Nick Compton had it all. A literal golden boy, to many observers it would seem that he was born to be a great in the sporting arena coming as he did from an incredible sporting ancestry.

His grandfather Sir Denis Compton played cricket for England and football for Arsenal. Honed at an elite English boarding school, with a telegenic profile perfectly suited to the modern media environment, Nick appeared to be blessed with that rare ability to be able to stride out and face down the world's quickest bowlers, to survive and thrive in the danger zone at the hands of the hurtling new ball. However, greatness in any field comes at a price and this memoir explores the almost 'Faustian pact' he made in order to secure that time in the sun.

It will show what 'Mistress Cricket' demanded from Nick as his side of that bargain.

The family he left behind, the failed relationships both personal and professional and the utter physical and mental exhaustion which resulted from his drive to stay at the top.

A defining collection from Alistair Cooke's legendary BBC Radio broadcasts, guiding us through nearly sixty years of changing life in the United States 'No one else succeeded in explaining to the English-speaking world ... the idiosyncrasies of a country at once so familiar, and yet so utterly foreign' Independent When Alistair Cooke retired in February 2004 he was acclaimed as one of the greatest broadcasters of all time. His Letter from America radio series, which began in 1946 and continued every week for fifty-eight years until his retirement, kept the world in touch with what was happening in America. Cooke's wry, humane and liberal style both informed and entertained his audience. The selection here, made largely by Cooke himself and supplemented by his literary executor, gives us the very best of these legendary broadcasts. It covers key moments from the assassination of Kennedy through to the Vietnam War and Watergate to 9/11, the Iraq War and anticipates the 2004 elections. It includes portraits of the great and the good from Charlie Chaplin to Martin Luther King, Jr, and topics as varied as civil rights, golf, jazz and the changing colours of a New England fall. Each Letter contributes to a captivating portrait of a nation - and of a man.

This now classic portrait of Douglas Fairbanks - the swashbuckling original King of Hollywood - was first published in 1940. Long out of print and hard to find, Alistair Cooke's posthumous biography was the first serious consideration of the career of the great silent screen star and husband of America's sweetheart, Mary Pickford. Reissued here in a facsimile edition, Douglas Fairbanks: The Making of a Screen Character treats, step by step, the course of Fairbanks' career, and sheds light on the mysterious ingredients of screen popularity and on the history of motion pictures generally. Alistair Cooke, the distinguished journalist and broadcaster, was assistant to Charlie Chaplin when he met Iris Barry, MoMA's first film curator, in 1938. Barry invited Cooke to participate in the Museum's groundbreaking film course at Columbia University and commissioned him to write Douglas Fairbanks: The Making of a Screen Character.

This is a new release of the original 1940 edition.

This collection of pen-portraits of the renowned public intellectual Isaiah Berlin, published to mark the centenary of his birth, brings him vividly to life from many vantage-points: essential reading for all who seek to understand the full range of his impact. Isaiah Berlin was born a century ago. One of the most celebrated British thinkers of the twentieth century, he was a tireless champion of freedom and diversity against control and conformity. His generous, open vision of life is displayed with special immediacy in his brilliant pen-portraits of contemporaries, Personal Impressions, in which he sees the point of radically differing personalities, enters into their distinctive outlooks, and describeshis encounters with them, in arrestingly idiosyncratic prose. The Book of Isaiah turns the tables on Berlin, offering a series of personal impressions of him and his ideas by a range of people who knew him, or have been affected by his work. This multi-faceted testimony enriches and supplements Michael Ignatieff's celebrated authorised biography. The volume includes tributes written when Berlin died, essays specially commissioned from friends and from students of his work, and a previously unpublished family memoir by Berlin's father, which preserves for his son, and for posterity, the story of his Hasidic forebears, and of the many relatives murdered by the Nazis. The result is a collection indispensable both for existing enthusiasts and for those who are curious to learn about Berlin's unique, compelling appeal. HENRY HARDY is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and one of Isaiah Berlin's Literary Trustees.

In nearly three thousand BBC broadcasts over fifty-eight years, Alistair Cooke reported on America, revealing our country's complexities and idiosyncrasies to a global audience. He was one of the most widely read and widely read and widely heard chroniclers of America--the Twentieth Century's de Tocqueville. Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Cooke, a newly naturalized American citizen, set out to see his country as it was undergoing monumental change. He wanted to "see what the war had done to people, to the towns I might go through, to some jobs and crops, to stretches of landscape I loved and had seen at peace; and to let significance fall where it might." Working throughout the war, Cooke finished the manuscript for The American Home Front as the atomic bomb was being dropped on Hiroshima. His publisher at the time thought there would be little interest in books on the war, and so it was stuffed in a closet. It stayed there for almost sixty years, nearly forgotten, until it was unearthed shortly before Cooke's death. The American Home Front is "a celebration of the American character and a fitting testament to a fine journalist" (The Bookseller UK]). It is a fascinating artifact, a charming travelogue, and a sharp portrait that shows a nation switching from civilian pursuits to military engagement, from the production of consumer goods to materials of war. It is also a unique record of American life. Cooke travels small highways, with their advertising signs and their local topography, in an age before the interstate highway system. He chronicles the regional glories he encounters, elements of long-lost culture such as his beloved soda fountains, and the reactionsof the citizens, from indifference to grief, from opportunism to resilience under military threat. Filled with touching personal stories of the effects of war, from a Japanese family facing internment that tries to sell Cooke their car, to the experiences of the unemployed relocating in hopes of jobs in a gunpowder factory, The American Home Front is the work of an experienced, talented journalist; it is intelligent, touching, and funny.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Broadcaster Alistair Cooke narrates this World War Two documentary detailing the defence of Britain over the course of a year from 10th May 1940 to 10th May 1941. Based on original and dramatic film taken from both British and German sources, the film includes air-to-air footage of dogfights during the Battle of Britain and images of British cities enduring the Blitz.

First published in 1973, this follow-up to Alistair Cooke's acclaimed 1972 television documentary series "America: A Personal History of the United States" has sold almost two million copies. From the nation's discovery to modern times; from the American revolutionaries to the pioneers who forged westward; from the slaves who fled north to the immigrants that sought a new life, Cooke vividly describes the spirit of the United States. Cooke's portrayal of America's dynamic history and its ever-changing present continues to provide striking insights into the remarkable character of a nation.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

This now classic portrait of Douglas Fairbanks -- the swashbuckling original King of Hollywood -- was first published in 1940. Long out of print and hard to find, Alistair Cooke's posthumous biography was the first serious consideration of the career of the great silent screen star and husband of America's sweetheart, Mary Pickford. Reissued here in a facsimile edition, The Making of a Screen Character treats, step by step, the course of Fairbanks' career, and sheds light on the mysterious ingredients of screen popularity and on the history of motion pictures generally.

THE VINTAGE MENCKEN - AN INTRODUCTION TO H. L. MENCKEN BY Attstair Cootp This book was put together in a period which, in spite of the anxious humility forced on us by the atom and hydrogen bombs, has much in common with the 1920 1 that Mencken came to immortalize and to deflate. Since his day there are slicker types of demagogues in politics and new schools of necromancy in advertising, show business, industry, psychiatry, and public rela tions, to go no further. Following their antics in these later days as a newspaper reporter, I have often thought that Mencken should be living and writing at this hour So this volume is meant incidentally to recall to die tamed radicals who cut their intellectual teeth on him what manner of man he was but mainly to introduce to a generation that never read him a writer who more and more strikes me as the master craftsman of daily journalism in the twentieth century. He has written nothing since his stroke in 1948, and it is surely no se cret that he ceased to be a missionary force long before ALISTAIB COOKE then. To be precise, it was the Roosevelt era that brought him to the mat. At first glance, the New Deal might appear to offer just the sort of target he loved a big popular idol, an idealist in the Wilsonian tradition who was yet undis mayed by the shifts and audacities necessary to get his own way moreover, a liberal with the further stigma of having gone back on a patrician upbringing for the peoples sake. But as a matter of record the New Deal was Menckens Waterloo, and Roosevelt his Wellington. To jeer at democratic government when it paid off in filet mignon and a car in every garage was one thing. To pipe the same tune in the unfunny daysof I2-000,000 unemployed was another. Menckens thunder issued from an immaterial mind, but also from a full stomach. In the thirties it impressed only those who feared die hungrier chorus of die breadlines. It was al ways plain that Mencken had a clear eye for the reali ties that conceived the Roosevelt period. He saw that the way ahead for America lay between no such simple choices as he had laid down between the aristocrat the first-rate man speaking his mind and the boo boisie that had no mind to speak. But this thesis was his specialty, and in a vulgar time it had made him fa mous. He naturally came to hate the man and the shift of history that made it an anachronism. The decline of his prestige was very swift, and he was honest enough to recognize it. In the middle 1930 5 he all but aban doned the preoccupation of his palmy days, his self chosen trade as a critic of ideas. He turned to his old hobby of the American language, rewrote once again the original volume and, to clinch his reputation if it was ever in doubt as the classical authority on the English of the United States, put out in the next ten years two magnificent Supplements to the parent work. As he moved into his sixties he amused himself by put ting on paper a few recollections of his childhood in Baltimore. These fugitive magazine pieces blossomed ri An Introduction to H. L. Mencken into a three-volume autobiography, completed by the end of 1943. After the war he concerned himself almost wholly with his notes on the language, but he roused himself in 1948 to cover the presidential nominating conventions. In the fall of that year he came down with a cerebral thrombosis...

For more than sixty years Alistair Cooke wrote and broadcast on every facet of American life with incomparable wit and wisdom. This is his ‘personal history’ of America, the best-selling book that accompanied his legendary BBC television series which was first broadcast in November 1972. It has sold over two million copies and has emerged through tumultuous times to become regarded as a classic. It is an irresistibly readable guide to what has made this powerful democracy work and survive through 200 years. Alistair writes with authority about the explorers who put their new-found land on the map, the pioneers who tamed the Wild West, the soldiers who fought for independence, the slaves who fled north, the tycoons who built fortunes and the immigrants that sought a new life. From the Mayflower to the gold rush, the jazz age to Pearl Harbor, with portraits of figures as varied as Buffalo Bill, John D. Rockefeller and Martin Luther King Jr., here is the American story in all its triumphs and failures, grandeurs and tragedies. It is the defining portrait of a nation. This anniversary edition includes the reflective note to the reader that Alistair Cooke wrote in 2002.

What is Non-Traditional Security? How have our understandings of security changed over the past decade? What are the dominant non-traditional security challenges we face in the world today?The concept of national security remains contested but our understanding of it continues to evolve as it is shaped by the world around us. From a globally dominant 'traditional' understanding of security during the Cold War characterised by a focus on countries and their militaries protecting their sovereignty to today, where non-military threats such as global pandemics, climate change, energy, to disasters threaten the wellbeing and livelihoods of people, communities, and the environment that form the backbone of society.The global dial has shifted towards a more comprehensive understanding of security that recognises these non-traditional security threats moving the focus away from solely the survival of the state to the empowerment and protection of people and the environment. This shift highlights the experiences of different individuals and communities, from civilians affected by war to irregular migrants moving from one place to the next, and what the world witnesses as efforts to empower and protect people and the environment.Indeed, comprehensive security has a long history in the post-colonial Asia-Pacific. Non-Traditional Security emerged after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. It emerged as a way to recalibrate the ways governments engaged people and communities and developed pathways for countries in the region to cooperate.Non-Traditional Security in the Asia-Pacific: A Decade of Perspectives, an interdisciplinary collection, is essential reading for anyone interested in the developments of security with a focus on the dominant non-traditional security threats in the Asia-Pacific over the last decade - from advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars, to policymakers at the local, national, regional, and international levels.

The anthology that spans an entire lifetime of writing by America's greatest curmudgeon, with a "flick of mischief on nearly every page."