Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence investigates the ways in which some of our best poets writing in English have used poetic sequences to capture the lived experience of marriage. Beginning in 1862 with George Meredith's Modern Love, Jane Hedley's study utilizes the rubrics of temporality, dialogue, and triangulation to bring a deeply rooted and vitally interesting poetic genre into focus. Its twentieth- and twenty-first-century practitioners have included Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Lowell, Rita Dove, Eavan Boland, Louise Gluck, Anne Carson, Ted Hughes, Claudia Emerson, Rachel Zucker, and Sharon Olds. In their poetic sequences the flourishing or failure of a particular marriage is always at stake, but as that relationship plays out over time, each sequence also speaks to larger questions: why we marry, what a marriage is, what our collective stake is in other people's marriages. In the book's final chapter gay marriage presents a fresh testing ground for these questions, in light of the US Supreme Court's affirmation of same-sex marriage.

The true story of a detective, two bronze horses and the dictator who set the world on fire. When detective Arthur Brand is summoned to a meeting with one of the most dangerous men in the art world, he learns that a clue has emerged that could solve one of the Second World War's unexplained mysteries: what really happened to the Striding Horses, Hitler's favourite statue, which disappeared during the bombing of Berlin. As Brand goes undercover to find the horses, he discovers a terrifying world ruled by neo-Nazis and former KGB agents, where Third Reich memorabilia sells for millions of dollars. The stakes get ever higher as Brand carefully lays his trap to catch the criminal masterminds trying to sell the statue on the black market. But who are they? And will he manage to bring them to justice before they discover his real identity? With a plot worthy of John Le Carre, Hitler's Horses is a thrilling retelling of one of history's most extraordinary heists.

When 20-year-old student J. S. Margot took a tutoring job in 1987, little did she know it would open up an entire world. In the family's Orthodox Jewish household she would encounter endless rules - 'never come on a Friday, never shake hands with a man' - and quirks she had not seen before: tiny tubes on the doorposts, separate fridges for meat and dairy products. Her initial response was puzzlement and occasionally anger, but as she taught the children and fiercely debated with the family, she also began to learn from them. Full of funny misunderstandings and unexpected connections, Mazel Tov is a heartwarming, provocative and disarmingly honest memoir of clashing cultures and unusual friendships - and of how, where adults build walls, sometimes only children can dissolve them.

English lyric poetry from Wyatt to Donne falls into three consecutive stylistic phases. Tottel's Miscellany presided over the first, making the lyrics of Wyatt and Surrey available for imitation by mid-century poets like Barnabe Googe, George Turberville, and George Gascoigne. The Shepheardes Calender and Sidney's Defense of Poesy ushered in the second, the Elizabethan or "Golden" phase of the 1580s and 1590s. In the third phase Donne and Jonson, reacting against the stylistic orientation of the Elizabethan poets, reconceived the status of "poesy" and resituated the lyric for a post-Elizabethan audience.

Chapter 7 is shared between Donne and Jonson, post-Elizabethan writers who used metonymy to subvert the metaphoric stance of Elizabethan poetry. In a Postscript Hedley takes on the "metaphysical conceit" for a final demonstration of the explanatory power of Jakobson's theory of language.

Professor Hedley uses the semiotic theory of Roman Jakobson to create stylistic profiles for each of these three phases of early Renaissance poetry. Along with the poetry itself she reexamines contemporary treatises, "defenses," and "notes of instruction" to highlight key features of poetic practice. She proposes that early and mid-Tudor poetry is "metonymic," that the collective orientation of the Elizabethan poets is "metaphoric," and that Donne and Jonson bring metonymy to the fore once again.

Chapter 1 sets out the essentials of Jakobson's theory. Hedley uses particular poems to show what is involved in claiming that a writer or a piece of writing has metaphoric or a metonymic basis. Chapter 2 explains how the metaphoric bias of Elizabethan poetry was produced, as "poesy" became part of England's national identity. This chapter broadens out beyond the lyric to include other modes of writing whose emergence belongs to an Elizabethan "moment" in the history of English literature. Beyond chapter 2, each chapter has a double purpose: to create stylistic profile for a single poetic generation and to highlight a particular aspect or feature of the poetry as an index of difference from one generation to the next.

In the third chapter Hedley shows how Wyatt and Surrey used deixis metonymically to give their poems particular occasions. Chapter 4 explains how the metonymic bias of the mid-Tudor poets affected their use of metaphor, and highlights Gascoigne's appreciation of a metaphor as a social gambit or an instrument of moral suasion. Chapters 5 and 6 are centered in the Elizabethan period, but with perspectives into earlier and subsequent phases of metonymic writing. In chapter 5, a comprehensive discussion of the sonnet and the sonnet sequence shows how metaphoric writing cooperates with the "poetic function" of language. Chapter 6 deals with love poetry, as a social/political activity whose orientation differs radically from one generation of English Petrarchists to the next.