Covers everything from hosepipe bans to Spanish restaurants, from writer's block to slug warfare, from slob holidays to the banning of beige. This book reveals the author, ourselves and the nation in a new light.

'York Notes' offer an approach to English literature that aims to fully reflect student needs. They are filled with summaries, commentaries, exam advice, margin and textual features to offer a wider context to the text and encourage a critical analysis.

This work is a definitive study of R.K. Narayan, author of fifteen novels and novellas and more than half a dozen collections of short stories. Based on his personal experiences with Narayan and his friends and relatives, Rao does detailed critical analyses of all of Narayan's works, reading them through the lens of the Indian philosophical concept of the three 'gunas'.

This book reappraises the place of children's literature, showing it to be a creative space where writers and illustrators try out new ideas about books, society, and narratives in an age of instant communication and multi-media. It looks at the stories about the world and young people; the interaction with changing childhoods and new technologies.

* Provides an unparalleled insight into the influence of one of the centurya s exemplary public intellectuals. * Includes a detailed historical and theoretical introduction. * Incorporates extracts from key works as well as less well--known texts and seminal essays. .

One of the world's leading neurologists reveals the extraordinary stories behind some of the brain disorders that he and his staff at the Harvard Medical School endeavour to treat - an updated and revised edition of the Sunday Times bestseller and modern classic of the medical memoir genre.

A collection of essays that explores how reading shapes an individual's life.

Readers' Liberation addresses question of what we should be reading to obtain information, examining how past readers encountered the same problems that today's readers face, and how they dealt with them.

This new anthology of radical writings for children from the first half of the twentieth century contains a wide selection of the kinds of materials that left-wing and progressive parents would have wanted their children to read, and which children understood as part of their initiation into a politically radical class.

Reading and the Reader defends the value of reading serious literature, investigating the role of the reader in the human search for meaning outside as well as inside of books.

Reading is both a social process and a social formation, as this book illustrates across centuries and cultural contexts. Highlighting links evident in reading communities from literary salons to online environments, each essay reflects the rich repertoire of research methods available to reading scholars.

Reading is both a social process and a social formation, as this book illustrates across centuries and cultural contexts. Highlighting links evident in reading communities from literary salons to online environments, each essay reflects the rich repertoire of research methods available to reading scholars.

While travelling in Calgary, Alberto Manguel was struck by how the novel he was reading seemed to reflect the world he was living in.

This history of reading for Middle English poetry combines close readings, detailed case studies of surviving codices, and systematic manuscript surveys to demonstrate the variety, vitality, and formal concerns visible in the reading of verse in this period.

This volume presents original case-histories of readers to delve into just what reading is and how it works. Each chapter begins with a poem or excerpt which becomes the scene either of a reading-group transcription or of a thought-piece from an interviewed reader to explore therapeutic reading and how culture might impact upon health.

Growing evidence of the vital role reading for pleasure plays in children and young people's academic outcomes and socio-emotional wellbeing has placed it high on the agenda in both educational policy and practice.

Who cares about details? We do, but it has not always been so. Secularization, the disciplining of society, the rise of consumerism have brought detail to the fore. This book provides ways of thinking about details and ornament in literature, art and architecture, and uncovering the unspoken but powerful ideologies that attached gender to details.

Reading Material in Early Modern England rediscovers the practices and representations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English readers.