'Elegiac, informative and funny; some truly magical encounters in the wild' Peter Fiennes Britain is teeming with wildlife, often in the most unexpected places. There are stone mines where bats hang out with pot-smoking teenagers and water voles thrive without water in Glaswegian parklands. Our coastlines are laden with seals. That’s the good news. The bad news is that a quarter of British mammals are at imminent risk of extinction. Tim Kendall and Fiona Mathews take us on a safari unlike any other. Armed with binoculars, a Thermos and, regrettably, an inexhaustible supply of puns, they travel from Scotland to the Isles of Scilly in search of their elusive subjects. You’ll find answers to questions you never thought to ask: do pine marten droppings really smell like Parma Violets? Should we give squirrels access to family planning? And what do wild boar have in common with a certain royal? Black Ops and Beaver Bombing is a celebration of Britain’s marvellous mammals, and a rallying cry to save them.

Thirty-seven chapters, written by leading literary critics from across the world, describe the latest thinking about twentieth-century war poetry. The book maps both the uniqueness of each war and the continuities between poets of different wars, while the interconnections between the literatures of war and peacetime, and between combatant and civilian poets, are fully considered. The focus is on Britain and Ireland, but links are drawn with the poetry of the United States and continental Europe.
The Oxford Handbook feeds a growing interest in war poetry and offers, in toto, a definitive survey of the terrain. It is intended for a broad audience, made up of specialists and also graduates and undergraduates, and is an essential resource for both scholars of particular poets and for those interested in wider debates about modern poetry. This scholarly and readable assessment of the field will provide an important point of reference for decades to come.

Tim Kendall's study offers the fullest account to date of a tradition of modern English war poetry. Stretching from the Boer War to the present day, it focuses on many of the twentieth-century's finest poets - combatants and non-combatants alike - and considers how they address the ethical challenges of making art out of violence. Poetry, we are often told, makes nothing happen. But war makes poetry happen: the war poet cannot regret, and must exalt at, even the most appalling experiences. Modern English War Poetry not only assesses the problematic relationship between war and its poets, it also encourages an urgent reconsideration of the modern poetry canon and the (too often marginalised) position of war poetry within it. The aesthetic and ethical values on which canonical judgements have been based are carefully scrutinized via a detailed analysis of individual poets. The poets discussed include Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Wilfred Owen, Charlotte Mew, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, W. H. Auden, Keith Douglas, Ted Hughes, and Geoffrey Hill.

Thirty-seven chapters, written by leading literary critics from across the world, describe the latest thinking about twentieth-century war poetry. The book maps both the uniqueness of each war and the continuities between poets of different wars, while the interconnections between the literatures of war and peacetime, and between combatant and civilian poets, are fully considered. The focus is on Britain and Ireland, but links are drawn with the poetry of the United States and continental Europe.
The Oxford Handbook feeds a growing interest in war poetry and offers, in toto, a definitive survey of the terrain. It is intended for a broad audience, made up of specialists and also graduates and undergraduates, and is an essential resource for both scholars of particular poets and for those interested in wider debates about modern poetry. This scholarly and readable assessment of the field will provide an important point of reference for decades to come.

Tim Kendall's study offers the fullest account to date of a tradition of modern English war poetry. Stretching from the Boer War to the present day, it focuses on many of the twentieth-century's finest poets - combatants and non-combatants alike - and considers how they address the ethical challenges of making art out of violence. Poetry, we are often told, makes nothing happen. But war makes poetry happen: the war poet cannot regret, and must exalt at, even the most appalling experiences. Modern English War Poetry not only assesses the problematic relationship between war and its poets, it also encourages an urgent reconsideration of the modern poetry canon and the (too often marginalised) position of war poetry within it. The aesthetic and ethical values on which canonical judgements have been based are carefully scrutinized via a detailed analysis of individual poets. The poets discussed include Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Wilfred Owen, Charlotte Mew, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, W. H. Auden, Keith Douglas, Ted Hughes, and Geoffrey Hill.

This is the first volume in a five-volume edition of the complete poetical works of Ivor Gurney (1890-1937). Following an extensive study of all known manuscripts, the edition brings much of that work to publication for the first time. Since his death, much of his work has been censored or overlooked, his stylistic development towards modernism written off as the product of 'insanity' The availability of his complete poetry will change absolutely our understanding of Gurney's development, and the true nature of his poetry. It will lay bare his aspirations and pursuits as an artist in all its diversity, as a poet of war, of place, and of the asylum; a poet whose work has been celebrated by Geoffrey Hill for its 'incontestible grandeur'. Volume I presents all of Gurney's poems written from March 1907 to December 1918. It begins with Gurney's earliest surviving verse, and ends, just after the Armistice, with his return to civilian life.

'What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?' The First World War produced an extraordinary flowering of poetic talent, from poets whose words commemorate the conflict as enduringly as monuments in stone. Their poems have come to express the feelings of a nation about the horrors and aftermath of war. This new anthology provides a definitive record of the achievements of the Great War poets. As well as offering generous selections from the celebrated soldier-poets, including Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and Ivor Gurney, it also incorporates less well-known writing by civilian and women poets. Music hall and trench songs provide a further lyrical perspective on the War. The work of each poet is prefaced with a biographical account that sets the poems in their historical context. In addition, Tim Kendall's introduction charts the history of the war poets' reception and challenges prevailing myths about their progress from idealism to bitterness. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range 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, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

"Which of us has not longed to be transported back to those carefree innocent days of childhood when everything was a blank canvas for our fertile and limitless imaginations. A time when life was simple and every day an adventure. This poignant, sometimes humorous, sometimes sad but always entertaining book started life as short stories for children, but here it is brought together for both children and adults to enjoy and reflect upon their own childhood." Although this is the story of my childhood, this book started as a series of stories told in assemblies at a large Primary school in Birkenhead. The wonder of growing up in a rural suburb in the 1950s was in itself a story to chidren of a large industrial town in the 1990s and 2000s, and yet I was talking about places the children knew. They could relate to the scrapes, the escapades, the ups and downs, the relationships between families and friends, and yet it was so different a world. Eventually the children and teachers persuaded me to write down the stories in order and now, just as I retire from teaching they are finished. Matthew aged 10 inspired the title of the book. Walking along a corridor he said, as we passed, "Sir. When you write down the stories you ought to somehow include the way you start every story." Every assembly, when I was going to use a story about my childhood I would start by stroking my beard and saying "No beard," then shaking my glasses I would add "No glasses," and finally holding my arm out at the height of my head I would lower it slowly to the approximate height that I would be in the story. Hence the title "No Beard, No Glasses (and very much shorter)."