Thomas Pinney – författare

Since its first publication in 1920, George Saintsbury's classic Notes on a Cellar-Book has remained one of the greatest tributes to drink and drinking in the literature of wine. A collection of tasting notes, menus, and robust opinions, the work is filled with anecdotes and recollections of wines and spirits consumed—from the heights of Romanée-Conti to the simple pleasures of beer, flip, and mum. Thomas Pinney brings this unique work alive for contemporary audiences by providing the keys to a full understanding of Notes on a Cellar-Book in a new edition that includes explanatory endnotes, an essay on the book's legacy, and additional articles on wine by Saintsbury.

Kipling's letters, never before collected and edited and largely unpublished, are now presented in an annotated edition based on the more than 6,000 letters preserved in public and private collections all over the world.

'The letters bring the man marvellously alive...a perfect bedside book and an important contribution to Kipling scholarship.' - Ian McIntyre, Times;Volume 3 of Kipling's Letters covers the decade 1900-10, the years in which Kipling published Kim, Just So Stories, The Five Nations, Traffics and Discoveries, Puck of Pook's Hill, Actions and Reactions, and Rewards and Fairies. The narrative of his life includes the years in South Africa during and after the Boer War, his move to Bateman's in Sussex, his increasing involvement in the politics of preparedness and the growing record of his honours, culminating in the Nobel Prize.

Since its first publication in 1920, George Saintsbury's classic "Notes on a Cellar-Book" has remained one of the greatest tributes to drink and drinking in the literature of wine. A collection of tasting notes, menus, and robust opinions, the work is filled with anecdotes and recollections of wines and spirits consumed - from the heights of Romanee-Conti to the simple pleasures of beer, flip, and mum. Thomas Pinney brings this unique work alive for contemporary audiences by providing the keys to a full understanding of "Notes on a Cellar-Book" in a new edition that includes explanatory endnotes, an essay on the book's legacy, and additional articles on wine by Saintsbury.

The Vikings called North America 'Vinland', the land of wine. Giovanni de Verrazzano, the Italian explorer who first described the grapes of the New World, was sure that 'they would yield excellent wines'. And when the English settlers found grapes growing so thickly that they covered the ground down to the very seashore, they concluded that 'in all the world the like abundance is not to be found'. Thus, from the very beginning the promise of America was, in part, the alluring promise of wine. How that promise was repeatedly baffled, how its realization was gradually begun, and how at last it has been triumphantly fulfilled is the story told in this book. It is a story that touches on nearly every section of the United States and includes the whole range of American society from the founders to the latest immigrants. Germans in Pennsylvania, Swiss in Georgia, Minorcans in Florida, Italians in Arkansas, French in Kansas, Chinese in California - all contributed to the domestication of Bacchus in the New World. So too did innumerable individuals, institutions, and organizations.Prominent politicians, obscure farmers, eager amateurs, sober scientists: these and all the other kinds and conditions of American men and women figure in the story. The history of wine in America is, in many ways, the history of American origins and of American enterprise in microcosm. While much of that history has been lost to sight, especially after Prohibition, the recovery of the record has been the goal of many investigators over the years, and the results are here brought together for the first time. In print in its entirety for the first time, "A History of Wine in America" is the most comprehensive account of winemaking in the United States, from the Norse discovery of native grapes in 1001 A.D., through Prohibition, and up to the present expansion of winemaking in every state.

"A History of Wine in America" is the definitive account of winemaking in the United States, first as it was carried out under Prohibition, and then as it developed and spread to all fifty states after the repeal of Prohibition. Engagingly written, exhaustively researched, and rich in detail, this book describes how Prohibition devastated the wine industry, the conditions of renewal after Repeal, the various New Deal measures that affected wine, and the early markets and methods. Thomas Pinney goes on to examine the effects of World War II and how the troubled postwar years led to the great wine boom of the late 1960s, the spread of winegrowing to almost every state, and its continued expansion to the present day. The history of wine in America is, in many ways, the history of America and of American enterprise in microcosm. Pinney's sweeping narrative comprises a lively cast of characters that includes politicians, bootleggers, entrepreneurs, growers, scientists, and visionaries.Pinney relates the development of winemaking in states such as New York and Ohio; its extension to Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, and other states; and its notable successes in California, Washington, and Oregon. He is the first to tell the complete and connected story of the rebirth of the wine industry in California, now one of the most successful winemaking regions in the world.

Americans learned how to make wine successfully about two hundred years ago, after failing for more than two hundred years. Thomas Pinney takes an engaging approach to the history of American wine by telling its story through the lives of 13 people who played significant roles in building an industry that now extends to every state. While some names - such as Mondavi and Gallo - will be familiar, others are less well known. These include the wealthy Nicholas Longworth, who produced the first popular American wine; the German immigrant George Husmann, who championed the native Norton grape in Missouri and supplied rootstock to save French vineyards from phylloxera; Frank Schoonmaker, who championed the varietal concept over wines with misleading names; and, Maynard Amerine, who helped make UC Davis a world-class winemaking school.

Some of Macaulay's letters were printed in nineteenth-century memoirs, but a 'Complete Letters' of this eminent Victorian has long been needed. Professor Pinney is editing the whole body of surviving letters by Macaulay, giving accurate texts and textual and explanatory notes. The letters are in chronological order, grouped by historical theme and phases of Macaulay's life. The first two volumes deal with his childhood, career at Cambridge, early legal career and early political career, and end with him about to leave for India. The letters are lively because Macaulay (as lawyer, essayist, historian, politician, administrator, poet) was a man of enormous energy and very wide interests. They will add greatly to our sense of early Victorian political and cultural life as well as to our understanding of Macaulay himself.

Some of Macaulay's letters were printed in nineteenth-century memoirs, but a 'Complete Letters' of this eminent Victorian has long been needed. Professor Pinney is editing the whole body of surviving letters by Macaulay, giving accurate texts and textual and explanatory notes. The letters are in chronological order, grouped by historical theme and phases of Macaulay's life. The first two volumes deal with his childhood, career at Cambridge, early legal career and early political career, and end with him about to leave for India. The letters are lively because Macaulay (as lawyer, essayist, historian, politician, administrator, poet) was a man of enormous energy and very wide interests. They will add greatly to our sense of early Victorian political and cultural life as well as to our understanding of Macaulay himself.

The third volume of Thomas Pinney's acclaimed edition of Macaulay's letters brings the work to its halfway point. This volume begins with Macaulay preparing to sail for India as a member of the supreme Council, covers his Indian career, his return to England, renewed election to Parliament and appointment to the Whig Cabinet; it ends with the defeat of Melbourne's ministry. Many of the letters are previously unpublished, and are notable for their brisk and vivid style, clear and readable as was all Macaulay's prose. They throw particular light on his Indian years, in which Macaulay played a significant part in liberalising movement begun by Bentinck. The period also took Macaulay through several personal crises, brought about by the death of one favourite sister and the marriage of another. In these letters too Macaulay often concerns himself with his continuing literary career.

The fourth volume of Thomas Pinney's acclaimed edition of Macaulay's letters covers the period between September 1841 and December 1848, in which Macaulay is shown keeping up an active political life as MP for Edinburgh and member of Lord John Russell's Whig Cabinet. At the same time his literary reputation is extended by The Lays of Ancient Rome, the collected Essays, and, at the end of the period spanned by this volume, the triumphant publication of the first two volumes of the History of England. In the same years Macaulay was enjoying perhaps the most satisfactory period of his private life: we see him comfortably established in the Albany, enjoying the society of his sister and her family, taking part as a leading figure in Whig political and literary circles, and confidently at work on the book which was to crown his fame.

The years covered in this fifth volume of Macaulay's letters were a striking mixture of triumph and loss. The publication of the first part of The History of England at the end of 1848 set Macaulay at the top of his fame, not merely in England, but on the Continent and in America. Honours came pouring in, and the sales of his books began to make him a rich man. The publication of the second part of the History in 1855 was a publishing event of unparalleled magnitude: 25,000 copies were subscribed at once in England, and four times that number were quickly sold in the United States. To add to his triumph, the people of Edinburgh, who had so rudely and unexpectedly rejected him in 1847 as their representative in parliament, now recanted; though Macaulay refused even to appear before them, they insisted upon returning him to parliament, and did so in 1852.

The last four years of Macaulay's life, documented in this final volume of the Letters, began as an agreeable coda to the rest. He had come to terms with his invalid state, and took great satisfaction in the achievement that he had already realised. He continued to work at his History, but without any expectations or anxieties, instead he enjoyed what his labours had already brought him. First among these was his house, Holly Lodge, in Kensington, where he removed early in 1856 after nearly fifteen years in chambers at the Albany. At Holly Lodge, attended by servants, and visited by a steady company of family and friends, Macaulay took pleasure in entertaining, and in supervising the care of his trees, lawn and flowers - novel amusements to an urban bachelor of literary habits.

A personal view of England, from the Napoleonic Wars to the high tide of mid-Victorian prosperity, is recorded in these letters of one of the Victorian era's greatest figures. Historian, essayist, poet, orator, statesman, Macaulay saw and recorded - and frequently had part in - some of the most important events of his time. The abolition of slavery and the slave trade, the passage of the Reform Bill, the reform of Indian government, and the struggle over the Corn Laws are among the public interests of Macaulay's letters. At the same time they present a lively picture of the style and behaviour of Macaulay's time as he saw it in many different scenes: among the Evangelicals of Clapham, at Cambridge, amidst the society of Holland House, in Parliament, at the country houses of the grand Whigs, and among the literary, legal and political circles of Victorian London.

Rudyard Kipling has been described as 'one of the few complete originals in English literature'. In his last work, Something of Myself, he reflects on his life and the basis of his art. Yet paradoxically this ostensibly autobiographical work (as an early critic pointed out) actually discloses very little of himself. Thomas Pinney's revealing edition now uncovers the extraordinary extent to which Kipling's account of his life fails to match the biographical facts, in a series of selections, omissions and distortions. Illustrated with Kipling's own satirical drawings from the manuscripts, and brought together with his other autobiographical writings (some previously unpublished), this fascinating book sheds new light on the intriguing relationship between Kipling's life and work.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), winner of the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of one of the most popular poems in the English language, 'If-', has long captured the interest of poetry lovers. Here, Thomas Pinney brings together a selection of well-established favourites and the best of the previously uncollected and unpublished poems from The Cambridge Edition of the Poems of Rudyard Kipling (2013). The poems, whether exploring the colonial experience, exposing the injustice of war, or appreciating the beauties of nature, resonate with Kipling's keen observations of his world and strong sense of poetic rhythm. Discovered by Pinney in an array of unlikely hiding places, the uncollected and unpublished poems show the diversity and development of Kipling's talent over his lifetime, and, when combined with long-held favourites, offer readers a unique opportunity to experience Kipling's mastery of poetry in a new way.

Rudyard Kipling's (1865-1936) work is known and loved the world over by children and adults alike; it has been translated into many languages, and onto the cinema screen. This volume brings together for the first time some 86 uncollected short fictions. Almost all of them will be unfamiliar to readers; some are unrecorded in any bibliography; some are here published for the first time. Most of them come from Kipling's Indian years and show him experimenting with a great variety of forms and tones. We see the young Kipling enjoying the exercise of his craft; yet the voice that emerges throughout is always unmistakably his own, changing the scene every time the curtain is raised.