Joad Raymond Wren – författare

News moves. It is a battle, a scandal, a disaster. It is a letter, a newspaper, a proclamation. News is a material thing, but also something between us, something we take into us and feel.This book tells the story of news from the sunset of the Middle Ages to the rise of mass media. Following the beat of news from the Venetian envoys and merchants who established its channels and conventions, it uncovers a vast, invisible network carrying news all around Europe, traversing the borders imposed by geography and politics, religion and language.Joad Raymond Wren allows the reader to see news – of the battle of Lepanto, the siege of Vienna – spreading around this network in real time. Dispelling the myth that news was until the printing press scarce and unreliable, and until the telegraph slow and provincial, he opens up windows onto a world buzzing with news from faraway. News brought the distant closer, and provided the means for Europe to know itself. The continent was, for a time, held together by that most essential of human acts: communication.

John Milton's Latin Defences are landmark texts in the history of English Civil War and Interregnum polemics. Part of Oxford University Press's authoritative Complete Works of John Milton, this is the first edition of the Latin Defences to be edited to modern standards of scholarship, together with new translations into English which feature in easy to read facing pages. It offers a rich exploration of the publishing history of these works and contextualises them in the political exchanges and republican thought of the mid-seventeenth century. The annotations are especially alert to Milton's controversial engagement with the writings of his adversaries and to his careful alignment of his tracts with the diplomatic objectives of the republican governments of the 1650s.

‘Highly ambitious and impressive … a rich, multifaceted and thought-provoking book'Noel Malcolm, Times Literary SupplementNews moves. It is a battle, a scandal, a disaster. It is a letter, a newspaper, a proclamation. News is a material thing, but also something between us, something we take into us and feel.This book tells the story of news from the sunset of the Middle Ages to the rise of mass media in modern times. It begins in Renaissance Italy, with the envoys and merchants who drew in and disseminated news across Europe, establishing its channels and conventions. Following the beat of news around the continent, it uncovers a vast, invisible network traversing the boundaries of geography and politics, religion and language.Joad Raymond Wren allows the reader to see news – of the battle of Lepanto, the siege of Vienna – spreading around this network in real time. Dispelling the tenacious myth that news was until the printing press scarce and unreliable, and until the telegraph slow and provincial, he opens up windows onto a world buzzing with news from faraway. News brought the distant closer, and provided the means for Europe to know itself. The continent was, for a time, held together by that most essential of human acts: communication.

An epic history of the birth of news in EuropeNews moves. It is a battle, a scandal, a disaster. It is a letter, a newspaper, a proclamation. News is a material thing, but also something between us, something we take into us and feel.This book tells the story of news from the sunset of the Middle Ages to the rise of mass media in modern times. It begins in Renaissance Italy, with the envoys and merchants who drew in and disseminated news across Europe, establishing its channels and conventions. Following the beat of news around the continent, it uncovers a vast, invisible network traversing the boundaries of geography and politics, religion and language.Joad Raymond Wren allows the reader to see news – of the battle of Lepanto, the siege of Vienna – spreading around this network in real time. Dispelling the tenacious myth that news was until the printing press scarce and unreliable, and until the telegraph slow and provincial, he opens up windows onto a world buzzing with news from faraway. News brought the distant closer, and provided the means for Europe to know itself. The continent was, for a time, held together by that most essential of human acts: communication.

'This fascinating intellectual history of imagined paradises takes us from Thomas More to Ursula K Le Guin' (Guardian)Utopia is not somewhere you can go. But neither is it an idle fantasy.It runs through history and literature from Plato to Thomas More, Margaret Cavendish to Ursula Le Guin. Utopia, this book shows, was for them a tool for exploring the horizons of thought, asking the unaskable and challenging entrenched assumptions about how society has to be.The Uses of Utopia travels not only to the remote islands, parallel realities and distant planets where this played out, but also the places where those inspired by visions of perfection tried to establish them, from the egalitarian communities built in colonial Mexico to the novelist Étienne Cabet’s disastrous attempt to realize socialism on the Mississippi. We see the groundbreaking ideas, about liberty and the law, sex and the sexes, work and wealth, that imagining an ideal society made possible. We hear the voices of radicals of many kinds talking freely to each other - and also to us. Here, in our imperfect world, how will you use utopia?