From the end of the 15th century until the 18th, Spanish Jews carried on Jewish practices in the shadow of the Inquisition. Those caught were forced to recant or be burnt at the stake. Drawing on their confessions and trial documents, this book tells their story.

London in the 1840s was sprawling and smoke-filled, a city of extreme wealth and abject poverty. Some streets were elegant with brilliantly gas-lit shop windows full of expensive items, while others were narrow, fetid, muddy, and in many cases foul with refuse and human filth. Railways, stations and sidings were devouring whole districts and creating acres of slums or 'rookeries' into which the poor of the city were jammed and where crime, disease and prostitution were rife. The most sensational crime of the epoch, the murder of Patrick O'Connor by Frederick and Maria Manning, filled the press in the summer and autumn of 1849. Michael Alpert uses the trial record of this murder, accompanied by numerous other contemporary sources, among them journalism, diaries and fiction, to show how day-to-day lives, birth, death, sickness, work, shopping, cooking, and buying clothes, were lived in the crowded, noisy capital in the early decades of Victoria's reign. These sources illustrate how ordinary people lived in London, their incomes, entertainments, religious practice, reading and education, their hopes and anxieties. Life in Early Victorian London reveals how ordinary people like the Mannings and thousands of others experienced their multifaceted lives in the greatest capital city of the world. Early Victorian London lived on the cusp of great improvements, but it was a city which in some aspects was mediaeval. Its inhabitants enjoyed the benefit of the Penny Post and the omnibus, and they were protected to some extent by a police force. The Mannings fled their crime on the railway, were trapped by the recently-invented telegraph and arrested by 'detectives' (a new concept and word), but they were hanged in public as murderers had been for centuries, watched by a baying, drunken and swearing mob.

This is a long-awaited translation of a definitive account of the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War. Michael Alpert examines the origins, formation and performance of the Republican Army and sets the Spanish Civil War in its broader military context. He explores the conflicts between communists and Spanish anarchists about how the war should be fought, as well as the experience of individual conscripts, problems of food, clothing and arms, and the role of women in the new army. The book contains extensive discussion of international aspects, particularly the role of the International Brigades and of the Soviet Russian advisers. Finally, it discusses the final uprising of professional Republican officers against the Government and the almost unconditional surrender to Franco. Professor Alpert also provides detailed statistics for the military forces available to Franco and to the Republic, and biographies of the key figures on both sides.

This is a long-awaited translation of a definitive account of the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War. Michael Alpert examines the origins, formation and performance of the Republican Army and sets the Spanish Civil War in its broader military context. He explores the conflicts between communists and Spanish anarchists about how the war should be fought, as well as the experience of individual conscripts, problems of food, clothing and arms, and the role of women in the new army. The book contains extensive discussion of international aspects, particularly the role of the International Brigades and of the Soviet Russian advisers. Finally, it discusses the final uprising of professional Republican officers against the Government and the almost unconditional surrender to Franco. Professor Alpert also provides detailed statistics for the military forces available to Franco and to the Republic and biographies of the key figures on both sides.

The Spanish Civil War was fought on land and at sea but also in an age of great interest in air warfare and the rapid development of warplanes. The war in Spain came a turning point in the development of military aircraft and was the arena in which new techniques of air war were rehearsed including high-speed dogfights, attacks on ships, bombing of civilian areas and tactical air-ground cooperation. At the heart of the air war were the Condor Legion, a unit composed of military personnel from Hitler's Germany who fought for Franco's Nationalists in Spain. In this book, Michael Alpert provides the first study in English of the Spanish Civil War in the air. He describes and analyses the intervention of German, Italian and Soviet aircraft in the Spanish conflict, as well as the supply of aircraft in general and the role of volunteer and mercenary airmen. His book provides new perspectives on the air war in Spain, the precedents set for World War II and the possible lessons learnt.

‘Being a thief isn’t just a job, it’s a liberal profession’

These Spanish picaresque novels focus on the adventures of two unlikely heroes – delinquent pícaros living by their wits among corrupt priests and prostitutes, beggars and idle gentlemen, thieves, tricksters and murderers. The tales are sharply critical of the Church and conventions of nobility, and grotesquely exaggerated depictions of the criminal underworld. The anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) provided a literary model for Cervantes in Don Quixote and describes the ingenious ruses employed by a boy from Salamanca to outwit a succession of disreputable masters. Francisco de Quevedo’s The Swindler (1626) is a comic, yet brutal and sordid, account of a servant who wants to become a gentleman but ends up as a cardsharp and a common criminal.

For this edition Michael Alpert has updated his translation from the original Penguin Classics edition of 1969, with a new map, chronology of events, notes and bibliography. His revised introduction examines the historical, economic and social context of the picaresque novel, with a detailed discussion of each story.

Can the effects of early childhood traumas traumas that may have seemed small at the time but that have affected personality development be overcome in short-term therapy? Here, leaders in the field of short-term therapy present a definitive statement on state-of-the-art intensive dynamic short-term psychotherapy. While they have approached these questions from different perspectives, the renowned practitioners in this book note points of contact and overlap among their ideas about the underlying causes of depression, maladjustment, marital discord, character pathology, and posttraumatic stress disorders. Each outlines the precise methods he or she uses with patients to create emotional growth and reintegration, illustrating these with cases and transcripts. Their methods can be proven scientifically valid, taught to others, and reliably reproduced by effectively trained psychotherapists with a wide variety of patients. Readers will find variations on the theme of short-term therapy for long-term change. Habib Davanloo was a colleague of Malan s and has influenced Neborsky, Alpert, and McCullough. While Neborsky has devoted himself to refining and presenting clearly Davanloo s theory and method, Alpert has developed a method of accelerated empathic treatment and McCullough has designed an anxiety-regulating therapy that is the subject of several research studies. Solomon has applied dynamic theories to treatment of intimate relationships. Shapiro, using EMDR, approaches Big-T and small-t traumas in what seems initially a quite different way but is shown ultimately to have many similarities to short-term dynamic psychotherapy. With this basis in research and clinical practice, the theories and methods presented here have the potential to revolutionize psychodynamic psychotherapy."