‘A marvel of clarity, fluency, and (Morris’s favourite word in her final days) kindness.’ The Sunday Times The first full account of the remarkable life of Jan Morris: writer, soldier, traveller, and trans pioneer. Jan Morris is widely considered one of Britain’s best-loved writers, known for her observational genius, lyricism, and humour. Born in 1926, she spent her childhood amidst Oxford’s Gothic beauty and later participated in military service in Italy and the Middle East, before becoming an internationally fêted foreign correspondent. However, public success masked a private dilemma that was only resolved when she transitioned genders in the late sixties. She went on to live happily with her wife Elizabeth in Wales for another five decades, and never stopped writing and publishing. Here, for the first time, the many strands of Morris’s rich and at times paradoxical life are brought together. 

The Austrian composer Hanns Eisler was Bertolt Brecht's closest friend and most politically committed collaborator. In these conversations with Hans Bunge which took place over a period of four years, from 1958 until his death in 1962, Eisler offers a compelling and absorbing account of his and Brecht's period of exile in Europe and the USA between 1933 and 1947, and of the quality of artistic, social and intellectual life in post-war East Germany. Brecht, Music and Culture includes a discussion of a number of Brecht's principal plays, including Life of Galileo and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, considers the place of music in Brecht's work and discusses the time that Brecht was brought before The House of Un-American Activities Committee. It includes lively accounts of Brecht's meetings with key cultural figures, including Arnold Schoenberg, Charlie Chaplin and Thomas Mann, and offers throughout a sustained response to the question of the purpose of art in a time of political turmoil. Throughout the conversations, Eisler provides illuminating and original insights into Brecht's work and ideas and gives a highly entertaining first-hand account of his friend's personality and attitudes. First published in Germany in 1975, and now published in English for the first time, the conversations provide a fascinating account of the lives and work of two of the twentieth century's greatest artists.

This book uses cultural and psycho-social analysis to examine the beat writer Charles Bukowski and his literature, focusing on representations of the anti-hero rebel and outsider. Clements considers the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions represented by the author and his work, exploring Bukowski's visceral writing of the cultural ordinary and everyday self-narrative. The study considers Bukowski's apolitical, gendered, and working-class stance to understand how the writer represents reality and is represented with regards to counter-cultural literature. In addition, Clements provides a broader socio-cultural focus that evaluates counterculture in relation to the American beat movement and mythology, highlighting the male cool anti-hero. The cultural practices and discourses utilized to situate Bukowski include the individual and society, outsiderdom, cult celebrity, fan embodiment, and disneyfication, providing a greater understanding of the beat generation and counterculture literature.

'A marvel of clarity, fluency, and (Morris's favourite word in her final days) kindness.' The Sunday Times 'A measured and elegant biography that Morris aficionados will find fascinating.' The Times The first full account of a truly remarkable life. When Jan Morris passed away in 2020, she was considered one of Britain's best-loved writers. The author of Venice, Pax Britannica, Conundrum, and more than fifty other books, her work was known for its observational genius, lyricism, and humour, and had earned her a passionate readership around the world. Morris's life was no less fascinating than her oeuvre. Born in 1926, she spent her childhood amidst Oxford's Gothic beauty and later participated in military service in Italy and the Middle East, before embarking on a career as an internationally feted foreign correspondent. From being the only journalist to join the first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953 to covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Morris's reportage spanned many of the twentieth century's defining moments. However, public success masked a private dilemma that was only resolved when she transitioned genders in the late sixties, becoming renowned as a transgender pioneer. She went on to live happily with her wife Elizabeth in Wales for another five decades, and never stopped writing and publishing. Here, for the first time, the many strands of Morris's rich and at times paradoxical life are brought together. Based on a wealth of interviews, archival material, and hitherto unpublished documents, Jan Morris: life from both sides portrays a person of extraordinary talent, curiosity, and joie de vivre.

In August 1939 the Irish travel writer Richard Hayward set out on a road trip to explore the Shannon region just two weeks before the Second World War broke out. His evocative account of that trip, Where the River Shannon Flows, became a bestseller. The book, still sought after by lovers of the river, captures an Ireland of small shops and barefoot street urchins that has long since disappeared. Eighty years on, inspired by his work, Paul Clements retraces Hayward's journey along the river, following - if not strictly in his footsteps - then within the spirit of his trip. From the Shannon Pot in Cavan, 344 kilometres south to the Shannon estuary, his meandering odyssey takes him by car, on foot, and by bike and boat, discovering how the riverscape has changed but is still powerful in symbolism. While he recreates Hayward's trip, Clements also paints a compelling portrait of twenty-first century Ireland, mingling travel and anecdote with an eye for the natural world. He sails to remote islands, spends times in rural backwaters and secluded riverside villages where the pub is the hub, and attempts a quest for the Shannon connection behind the title of Flann O'Brien's novel At Swim-Two-Birds. The book gives a voice to stories from water gypsies, anglers, sailors, lock keepers, bog artists, 'insta' pilgrims and a water diviner celebrating wisdom through her river songs and illuminates cultural history and identity. It focuses on the hardship faced by farmers and householders caused by the flooding of the river, which in recent winters left fields and towns under siege by water. Wildlife, nature, and the built heritage, including historic bridges, all play a part. The Shannon Callows, which used to be 'corncrake central', is explored for birdlife, along with the wildflower secrets of roadside hedges and riverbanks. On a quixotic journey by foot, boat, bike and car, Paul Clements produces an intimate portrait of the hidden countryside, its people, topography and wildlife, creating a collective memory map, looking at what has been lost and what has changed. Through intermittent roaming, he maps the geography of the river in stories, testimonies and recollections, intercutting the past and the present in an eternal rhythm. Beyond the motorways and cities, you can still catch the pulse of an older, quieter Ireland of hay meadows and bogs, uninhabited islands and remote towpaths. This is the country of the River Shannon that runs through literature, art, cultural history and mythology with a riptide pull on our imagination. This is a tribute to Ireland's longest river reflecting the deep vein flowing through the culture of the country

Paul Clements champions the creative underground and expressions of difference through visionary avant-garde and resistant ideas. This is represented by an admixture of utopian literature, manifestos and lifestyles which challenge normality and attempt to reinvent society, as practiced for example, by radicals in bohemian enclaves or youth subcultures. He showcases a range of 'art' and participatory cultural practices that are examined sociopolitically and historically, employing key theoretical ideas which highlight their contribution to aesthetic thinking, political ideology, and public discourse. A reevaluation of the arts and progressive modernism can reinvigorate culture through active leisure and post-work possibilities beyond materialism and its constraints, thereby presenting alternatives to established understandings and everyday cultural processes. The book teases out the difficult relationship between the individual, culture and society especially in relation to autonomy and marginality, while arguing that the creative underground is crucial for a better world, as it offers enchantment, vitality and hope.

This book uses cultural and psycho-social analysis to examine the beat writer Charles Bukowski and his literature, focusing on representations of the anti-hero rebel and outsider. Clements considers the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions represented by the author and his work, exploring Bukowski's visceral writing of the cultural ordinary and everyday self-narrative. The study considers Bukowski's apolitical, gendered, and working-class stance to understand how the writer represents reality and is represented with regards to counter-cultural literature. In addition, Clements provides a broader socio-cultural focus that evaluates counterculture in relation to the American beat movement and mythology, highlighting the male cool anti-hero. The cultural practices and discourses utilized to situate Bukowski include the individual and society, outsiderdom, cult celebrity, fan embodiment, and disneyfication, providing a greater understanding of the beat generation and counterculture literature.

This cross-disciplinary book, situated on the periphery of culture, employs humour to better comprehend the arts, the outsider and exclusion, illuminating the ever-changing social landscape, the vagaries of taste and limits of political correctness. Each chapter deals with specific themes and approaches - from the construct of outsider and complexity of humour, to Outsider Art and spaces - using various theoretical and analytical methods. Paul Clements draws on humour, especially from visual arts and culture (and to a lesser extent literature, film, music and performance), as a tool of ridicule, amongst other discourses, employed by the powerful but also as a weapon to satirize them. These ambiguous representations vary depending on context, often assimilated then reinterpreted in a game of authenticity that is poignant in a world of facsimile and 'fake news'. The humour styles of a range of artists are highlighted to reveal the fluidity and diversity of meaning which challenges expectations and at its best offers resistance and, crucially, a voice for the marginal. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art history, cultural studies, fine art, humour studies and visual culture.

Paul Clements champions the creative underground and expressions of difference through visionary avant-garde and resistant ideas. This is represented by an admixture of utopian literature, manifestos and lifestyles which challenge normality and attempt to reinvent society, as practiced for example, by radicals in bohemian enclaves or youth subcultures. He showcases a range of 'art' and participatory cultural practices that are examined sociopolitically and historically, employing key theoretical ideas which highlight their contribution to aesthetic thinking, political ideology, and public discourse. A reevaluation of the arts and progressive modernism can reinvigorate culture through active leisure and post-work possibilities beyond materialism and its constraints, thereby presenting alternatives to established understandings and everyday cultural processes. The book teases out the difficult relationship between the individual, culture and society especially in relation to autonomy and marginality, while arguing that the creative underground is crucial for a better world, as it offers enchantment, vitality and hope.

The Definitive, Practical, Proven Guide to Architecting Modern Software--Fully Updated with New Content on Mobility, the Cloud, Energy Management, DevOps, Quantum Computing, and More Updated with eleven new chapters, Software Architecture in Practice, Fourth Edition, thoroughly explains what software architecture is, why it's important, and how to design, instantiate, analyze, evolve, and manage it in disciplined and effective ways. Three renowned software architects cover the entire lifecycle, presenting practical guidance, expert methods, and tested models for use in any project, no matter how complex. You'll learn how to use architecture to address accelerating growth in requirements, system size, and abstraction, and to manage emergent quality attributes as systems are dynamically combined in new ways. With insights for utilizing architecture to optimize key quality attributes--including performance, modifiability, security, availability, interoperability, testability, usability, deployability, and more--this guide explains how to manage and refine existing architectures, transform them to solve new problems, and build reusable architectures that become strategic business assets. Discover how architecture influences (and is influenced by) technical environments, project lifecycles, business profiles, and your own practices Leverage proven patterns, interfaces, and practices for optimizing quality through architecture Architect for mobility, the cloud, machine learning, and quantum computing Design for increasingly crucial attributes such as energy efficiency and safety Scale systems by discovering architecturally significant influences, using DevOps and deployment pipelines, and managing architecture debt Understand architecture's role in the organization, so you can deliver more value Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

""This new edition is brighter, shinier, more complete, more pragmatic, more focused than the previous one, and I wouldn't have thought it possible to improve on the original. As the field of software architecture has grown over these past decades, there is much more to be said, much more that we know, and much more that we can reflect upon of what's worked and what hasn't--and the authors here do all that, and more.""--From the Foreword by Grady Booch, IBM Fellow Software architecture--the conceptual glue that holds every phase of a project together for its many stakeholders--is widely recognized as a critical element in modern software development. Practitioners have increasingly discovered that close attention to a software system's architecture pays valuable dividends. Without an architecture that is appropriate for the problem being solved, a project will stumble along or, most likely, fail. Even with a superb architecture, if that architecture is not well understood or well communicated the project is unlikely to succeed. "Documenting Software Architectures, Second Edition, " provides the most complete and current guidance, independent of language or notation, on how to capture an architecture in a commonly understandable form. Drawing on their extensive experience, the authors first help you decide what information to document, and then, with guidelines and examples (in various notations, including UML), show you how to express an architecture so that others can successfully build, use, and maintain a system from it. The book features rules for sound documentation, the goals and strategies of documentation, architectural views and styles, documentation for software interfaces and software behavior, and templates for capturing and organizing information to generate a coherent package. New and improved in this second edition: Coverage of architectural styles such as service-oriented architectures, multi-tier architectures, and data modelsGuidance for documentation in an Agile development environmentDeeper treatment of documentation of rationale, reflecting best industrial practicesImproved templates, reflecting years of use and feedback, and more documentation layout optionsA new, comprehensive example (available online), featuring documentation of a Web-based service-oriented systemReference guides for three important architecture documentation languages: UML, AADL, and SySML

Following the spirit of the world's longest coastal driving route, Paul Clements sets out to discover the real west of Ireland. Along the way he encounters memorable characters living on the Atlantic edge and presents a unique portrait of their lives. We meet the last man standing on a remote Galway island, listen to the banter at Puck Fair, and hear from a descendant of the original sixteenth-century wild Atlantic woman. Tagging along on his meandering journey is the swashbuckling presence of the Celtic sea god, Manannan Mac Lir. For his first travel book in 1991, Paul hitchhiked the same route. Now retracing his steps along the Wild Atlantic Way - this time by car and bike, on horseback and on foot - he looks at how Ireland has changed and realises everyone still has a story to tell. Laced with wry humour and endless curiosity, this is a distinctive mix of travel writing, social history and nature. Also by this author: `The Height of Nonsense: The Ultimate Irish Road Trip' Praise for this author: "Stacks of free copies should be sent to all our tourist desks abroad." - The Irish Times. "For sheer pleasure, nothing I read beat Paul Clements' `The Height of Nonsense'." - The Observer. "A compulsive, educational, laugh-out-loud read." - Sunday Independent. "A fascinating journey around the hidden corners of Ireland." - BBC Radio

Revised, updated and expanded Basic Water Treatment remains an essential reference on all aspects of water quality and treatment systems. A bestselling text, this book has been written by two of the world s leading experts in the field and remains the definitive reference for all those involved in water treatment systems.

This widely-accepted introduction and practical guide to water treatment focuses on the issues of most interest to practising engineers, summarising the key issues and criteria in short and accessible sections with additional theory to explain and support the treatment processes considered. The book also presents up-to-date information on UK, European and American water-quality standards, including the 2007 amendments to the English and Welsh drinking water regulations. Expanding further on topics such as membrane processes and water demands, the fourth edition includes a new section on water re-use, and two new chapters on water safety plans and private water supplies.

Basic Water Treatment is an essential resource for water engineers at all levels. Ideal as a textbook for students, a handbook for young engineers or chemists, and an indispensable guide full of practical information for the established practitioner.
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We are a nation in process, we have the tools to excel to greater heights. For some of those that confronted our shores in the late 19th and early 20th century, you are either unaware of this country foundation or unconcerned of it's undead roots. There is a spirit in this land that still awaits its resting place.