Brenda Ralph Lewis

Here is the essential reference book for anyone with an interest in British history. Drawing on the latest scholarship, this illustrated volume describes and analyses people and events that have shaped and defined life in Britain and the impact British history has had on the rest of the world.

As is so often the case with Charles Dickens's writing, characters and situations from his 1837-39 novel Oliver Twist seem to have found life apart from the text: little Oliver's asking for "more," Bumble's pomposity, Fagin's treachery, and the Artful Dodger's shenanigans have become standard literary and cultural reference points. Generations of readers have found different elements to savor - from the melodramatic alternation between sentimentality and terror to the fairy-tale plot to the cast of remarkable characters. And of course there's the novel's social implications: Dickens pointedly maintained in his preface to the book's 1841 edition that Oliver Twist was important precisely because of its realistic, uncompromising account of the harshness and cruelty of life in early Victorian England. In this engaging study of Dickens's sccond book (it initially appeared as a magazine serial), Richard J.^ Dunn uses the author's admission that he put his "whole heart and soul" into the novel's writing to explore the connections between Dickens's own adversity - having to work under wretched conditions in a blacking factory as a boy - and the dire and often life-threatening situations the bastard child Oliver must endure before, as Dickens put it, "trimumphing at last." Taking a controversial and timely subject - England's poor laws, whose debates in Parliament he covered as a court reporter - and a child as his hero, Dickens, Dunn contends, drew together two worlds: the destitute London slums that served as a breeding ground for criminal activity and the innocent world we associate with childhood. Dunn points out that Oliver's "progress" from dark world to light shows, almost paradoxically, that these worlds are linked and will always coexist, however secure one may feel in the latter.^ The colorful array of characters that either help along or hinder Oliver's progress Dunn analyzes in detail, but to the book's most controversial character, the sinister yet only-all-too-human Fagin, he devotes an entire chapter. Dunn observes that Oliver, though the novel's "hero," in many ways functions as a blank sheet of paper on which the impressions of Dickens's richly drawn personalities, particularly Fagin, are cast. Such characters, Dunn notes, provide us wide the clues to the wholeness of thought to which Oliver aspires. Dunn underscores the importance of the George Cruikshank drawings that accompanied the serialized Oliver Twist, considering these visual renderings (four of which are reprodueed here) as more of a collaborative than a purely illustrative effort. And to round out this lively study, Dunn examines the myriad stage and screen adaptations of Oliver Twist, which found new life in Oliver!, the Academy Award-winning film of the 1960s.

Essays examine Churchill's family life, foreign policy, social reforms, economic ideas, views on Zionism, and relationship with the monarchy and fellow statesmen.

Presents the life of Anne Frank, the real girl who lies behind the words of her immortal diary. Provides insights into her early life, her relationships with family and friends and the family's harrowing two years spent hiding from the Nazis in the 'Secret Annexe'. Includes the terrible facts that lie beyond the end of her diary, of her imprisonment and death. Suggested level: secondary.

Glamour. Duty. Tragedy: The Woman Behind the Princess. Sarah Bradford delivers an authoritative and explosive study of the greatest icon of the twentieth century: Diana.After more than a decade interviewing those closest to the Princess and her select circle, Sarah Bradford exposes the real Diana: the blighted childhood, the old-fashioned courtship which saw her capture the Prince of Wales, the damage caused by the spectre of Camilla Parker Bowles, through to the collapse of the royal marriage and Diana's final and complicated year as single woman.Diana paints an honest portrait of a woman riddled with contradictions and whose vulnerability and unique empathy with the suffering made her one of the most extraordinary figures of the modern age.