Edward Everett Root Publishers Co. Ltd. – förlag

This newly revised fictional re-writing of the Hamlet story is set in a time somewhere between the Scandinavian Dark Ages - out of which the original tale of Hamlet came - and the Renaissance society of Shakespeare's play.

Graham Holderness's novel provides both a prequel and a sequel to Shakespeare's Hamlet: beginning with the great duel fought between his father King Amled and Fortinbras' father Prince Fortenbrasse; and continuing after Hamlet's death to tell both his story, and that of his invented son.

In the light of this re-imagined history, the conflicts and alliances between ancient Viking chivalry, Renaissance realpolitik and Christian forgiveness are dramatically explored.

This remarkable book reveals the sensational, historical and personal stories of the physical, cultural and psychological territory of London’s Smithfield.In an extraordinary area, measuring little more than a square mile - bounded by Farringdon Street, Charterhouse Street, Aldersgate and Ludgate - can be found in microcosm some of the key contours of British national life. Here, to borrow the name of a famous Smithfield street, in something like its entirety, is ‘Little Britain’.Originally a ‘smooth field’ outside the City walls, used for grazing animals, Smithfield was, from time out of mind, the site of the famous livestock market until it was moved to Islington in 1855. It thus became a place for the slaughter of animals, and for the dead meat market that still survives.Violence against animals was extended to violence against humans. The site of animal slaughter became one of the premier arenas of public execution, for treason or heresy. Since many were judicially killed for religious rather than criminal reasons, some of their deaths may be considered martyrdom, rather than execution. The area is rich in ancient institutions of law and punishment. Newgate Prison was built nearby in 1188, and the central criminal court, better known as the Old Bailey, erected there in the 16th century. Newgate has gone, but the Bailey remains.Between these instruments of justice, and the stench and violence of market and abattoir, stand institutions of healing and salvation: St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and the Church of St Bartholomew the Great, both founded in the 12th century. And close by is St Paul’s Cathedral, which may have roots extending as far back as the 7th century. Clerkenwell priory, the huge London base of the Knights Hospitaller, stood alongside Smithfield, entered through the still surviving Gate of St John.These monuments of national life are not discrete but interactive. In Smithfield medicine, faith, justice, punishment and animal slaughter all share common ground.Graham Holderness tells the stories of Wat Tyler, Aaron Kominski [‘Jack the Ripper’], Heinrich Himmler and others as rooted in the ground of Smithfield. They revolve around the institutions it houses, and dwell on the overlapping activities that have characterised it for centuries. They range across historical fiction, ‘Restoration comedy’, Gothic romance, drama, ‘alternative history’, and contemporary realism. Most are closely tied to the real past by the use of historical sources and documented events: the execution of William Wallace, the killing of Wat Tyler, the burning of Anne Askew, the execution of Amelia Dyer. Others explore the imaginative possibilities of Smithfield, rather than its authenticated events and characters, reanimating fictional characters such as Sweeney Todd, or the hero of Hogarth’s Four Stages of Cruelty; or inventing a modern Halal butcher who is radicalised and joins Isis.These stories trace in every example the interactions of meat, murder, malfeasance, medicine and martyrdom. They are concerned with the commonalities of violence exhibited in the slaughtering of beasts, the torture and execution of criminals, the violations of the body practised on the autopsy table and in the research laboratory, the atrocities of murder and cannibalism.These stories construct an impression of Smithfield, ‘Little Britain’, and throw their dark light both on British national history, and on the human condition.  

See a short video about this book here  https://vimeo.com/388556359/dda5dc58cb /

The power of these first-hand and well-illustrated recollections about a boyhood in occupied Holland lies in their extraordinary ordinariness.  / As the fourth child of a large Catholic family in The Hague, Jan was spared the horrors of true persecution by the Nazis.  Yet his detailed memories of deprivation and dread vividly conjure up the harshness of Dutch life under Hitler’s cruel rule.Young Jan was roughly Anne Frank’s age during the war.  Published here for the first time, his wartime memories preserve yet another child witness to adult injustice.  Touching and surprisingly witty, his stories demonstrate how danger and domesticity go hand-in-hand during wartime. /  Jan was fortunate to survive the war. Born in 1931, he only died in 2019.  / As a boy, he was able to slip past the Nazi occupiers unnoticed and unharmed, often running errands for adults who dare not show themselves, joining a hidden resistance.  This is how Jan comes into brief contact with some of the war’s heroes and villains.  By chance, his after-school job as an apprentice-baker placed him at the side of a prominent member of the Resistance—while a random schoolyard spat with a bully brings him to the headmaster’s office to face the boy’s Nazi father, the Dutch leader of Germany’s largest counter-intelligence programme. For students of this important moment in history, each nail-biting recollection introduces features of the occupation with a disarming matter-of-factness: food coupons, bombardments, people forced to go into hiding, the constant search for food, the lack of electric light, curfews, coats sewn from blankets, and secret radio programs.

Ezra Pound - one of the most innovative and influential, if controversial, poets of the 20th century - continues to dominate the current literary landscape. / He was a key figure in helping to create what became ‘modernism’. Pound wrote poetry and criticism based on revolutionary aesthetic principles still relevant to our understanding of the arts today.  / This new work asks what are these principles and how did Pound develop them?  Who and what influenced him?  What beliefs enabled him not only to write poetry that remains challenging, intriguing and original, but also to recognize other writers and visual artists of distinction?  /   The author places Pound in the cultural context, examining how his early and wide ranging interests from antiquity to the contemporary shaped his aesthetic views. From his study and analysis of literature and art across cultures and centuries, Pound developed guiding principles for his own work and an enduring way of conceptualizing imaginative and lived experience.   /  Emerging from the cultural background of his immediate predecessors, the English Romantics and American Transcendentalists, Pound relied on his own understanding of particular writers from ancient Greece, Rome, and medieval Italy as well as China, in order to discover techniques and themes he could adapt. He synthesized sources from East and West. The catchphrase “Make it New” associated with Pound’s modernism takes on a different light in the full context of his translation: “AS THE SUN MAKES IT NEW -- DAY BY DAY MAKE IT NEW.” His aesthetics thus present not a rejection of the past, but an ongoing vision for today. This is an original study which will be widely welcomed.

The focus of this study is Bowen's Irish background as a guiding thread through this interpretation of her work.