A prominent British conservative argues forcefully and passionately that Americans must not allow Barack Obama to take them down the road to European Union-style social democracy. He pleads with Americans not to abandon the founding principles that have made their country a beacon of liberty for the rest of the world.
'Forget "bones". Forget "structure". Forget trees, shrubs, and perennials. This is not a book about big projects. It is about thinking your way towards an essential flower garden, by the most traditional of routes: planting some seeds and seeing how they grow.'
'The breadth of Butler's interests and concerns is remarkable, even for a writer whose career spanned the greater part of a tumultuous century ... whether he is writing about wartime atrocities or local history, the slaughter of the Jews or Celtic hagiography, he speaks with authenticity. In this he is a member of a dying species.' John Banville
The essays and reflections in this collection explore the seriousness of play and the mysteries of inanimate life - 'the unknown spaces, noises, dust, lost objects, and small animals that fill any house' - which have provoked many writers to take the side of these dead or non-human things.
Generations of English tourists have been dependent on travel guides, whether for information on art history, or for practical advice. Keates's lively cultural history of the guide-book, based on his own unparalleled collection, shows that the Englishman has always revealed most about himself when he is abroad.
Paris in the nineteenth century was a magnet for Europe's exiles, among them the Russian genius, Alexander Herzen, who described the experience of displacement from the inside. Richard Sennett plunges into this vibrant, anxious world to recreate the experiences of Herzen and his contemporaries.
You've paid money for this book, or you have family or friends who don't mind your borrowing or who gift books like this. You are being attentive because you're interested in what type of person this gifter thinks you are - too attentive, to them, to yourself, or too inattentive.
The extraordinary story of abundance being hunted to extinction in a New World unused to ecological husbandry. An extinction which coincided with the outbreak of World War 1 - another example of mass destruction.
Sixteen short essays on places as varied as Glasgow and Norwich, Llanidloes and Sheffield, by the finest English Architectural writer of the Twentieth Century.
Perec was a leading exponent of French literary surrealism who found humour - and pathos - in the human need for classification. Thoughts of Sorts is itself unclassifiable, a unique collection of philosophical riffs on his obsession with lists, puzzles, catalogues, and taxonomies. Introduced by Margaret Drabble.
Woolf responds passionately to those writers - past, present - who deal honestly with the reader, who express their own variations on the 'I am I' - the selective vision of the finite self.
N+1 Anthology Volume II brings together some of the best Essays of the last decade. Emily Witt writes on Pornography, Nikil Saval on the birth of the office, A.S.Hamrah on Hollywood and the war on terror and Philip Connors on working at The Wall Street Journal during 9/11.
'Perhaps when Orwell described sheer egoism as a necessary quality for a writer, he was not thinking about the sheer egoism of a female writer. Even the most arrogant female writer has to work over time to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December.' Deborah Levy
The French critic Roland Barthes has guru status among literary theorists. Yet his Journal of Mourning opens the door onto his strange personal world. A private diary, it records the day-by-day impact of bereavement as he struggles to live without the most important person in his life: his mother.
In the last years of the Second World War, a million tonnes of bombs were dropped by the Allies on 131 German towns and cities. 600,000 civilians died, seven and a half million Germans were left homeless. W.G. Sebald's lucid but harrowing essays explore the consequences for the German people of the mass destruction of their cities.
The n+1 Anthology is a selection from the best of n+1, a Brooklyn-based print magazine of politics, literature and culture, founded in 2004 and published thrice yearly.
As autobiography, Brainard's method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories ('everything is interesting, sooner or later') as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each prefaced by the refrain 'I remember.'
For more than two intellectual generations, since 1945, the nation-state has been presented as pathological in its very nature. This collection of essays is a first attempt to restore it to its rightful place: At the heart of the people, centre-stage in politics, deserving of academic study.