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The case of the Cambridge spies has long captured the public's
attention, but perhaps never more so than in the wake of Anthony
Blunt's exposure as the fourth man in November 1979. With the Cold
War intensifying, patriotism running high during the Falklands War
and the AIDS crisis leading to widespread homophobia, these
notorious traitors were more relevant than ever. This book explores
how they were depicted in literature, television and film
throughout the 1980s. Examining works by an array of distinguished
writers, including Dennis Potter, Alan Bennett, Tom Stoppard and
John le Carre, it sheds new light on the affair, asking why such
privileged young men chose to betray their country, whether loyalty
to one's friends is more important than patriotism and whether we
can really trust the intelligence services. -- .
Cumulatively [the volumes] are of increasing value as repositories
of scholarship on the multi-dimensional subject of knighthood ...
highly informative and useful. ALBION Studies treating a wide
variety of aspects of knighthood. Topics include the way in which
the word "knight" has been used, studying the terminology and
ritual concerned with "making a knight"; the circumstances and
implications ofthe knighting of the social elite of England between
1066 and 1272; the difficulties of distinguishing between knight
and clerk, as exemplified by Abelard's multi-faceted image; the
debt which Geoffrey de Charny's treatise on chivalry owes to the
ideas and ideals of knighthood in Arthurian prose romances; and the
linguistic competence of the twelfth-century knightly classes as
courtly audience of troubadour song. There are also important
contributions onthe warhorse; and on the fortifications of
fourteenth-century English towns, arguing that they were more the
expression of bourgeois aspirations than a response to serious
military threat. Professor STEPHEN CHURCH teaches in the Department
of History, University of East Anglia; Dr RUTH HARVEY is lecturer
in French, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College. Contributors:
RICHARD BARBER, MATTHEW BENNETT, JONATHAN BOULTON, MICHAEL CLANCHY,
CHARLES COULSON, RUTH HARVEY, ELSPETH KENNEDY, AD PUTTER
"Worlds of Dissent" analyzes the myths of Central European
resistance popularized by Western journalists and historians, and
replaces them with a picture of the struggle against state
repression as the dissidents themselves understood, debated, and
lived it. In the late 1970s, when Czech intellectuals, writers, and
artists drafted Charter 77 and called on their government to
respect human rights, they hesitated to name themselves
"dissidents." Their personal and political experiences-diverse,
uncertain, nameless-have been obscured by victory narratives that
portray them as larger-than-life heroes who defeated Communism in
Czechoslovakia.
Jonathan Bolton draws on diaries, letters, personal essays, and
other first-person texts to analyze Czech dissent less as a
political philosophy than as an everyday experience. Bolton
considers not only Vaclav Havel but also a range of men and women
writers who have received less attention in the West-including
Ludvik Vaculik, whose 1980 diary "The Czech Dream Book" is a
compelling portrait of dissident life.
Bolton recovers the stories that dissidents told about
themselves, and brings their dilemmas and decisions to life for
contemporary readers. Dissidents often debated, and even doubted,
their own influence as they confronted incommensurable choices and
the messiness of real life. Portraying dissent as a human,
imperfect phenomenon, Bolton frees the dissidents from the
suffocating confines of moral absolutes. "Worlds of Dissent" offers
a rare opportunity to understand the texture of dissent in a closed
society."
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