International bestseller Tom Phillips (Humans; Truth; Conspiracy) is back with a fascinating and hilarious look at armageddon through the ages

Do you feel like we're living in the end times? Does it seem like everything is on fire, and one disaster follows another?

Here's a small comfort: you're not the first to feel that way. If there's one thing that people throughout history have agreed on, it's that history wasn't going to be around for much longer.

This book is about the apocalypse, and how humans have always believed it to be very f*cking nigh. Across thousands of years, we'll meet weird cults, failed prophets and mass panics, holy warriors leading revolts in anticipation of the last days, and suburbanites waiting for aliens to rescue them from a doomed Earth. We'll journey back to the 'worst period to be alive', as the world reeled from a simultaneous pandemic and climate crisis. And we'll look to the future to ask the unnerving question: how might it all end?

But it's also a book about how we live in a world where catastrophe is always looming - whether it's a madman with a nuclear button or the slow burn of environmental collapse. Because when we talk about the end of the world, what we really mean is the end of our world. Our obsession with doomsday is really about change: our fear of it, and our desire for it, and how - ultimately - we can find hope in it.

This book is a study both of anachronism in antiquity and of anachronism as a vehicle for understanding antiquity. It explores the post-classical origins and changing meanings of the term 'anachronism' as well as the presence of anachronism in all its forms in classical literature, criticism and material objects. Contrary to the position taken by many modern philosophers of history, this book argues that classical antiquity had a rich and varied understanding of historical difference, which is reflected in sophisticated notions of anachronism. This central hypothesis is tested by an examination of attitudes to temporal errors in ancient literary texts and chronological writings and by analysing notions of anachronistic survival and multitemporality. Rather than seeing a sense of anachronism as something that separates modernity from antiquity, the book suggests that in both ancient writings and their modern receptions chronological rupture can be used as a way of creating a dialogue between past and present. With a selection of case-studies and theoretical discussions presented in a manner suitable for scholars and students both of classical antiquity and of modern history, anthropology, and visual culture, the book's ambition is to offer a new conceptual map of antiquity through the notion of anachronism.

The final edition of the late Tom Phillips's 'defining masterpiece of postmodernism'. In 1966 the artist Tom Phillips discovered A Human Document (1892), an obscure Victorian romance by W.H. Mallock, and set himself the task of altering every page, by painting, collage or cut-up techniques, to create an entirely new version. Some of Mallock's original text remains intact and through the illustrated pages the character of Bill Toge, Phillips's anti-hero, and his romantic plight emerges. First published in 1973, A Humument - as Phillips titled his altered book - quickly established itself as a cult classic. From that point, the artist worked towards a complete revision of his original, adding new pages in successive editions. That process is now finished. This final edition presents an entirely new and complete version of A Humument. It includes a revised Introduction by the late artist, in which he reflects on the 50-year project, and 92 new illustrated pages.

This title was first published in 2000. Most children enjoy drawing and use it to express a wide range of experiences and emotions. Drawing can offer an avenue of expression where words fail. So why do many people stop drawing after the early school years? This is an examination of the early work of John Everett Millais, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pablo Picasso, Michael Rothenstein, Gerard Hoffnung, Sarah Raphael and David Downes to investigate the reasons why these artists were able to sustain and develop their drawing skill and expressive potential while others failed. The close study of these artists' early drawings reveals their sequences of progress and their eventual achievement. The author, a former President of the National Society for Education in Art and Design, shares the experience of a lifetime's work in art education to explore the mysteries of drawing fluency, its often precocious beginnings, and the personal, social and cultural circumstances which help or hinder its development.

'Uproarious . . . [Phillips and Elledge] pair the abundant good humour of this book with a warning about the corrosive effects of conspiracy theories' The Times From the Satanic Panic to the anti-vaxx movement, the moon landing to Pizzagate, it's always been human nature to believe we're being lied to by the powers that be (and sometimes, to be fair, we absolutely are). But while it can be fun to indulge in a bit of Deep State banter on the group chat, recent times have shown us that some of these theories have taken on a life of their own - and in our dogged quest for the truth, it appears we might actually be doing it some damage. In Conspiracy, Tom Phillips and Jonn Elledge take us on a fascinating, insightful and often hilarious journey through conspiracy theories old and new, to try and answer a vital question for our times: how can we learn to log off the QAnon message boards, and start trusting hard evidence again? Praise for the Brief History series: 'Witty, entertaining and slightly distressing... You should probably read it' Sarah Knight, author of The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck 'Brilliant. Utterly, utterly brilliant' Jeremy Clarkson 'Very funny' Mark Watson 'Both readable and entertaining' Telegraph

In 1966 the artist Tom Phillips discovered A Human Document (1892), an obscure Victorian romance by W.H. Mallock, and set himself the task of altering every page, by painting, collage or cut-up techniques, to create an entirely new version. Some of Mallock's original text remains in tact and through the illustrated pages the character of Bill Toge, Phillips's anti-hero, and his romantic plight emerges. First published in 1973, A Humument - as Phillips titled his altered book - quickly established itself as a cult classic. Since then, the artist has been working towards a complete revision of his original, adding new pages in successive editions. That process is now finished. This 50th anniversary edition presents, for the first time, an entirely new and complete version of A Humument . This edition includes a revised Introduction by the artist, reflecting on the last 50 years' work on this project, and 92 new illustrated pages. A Special Limited edition is also available: this presents a copy of the 50th anniversary edition in a clamshell box with a limited-edition print, signed by the artist.

This title was first published in 2000. Most children enjoy drawing and use it to express a wide range of experiences and emotions. Drawing can offer an avenue of expression where words fail. So why do many people stop drawing after the early school years? This is an examination of the early work of John Everett Millais, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pablo Picasso, Michael Rothenstein, Gerard Hoffnung, Sarah Raphael and David Downes to investigate the reasons why these artists were able to sustain and develop their drawing skill and expressive potential while others failed. The close study of these artists' early drawings reveals their sequences of progress and their eventual achievement. The author, a former President of the National Society for Education in Art and Design, shares the experience of a lifetime's work in art education to explore the mysteries of drawing fluency, its often precocious beginnings, and the personal, social and cultural circumstances which help or hinder its development.

'TOM PHILLIPS IS A VERY CLEVER, VERY FUNNY MAN' Greg Jenner This is a book about TRUTH - and all the ingenious ways, throughout history, that we've managed to avoid it. We live in a 'post-truth' age, we're told. The US has a president who openly lies on a daily basis (or who doesn't even know what's true, and doesn't care). The internet has turned our everyday lives into a misinformation battleground. People don't trust experts any more. But was there ever really a golden age of truth-telling? As the editor of the UK's leading independent fact-checker, Tom Phillips deals with complete bollocks every day. Here, he tells the story of how we humans have spent history lying to each other - and ourselves - and asks an important question: how can humanity move towards a truthier future? PRAISE FOR HUMANS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HOW WE F*CKED IT ALL UP: 'F*cking brilliant' Sarah Knight, The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck 'Very funny' Mark Watson 'In dark times, it's reassuring to learn that we've always been a bunch of clueless f*cking nitwits' Stuart Heritage, Don't Be a Dick, Pete 'A light-touch history of moments when humans have got it spectacularly wrong... Both readable and entertaining' Telegraph

'This book is brilliant. Utterly, utterly brilliant. Apart from the epilogue, which is idiotic' Jeremy Clarkson 'F*cking brilliant' Sarah Knight AN EXHILARATING JOURNEY THROUGH THE MOST CREATIVE AND CATASTROPHIC F*CK-UPS OF HUMAN HISTORY In the seventy thousand years that modern human beings have walked this earth, we've come a long way. Art, science, culture, trade - on the evolutionary food chain, we're real winners. But, frankly, it's not exactly been plain sailing, and sometimes - just occasionally - we've managed to really, truly, quite unbelievably f*ck things up. From Chairman Mao's Four Pests Campaign, to the American Dustbowl; from the Austrian army attacking itself one drunken night, to the world's leading superpower electing a reality TV mogul as President... it's pretty safe to say that, as a species, we haven't exactly grown wiser with age. So, next time you think you've really f*cked up, this book will remind you: it could be so much worse... FURTHER PRAISE FOR HUMANS: 'Very funny' Mark Watson 'A light-touch history of moments when humans have got it spectacularly wrong... Both readable and entertaining' The Telegraph 'Chronicles humanity's myriad follies down the ages with malicious glee and much wit ... a rib-tickling page-turner' Business Standard 'A timely, irreverent gallop through thousands of years of human stupidity' Nicholas Griffin, Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World

Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica is a voyage across time as well as space. The Argonauts encounter monsters, nymphs, shepherds, and kings who represent earlier stages of the cosmos or human society; they are given glimpses into the future, and themselves effect changes in the world through which they travel. Readers undergo a still more complex form of temporal transport, enabled not just to imagine themselves into the deep past, but to examine the layers of poetic and intellectual history from which Apollonius crafts his poem. Taking its lead from ancient critical preoccupations with poetry's ethical significance, this volume argues that the Argonautica produces an understanding of time and temporal experience which ramifies variously in readers' lives. When describing the people and creatures who occupied the past, Apollonius extends readers' capacity for empathetic response to the worlds inhabited by others. In the ecphrasis of Jason's cloak and the account of Jason's conversations with Medea, readers are invited to scrutinize the relationship between exempla and temporal change, while episodes such as the taking of the Golden Fleece explore links between perceptions and their temporal situation. Running through the poem, and through the readings that comprise this book, is an attention to the intellectual potential of the 'untimely' - objects, experience, and language which do not belong straightforwardly to a particular time. Treatment of such phenomena is crucial to the poem's aspiration to inform and expand readers' understanding of themselves as subjects in and of history.

Online dating was supposed to make life easier, to help us bypass cheesy chat-up lines and avoid those awkward getting-to-know-you chats. But thanks to Tinder, the world's favourite dating app, you can now be horrified by lewd come-ons, cringe at incompetent smalltalk and wonder at what some people think passes for 'banter' in the comfort of your own home! Isn't technology great? Featuring some of the most awkward, embarrassing and outright insane Tinder conversations ever committed to smartphone, this is an essential - and entertaining - guide to how NOT to use Tinder.

Pindar's Library is the first volume to explore how readers during the Hellenistic period encountered Pindar's poetry in book form, analysing in detail the role played by Pindar's literary, cultic, and scholarly reception in affecting readers' engagement with his epinician odes. The volume examines the poet's literary devices of encomiastic techniques, mythical narratives, and paraenetic discourses against the background of the song culture of the fifth century, considering the poems as both material documents and performance pieces. With a particular focus on the poems that begin and end the Olympian and Pythian books, the volume considers the continuities between reading and attending performances, highlighting elements of readers' experiences distinctive to Hellenistic culture. It also investigates the issue of quotations of poets in ancient commentaries, and how such citations influenced readers' understanding of intertextual relationships. Throughout the volume, the relations between Pindar's epinicians and the contextual factors that influence their reception are seen in dialogic terms: as well as exerting a powerful influence over subsequent literature, the poems are also recontextualized in ways that shift and extend their cultural significance.

How does a goddess become a witch? Why do the 9 o'clock horses roam the streets of Leicester? Where can you find a bleeding gravestone? And should you be afraid of the shag-dog? Everywhere has a story to tell. Every building, road, forest and field. Some are true, some are not. These stories have been passed down through the ages so that we don't forget them, and now they are being passed on to you. They will open your eyes to the wonders of what lies just around the corner. You will become the keeper of these local tales. Leicestershire Folk Tales for Children is a book to read on your own, together or out loud. Bring our folk tales to life and let them leap off the page.

Tom Phillips' first full-length collection navigates terrains which range from Eastern Europe, Australia and the Home Counties to his own back garden in Bristol. From the different perspectives these vantage points offer, it unearths connections between chance meetings and `big history', family stories and the state we're in. It also looks at poetry itself as a ground on which to recreate - and negotiate with - one thing that nobody can change: the past.

Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts, and the fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms alone. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as 'textual events'. Some chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings, while others consider how lyric poems position themselves in relation to earlier texts and textual traditions, or discuss the distinctive encounters lyric poems create between listeners, authors, and performers. Individual lyric texts and authors, such as Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar, are analysed in detail, alongside treatments of the relationship between lyric and the Homeric Hymns. Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic in the study of Greek lyric and beyond, Textual Events aims to re-examine the relationship between the poems' formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of socio-political discourse, but they are also objects of attention in themselves. They enable reflection on social and ritual practices as much as they are embedded within them. As well as expressing cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh.

What difference does music make to performance poetry, and how did the ancients themselves understand this relationship? Although scholars have long recognized the importance of music to ancient performance culture, little has been written on the specific effects that musical accompaniment, and features such as rhythmical structure and melody, would have created in individual poems. This volume attempts to answer these questions by exploring more fully the relationship between music and language in the poetry of ancient Greece. Arranged into two parts, the essays in the first half engage closely with the evidential and interpretative challenges posed by the interaction of ancient music and poetry, and propose original readings of a range of texts by authors such as Homer, Pindar, and Euripides, as well as later poets such as Seikilos and Mesomedes. While they emphasize different formal features, they also argue collectively for a two-way relationship between music and language: attention to the musical features of poetic texts, insofar as we can reconstruct them, enables us to better understand not only their effects on audiences, but also the various ways in which they project and structure meaning. In the second part, the focus shifts to ancient attempts to conceptualize interactions between words and music; the essays in this section analyse the contested place that music occupied in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and other critical writers of the Hellenistic and Imperial periods. Thinking about music is shown to influence other domains of intellectual life, such as literary criticism, and to be vitally informed by ethical concerns. These essays illustrate the importance of music for intellectual culture in ancient Greece and the ancients' abiding concern to understand and control its effects on human behaviour.

Peter Robinson was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953 and grew up mainly in Liverpool. He is an internationally appreciated poet, whose Collected Poems was published by Shearsman Books in 2017, and has been awarded the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize, and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations for volumes of his poetry and translations. The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, edited by Adam Piette and Katy Price, appeared in 2007 and a new volume of critical studies edited by Tom Phillips, Peter Robinson: A Portrait of his Work, was published by Shearsman Books simultaneously with this volume. He has also published aphorisms, short stories, literary fiction, and his six volumes of literary criticism are in print from the university presses of Oxford, Cambridge, and Liverpool. Two Rivers Press has published two of his collaborations with artists: English Nettles (with Sally Castle, 2010), and Bonjour Mr Inshaw, (with David Inshaw, 2020). Two Rivers Press also publishes Foreigners, Drunks and Babies: Eleven Stories (2013) and his second novel, The Constitutionals (2019). Peter Robinson is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. This volume contains essays on his work by Ian Brinton, Peter Carpenter, Tony Crowley, Martin Dodsworth, Andrew Houwen, Miki Iwata, James Peake, Piers Pennington, Tom Phillips, Adam Piette, Elaine Randell, Anna Saroldi, Matthew Sperling, and Alison Stone, and covers all aspects of Peter Robinson's literary output.

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