Chris Murray reveals the largely unknown and rather surprising history of the British superhero. It is often thought that Britain did not have its own superheroes, yet Murray demonstrates that there were a great many in Britain and that they were often used as a way to comment on the relationship between Britain and America. Sometimes they emulated the style of American comics, but they also frequently became sites of resistance to perceived American political and cultural hegemony, drawing upon satire and parody as a means of critique. Murray illustrates that the superhero genre is a blend of several influences, and that in British comics these influences were quite different from those in America, resulting in some contrasting approaches to the figure of the superhero. He identifies the origins of the superhero and supervillain in nineteenth-century popular culture such as the penny dreadfuls and boys' weeklies and in science fiction writing of the 1920s and 1930s. He traces the emergence of British superheroes in the 1940s, the advent of ""fake"" American comics, and the reformatting of reprinted material. Murray then chronicles the British Invasion of the 1980s and the pivotal roles in American superhero comics and film production held by British artists today. This book will challenge views about British superheroes and the comics creators who fashioned them. Murray brings to light a gallery of such comics heroes as the Amazing Mr X, Powerman, Streamline, Captain Zenith, Electroman, Mr Apollo, Masterman, Captain Universe, Marvelman, Kelly's Eye, Steel Claw, the Purple Hood, Captain Britain, Supercats, Bananaman, Paradax, Jack Staff, and SuperBob. He reminds us of the significance of many such creators and artists as Len Fullerton, Jock McCail, Jack Glass, Denis Gifford, Bob Monkhouse, Dennis M. Reader, Mick Anglo, Brendan McCarthy, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Dave Gibbons, and Mark Millar.

Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century provides a unique and authoritative guide to modern responses to art. Featuring 48 essays on major twentieth-century writers and thinkers, and written by an international panel of expert contributors, it introduces readers to the key approaches and analytical tools of contemporary art study and debate, including iconography, formalism, Marxism, feminism, semiotics, Freudian psychoanalysis, object-relations theory, aesthetics, the psychology of perception, and deconstruction.
Each entry includes:
* a critical essay
* a short biography
* a bibliography listing both primary and secondary texts
Unique in its range and accessibly written, this book, together with its companion volume Key Writers on Art: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century, provides an invaluable guide for students as well as general readers with an interest in art history, aesthetics and visual culture.

Unknown Conflicts of the Second World War: Forgotten Fronts is a collection of chapters dealing with various overlooked aspects of the Second World War. The aim is to give greater depth and context to the war by introducing new stories about regions of the world and elements of the war rarely considered. These chapters represent new discussions on previously undeveloped narratives that help to expand our understanding of the interconnectedness of the war. It also provides an expanded view of the war as a mosaic of overlapping conflicts rather than a two-sided affair between massive alliance structures. The Second World War saw revolutions, civil wars, social upheaval, subversion, and major geopolitical policy shifts that do not fit neatly into the Allied vs. Axis 1939-1945 paradigm. This aim is to connect the unseen dots from around the globe that influenced the big turning points we think we know well but have really only a superficial understanding of and in so doing shed new light on the scope and influence of the war.

To Samuel Taylor Coleridge, tragedy was not solely a literary mode, but a philosophy to interpret the history that unfolded around him. Tragic Coleridge explores the tragic vision of existence that Coleridge derived from Classical drama, Shakespeare, Milton and contemporary German thought. Coleridge viewed the hardships of the Romantic period, like the catastrophes of Greek tragedy, as stages in a process of humanity's overall purification. Offering new readings of canonical poems, as well as neglected plays and critical works, Chris Murray elaborates Coleridge's tragic vision in relation to a range of thinkers, from Plato and Aristotle to George Steiner and Raymond Williams. He draws comparisons with the works of Blake, the Shelleys, and Keats to explore the factors that shaped Coleridge's conception of tragedy, including the origins of sacrifice, developments in Classical scholarship, theories of inspiration and the author's quest for civic status. With cycles of catastrophe and catharsis everywhere in his works, Coleridge depicted the world as a site of tragic purgation, and wrote himself into it as an embattled sage qualified to mediate the vicissitudes of his age.

Key Writers on Art: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century offers a unique and authoritative guide to theories of art from Ancient Greece to the end of the Victorian era, written by an international panel of expert contributors. Arranged chronologically to provide an historical framework, the 43 entries analyse the ideas of key philosophers, historians, art historians, art critics, artists and social scientists, including Plato, Aquinas, Alberti, Michelangelo, de Piles, Burke, Schiller, Winckelmann, Kant, Hegel, Burckhardt, Marx, Tolstoy, Taine, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Ruskin, Pater, Wölfflin and Riegl.
Each entry includes:
* a critical essay
* a short biography
* a bibliography listing both primary and secondary texts
Unique in its range and accessibly written, this book, together with its companion volume Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century, provides an invaluable guide for students as well as general readers with an interest in art history, aesthetics and visual culture.

This is an authoritative guide to modern responses to art, featuring 48 essays on the most important 20th century writers and thinkers, written by an internatinal panel of expert contributors. It introduces key approaches and analytical tools used in the study of contemporary art and discusses writers such as Adorno, Barthes, Benjamin, Freud, Greenberg, Heuser, Kristeva, Merleau-Ponty, Pollock, Read and Sontag.

Arranged chronologically to provide a historical framework, 43 essays consider the ideas of key philosophers, historians, artists, art critics and social scientists, including: Plato, Aquinas, Alberti, Michelangelo, de Piles, Burke, Schiller, Winckelmann, Kant, Hegel, Burckhardt, Marx, Tolstoy, Taine, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Ruskin, Pater, Wölfflin and Riegl.
Each entry includes:
* a critical essay
* a short biography
* a bibliography listing both primary and secondary texts.

From international bestselling author Marc Levy comes a witty and beguiling novel of one woman's unexpected journey to follow her destiny. Alice Pendelbury believes everything in her life is pretty much in order-from her good friends to her burgeoning career. But even Alice has to admit it's been an odd week. Not only has her belligerent neighbor, Mr. Daldry, suddenly become a surprisingly agreeable confidant, but he's encouraging her to take seriously the fortune-teller who told her that only by traveling to Turkey can Alice meet the most important person in her life. What's more, the peculiarly insistent Mr. Daldry has even agreed to finance Alice's trip-one that against all reason seems to be predestined. It's on this journey, crazy from the outset and strangely irresistible, that Alice will find out that nothing in her life is real, that her past is not true, and that the six people she's about to encounter will shape her future in ways she could never have dreamed. Revised edition: Previously published as L'etrange voyage de Monsieur Daldry, this edition of The Strange Journey of Alice Pendelbury includes editorial revisions.

"Elvis who?" was photographer Alfred Wertheimer's response when, in early 1956, an RCA Victor publicist asked him to photograph an up-and-coming crooner from Memphis. Little did Wertheimer know that this would be the job of his life: just 21 years old, Elvis Presley was-as we now know-about to become a legend. Trailing Presley like a shadow, Wertheimer took nearly 3,000 photographs of Presley that year, creating a penetrating portrait of a man poised on the brink of superstardom. Extraordinary in its intimacy and unparalleled in its scope, Wertheimer's Elvis project immortalized a young man in the very process of making history. Elvis and the Birth of Rock and Roll collects Wertheimer's most remarkable Elvis shots from that magical year, along with a selection of his historic 1958 pictures of the star being shipped off to an army base in Germany. Each chapter is illustrated with a poster by Hatch Show Print, one of the oldest letterpress print shops in America, which created many early Elvis posters in the 1950s.

Fascinated and often baffled by China, Anglophone writers turned to classics for answers. In poetry, essays, and travel narratives, ancient Greece and Rome lent interpretative paradigms and narrative shape to Britain's information on the Middle Kingdom. While memoirists of the diplomatic missions in 1793 and 1816 used classical ideas to introduce Chinese concepts, Roman history held ominous precedents for Sino-British relations according to Edward Gibbon and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. John Keats illuminated how peculiar such contemporary processes of Orientalist knowledge-formation were. In Britain, popular opinion on Chinese culture wavered during the nineteenth century, as Charles Lamb and Joanna Baillie demonstrated in ekphrastic responses to chinoiserie. A former reverence for China yielded gradually to hostility, and the classical inheritance informed a national identity-crisis over whether Britain's treatment of China was civilized or barbaric. Amidst this uncertainty, the melancholy conclusion to Virgil's Aeneid became the master-text for discussion of British conduct at the Summer Palace in 1860. Yet if Rome was to be the model for the British Empire, Tennyson, Sara Coleridge, and Thomas de Quincey found closer analogues for the Opium Wars in Greek tragedy and Homeric epic. Meanwhile, Sinology advanced considerably during the Victorian age. Britain broadened its horizons by interrogating the cultural past anew as it turned to Asia; Anglophone readers were cosmopolitans in time as well as space, aggregating knowledge of Periclean Athens, imperial Rome, and many other polities in their encounters with Qing Dynasty China.

A martial-arts master escapes from a prison camp in wartime China and flees to Malaya. His hopes for a quiet life are dashed when he saves a bus driver from a lynch mob. The master agrees to impart his secrets to five disciples. Although the organisation they found becomes internationally renowned, the arts are almost entirely lost as the initiates succumb to internal squabbling and greed. New in Singapore, Chris Murray tracks down Chan See-meng, favourite disciple of the great Chee Kim Thong. Through dusty Malaysian villages and Shaolin Temple in China, the adventure that begins with gruelling practice on Chan's rooftop leads Chris in the footsteps of the masters. As he becomes absorbed in the esoteric depths of Five Ancestors Fist, he investigates the journey of Zen martial-arts from ancient temples to modern gymnasia. Can these traditions survive in modernity? An intimate memoir with historical scope, Crippled Immortals unites a cast of legendary heroes and slack-jawed monks, Indian yogi and Tibetan lamas, bluffers, gangsters, and champions who have been touched by Old Man Chee's arts. The practitioner's path to enlightenment is always arduous, often hilarious, and sometimes heart-breaking. True adepts talk with their fists, but the strength that endures lies in the bond between master and disciple.

Unlock the 7 rules of success passed down through generations, originating from a secret and ancient organisation, The Extremely Successful Salesman's Club.

Often described as the most elite and important in all of Victorian London, The Extremely Successful Salesman's Club was a place where the like-minded shared their wisdom, secrets and methods.

Follow Barnabas Kreuz and his nephew Simeon, a young man who quickly discovers how 7 secret rules can become the foundation to unlimited success and a considerable fortune.

This book will change your life.

Read it, recommend it to friends - just make sure you keep it hidden from your competition.

Unlock the 7 rules of success passed down through generations, originating from a secret and ancient organisation, The Extremely Successful Salesman's Club.

Often described as the most elite and important in all of Victorian London, The Extremely Successful Salesman's Club was a place where the like-minded shared their wisdom, secrets and methods.

Follow Barnabas Kreuz and his nephew Simeon, a young man who quickly discovers how 7 secret rules can become the foundation to unlimited success and a considerable fortune.

This book will change your life.

Read it, recommend it to friends - just make sure you keep it hidden from your competition.

Indispensable summaries of the best marketing books of our time Since 1978, Soundview Executive Book Summaries has offered its subscribers condensed versions of the best business books published each year. Focused, insightful, and practical, Soundview's summaries have been acclaimed as the definitive selection service for the sophisticated business book reader. Now Soundview is bringing together summaries of seventeen essential marketing classics in a single volume that include one all-new, previously unpublished summary. Here is just about everything you ever wanted to know about marketing. "The Marketing Gurus" distills thousands of pages of powerful insights into less than three hundred, making it an ideal resource for busy professionals and students. Who are the gurus? They include: Guy Kawasakion "How to Drive Your Competition Crazy"Geoffrey Mooreon marketing high technology, in "Crossing the Chasm."Jack Trout on how companies can help their products stand above the crowd, in "Differentiate or Die."Regis McKenna on the changing role of the customer, in the classic "Relationship Marketing."Philip Kotler on the concept of "Lateral Marketing," which helps companies avoid the trap of market fragmentation.Seth Godin on how to create a "Purple Cow" that will take off through word of mouth.Lisa Johnson and Andrea Learnedon marketing to women in "Don't Think Pink." The collective wisdom contained in "The Marketing Guru" can help any marketer on his or her journey to becoming a marketing guru. www.summary.com

Chris Murray reveals the largely unknown and rather surprising history of the British superhero. It is often thought that Britain did not have its own superheroes, yet Murray demonstrates that there were a great many in Britain and that they were often used as a way to comment on the relationship between Britain and America. Sometimes they emulated the style of American comics, but they also frequently became sites of resistance to perceived American political and cultural hegemony, drawing upon satire and parody as a means of critique. Murray illustrates that the superhero genre is a blend of several influences, and that in British comics these influences were quite different from those in America, resulting in some contrasting approaches to the figure of the superhero. He identifies the origins of the superhero and supervillain in nineteenth-century popular culture such as the penny dreadfuls and boys' weeklies and in science fiction writing of the 1920s and 1930s. He traces the emergence of British superheroes in the 1940s, the advent of ""fake"" American comics, and the reformatting of reprinted material. Murray then chronicles the British Invasion of the 1980s and the pivotal roles in American superhero comics and film production held by British artists today. This book will challenge views about British superheroes and the comics creators who fashioned them. Murray brings to light a gallery of such comics heroes as the Amazing Mr X, Powerman, Streamline, Captain Zenith, Electroman, Mr Apollo, Masterman, Captain Universe, Marvelman, Kelly's Eye, Steel Claw, the Purple Hood, Captain Britain, Supercats, Bananaman, Paradax, Jack Staff, and SuperBob. He reminds us of the significance of many such creators and artists as Len Fullerton, Jock McCail, Jack Glass, Denis Gifford, Bob Monkhouse, Dennis M. Reader, Mick Anglo, Brendan McCarthy, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Dave Gibbons, and Mark Millar.