![]() ![]() ![]() Ackroyd’s parade of monarchs includes mostly ruthless abusers of England’s resources, while the author also outlines gradual steps toward democracy. ![]() when England was continually colonized and exploited by foreigners, including various Germanic tribes such as the Angles and Saxons, Vikings, and Normans. Beginning with the earliest archeological remains dating to 900,000 years ago, Ackroyd continues from the first to the 13th centuries. This first in a projected six-volume history by über-prolific novelist and literary biographer Ackroyd (London: The Biography) starts with the Stone Age, devotes most of its pages to the Middle Ages, and ends with the death of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, in 1509. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() The film spent years in Development Hell before getting dumped straight to video. However, the show earned a loyal cult following and has proved to be one of the more influential comedy shows in recent decades.Īfter its cancellation, the show was spun off into the feature film Run Ronnie Run, starring one of its recurring characters. Due to airing on a premium cable network, the show never obtained a great deal of popularity, and was eventually dumped into a poor time slot before getting canceled. ![]() The show filled its ranks with performers and writers from the alternative comedy scene, and served as a career springboard for many up-and-coming comedians. It is noted for its edgy, cynical, and oftentimes cruel sense of humor as well as the way the sketches would transition into each other, much like an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. The show aired on HBO for four seasons (1995–98). Show with Bob and David was a highly influential Sketch Comedy series starring and written by Bob Odenkirk and David Cross. ![]() ![]() ![]() At home her family call her ‘Bunny Rabbit,’ showing how Frankie’s family still see her as an innocent and harmless ‘child’. ![]() ![]() Lockhart depicts the struggles of Frankie Landau-Banks to prove herself to her family, her boyfriend and everyone around her that she is not to be underestimated. The reason becomes clear as Frankie remembers ‘The Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds’, an exclusive male-only secret society which has existed for centuries in Alabaster. Soon Frankie finds herself finds herself sitting with the ‘popular’ seniors at lunch and whilst on the surface they seem to accept her, Frankie senses a distance and unbridgeable gap. As she starts the school year she quickly attracts the attention of Matthew Livingstone, a senior who becomes her main preoccupation. Frankie Landau-Banks is privileged enough to go to one of the most prestigious schools in America: Alabaster Academy. ![]() ![]() Constitution ever to be repealed? How did King Henry II of England provide a procedural blueprint for criminal law? These are just a few of the thought-provoking questions addressed in this beautifully illustrated book. "Which was the last country to abolish slavery? Which is the only amendment to the U.S. Ferguson: Separate but equalġ915 The prohibition of illegal narcoticsġ919 Yelling "fire!" in a crowded theaterġ947 Colonialism and postwar independenceġ948 General agreement on tariffs and tradeġ948 Universal declaration of human rightsġ970 The National Environmental Policy Actġ970 The Count-Martial of William Calley Jr.ġ970 The Occupational Safety and Health Actġ972 The Equal Employment Opportunity Actġ975 Restrictions on involuntary commitmentġ984 Administrative agency determinationsġ986 Peremptory challenges to jury selectionġ987 Robert Bork's Supreme Court nominationġ989 The Fatwa against The Satanic verses 1789 The Declaration of the Rights of Manġ824 Congressional regulation of commerceġ869 Prohibition of racial voter discriminationġ888 The Brazilian Slave Emancipation Actġ896 Plessy v. ![]() ![]() ![]() Some of her essays are about amusing or annoying brief episodes in her life, like Right Aid, about sharing a birthday with the clerk at her local drugstore or The Chupacabra about the surreal moment when she was receiving a massage and the masseuse's dog had a seizure in front of her. ![]() Topics are far-ranging, from the time she attended the wrong shiva (and didn't admit it to the hosting family!) to her cameo on an episode of Gossip Girl that didn't quite meet her expectations. Each one is an acute observation of an ordinary moment (or more) in time. I so enjoyed her warm, witty writing that covers everything from the trivial to the deeply moving.Ĭrosley's book includes 16 essays, some under two pages long and some continuing for more than 20 pages. So, I was excited to listen to her latest essay collection, Look Alive Out There, on audio last month, read by the author. I'd heard rave reviews online, on podcasts, and from friends. ![]() Ever since the 2008 release of her best-selling collection of essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, I've been wanting to read some of Sloane Crosley's work. ![]() ![]() The novel playfully twists genre conventions-there are plenty of wink-wink, nudge-nudge moments to satisfy faithful fantasy readers-but it also stands alone as a modern bildungsroman. ![]() The narrative perspective, shifting among Simon and his supporters and opponents, gives voice to their deeper motivations and angst the dialogue, both internal and external, is contemporary and occasionally profane, with an authentic level of teenage snark. ![]() Rowell’s creation is less preoccupied with the trappings of wizard life than it is focused on the relationships of the characters. But there are also mobile phones, contemporary slang and pop-culture references, and gay romance. There is a great battle between good and evil. He has a talented, stalwart friend, a fascinatingly ambiguous foe, and a complicated, emotionally unavailable mentor. Simon, an orphaned magician whose power is so immense that he is mostly inept at wielding it, returns to Watford School of Magicks for his final year of education in the magical arts. Deftly self-contained so that readers need not have read Fangirl to enjoy this tale, it will nonetheless appeal to Harry Potter fans sophisticated enough to recognize the fundamental tropes at work. Rowell pulls on a central thread of Fangirl (2013)-Cath’s fanfic epic of Simon Snow, the Chosen One and Mage's heir-and uses it to weave a tapestry of realigned affections and alliances. ![]() ![]() ![]() If you believe these plots are real, you are not the target audience for historian Richard Hofstadter’s collection of essays, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, first published in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s quite another to believe that a demonic organization of millions is murdering as many people as Nazi Germany did-and without a single government anywhere in the world uttering so much as a peep about it or a single insider blowing the whistle or leaking. Kennedy because they didn’t like his Cold War policies. It’s one thing to believe that, say, the CIA assassinated President John F. ![]() These are not garden-variety conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, 25 percent of Americans believe that it’s “definitely true” or “probably true” that the coronavirus pandemic was “planned.” More than a third of self-identified conservative Republicans are in this camp, as are nearly one-in-five Democrats. ![]() Roughly a quarter of Republican voters in the United States believe that “elitists” in government, the media, and Hollywood are a cabal of Satan-worshipping, child-trafficking pedophiles who murder children for their adrenochrome. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In 1935 he started working for Polish Radio, a collaboration that would span the war and spread the fame of his name even further. By the mid-1930s he had become something of a celebrity, touring the country as a soloist or accompanied by violists. He was prolific writer of musical compositions that could range from jazz to classical, he also penned hundreds of songs, and his talent was such that after the war he regained the fame he had won before it had started.īorn in Sosnowiec on December 5, 1911, Szpilman studied piano at Warsaw’s Conservatory of Music and soon made his mark on the city’s cultural scene. After the end of the war Szpilman resumed his career, writing music and songs, and becoming very much part of the cultural landscape of post-war Poland.įor many the name of Władysław Szpilman will forever be associated with the ‘The Pianist’, the Roman Polański film about a Jewish musician’s battle to survive the war, and the unlikely help he got from a German officer.īut there is much more to Szpilman’s life than just the few years covered in the celluloid hours of Polanski’s film. ![]() ![]() ![]() Sophie Hughes superbly translates the rhythm and lyricism of The Remainder into English. ![]() And then it came really easily it was kind of writing a rhythm.” Something that would break the linear narrative and so I started trying out Felipe’s voice over and over until all of a sudden I had it. “Then the more I wrote that voice the more I needed a second voice. “When I started writing this novel, I started crafting the voice of Iquela, the woman protagonist, which came naturally to me,” she explains. The project had to mature inside her before she was able to express it the way she wanted. “I had part of the story with me since my early twenties and only felt I was able to write the voices when I was 27 or 28,” Trabucco tells me, sitting across the table in a café in London’s Bloomsbury. It places Trabucco alongside writers like Hang Kang, Philip Roth and Alice Munro. The Remainder is Alia Trabucco Zerán’s first novel and nominated for the Man Booker International Prize 2019. In this interview, originally published by Literary South, Silvia Rothlisberger talks to Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán about her debut novel. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Vargas receives his comeuppance when one of his adulterous affairs comes back to haunt him, and his wife and concubine team up against him. The story concerns the buried gold of Tomás Vargas, a wife-beating, adulterous miser who is disliked by everybody in the town. Like the other stories in the collection, "The Gold of Tomás Vargas" takes place in an undetermined time in the fictional village of Agua Santa, which resembles a South American town. ![]() At the beginning of the short story collection, Eva Luna is responding to the request of her lover from the novel, Rolf Carlé, to tell him one of her stories. The collection was inspired by Allende's 1988 novel, Eva Luna, in which the title character is a storyteller and screenwriter who alludes to many stories that she never tells. A year later, it was translated into English and published by Atheneum as The Stories of Eva Luna. Isabel Allende's "The Gold of Tomás Vargas" was first published in Barcelona in the story collection, Cuentos de Eva Luna, in 1990. ![]() |