UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND AUTHOR · GENERAL · FICTION
Maurice Baring
Maurice Baring (Wikipedia) was a versatile English man of letters, known as a dramatist, poet, novelist, translator and essayist, and also as a travel writer and war correspondent. He was the eighth child, and fifth son, of Edward Charles Baring, first Baron Revelstoke, of the Baring banking family, and his wife Louisa Emily Charlotte Bulteel, granddaughter of the second Earl Grey. He was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. After an abortive start on a diplomatic career, he travelled widely, particularly in Russia. He reported as an eye-witness on the Russo-Japanese War for the London Morning Post. At the start of World War I he joined the Royal Flying Corps, where he served as assistant to Trenchard. In 1918 Baring served as a staff officer in the Royal Air Force and was appointed OBE. In 1925 Baring received an honorary commission as a wing commander in the Reserve of Air Force Officers. After the war he enjoyed a period of success as a dramatist, and began to write novels. He suffered from chronic illness in the last years of his life; for the final 15 years of his life he was debilitated by Parkinson's Disease. He was widely connected socially, to some of the Cambridge Apostles, to The Coterie, and to the literary group around G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in particular. He was staunch in his anti-intellectualism with respect to the arts, and a convinced practical joker. He became a Roman Catholic convert in 1909, being received into the church by Fr. Bowden at the Brompton Oratory. He described his conversion as "the only action in my life which I am quite certain I have never regretted." Baring became a novelist late in his life, but went on to find success in that genre, as well as in playwriting. In France his novel Daphne Adene ran to over twenty printings.
WHO stands on that cliff, like a figure of stone,
— from Poems
Most acclaimed
Poems
This is an edition of all the known poems of Mark Akenside, the eighteenth-century English poet and physician, whose poetry has not been newly edited for more than a century. This edition will thus provide scholars and students with a much-needed opportunity to reassess the extent of Akenside's contribution to literary culture, and it will also clarify his role in the development of the aesthetic theories of his own generation and the one that followed. The career of Mark Akenside (1721-70) spans a period of extraordinarily fast change in English literature: his first major poem, The Pleasures of Imagination, appeared in the year of Pope's death; and Akenside died in the year Wordsworth was born. His works not only reflected the very considerable changes that took place during these years; they also contributed in many ways to the shifts in focus, interest, and emphasis that characterize the literature of the later eighteenth century. Akenside's fascination with the imagination, its characteristics and functions, resulted in an intriguing and influential blend of the poetic and the philosophical in his longer poems, The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) and The Pleasures of the Imagination (1772). The earlier work explores the then new subject of aesthetics in greater detail than it had ever been explored before, presenting various original insights and arguments. Yet it would be wrong to see the poem as merely a versified philosophical treatise; its complex structure offers satisfactions beyond those of sequential logic, and the examples cited to illustrate the central ideas are imbued with considerable vigor and clarity. As products of, and contributors to, the eighteenth-century enthusiasm for aesthetics, Akenside's longer poems are captivating examples of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experiment in developing the philosophical poem into a major literary form. It is for this reason above all others that they are valued by Coleridge and the writers of the next generation. Because of the comparative obscurity into which Akenside's works fell after the demise of the long philosophical poem in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they have not by and large attracted the attention of modern bibliographers. In this edition numerous bibliographical and textual puzzles presented by his poems are solved for the first time. The apparatus, meanwhile, demonstrates the full extent of the poet's urge to revise - an urge that extended from the wholesale rewriting of some poems to subtle alterations of textual minutiae, showing a mind and an ear alive to nuances of meaning and intonation.
Cat's cradle
Cat Beaudine Was Nobody's Baby And that's the way she liked it. She could take care of herself - and she knew that marriage and motherhood were for other women, not her. Until the stranger with the familiar face had her wondering if being alone was all it was cracked up to be.... Dillon McKenna Wanted a Family For the professional daredevil, living on the edge had lost its appeal. He knew Cat was the woman for him. Now all he had to do was convince her of that - with the help of the unexpected bundle of joy in the back of his van....
Plays
Miller Plays: 6 is the final volume in Methuen Drama's acclaimed series of work by Arthur Miller who, during his lifetime, was acknowledged as 'the greatest American dramatist of our age' (Evening Standard). Featuring two plays from the 1990s and his final two plays (2002 and 2004), it is the first ever publication of Miller's final play, Finishing the Picture. Inspired by his experience during the filming of The Misfits with his then wife Marilyn Monroe, the play was completed and produced at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, just months before the playwright's death in Feburary 2005. Broken Glass (1994) is set in Brooklyn in 1938 and intertwines a woman's obsession with the news from Germany that government thugs are smashing Jewish stores, with her strange relationship with her husband. Mr Peter's Connections (1998) is an unforgettable journey through one man's mind at a time of suspended consciousness, where the living and dead intermingle in his memory. Resurrection Blues is Miller's astonishing black comedy set in a South American banana republic, that satirises global politicsand the predatory nature of a media-saturated culture. The volume also features a chronology of the writer's work and an introduction by Enoch Brater, professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan.