![]() This is popular history at its most stirring. ![]() More than twenty years in the making, The Last Lion presents a revelatory and unparalleled portrait of this brilliant, flawed, and dynamic leader. The Last Lion brilliantly recounts how Churchill organized his nation's military response and defense, compelled FDR into supporting America's beleaguered cousins, and personified the "never surrender" ethos that helped the Allies win the war, while at the same time adapting himself and his country to the inevitable shift of world power from the British Empire to the United States. The Churchill conjured up by William Manchester and Paul Reid is a man of indomitable courage, lightning-fast intellect, and an irresistible will to action. ![]() ![]() Spanning the years of 1940-1965, The Last Lion picks up shortly after Winston Churchill became Prime Minister-when his tiny island nation stood alone against the overwhelming might of Nazi Germany. The long-awaited final volume of William Manchester's legendary biography of Winston Churchill. ![]()
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6/30/2023 0 Comments In the company of the courtesan![]() ![]() Together they make the perfect partnership: the sharp-tongued, sharp-witted dwarf, and his vibrant mistress, trained from birth to charm, entertain, and satisfy men who have the money to support her. With a mix of courage and cunning they infiltrate Venetian society. ![]() ![]() Escaping the sack of Rome in 1527, with their stomachs churning on the jewels they have swallowed, the courtesan Fiammetta and her dwarf companion, Bucino, head for Venice, the shimmering city born out of water to become a miracle of east-west trade: rich and rancid, pious and profitable, beautiful and squalid. Thus begins In the Company of the Courtesan, Sarah Dunant’s epic novel of life in Renaissance Italy. My lady, Fiammetta Bianchini, was plucking her eyebrows and biting color into her lips when the unthinkable happened and the Holy Roman Emperor’s army blew a hole in the wall of God’s eternal city, letting in a flood of half-starved, half-crazed troops bent on pillage and punishment. ![]() ![]() ![]() If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms. ![]() ![]() The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born–or enter involuntarily. We cannot have love without lovers, nor deference without squires and labourers.Īnd class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. Moreover, we cannot have two distinct classes, each with an independent being, and then bring them into relationship with each other. The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context. The finest-meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomise its structure. More than this, the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. EP Thompson – The Making of the English Working Class ![]() 6/30/2023 0 Comments Emily st john mandel glass hotel![]() ![]() Mandel’s corrupt financial adviser, Jonathan Alkaitis, also has a team of enablers on his staff. It takes a team to execute a massive financial crime, and I just found myself thinking, Who are these people?” “What interested me about Madoff was that he had a staff who also went to prison. “I was fascinated by the Madoff story,” says Mandel. Instead, a Madoff-like Ponzi scheme provides Mandel a point of departure for a much bigger-and stranger-novel about how the decisions we make affect not just our own lives, but the lives of everyone around us. ![]() John Mandel’s new novel, The Glass Hotel (Knopf, March 24), may dramatize large-scale financial fraud, but it’s definitely not about disgraced financier Bernie Madoff, the author cautions. ![]() |