Martin Lamb – författare

Through the diaries of nine men and women We Shall Never Surrender tells the story of the war as they experienced it, whether at home struggling simply to keep going, in high office with direct influence on its outcome, or protesting against it. Some of them, like Alan Brooke, who became Chief of the General Staff, the politician Harold Nicolson or the pacifist writer Vera Brittain, are well known. Others – Anne Garnett, the wife of a country solicitor, George Beardmore, a young husband and father with ambitions to become a novelist, or Clara Milburn, a contended wife and mother of an adult son – are not. But in their diaries they all – together with the diplomat Charles Ritchie, the novelist Naomi Mitchison and the resourceful and frequently unconventional Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly –followed the war in their diaries from outbreak to victory. For some, keeping a diary was a way of documenting their hopes and fears for an unforeseen future. For others, it was a way of carefully preserving their lives on the page, uncertain in what state they would find the world the next time they woke. Together they constitute a remarkable record of human endeavour and human cost, at a time when the whole world was locked in conflict and it often seemed that the outcome rested on the shoulders of one small island.

This handbook offers an authoritative, one-stop reference work for the dynamic and expanding field of language learning motivation. The 32 chapters have been specially commissioned from the field’s most influential researchers and writers. Together they present a compelling picture of the motivations people have for learning languages, the diverse ways we can research motivation, and the implications for promoting and sustaining learners’ motivation. The first section outlines the main theoretical approaches to language learning motivation; the next section presents ways in which motivation theory has been applied in practice; the third section showcases examples of motivation research in particular contexts and with particular types of language learners; and the final section describes the exciting directions that contemporary research is taking, promising important new insights for academics and practitioners alike.