Homecoming, haunting, nostalgia, desire: these are some of the themes evoked by the beguiling motif of the lighted window in literature and art. In this innovative combination of place-writing, memoir and cultural study, Peter Davidson takes us on atmospheric walks through nocturnal cities in Britain, Europe and North America, and revisits the field paths of rural England. Surveying a wide range of material, the book extends, chronologically, from early romantic painting to contemporary fiction, and geographically, from the Low Countries to Japan. It features familiar lighted windows in English literature (in the works of poets such as Thomas Hardy and Matthew Arnold and in the novels of Virginia Woolf, Arthur Conan Doyle and Kenneth Grahame) and examines the painted nocturnes of James Whistler, John Atkinson Grimshaw and the ruralist Samuel Palmer. It also considers Japanese prints of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; German romanticism in painting, poetry and music; Proust and the painters of the French belle epoque; Rene Magritte's 'L'Empire des Lumieres'; and North American painters such as Edward Hopper and Linden Frederick. By interpreting the interactions of art, literature and geography around this evocative motif, Peter Davidson shows how it has inspired an extraordinary variety of moods and ideas, from the romantic period to the present day.

First published in 1814 and expanded in 1821 – long before the era of colour photography or print – Syme’s edition of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours attempted to establish a universal colour reference system to help identify, classify and represent species from the natural world. Werner’s set of 54 colour standards was enhanced by Patrick Syme with the addition of colour swatches and further references from nature, taking the total number of hues classified to 110. The resulting resource proved invaluable not only to artists but also to zoologists, botanists, mineralogists and anatomists. In Nature’s Palette this technicolour trove has, for the first time, been enhanced with the addition of illustrations of the animals, vegetables and minerals Werner referenced alongside each colour swatch and accompanied by expert text explaining the uses and development of colour standards in relation to zoology, botany, minerology and anatomy. This fully realized colour catalogue includes elegant contemporary illustrations of every animal, plant or mineral that Syme cited. Readers can see for themselves Tile Red in the Cock Bullfinch’s breast, Shrubby Pimpernel and Porcelain Jasper; or admire the Berlin Blue that Syme identified on the wing feathers of a Jay, in the Hepatica flower and in Blue Sapphire. Displays of contemporary collector’s cabinets of birds, butterflies, eggs, flowers and minerals are interspersed at intervals throughout the compendium, with individual specimens colour matched to colour swatches. Still a much-loved reference among artists, naturalists and everyone fascinated by colour today, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours finds its fullest expression in this beautiful and comprehensive colour reference system. With 1000 illustrations in colour

A paperback edition of a classic of 17th-century English writing about food and drink. There is perhaps none more frequently quoted than this, no title more familiar. Its reappearance, therefore, will be very welcome to both the academic market, and the general reader. Digby was a European figure of some renown in scientific, philosophical and mathematical circles (besides being a military man, a pirate and a womaniser). This recipe collection made by him (in line with similar collections made by male enthusiasts and intellectuals of the time, for example the diarist John Evelyn) was published after his death by his former assistant George Hartman. It is perhaps the most literate of such cookery books. Digby was a natural writer, as entertaining as instructive. Many of the recipes are for drinks, particularly of meads or metheglins, but the culinary material provides a remarkable conspectus of accepted practice among court circles in Restoration England, with extra details supplied from Digby's European travels. The editors also include the inventory of Digby's own kitchen in his London house, discovered amongst papers now deposited in the British Library, and they have provided a few modern interpretations of Digby's recipes. The work was last printed in 1910, in a sound edition that is no longer easily available. This new version has several improvements. The editors discuss the role of George Hartman in the compilation of the book, and relate its contents to the work that appeared in 1682 under Hartman's own name, The True Preserver and Restorer of Health . There is a full glossary and the reader will be helped by the extensive biographical notes about people named in the text as the source of recipes. Sir Kenelm Digby (1611-1665) was born of gentry stock, but his family's adherence to Roman Catholicism coloured his career. His father, Sir Everard, was executed in 1606 for his part in the Gunpowder Plot. Digby went to Gloucester Hall, Oxford, in 1618. He spent three years in Europe between 1620 and 1623. Around 1625, he married Venetia Stanley. He had also become a member of the Privy Council. In 1628, Digby became a privateer, with some success, particularly in the Mediterranean. He returned to become a naval administrator and later Governor of Trinity House. His wife died suddenly in 1633. Digby, stricken with grief and the object of enough suspicion that the Crown had ordered an autopsy (rare at the time) on Venetia's body, secluded himself in Gresham College and attempted to forget his personal woes through scientific experimentation. Digby received the regional monopoly of sealing wax in Wales and the Welsh Borders and monopolies of trade with the Gulf of Guinea and with Canada. In the Civil War he went into exile in Paris, where he spent most of his time until 1660. He became Chancellor to Queen Henrietta Maria. Digby was regarded as an eccentric by contemporaries, partly because of his effusive personality, and partly because of his interests in scientific matters. Notable among his pursuits was the concept of the Powder of Sympathy. This was a kind of sympathetic magic to cure injuries. His book on this salve went through 29 editions. He was a founding member of the Royal Society. His correspondence with Fermat contains the only extant mathematical proof by Fermat. His Discourse Concerning the Vegetation of Plants (1661) proved controversial. He is credited with being the first person to note the importance of "vital air," or oxygen, to the sustenance of plants. Digby is also considered the father of the modern wine bottle. During the 1630s, Digby owned a glassworks and manufactured wine bottles which were globular in shape with a high, tapered neck, a collar, and a punt.

This is an advanced textbook on the subject of turbulence, and is suitable for engineers, physical scientists and applied mathematicians. The aim of the book is to bridge the gap between the elementary accounts of turbulence found in undergraduate texts, and the more rigorous monographs on the subject. Throughout, the book combines the maximum of physical insight with the minimum of mathematical detail. Chapters 1 to 5 may be appropriate as background material for an advanced undergraduate or introductory postgraduate course on turbulence, while chapters 6 to 10 may be suitable as background material for an advanced postgraduate course on turbulence, or act as a reference source for professional researchers. This second edition covers a decade of advancement in the field, streamlining the original content while updating the sections where the subject has moved on. The expanded content includes large-scale dynamics, stratified & rotating turbulence, the increased power of direct numerical simulation, two-dimensional turbulence, Magnetohydrodynamics, and turbulence in the core of the Earth

This collection of original articles provides language teachers with a theoretical background of key issues associated with language testing as well as practical advice on how to improve the effectiveness of the tests they develop and implement. Written by internationally prominent researchers and educators, the chapters are organized into five sections: key issues in the field, assessment purposes and approaches, assessment of second language skills, technology in assessment, and administrative issues. Chapters assume no particular background knowledge and are written in an accessible style.

In the far future and the recent past, the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan discover that humans can be monsters too. Contains two new adventures; 1. Friendly Fire by John Dorney (3 parts). When the TARDIS needs to reset itself, the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan find themselves having to fill time on a space-hub filled with numerous attractions. This pleases Tegan and Nyssa no end... but the Doctor is more interested in visiting an alien friend of his living on a nearby mining planet and is able to persuade his friends to join him. But on arrival his friend is nowhere to be found and the locals are more than slightly unwelcoming. With limited options for departure and a hostile populace they may be in a lot of trouble. Sometimes true monsters are found in the strangest places. 2. The Edge of the War by Jonathan Barnes (3 parts). France in the summer of 1936. The village of Villy is in a state of contentment, tinged only slightly with unease. A kilometre away, construction is underway on a large underground fortification, part of the Maginot Line project which has seen the building of a series of defences against future invasion. A young artist has arrived in the village to paint the landscape. Her name is Nyssa and she has taken a room in the local inn, run in its owner's absence by a young Australian woman called Tegan. But she's not the only newcomer. A detective called the Doctor has just got in from Paris. And he has quite a mystery to solve... CAST: Peter Davison (The Doctor), Janet Fielding (Tegan), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa), Alice Krige (Reno), Poppy Miller (Madame LaChappelle), Matt Addis (Jean-Baptiste), Phillipe Bosher (Armand Barbier), Alistair Petrie (The Count). Further cast to be announced.

This is a mighty book of Norths: northern geographies, histories, lights; a place of definition, frost and cold. There is an unfaltering Recusant spirit about these poems, a survival through defeat and a sense of underlying permanences. Each poem has an occasion: some of the occasions are personal meetings, conversations, which unlock shared scenes and themes; some are historical in origin, their past often one of early Christian faith or religious conflict. The poems abound in art, in specific lived detail, particulars of landscape, and in a harsh weather which is not unlike time itself in its effect on the living and ageing imagination. Each poem requires a different metre, a different pace; each form is carefully attuned to its occasion.

'The nation-state is the enemy of the baroque.' This is the point of departure of this radical, even revolutionary, re-examination of the cultural history of the early-modern world. Drawing on sources in six languages, many of them hitherto unavailable to the English-speaking reader, and touching on the visual arts, architecture, music and literature, this study frees the word 'baroque' from being a term of periodisation into being the descriptor for a network of circulation of ideas, words, plants, arts and energies which encompassed the totality of the early-modern world. This challenging book also forces a reconsideration of many of the prejudices of the Anglophone perception of cultural history and in doing so opens to the reader a world of wonders: the allegorical dramas of Ireland and Belgrade; the arquebusier angels of Cuzco painting; the operas and festival music of Bolivia; the vertiginous architectural fantasies of the Jacobite exiles. -- .

Old Mortality (1816), which many consider the finest of Scott's Waverley novels, is a swift-moving historical romance that places an anachronistically liberal hero against the forces of fanaticism in seventeenth-century Scotland, in the period infamous as the killing time'. Its central character, Henry Morton, joins the rebels in order to fight Scotland's royalist oppressors, little as he shares the Covenanters' extreme religious beliefs. He is torn between his love for a royalist's granddaughter and his loyalty to his downtrodden countrymen.
As well as being a tale of divided loyalties, the novel is a crucial document in the cultural history of modern Scotland. Scott, himself a supporter of the union between Scotland and England, was trying to exorcise the violent past of a country uncomfortably coming to terms with its status as part of a modern United Kingdom. This novel is in itself a significant political document, in which Scott can be seen to be attempting to create a new centralist Scottish historiography, which is not the political consensus of his own time, the seventeenth century, or today.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

As with the compass needle, so people have always been most powerfully attracted northwards; everyone carries within them their own concept of north. "The Idea of North" is a study, ranging widely in time and place, of some of the ways in which these ideas have found expression. Peter Davidson explores the topography of north as represented in images and literature, taking in Netherlandic winter paintings of the Renaissance, German Romantic landscapes, Scandinavian Biedermeyer and twentieth-century topographical painting and printmaking. He examines a bewildering diversity of mythologies and imaginings of north, including The Snow Queen; Scandinavian Sagas; ghost-stories; Moomintrolls, Arctic exploration; the fictitious snowy kingdoms of Zembla and Naboland; Nabokov's nostalgias; Baltic midsummer; rooms in winter light; compasses and star-stones; hoar-frost; and, ice and glass. The book also traces a northward journey, describing northern rural England, industrial sites, and the long emptiness of the borders, Scotland and the Highlands. He looks at the region far north of Scotland, then moves to the Northern Netherlands and Scandinavia to explore their identifiable northernness.The last visited place is Iceland, identified by W. H. Auden and Louis McNeice in 1936 as furthest, most remote, most distant, most northerly'. An engaging meditation on solitude, absence and stillness, "The Idea of North" shows north to be a goal rather than a destination, a place of revelation that is always somewhere ultimate and austere.

This ambitious account of the arts of the evening, now available in paperback, deftly combines prose-poetry, memoir, philosophy and art history. Intertwining personal, cultural and artistic histories, it is a richly rewarding book written in a unique voice.

This is a book about remoteness: a memoir of places observed in solitude, of the texture of life through the quiet course of the seasons in the far north of Scotland. It is a book grounded in the singularity of one place - a house in northern Aberdeenshire - and threaded through with an unshowy commitment to the lost and the forgotten. In these painterly essays Davidson reflects on art, place, history and landscape. Distance and Memory is his testament to the cold, clear beauty of the north.