Andrew Marvell brings together ten recent and critically informed essays by leading scholars on one of the most challenging and important seventeenth-century poets. The essays examine Marvell's poems, from lyrics, such as 'To His Coy Mistress' and 'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn', to celebrations of Cromwell and Republican Civil War culture and his biting Restoration satires. Representing the most significant critical trends in Marvell criticism over the last twenty years, the essays and the authoritative editorial work provide an excellent introduction to Marvell's work. Students of Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature, English Civil War writing, and seventeenth-century social and cultural history will find this collection a useful guide to helping them appreciate and understand Marvell's poetry.

Andrew Marvell brings together ten recent and critically informed essays by leading scholars on one of the most challenging and important seventeenth-century poets. The essays examine Marvell's poems, from lyrics, such as 'To His Coy Mistress' and 'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn', to celebrations of Cromwell and Republican Civil War culture and his biting Restoration satires. Representing the most significant critical trends in Marvell criticism over the last twenty years, the essays and the authoritative editorial work provide an excellent introduction to Marvell's work. Students of Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature, English Civil War writing, and seventeenth-century social and cultural history will find this collection a useful guide to helping them appreciate and understand Marvell's poetry.

Literature and the English Civil War charts the relationship between literary texts and their historical context during this era of profound change and upheaval for British society and culture. The volume demonstrates that literary texts are not merely passive reflections of the historical events that help to form them. On the contrary, 'history' is fashioned by the way events are named and the language used to describe them. To understand the literature of the English Civil War is to form a vital perspective on this major period of transition. Essays in the volume focus on issues of ideology and genre, often with reference to topical debates about how the events of 1640 1660 can best be characterised. There are pieces on the politics of the masque; lyric and devotional poetry; women's writing and the Civil War; attitudes towards Ireland; colonialism; madness and division; individual writers such as Hobbes, Marvell, and Milton; and other relevant topics. An editorial introduction traces themes and provides a useful overview. This book is a major contribution to our awareness of the conditions of literature during the English Civil War and an important statement in the debate about the relation between literature and history.

No right seems more fundamental to American life than freedom of speech. Yet well into the twentieth century that freedom was still an unfulfilled promise, with Americans regularly imprisoned merely for speaking out against government policies. Indeed, free speech as we know it comes less from the First Amendment than from a most unexpected source: Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. A lifelong skeptic, he disdained all individual rights, including the right to express one's political views. But in 1919, it was Holmes who wrote a dissenting opinion that would become the canonical affirmation of free speech in the United States.
Why did Holmes change his mind? That question has puzzled historians for almost a century. Now, with the aid of newly discovered letters and confidential memos, Thomas Healy reconstructs in vivid detail Holmes's journey from free-speech opponent to First Amendment hero. It is the story of a remarkable behind-the-scenes campaign by a group of progressives to bring a legal icon around to their way of thinking--and a deeply touching human narrative of an old man saved from loneliness and despair by a few unlikely young friends.
Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, "The Great Dissent" is intellectual history at its best, revealing how free debate can alter the life of a man and the legal landscape of an entire nation.

This book gives writers pointers and guidelines on how to improve their action scenes by implementing some of the same kinds of techniques used in film-making. Loaded with new terminology and definitions, an introduction to the basic concepts of an Action Scene, and application of the concepts, this book gives writers the tools to write their own expert-level action scenes KAPOW BANG ZOOM

"Smart, acerbic, laconic, with nary an ounce of treacle dripping through Healy's muscular prose. A"--"Entertainment Weekly"

Thomas Healy was a drunk, a fighter, sometimes a writer, often unemployed, and no stranger to the police. His life was going steadily downhill. Then one day he bought a pup--a Doberman. He called him Martin. Gradually man and dog became unshakable allies, the best of friends. They took long walks together, they vacationed together, they even went to church together. Martin, in more ways than one, saved Thomas Healy's life.

"Healy's memoir tells how the love he came to feel for Martin led him to quit drinking and fighting and make a new life. Healy's tone is whimsical more often than sentimental, but that doesn't prevent him from concluding that Martin was 'a gift from God.'"--"The Christian Science Monitor" Thomas Healy grew up in Glasgow in the 1950s. He left school at fifteen and worked as, among other things, a shunter in a railway yard, and a security guard at a meat market. He is the author of a book about boxing, "A Hurting Business", and two novels: "It Might Have Been Jerusalem "and "Rolling". He lives in Glasgow.