One English critic called The Abolition of Britain “an elegant jeremiad” in which Peter Hitchens identifies everything that has gone wrong with Britain since World War II and makes the case for “those many millions who feel that they have become foreigners in their own land and wish with each succeeding day that they could turn the clock back.” Writing with passion and flair, Hitchens targets the pernicious effects of TV culture, the “corruption and decay” of the English language, the loss of politeness, and the “syrupy confessional mood” brought on by the death of Diana, which Hitchens contrasts with the somber national response to the death of Winston Churchill. If there is a term that summarizes everything that has gone wrong in Britain, it is “Tony Blairism,” which Hitchens sees as having rewritten England’s history, trivialized its journalism, subverted its educational system and cultural standards, and overthrown accepted notions of patriotism, faith, and morality. The New Britain is government by focus group in which people are told what to feel as a way of preventing them from asking how they want to be governed. Looking at the changed face of his country, Hitchens finds a “politically correct zeal for the new” whose impact on daily life has been “as devastating in effect, if not in violence, as Mao tse Tung’s Cultural Revolution in China.”

    Costello went into the family business and had taken the popular music world by storm before he was twenty-four.Costello continues to add to one of the most intriguing and extensive songbooks of the day. His performances have taken him from a cardboard guitar in his front room to fronting a rock and roll band on your television screen and performing in the world's greatest concert halls in a wild variety of company. Unfaithful Music describes how Costello's career has somehow endured for almost four decades through a combination of dumb luck and animal cunning, even managing the occasional absurd episode of pop stardom.This memoir, written with the same inimitable touch as his lyrics, and including dozens of images from his personal archive, offers his unique view of his unlikely and sometimes comical rise to international success, with diversions through the previously undocumented emotional foundations of some of his best known songs and the hits of tomorrow. The book contains many stories and observations about his renowned co-writers and co-conspirators, though Costello also pauses along the way for considerations on the less appealing side of infamy.Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink is destined to be a classic, idiosyncratic memoir of a singular man.

    In popular culture, the straitlaced era is portrayed as one of propriety, industry, prudishness, and piety. But scratch the surface and you’ll find haunting tales of scandal, sadism, sex, madness, malice, and murder.

    The crucial players in this drama were the British, who invented both capitalism and imperialism and were incomparably the richest, most important investors in the developing world. In this sense, England's position has strong resemblances to America's in the late twentieth century.As one of our most accomplished biographers and novelists, A. N. Wilson has a keen eye for a good story, and in this spectacular work he singles out those writers, statesmen, scientists, philosophers, and soldiers whose lives illuminate so grand and revolutionary a history: Darwin, Marx, Gladstone, Christina Rossetti, Gordon, Cardinal Newman, George Eliot, Kipling. Wilson's accomplishment in this book is to explain through these signature lives how Victorian England started a revolution that still hasn't ended.

    It was a culture that reflected a turbulent political reality.

    In this epic history, Dan Jones vividly resurrects this fierce and seductive royal dynasty and its mythic world. We meet the captivating Eleanor of Aquitaine, twice queen and the most famous woman in Christendom; her son, Richard the Lionheart, who fought Saladin in the Third Crusade; and King John, a tyrant who was forced to sign Magna Carta, which formed the basis of our own Bill of Rights. This is the era of chivalry, of Robin Hood and the Knights Templar, the Black Death, the founding of Parliament, the Black Prince, and the Hundred Year’s War. It will appeal as much to readers of Tudor history as to fans of 'Game of Thrones.

    Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popular artists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublished essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history—from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin—through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and indie-rock hipsters in Beijing.Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Witty, passionate, and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us how to listen more closely.

    In this comprehensive account of the label’s first two decades (up to the point that Russell left), music journalist Martin Aston explores the fascinating story with unique access to all the key players and pretty much every artist who released a record on 4AD during that time, and to its notoriously reclusive founder.With a cover designed by Vaughan Oliver this is an essential book for all 4AD fans and anyone who loved the music of that time.

    But every now and then, someone strikes a match that lights up the whole planet. Henry Every was the seventeenth century's most notorious pirate. The press published wildly popular--and wildly inaccurate--reports of his nefarious adventures. The British government offered enormous bounties for his capture, alive or (preferably) dead. But Steven Johnson argues that Every's most lasting legacy was his inadvertent triggering of a major shift in the global economy. Enemy of All Mankind focuses on one key event--the attack on an Indian treasure ship by Every and his crew--and its surprising repercussions across time and space. It's the gripping tale one of the most lucrative crimes in history, the first international manhunt, and the trial of the seventeenth century.Johnson uses the extraordinary story of Henry Every and his crimes to explore the emergence of the East India Company, the British Empire, and the modern global marketplace: a densely interconnected planet ruled by nations and corporations. How did this unlikely pirate and his notorious crime end up playing a key role in the birth of multinational capitalism? In the same mode as Johnson's classic non-fiction historical thriller The Ghost Map, Enemy of All Mankind deftly traces the path from a single struck match to a global conflagration.

    For most of the 19th century, a wide variety of expressive forms--Shakespearean drama, opera, orchestral music, painting & sculpture, as well as the writings of such authors as Dickens & Longfellow--enjoyed both high cultural status & mass popularity. In the 19th century Americans (in addition to whatever specific ethnic, class & regional cultures they were part of) shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival groupings than their descendants were to experience. By the 20th century this cultural eclecticism & openness became increasingly rare. Cultural space was more sharply defined, less flexible than it had been. The theater, once a microcosm of America--housing both the entire spectrum of the population & the complete range of entertainment from tragedy to farce, juggling to ballet, opera to minstrelsy--now fragmented into discrete spaces catering to distinct audiences & separate genres of expressive culture. The same transition occurred in concert halls, opera houses & museums. A growing chasm between 'serious' & 'popular', 'high' & 'low' culture came to dominate the expressive arts."If there is a tragedy in this development," Levine notes, "it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven & Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the 19th century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value & importance of the popular art forms that were all around them. "Too many of those who considered themselves educated & cultured lost for a significant period--& many have still not regained--their ability to discriminate independently, to sort things out for themselves & understand that simply because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible & highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit."Note: first presented as The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization in 1986,

    For any student of the city and its secret life, it is indispensable reading." -Peter Ackroyd, The Times (London)Before his murder in 1831, the "Italian boy" was one of thousands of orphans on the streets of London, begging among the livestock, hawkers, and con men. When his body was sold to a medical college, the suppliers were arrested for murder. Their high-profile trial would unveil a furtive trade in human corpses carried out by "resurrection men" who killed to satisfy the first rule of the cadaver market: the fresher the body, the higher the price. Historian Sarah Wise reconstructs not only the boy's murder but the chaos and squalor of his world. In 1831 London, the poor were desperate and the wealthy petrified, the population swelling so fast that class borders could not hold. All the while, early humanitarians were attempting to protect the disenfranchised, the courts were establishing norms of punishment, and doctors were pioneering the science of anatomy.As vivid and intricate as a novel by Charles Dickens, The Italian Boy restores to history the lives of the very poorest Londoners and offers an unparalleled account of England's great metropolis at the brink of a major transformation.

    As a child, he rooted for conventionally good characters like wide-eyed Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. But as Klosterman aged, his alliances shifted—first to Han Solo and then to Darth Vader. Vader was a hero who consciously embraced evil; Vader wanted to be bad. But what, exactly, was that supposed to mean? When we classify someone as a bad person, what are we really saying (and why are we so obsessed with saying it)? In I Wear the Black Hat, Klosterman questions the very nature of how modern people understand the culture of villainy. What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don’t we see Batman the same way we see Bernhard Goetz? Who’s more worthy of our vitriol—Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson’s second-worst decision? And why is Klosterman still obsessed with some kid he knew for one week in 1985?Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and limitless imagination, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the anti-hero (seemingly the only kind of hero America still creates). I Wear the Black Hat is the rare example of serious criticism that’s instantly accessible and really, really funny. Klosterman is the only writer doing whatever it is he’s doing.

    It was such a radical idea that almost no one thought it would actually succeed, much less become a force in the worlds of music, television, film, fashion, sports, and even politics. But it did work. MTV became more than anyone had ever imagined.I Want My MTV tells the story of the first decade of MTV, the golden era when MTV's programming was all videos, all the time, and kids watched religiously to see their favorite bands, learn about new music, and have something to talk about at parties. From its start in 1981 with a small cache of videos by mostly unknown British new wave acts to the launch of the reality-television craze with The Real World in 1992, MTV grew into a tastemaker, a career maker, and a mammoth business. Featuring interviews with nearly four hundred artists, directors, VJs, and television and music executives, I Want My MTV is a testament to the channel that changed popular culture forever.

    Includes genealogical tables, coats of arms, and royal heraldry.

    The Industrial Revolution brought not simply misery and poverty. On the contrary, Griffin shows how it raised incomes, improved literacy, and offered exciting opportunities for political action. For many, this was a period of new, and much valued, sexual and cultural freedom. This rich personal account focuses on the social impact of the Industrial Revolution, rather than its economic and political histories. In the tradition of best-selling books by Liza Picard, Judith Flanders, and Jerry White, Griffin gets under the skin of the period and creates a cast of colorful characters, including factory workers, miners, shoemakers, carpenters, servants, and farm laborers.