Download or read book The Twilight Years written by Richard Overy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-11-30 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a leading British historian, the story of how fear of war shaped modern England By the end of World War I, Britain had become a laboratory for modernity. Intellectuals, politicians, scientists, and artists?among them Arnold Toynbee, Aldous Huxley, and H. G. Wells?sought a vision for a rapidly changing world. Coloring their innovative ideas and concepts, from eugenics to Freud?s unconscious, was a creeping fear that the West was staring down the end of civilization. In their home country of Britain, many of these fears were unfounded. The country had not suffered from economic collapse, occupation, civil war, or any of the ideological conflicts of inter-war Europe. Nevertheless, the modern era?s promise of progress was overshadowed by a looming sense of decay and death that would deeply influence creative production and public argument between the wars. In The Twilight Years, award-winning historian Richard Overy examines the paradox of this period and argues that the coming of World War II was almost welcomed by Britain?s leading thinkers, who saw it as an extraordinary test for the survival of civilization? and a way of resolving their contradictory fears and hopes about the future.
Download or read book The Twilight of Britain written by G. Gordon Betts and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Betts is to be commended on his careful and insightful elucidation of the complex and novel sets of dilemnas now facing the British people at a time of superficial calm masking serious divisions."--Albion The erosion of British sovereignty, national identity and culture, the subversion of its history and traditions, and the demoralization of its institutions and public services, are a source of increasing unease to many. The process began, Betts argues, with the end of the colonial empires. Since the beginning of the last decade, concern about the consequences has been heightened by global instability. The demise of the Communist empire, the rise of national independence movements, and the eruption of long standing and bitter ethno-national conflicts have resulted in a mass migration of economic refugees and asylum seekers to Britain and other Western nations. In Britain, public attitudes are ambivalent. In part this is a consequence of the promotion of the myth of the multiracial Commonwealth, the regional devolution of the United Kingdom, and the transition from a European Economic Union into a politically federalized European super-state. Britain's national interests have become secondary to those of the United Nations and an inchoate and unwilling international community. Influenced by an outmoded UN Convention on Refugees and the lack of a consistent immigration policy and failure of those immigration controls that do exist, gradual but major political, social, and cultural shifts have occurred without the express consent of the majority of the British electorate. Virtually all public debate by the government and by politicians on these issues has been taboo, effectively silenced by fear of being accused of xenophobia, discrimination, and racism. The result is cynicism and disenchantment with the political process as a whole. Betts's objective is to promote responsible and informed discussion of these issues. In the absence of this, he warns, we risk the twilight of a harmonious British society, diminished pride in British institutions and national identity, and competing and conflicting separatist ethnic, racial, and cultural claims. Twilight of Britain will be of interest to general readers, those interested in modern Britain and Europe, as well as sociologists, political scientists, and philosophers. G. Gordon Betts was educated in the Universities of Cambridge, Birmingham, Greenwich, and Kent at Canterbury. He is a chartered chemical engineer, having spent his professional career with a major British oil company in the petrochemical industry.
Download or read book The Twilight of the British Empire written by Chikara Hashimoto and published by Intelligence, Surveillance and Secret Warfare. This book was released on 2019-05-22 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncovers and examines Britain's counter-subversive policies and security measures implemented in the post-war Middle East, Middle Eastern affairs make headlines. Not only are they politically volatile, but the cultural and religious contexts complicate Western involvement in the region. This book reveals secret British intelligence liaisons with Middle Eastern regimes during the early Cold War. It shows how Britain tried to influence regional intelligence and security services and shape their approach to countering communist subversion. Analysing newly declassified documents alongside extensive archival research and historiography, the book pieces together the intelligence culture build by the British Empire in the Middle East in the post-war era.
Download or read book Twilight Over England written by William Joyce and published by . This book was released on 2015-11-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Joyce had much in common with the founder of the Third Reich. His nationality was other than that of the country he gave his life for. loathing England's class system Joyce's struggle was for the hearts and minds of the working class. Marxist street thugs who scarred him were the class system's defenders. England's greatest orator was anything but the pugilist that palace writers claim him to be. Joyce's academic achievements were never bettered.During the 1930s the former British Union of Fascists kingpin diligently studied the entrails of Jewish power and subversion. Joyce unearthed the roots of English aristocracy debauchery. The Irish-American's academia was complemented by observation of England's economic system purpose designed to institutionalise poverty. Upon surrendering himself, William Joyce was controversially murdered by England's vengeful elite. When the hangman's trapdoor opened the honour of England and its corrupt legal system plunged into the abyss.
Download or read book The Twilight of Britain written by G. Gordon Betts and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the erosion of Britain's sovereignty, national identity and culture, the subversion of her history and traditions, and the demoralization of her institutions. The process began, argues G. Gordon Betts, with the end of the colonial empires.
Download or read book Imperial Twilight written by Stephen R. Platt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.
Download or read book Twilight of the Celtic Gods written by David Clarke and published by Blandford Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twilight of the Celtic Gods is a fascinating account of Britain's surviving Celtic tradition. This ground-breaking book - based on the authors' combined research in the field - reveals for the first time clear evidence that many ancient traditions and customs are still kept alive today in the heart of twentieth-century Britain. Combining first-hand accounts with folklore, mythology and archeology, David Clarke and Andy Roberts have uncovered the last traces of a Celtic legacy which is in imminent danger of extinction. Their quest combines beliefs about the natural and supernatural worlds with the awesome forces locked in the landscape and in the mind. Illustrated throughout with colour and black and white photographs, line drawings and maps, this book is an important collection of the last remnants of our ancient past.
Download or read book The Morbid Age written by Richard Overy and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2009-05-07 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British intellectual life between the wars stood at the heart of modernity. The combination of a liberal, uncensored society and a large educated audience for new ideas made Britain a laboratory for novel ways to understand the world. The Morbid Age opens a window onto this creative but anxious era, the golden age of the public intellectual and scientist: Arnold Toynbee, Aldous and Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells, Marie Stopes and a host of others. Yet, as Richard Overy argues, a striking characteristic of so many of the ideas that emerged from this new age - from eugenics to Freud's unconscious, to modern ideas of pacifism and world government - was the fear that the West was facing a possibly terminal crisis of civilization. The modern era promised progress of a kind, but it was overshadowed by a growing fear of decay and death, an end to the civilized world and the arrival of a new Dark Age - even though the country had suffered no occupation, no civil war and none of the bitter ideological rivalries of inter-war Europe, and had an economy that survived better than most. The Morbid Age explores how this strange paradox came about. Ultimately, Overy shows, the coming of war was almost welcomed as a way to resolve the contradictions and anxieties of this period, a war in which it was believed civilization would be either saved or utterly destroyed.
Download or read book Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom written by Stephen R. Platt and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping account of China's nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in history. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and often gruesome battles--a sweeping yet intimate portrait of the conflict that shaped the fate of modern China. The story begins in the early 1850s, the waning years of the Qing dynasty, when word spread of a major revolution brewing in the provinces, led by a failed civil servant who claimed to be the son of God and brother of Jesus. The Taiping rebels drew their power from the poor and the disenfranchised, unleashing the ethnic rage of millions of Chinese against their Manchu rulers. This homegrown movement seemed all but unstoppable until Britain and the United States stepped in and threw their support behind the Manchus: after years of massive carnage, all opposition to Qing rule was effectively snuffed out for generations. Stephen R. Platt recounts these events in spellbinding detail, building his story on two fascinating characters with opposing visions for China's future: the conservative Confucian scholar Zeng Guofan, an accidental general who emerged as the most influential military strategist in China's modern history; and Hong Rengan, a brilliant Taiping leader whose grand vision of building a modern, industrial, and pro-Western Chinese state ended in tragic failure. This is an essential and enthralling history of the rise and fall of the movement that, a century and a half ago, might have launched China on an entirely different path into the modern world.
Download or read book Pagan Britain written by Ronald Hutton and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britain's pagan past, with its mysterious monuments, atmospheric sites, enigmatic artifacts, bloodthirsty legends, and cryptic inscriptions, is both enthralling and perplexing to a resident of the twenty-first century. In this ambitious and thoroughly up-to-date book, Ronald Hutton reveals the long development, rapid suppression, and enduring cultural significance of paganism, from the Paleolithic Era to the coming of Christianity. He draws on an array of recently discovered evidence and shows how new findings have radically transformed understandings of belief and ritual in Britain before the arrival of organized religion. Setting forth a chronological narrative, Hutton along the way makes side visits to explore specific locations of ancient pagan activity. He includes the well-known sacred sites—Stonehenge, Avebury, Seahenge, Maiden Castle, Anglesey—as well as more obscure locations across the mainland and coastal islands. In tireless pursuit of the elusive “why” of pagan behavior, Hutton astonishes with the breadth of his understanding of Britain’s deep past and inspires with the originality of his insights.
Download or read book Twilight of Avalon written by Anna Elliott and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-05-05 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book One in the Twilight of Avalon Trilogy She is a healer, a storyteller, a warrior, and a queen without a throne. In the shadow of King Arthur's Britain, one woman knows the truth that could save a kingdom from the hands of a tyrant... Ancient grudges, old wounds, and the quest for power rule in the newly widowed Queen Isolde's court. Hardly a generation after the downfall of Camelot, Isolde grieves for her slain husband, King Constantine, a man she secretly knows to have been murdered by the scheming Lord Marche -- the man who has just assumed his title as High King. Though her skills as a healer are renowned throughout the kingdom, in the wake of Con's death, accusations of witchcraft and sorcery threaten her freedom and her ability to bring Marche to justice. Burdened by their suspicion and her own grief, Isolde must conquer the court's distrust and superstition to protect her throne and the future of Britain. One of her few allies is Trystan, a prisoner with a lonely and troubled past. Neither Saxon nor Briton, he is unmoved by the political scheming, rumors, and accusations swirling around the fair queen. Together they escape, and as their companionship turns from friendship to love, they must find a way to prove what they know to be true -- that Marche's deceptions threaten not only their lives but the sovereignty of the British kingdom. In Twilight of Avalon, Anna Elliott returns to the roots of the legend of Trystan and Isolde to shape a very different story -- one based in the earliest written versions of the Arthurian tales -- a captivating epic brimming with historic authenticity, sweeping romance, and the powerful magic of legend.
Download or read book Badgerlands written by Patrick Barkham and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britain is the home of the badger - there are more badgers per square kilometre in this country than in any other. And yet many of us have never seen one alive and in the wild. They are nocturnal creatures who vanish into their labyrinthine underground setts at the first hint of a human. Here, Patrick Barkham follows in the footsteps of his badger-loving grandmother, to meet the feeders, farmers and scientists who know their way around Badgerlands: the mysterious world in which these distinctively striped creatures snuffle, dig and live out their complex social lives. As the debate over the badger cull continues, Barkham weighs the evidence on both sides of the argument, and delves into the rich history of the badger - from their prehistoric arrival in Britain and their savage persecution over the centuries, to Kenneth Grahame's fictional creation in Wind in the Willows and the badger who became a White House pet. From the celebrated author of The Butterfly Isles, this is rich, vivid nature writing at its best.
Download or read book The Break Up of Britain written by Tom Nairn and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic text, first published in 1977, Tom Nairn memorably depicts the 'slow foundering' of the United Kingdom on the rocks of imperial decline, constitutional anachronism and the gathering force of civic nationalism. Rich in comparisons between the nationalisms of the British Isles and those of the wider world, thoughtful in its treatment of the interaction between nationality and social class, The Break-Up of Britain concludes with a bravura essay on the Janus-faced nature of national identity. Postscripts from the Thatcher and Blair years trace the political strategies whose upshot accelerated the demise of a British state they were intended to serve. As a second Scottish independence referendum beckons, a new Introduction by Anthony Barnett underlines the book's enduring relevance.
Download or read book The Twilight of Unionism written by Geoffrey Bell and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2022-11-29 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fissures that have split the United Kingdom in the last decades have run through Northern Ireland. Since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the fragile peace has been threatened by Brexit, the rise and fall of the D U P and the failure of power-sharing arrangement between the main parties at the Stormont Assembly. As the very future of Northern Ireland is now in jeopardy, will Britain face up to its imperial legacy and address the deep inequalities that remain in the aftermath of the Troubles, and the uneven development of the 'New Ireland'? Geoffrey Bell offers an insightful history of Ulster Unionism from the 1960s to the present day. In recent years this has come to a crisis point. What is the future of the Union in the post-Brexit reality? How will the relationship between Northern Ireland and Westminster develop? Can the United Kingdom survive?
Download or read book Age of Tyrants written by Christopher A. Snyder and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the waning of Roman rule, Britain was called a "province fertile with tyrants". Christopher Snyder's history of Britain during the two centuries after Rome's withdrawal reveals a hybrid society of Celtic, Roman, and Christian elements and documents the transition from magisterial to monarchical power. An appendix explores the Arthur and Merlin myths. 30 illustrations.
Download or read book Twilight of the Elites written by Christophe Guilluy and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A passionate account of how the gulf between France’s metropolitan elites and its working classes are tearing the country apart Christophe Guilluy, a French geographer, makes the case that France has become an “American society”—one that is both increasingly multicultural and increasingly unequal. The divide between the global economy’s winners and losers in today’s France has replaced the old left-right split, leaving many on “the periphery.” As Guilluy shows, there is no unified French economy, and those cut off from the country’s new economic citadels suffer disproportionately on both economic and social fronts. In Guilluy’s analysis, the lip service paid to the idea of an “open society” in France is a smoke screen meant to hide the emergence of a closed society, walled off for the benefit of the upper classes. The ruling classes in France are reaching a dangerous stage, he argues; without the stability of a growing economy, the hope for those excluded from growth is extinguished, undermining the legitimacy of a multicultural nation.
Download or read book Kingdom of Twilight written by Steven Uhly and published by MacLehose Press. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 746 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "POWERFUL AND ORIGINAL." --THE TIMES "REWARDING AND WHOLLY ENGAGING." --HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY "ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT AND POWERFUL NOVELS OF RECENT GERMAN LITERATURE." --DEUTSCHLANDRADIO KULTUR Hypnotically lyrical and intensely moving, Steven Uhly's epic novel set in the wake of World War II is a finely nuanced yet shattering exploration of universal themes: love, hatred, doubt, survival, guilt, humanity, and redemption. One night in autumn 1944, a gunshot echoes through the alleyways of a small town in occupied Poland. An SS officer is shot dead by a young Polish Jew, Margarita Ejzenstain. In retaliation, his commander orders the execution of thirty-seven Poles--one for every year of the dead man's life. First hidden by a sympathetic German couple, Margarita must then flee the brutal advance of the Soviet army with her newborn baby. So begins a thrilling panorama of intermingled destinies and events that reverberate from that single act of defiance. Kingdom of Twilight follows the lives of Jewish refugees and a German family resettled from Bukovina, as well as a former SS officer, chronicling the geographical and psychological dislocation generated by war. A quest for identity and truth takes them from refugee camps to Lübeck, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York, as they try to make sense of a changed world, and of their place in it.
