Download or read book The Oxford Book of Royal Anecdotes written by Elizabeth Longford and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1989 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a sparkling collection of Crown jewels--from amusing tales that humanize their subjects to dramatic stories of martyrdoms, palace intrigues, and bloody battles. Elizabeth Longford, intimate of the royal family and biographer of Victoria and Elizabeth II, has assembled the best anecdotes ever written and reported abut the kings and queens of England, across the full range of Britain's history from the first century A.D. to the present day. Scholars and versifiers, lawgivers and saints crowd the pages alongside soldiers, scallywags, and imbeciles, and never have these distant figures been brought more vividly to life than in this splendid anthology. We read of Alfred's burnt cakes, Cnut and the wolves, Henry VIII and his six wives, George III resigning himself to American independence, Edward VII's gambling habits, and much more. There are samplings of royal wit (as when James I said of John Donne's poetry: Dr Donne's verses are like the peace of God; they pass all understanding."), of royal modesty (as in Elizabeth II's explanation of why she wore no crown at the musician Robert Mayer's 100th birthday party: "I thought it was Sir Robert's night, not mine."), and of royal certitude (as in Victoria's comment during a dark moment of the Boer War: "Please understand that there is no one depressed this house; we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist.") The Countess of Longford's helpful commentary clarifies the complexities of royal genealogy and adds a sharp and often humorous perspective to bygone events. Her sources range from the earliest medieval chroniclers to biographers and historians of today, from dispassionate descriptions to intimate and revealing accounts from the letters and journals of the monarchs themselves. The result is truly a historical feast fit for a king.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of Royal Anecdotes written by Elizabeth Longford and published by . This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 1489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes written by John Gross and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, master anthologist John Gross brings together a delectable smorgasbord of literary tales, offering striking new insight into some of the most important writers in history. Many of the anecdotes here are funny, others are touching, outrageous, sinister, inspiring, or downright weird. They show writers from Chaucer to Bob Dylan acting both unpredictably and deeply in character. The range is wide--this is a book which finds room for Milton and Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut and P. G. Wodehouse, Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin and Tom Wolfe. It is also a book in which you can find out which great historian's face was once mistaken for a baby's bottom, which film star experienced a haunting encounter with Virginia Woolf not long before her death, and what Agatha Christie really thought of her popular character Hercule Poirot. It is in short an unrivalled collection of literary gossip offering intimate glimpses into the lives of authors ranging from Shakespeare to Philip Roth--a book not just for lovers of literature, but for anyone with a taste for the curiosities of human nature.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of American Short Stories written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1992 with total page 788 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a survey of American short fiction in 59 tales that combine classic works with 'different, unexpected gems', which invite readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Authors include: Amy Tan, Alice Adams, David Leavitt and Tim O'Brien.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes written by James Runcieman Sutherland and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1987 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of nearly 500 stories covering 1300 years. Includes tall tales, portraits, and anecdotes about the men and women of English letters.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of Political Anecdotes written by Paul Johnson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1986 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book of political anecdotes.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes written by James Sutherland and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes written by Max Hastings and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1985 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This colleciton of anecdotes is principally concerned with American and British conflicts. Hastings has sought stories that illustrate the military condition through the ages, both on the battlefield and in the barracks.
Download or read book Middle English Literature written by Christopher Cannon and published by Polity. This book was released on 2008-04-07 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a boldly original account of Middle English literature from the Norman Conquest to the beginning of the sixteenth century. It argues that these centuries are, in fundamental ways, the momentous period in our literary history, for they are the long moment in which the category of literature itself emerged as English writing began to insist, for the first time, that it floated free of any social reality or function. This book also charts the complex mechanisms by which English writing acquired this power in a series of linked close readings of both canonical and more obscure texts. It encloses those readings in five compelling accounts of much broader cultural areas, describing, in particular, the productive relationship of Middle English writing to medieval technology, insurgency, statecraft and cultural place, concluding with an in depth account of the particular arguments, emphases and techniques English writers used to claim a wholly new jurisdiction for their work. Both this history and its readings are everywhere informed by the most exciting developments in recent Middle English scholarship as well as literary and cultural theory. It serves as an introduction to all these areas as well as a contribution, in its own right, to each of them.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories written by Douglas Dunn and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008-09-10 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From tales of the supernatural to pungent social realism, and from the humorous to the disturbing, whether rural or urban, this anthology shows the vitality of the Scottish short story.Douglas Dunn's eclectic selection displays the marvellous range of Scottish story-telling, beginning with three early traditional tales, and including a wealth of writers from the last three centuries: amongst them Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, Violet Jacob, Neil Gunn, Eric Linklater, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, and younger talents such as Ronald Frame, Janice Galloway, and A. L. Kennedy.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes written by Gyles Brandreth and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-08 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the ultimate anthology of theatrical anecdotes, edited by lifelong theatre-lover Gyles Brandreth in the Oxford tradition, and covering every kind of theatrical story and experience from the age of Shakespeare and Marlowe to the age of Stoppard and Mamet, from Richard Burbage to Richard Briers, from Nell Gwynn to Daniel Day-Lewis, from Sarah Bernhardt to Judi Dench. Players, playwrights, prompters, producers—they all feature. The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes provides a comprehensive, revealing, and hugely entertaining portrait of the world of theatre across four hundred years. Many of the anecdotes are humorous: all have something pertinent and illuminating to say about an aspect of theatrical life—whether it is the art of playwriting, the craft of covering up missed cues, the drama of the First Night, the nightmare of touring, or the secret ingredients of star quality. Edmund Kean, Henry Irving, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Ellen Terry, Edith Evans, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren—the great 'names' are all here, of course, but there are tales of the unexpected, too—and the unknown. This is a book—presented in five acts, with a suitably anecdotal and personal prologue from Gyles Brandreth—where, once in a while, the understudy takes centre-stage and Gyles Brandreth treats triumph and disaster just the same, including stories from the tattiest touring companies as well as from Broadway, the West End and theatres, large and small, in Australia, India, and across Europe.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of Death written by D. J. Enright and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inescapable reality of death has given rise to much of literature's most profound and moving work. D. J. Enright's wonderfully eclectic selection presents the words of poet and novelist, scientist and philosopher, mystic and sceptic. And alongside these 'professional' writers, he allows the voices of ordinary people to be heard; for this is a subject on which there are no real experts and wisdom lies in many unexpected places.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales written by Alison Lurie and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2003-02-01 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This marvelous collection of fairy tales, some moral, some satirical, some bizarre, reflects the popularity and scope of this enduring and versatile genre. Featuring tales written by figures as diverse as Charles Dickens and Ursula Le Guin, this anthology will appeal to the child that exists in every adult.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of English Short Stories written by A. S. Byatt and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2009-03 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Book of English Short Stories celebrates the excellences of the English short story. The thirty-seven stories featured here are selected from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by authors ranging from Dickens, Trollope, and Hardy to J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, and Ian McEwan. They pack together comedy and tragedy, farce and delicacy, elegance and the grotesque, with language as various as the subject-matter.
Download or read book Anecdotes and Antidotes written by Ibn Abi Usaybi'ah and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-06-25 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To my knowledge...no one...has ever written a comprehensive book dealing with physicians through the ages and recounting their history in a coherent fashion. So wrote Syrian physician Ibn Abi Usaybi'ah, circa 1243, as he embarked on the first world history of medicine ever attempted. Many physicians served at the royal courts of their time and were firmly part of the intellectual and cultural scene, where the ability to write stylishly and entertain one's peers in both prose and verse was the basis of social credibility. The work Ibn Abi Usaybi'ah created contains over 432 biographical accounts of physicians from those of ancient Greece, such as Galen, through Avicenna and Maimonides, to the author's own colleagues of the 13th century. As such, his work includes important accounts of medical activity in medieval hospitals. Through this book, a window opens not only on to the origins of the medical profession, but also into the truly multi-cultural, multi-religious world of the medieval Middle East. Anecdotes and Antidotes is an abridged version of this world history of medicine. It comprises 103 biographies of physicians and philosophers, organized geographically and chronologically, from the 4th century BC to the 13th century, and includes seminal Muslim, Christian and Jewish figures. It contains vital medical and historical information, as well as revealing the cultural values, interests and concerns of the literary and intellectual elite of the time.
Download or read book A Treasury of Royal Scandals written by Michael Farquhar and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-05-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Nero's nagging mother (whom he found especially annoying after taking her as his lover) to Catherine's stable of studs (not of the equine variety), here is a wickedly delightful look at the most scandalous royal doings you never learned about in history class. Gleeful, naughty, sometimes perverted-like so many of the crowned heads themselves-A Treasury of Royal Scandals presents the best (the worst?) of royal misbehavior through the ages. From ancient Rome to Edwardian England, from the lavish rooms of Versailles to the dankest corners of the Bastille, the great royals of Europe have excelled at savage parenting, deadly rivalry, pathological lust, and meeting death with the utmost indignity-or just very bad luck.
Download or read book Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations written by Ned Sherrin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This hilarious collection of humorous quotations, full of wisecracks and wit, snappy comments and inspired fantasy, has been specially compiled by the late broadcaster and raconteur Ned Sherrin, with a foreword by leading British satirist, Alistair Beaton. Now packed with even more quotes and covering more subjects than before, from Weddings to the Supernatural, Australia to Headlines. Find the best lines from your favourite jokesters and wordsmiths, add that extra something to a speech or presentation, or just enjoy a good laugh. 'A chair is a piece of furniture. I am not a chair because no one has ever sat on me.' Ann Widdecombe on the announcement that Parliamentary language will now be gender-neutral. 'No wonder Bob Geldof is such an expert on famine. He's been feeding off 'I don't like Mondays' for 30 years.' Russell Brand On deciding to run for governor of California: 'The most difficult decision I've ever made in my entire life, except for the one in 1978 when I decided to get a bikini wax.' Arnold Schwarzenegger 'Wanting to know an author because you like his work is like wanting to know a duck because you like p--acirc--;t--eacute--;.' Margaret Atwood 'I am so sorry. We have to stop there. I have just come to the end of my personality.' Quentin Crisp, closing down an interview
