Drawing on private and published sources, Roger Fagge takes an in-depth look at J.B. Priestley's work, seeking to reclaim him as an important English thinker. Priestley grew up in Bradford, and served on the front line in the First World War, before attending Cambridge and embarking on a career as a writer. A committed radical, he wrote widely for the press, as well as producing autobiographies, social criticism and plays. This work revealed a growing interest in the meaning of Englishness and the start of a long-running relationship with America. Priestley achieved even greater influence during the early years of World War II via his popular BBC radio 'postscripts'. His later career, however, saw his faith in the people give way to a disillusionment with the spread of the Americanised mass society, although his critical response to the latter maintained a perceptive engagement with world. The Vision of J.B. Priestley charts the continuities, strengths and weaknesses in the author's long career, and his vision of an outward looking radical Englishness.

This is a new and completely revised edition of the successful text published in 2000 entitled Core Management. The book provides excellent coverage of the CIPD syllabus for three core areas of the CIPD syllabus.New end of chapter website links are included. The text is written in an easy-to-read style and each chapter is linked to other relevant parts of the book.

New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Practice is an edited collection that captures the cutting edge of British jazz studies in the early twenty-first century, highlighting the developing methodologies and growing interdisciplinary nature of the field. In particular, the collection breaks down barriers previously maintained between jazz historians, theorists and practitioners with an emphasis on interrogating binaries of national/local and professional/amateur. Each of these essays questions popular narratives of jazz, casting fresh light on the cultural processes and economic circumstances which create the music. Subjects covered include Duke Ellington's relationship with the BBC, the impact of social media on jazz, a new view of the ban on visiting jazz musicians in interwar Britain, a study of Dave Brubeck as a transitional figure in the pages of Melody Maker and BBC2's Jazz 625, the issue of 'liveness' in Columbia's Ellington at Newport album, a musician and promoter's views of the relationship with audiences, a reflection on Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Eric Hobsbawm as jazz critics, a musician's perspective on the oral and generational tradition of jazz in a British context, and a meditation on Alan Lomax's Mr. Jelly Roll, and what it tells us about cultural memory and historical narratives of jazz.

This is a new and completely revised edition of the successful text published in 2000 entitled Core Management. The book provides excellent coverage of the CIPD syllabus for three core areas of the CIPD syllabus. New end of chapter website links are included. The text is written in an easy-to-read style and each chapter is linked to other relevant parts of the book.

New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Practice is an edited collection that captures the cutting edge of British jazz studies in the early twenty-first century, highlighting the developing methodologies and growing interdisciplinary nature of the field. In particular, the collection breaks down barriers previously maintained between jazz historians, theorists and practitioners with an emphasis on interrogating binaries of national/local and professional/amateur. Each of these essays questions popular narratives of jazz, casting fresh light on the cultural processes and economic circumstances which create the music. Subjects covered include Duke Ellington's relationship with the BBC, the impact of social media on jazz, a new view of the ban on visiting jazz musicians in interwar Britain, a study of Dave Brubeck as a transitional figure in the pages of Melody Maker and BBC2's Jazz 625, the issue of 'liveness' in Columbia's Ellington at Newport album, a musician and promoter's views of the relationship with audiences, a reflection on Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Eric Hobsbawm as jazz critics, a musician's perspective on the oral and generational tradition of jazz in a British context, and a meditation on Alan Lomax's Mr. Jelly Roll, and what it tells us about cultural memory and historical narratives of jazz.

Drawing on private and published sources, Roger Fagge takes an in-depth look at J.B. Priestley's work, seeking to reclaim him as an important English thinker. Priestley grew up in Bradford, and served on the front line in the First World War, before attending Cambridge and embarking on a career as a writer. A committed radical, he wrote widely for the press, as well as producing autobiographies, social criticism and plays. This work revealed a growing interest in the meaning of Englishness and the start of a long-running relationship with America. Priestley achieved even greater influence during the early years of World War II via his popular BBC radio 'postscripts'. His later career, however, saw his faith in the people give way to a disillusionment with the spread of the Americanised mass society, although his critical response to the latter maintained a perceptive engagement with world. "The Vision of J.B. Priestley "charts the continuities, strengths and weaknesses in the author's long career, and his vision of an outward looking radical Englishness.

No other region of the world has exerted such a fascination for the British, and for such a long time, as the United States of America. From the first explorations and settlements in the seventeenth century, through the heyday of the first British empire in the Americas in the eighteenth century and the fundamental re-conceptualisation of America following independence, to the present day American global hegemony a vast variety of Britons have looked across the Atlantic and pondered on American life, culture, politics and attitudes. In this volume a number of scholars from a variety of different disciplines (History, English, Theatre Studies, Music and History of Art) explore the ways in which Britons have imagined America. They show how some visited America themselves, while others relied on second-hand reports, but all engaged with America on various levels, often imagining and re-imagining it through different time-periods. The `reality' of American life, or of American politics was one issue, as were other factors including American identity, culture, music and theatre, all of which were filtered through a shifting gaze ranging from admiration to outright hostility Included are essays on the printed representations of early Virginia, the view of British consuls living in the slave South, the interpretations of diverse writers such as Dickens, Auden, Orwell and Amis, and on the lyrics and other public pronouncements of the band Radiohead. The time frame runs from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, and should enable the reader the see how British perceptions and understandings of America have evolved over those 400 years. Ultimately, the complexity and ambiguity of British imaginings of America emerges as the central theme of the book.