Norman White – författare

The Norton Commando is a motorcycle with an ohv pre-unit parallel-twin engine, produced by the Norton Motorcycle Company from 1967 until 1977. With over 700 colour photographs, this book provides step-by-step guides to restoring every component of this classic bike. Topics covered include how to find a worthy restoration project; setting up a workshop with key tools and equipment; dismantling the motorcycle to restore the chassis, engine cradle and swing arm; restoring the isolastic suspension, forks and steering; tackling the engine, transmission, carburettors, electrics, ignition and instruments and, finally, overhauling wheels and brakes, and replacing tyres. There is also a chapter on the assembly of a restored 'Five Times Machine of the Year' motorcycle.

Gerard Manley Hopkins spent five unhappy years in Ireland before his death in 1889, during which time he wrote perhaps the most interesting group of all his poems. Although he is one of the most well known and liked of poets, he is still one of the least understood. This is a full-length study of Hopkins's time in Ireland, when he was Professor of Classics at University College Dublin, and it is both a biography and a critical account of the poetry. Norman White examines the poet's personality and shows him as a sick and self-lacerating human being. This is not a conventional biography and it does not aim to be an account of Hopkins's doings in Ireland: the important things that happened to Hopkins in Ireland were mental, and so the book is an exploration of the poems written in Ireland largely as a form of psychological biography, working outwards from Hopkins's most intimate creations.