only in psychology but in all the social sciences and the arts. This looks at Freud's life from his birth in 1856 to his death in Hampstead in 1939. Each of Freud's major works is summarized, his central ideas are explored, and controversies over his methods and practices are examined. Did he, as some recent critics have alleged, turn his back on evidence of genuine child abuse in 1890s Vienna and prefer instead to ascribe it to fantasy and wish fulfilment? What were the reasons behind his terrible quarrel with Carl Gustav Jung? Does his "talking cure" of psychoanalysis actually work?
Every day thousands of people worldwide consult Roget's Thesaurus— yet Peter Mark Roget, one of the most remarkable men of the 19th century, did not even begin the great work of classification which bears his name until he was 70. Before that, Roget had already made his own contributions to knowledge in a dozen different fields such as anatomy, mathematics, education, and optics, including papers on persistence of vision which had later impact on the development of motion pictures. From his involvement in the foundation of the University of London to his books on magnetism, galvanism, and physiology, this biography reveals the full story of Roget's impact on the great issues and the great personalities of the 19th century, and recounts the forgotten life behind one of the most famous of all reference books.
London has always been home to outsiders. To people who won't, or can't, abide by the conventions of respectable society. For close to two centuries these misfit individualists have had a name. They have been called Bohemians. This book is an entertaining, anecdotal history of Bohemian London. A guide to its more colourful inhabitants. Rossetti and Swinburne, defying the morality of high Victorian England. Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley in the decadent 1890s. The Bloomsburyites and the Bright Young Things.
More than 350 major authors, from Margaret Atwood to Mile Zola, through Bruce Chatwin, Aldous Huxley, and Nevil Shute, are arranged in alphabetical order, each with a short article on style, influences, settings, theme, along with a list of their salient works. At the end of each entry, a Read On" section directs readers to similar works by other authors."
The book presents a comprehensive overview of contemporary British novelists, highlighting prominent authors such as Iain Banks, Jeanette Winterson, and Salman Rushdie. Each entry provides essential biographical details and insightful analyses of their major works and themes. With extensive cross-referencing and recommendations for further reading, it serves as an invaluable resource for students and enthusiasts of modern British fiction, offering a clear entry point into the diverse literary landscape of contemporary Britain.
It is 1870. When amateur archaeologist Adam Carver and his loyal but obdurate retainer Quint are visited in their lodgings in London's Doughty Street by an attractive young woman, their landlady is not pleased. The visitor's arrival pitches Carver and Quint headlong into an elaborate mystery which comes to centre on the existence (or not) of a lost text in Ancient Greek, one that may reveal the whereabouts of the treasure hoard of Philip II of Macedonia. Two deaths soon ensue as master and manservant follow what clues they can grasp in the roughest and most genteel parts of the teeming metropolis, with the whiff of cordite and blackmail never far from their nostrils. The scene shifts to Athens and the wilder fastness of a Greece gripped by political unrest as Carver and Quint join forces with Adam's former Cambridge tutor in an attempt to track down the elusive text. But nothing is quite what it seems, and no one involved is prepared for the final, shocking denouement amidst the extraordinary hilltop monasteries of Meteora...
Sherlock Holmes is the most famous fictional detective ever created. The supremely rational sleuth and his dependable companion, Dr Watson, will forever be associated with the gaslit and smog-filled streets of late nineteenth and early twentieth century London. Yet Holmes and Watson were not the only ones solving mysterious crimes and foiling the plans of villainous masterminds in Victorian and Edwardian England. There were countless imitators in the genre, and this volume highlights some of those 'Rivals of Sherlock Holmes'.
