Patrick Hamilton – författare

''I recommend Hamilton at every opportunity, because he was such a wonderful writer and yet is rather under-read today. All his novels are terrific'' Sarah Waters''If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man'' Nick HornbyPatrick Hamilton''s novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne''s new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.The Midnight Bell, a pub on the Euston Road, is the pulse of this brilliant and compassionate trilogy. It is here where the barman, Bob, falls in love with Jenny, a West End prostitute who comes in off the streets for a gin and pep. Around his obsessions, and Ella the barmaid''s secret love for him, swirls the sleazy life of London in the 1930s. This is a world where people emerge from cheap lodgings in Pimlico to pour out their passions, hopes and despair in pubs and bars - a world of twenty thousand streets full of cruelty and kindness, comedy and pathos, wasted dreams and lost desires.

''I recommend Hamilton at every opportunity, because he was such a wonderful writer and yet is rather under-read today. All his novels are terrific'' Sarah Waters''If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man'' Nick HornbyPatrick Hamilton''s novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne''s new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.Ernest Ralph Gorse''s heartlessness and lack of scruple are matched only by the inventiveness and panache with which he swindles his victims. With great deftness and precision Hamilton exposes how his dupes'' own naivete, snobbery or greed make them perfect targets. These three novels are shot through with the brooding menace and sense of bleak inevitability so characteristic of the author. There is also vivid satire and caustic humour. Gorse is thought to be based on the real-life murderer Neville Heath, hanged in 1946.

''All his novels are terrific'' Sarah WatersPatrick Hamilton''s novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne''s new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.In Craven House, among the shifting, uncertain world of the English boarding house, with its sad population of the shabby genteel on the way down - and the eternal optimists who would never get up or on - the young Patrick Hamilton, with loving, horrified fascination, first mapped out the territory that he would make, uniquely, his own. Although many of Hamilton''s lifelong interests are here, they are handled with a youthful brio and optimism conspicuously absent from his later work. The inmates of Craven House have their foibles, but most are indulgently treated by an author whose world view has yet to harden from scepticism into cynicism. The generational conflicts of Hamilton''s own youth thread throughout the narrative, with hair bobbing and dancing as the battle lines. That perennial of the 1920s bourgeoisie, the ''servant problem'', is never far from the surface, and tensions crescendo gradually to a resolution one climactic dinnertime.

''All his novels are terrific, but this one is my favourite'' Sarah WatersPatrick Hamilton''s novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne''s new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.Measuring out the wartime days in a small town on the Thames, Miss Roach is not unattractive but no longer quite young. The Rosamund Tea Rooms boarding house, where she lives with half a dozen others, is as grey and lonely as its residents. For Miss Roach, ''slave of her task-master, solitude'', a shaft of not altogether welcome light is suddenly beamed upon her, with the appearance of a charismatic and emotional American Lieutenant. With him comes change - tipping the precariously balanced society of the house and presenting Miss Roach herself with a dilemma.

The seventy-fifth anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Anthony Quinn.''I recommend Hamilton at every opportunity, because he was such a wonderful writer and yet is rather under-read today. All his novels are terrific'' Sarah Waters''If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man'' Nick HornbyPatrick Hamilton''s novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne''s new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.London, 1939, and in the grimy publands of Earls Court, George Harvey Bone is pursuing a helpless infatuation. Netta is cool, contemptuous and hopelessly desirable to George. George is adrift in a drunken hell, except in his ''dead'' moments, when something goes click in his head and he realises, without a doubt, that he must kill her. In the darkly comic Hangover Square Patrick Hamilton brilliantly evokes a seedy, fog-bound world of saloon bars, lodging houses and boozing philosophers, immortalising the slang and conversational tone of a whole generation and capturing the premonitions of doom that pervaded London life in the months before the war.

''I recommend Hamilton at every opportunity, because he was such a wonderful writer and yet is rather under-read today. All his novels are terrific'' Sarah Waters''If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man'' Nick HornbyPatrick Hamilton''s novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne''s new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.West Kensington - grey area of rot, and caretaking, and cat-slinking basements. West Kensington - drab asylum for the driven and cast-off genteel!'' Patrick Hamilton was acutely conscious that his third novel (first published in 1928) was longer and ''much grimmer'' than his previous and well-received productions. Twopence Coloured is the story of nineteen-year-old Jackie Mortimer, who leaves Hove in search of a life on the London stage, only to become entangled in ''provincial theatre'' and complex affairs of the heart with two brothers, Richard and Charles Gissing. The novel, unavailable for many years, is a gimlet-eyed portrait of the theatrical vocation, and fully exhibits Hamilton''s celebrated gift for conjuring London - the ''vast, thronged, unknown, hooting, electric-lit, dark-rumbling metropolis.

''I recommend Hamilton at every opportunity, because he was such a wonderful writer and yet is rather under-read today. All his novels are terrific'' Sarah Waters''If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man'' Nick HornbyPatrick Hamilton''s novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne''s new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.Impromptu in Moribundia is a satirical fable about one (nameless) man''s trespass (through a fantastical machine called the ''Asteradio'') into a parallel universe on a far-off planet where the ''miserably dull affairs of England'' are mirrored and transformed into an apparent idyll of bourgeois English imagination.Moribundia is the ''physical enactment of the stereotypes and myths of English middle-class culture and consciousness.'' Yet the narrator comes to discover that he has stumbled among a people characterised by ''cupidity, ignorance, complacence, meanness, ugliness, short-sightedness, cowardice, credulity, hysteria and, when the occasion called for it . . . cruelty and blood-thirstiness.

''If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man'' Nick Hornby''I recommend Hamilton at every opportunity, because he was such a wonderful writer and yet is rather under-read today. All his novels are terrific'' Sarah WatersPatrick Hamilton''s novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne''s new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.''Beyond the fact that it was, in face of a vivid and calamitous ending, to reveal from his own experience the ardent splendours of Youth''s adventure, he didn''t quite know what his novel was going to be about.''Monday Morning wryly tells the story of Anthony, a young man taking his passionate first steps in life, in London, and in love. Not yet worn down by the world, Anthony is determined to write the novel that will bring him fame and fortune - and to marry the beautiful Diane. Patrick Hamilton''s witty, playful first novel introduces us to the grimy world of metropolitan boarding houses and provincial theatrical digs that would be the setting for his later masterpieces Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude, and the hopes, dreams and regrets those who live there.

Earth now is dominated by both biogeophysical and anthropogenic processes, as represented in these two images from a simulation of aerosols. Dust (red) from the Sahara sweeps west across the Atlantic Ocean. Sea salt (blue) rises into the atmosphere from winds over the North Atlantic and from a tropical cyclone in the Indian Ocean. Organic and black carbon (green) from biomass burning is notable over the Amazon and Southeast Asia. Plumes of sulfate (white) from fossil fuel burning are particularly prominent over northeastern North America and East Asia. If present trends of dust emissions and fossil fuel burning continues in what we call the Anthropocene epoch, then we could experience high atmospheric CO2 levels leading to unusual warming rarely experienced in Earth''s history. This book focuses on human influences on land, ocean, and the atmosphere, to determine if human activities are operating within or beyond the safe zones of our planet''s biological, chemical, and physical systems.

Volume highlights include:

Future Earth is a valuable practical guide for scientists from all disciplines including geoscientists, museum curators, science educators, and public policy makers.

Earth now is dominated by both biogeophysical and anthropogenic processes, as represented in these two images from a simulation of aerosols. Dust (red) from the Sahara sweeps west across the Atlantic Ocean. Sea salt (blue) rises into the atmosphere from winds over the North Atlantic and from a tropical cyclone in the Indian Ocean. Organic and black carbon (green) from biomass burning is notable over the Amazon and Southeast Asia. Plumes of sulfate (white) from fossil fuel burning are particularly prominent over northeastern North America and East Asia. If present trends of dust emissions and fossil fuel burning continues in what we call the Anthropocene epoch, then we could experience high atmospheric CO2 levels leading to unusual warming rarely experienced in Earth''s history. This book focuses on human influences on land, ocean, and the atmosphere, to determine if human activities are operating within or beyond the safe zones of our planet''s biological, chemical, and physical systems.

Volume highlights include:

Future Earth is a valuable practical guide for scientists from all disciplines including geoscientists, museum curators, science educators, and public policy makers.

In this, the latest in the People and Plants series, plant conservation is described in the context of livelihoods and development, and ways of balancing the conservation of plant diversity with the use of plants and the environment for human benefit are discussed. A central contention in this book is that local people must be involved if conservation is to be successful. Also examined are ways of prioritizing plants and places for conservation initiatives, approaches to in situ and ex situ conservation, and how to approach problems of unsustainable harvesting of wild plants. Roles for botanists, foresters, sociologists, development workers and others are discussed. This book acts as a unifying text for the series, integrating case studies and methodologies considered in previous volumes and pointing out in a comprehensive, accessible volume the valuable lessons to be learned.

In this, the latest in the People and Plants series, plant conservation is described in the context of livelihoods and development, and ways of balancing the conservation of plant diversity with the use of plants and the environment for human benefit are discussed. A central contention in this book is that local people must be involved if conservation is to be successful. Also examined are ways of prioritizing plants and places for conservation initiatives, approaches to in situ and ex situ conservation, and how to approach problems of unsustainable harvesting of wild plants. Roles for botanists, foresters, sociologists, development workers and others are discussed. This book acts as a unifying text for the series, integrating case studies and methodologies considered in previous volumes and pointing out in a comprehensive, accessible volume the valuable lessons to be learned.