** Longlisted for the 2024 Cundill History Prize**‘A dozen pages in I realized that I had been waiting for much of my life to read this extraordinary book’ Annie ProulxA way of life that once encompassed most of humanity is vanishing in one of the greatest transformations of our time: the eclipse of the rural world by the urban.In this new history of peasantry, Patrick Joyce tells the story of this lost world and its people...

What is the state? The State of Freedom offers an important new take on this classic question by exploring what exactly the state did and how it worked. Patrick Joyce asks us to re-examine the ordinary things of the British state from dusty government files and post offices to well-thumbed primers in ancient Greek and Latin and the classrooms and dormitories of public schools and Oxbridge colleges. This is also a history of the 'who' and the 'where' of the state, of the people who ran the ...

Enter a world of coded messages, secret gatherings, maps made by spies, walls that have ears, cellars dripping with menace, skyscrapers that trap you in the clouds, and elevator rides that could be your last.When Harrison, the 14-year-old son of American diplomats, lands in Moscow at the height of the Cold War, all he wants is to be left alone with his daydreams and his music.But his father has vanished. His mother is keeping secrets. And his friend Prudenc...

Ambitious young reporters Josie and Laurent arrive in Prague in 1968 at a time of upheaval, keen to cover a revolution unfolding behind the Iron Curtain.It's the story of a lifetime. A dream come true.A dream that's about to become a nightmare.At dawn on a mist-covered bridge, Josie receives a cryptic message concealed inside a song. Before she can make sense of it, Soviet tanks thunder into the city, changing every...

The liberal governance of the nineteenth-century state and city depended on the "rule of freedom." As a form of rule it relied on the production of certain kinds of citizens and patterns of social life, which in turn depended on transforming both the material form of the city (its layout, architecture, infrastructure) and the ways it was inhabited and imagined by its leaders, citizens and custodians.Focusing mainly on London and Manchester, but with reference also to Glasgow, Dubli...

A groundbreaking study of the connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in American literature and US slave culture.Scholars of US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. Vincent Woodard takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the literal starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of the slaveho...

'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins with one of the most arresting opening sentences in literature' Patrick McGuinness, from his Preface.A Portrait first appeared in instalments in the modernist magazine The Egoist in 1914, before it came out as a book in 1916, the year of the Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland. An autobiographical 'coming of age' story, A Portrait is Joyce's first novel. Many elements of J...

An e book that will soften the hearts of even the most stubborn non-believers and atheists, written by a former devout atheist. If this book opens the eyes of only one person, it will have been worth the effort.

A historian's personal journey into the complex questions of immigration, home and nationFrom Ireland to London in the 1950s, Derry in the Troubles to contemporary, de-industrialised Manchester, Joyce finds the ties of place, family and the past are difficult to break. Why do certain places continue to haunt us? What does it mean to be British after the suffering of Empire and of war? How do we make our home in a hypermobile world without remembering our pasts?Patrick Joyce...

For centuries, spiritual seekers have profited from reading accounts of people’s spiritual journeys. Well-known examples include Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, Teresa of Avila’s The Story of Her Life, Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain, and M.K. Gandhi’s The Story of my Life. Reading such spiritual autobiographies can provide us with light for our own journeys and can help us correct course when we veer off the path. Some readers of this autobiography by Kevin Patrick Joyce, Surprise...

In just the past decade, the emergence of digital health has finally become palpable. Enhanced by the pandemic, social justice events, and planetary health urgency, Realizing Digital Health – Bold Challenges and Opportunities for Nursing explores that evolution with a focus on capturing the current state of digital health. Anchored in an introduction to digital health, new technologies, opportunities, and challenges are described. Consideration of the opportunities and cha...

Rethinking Gender in Development Practice is about the ways in which issues of gender—including violence against women and girls, entrenched gender roles and expectations, the exclusion of non-binary genders, and the participation of disempowered genders—affect and are affected by development practice.This volume, which pulls together papers from Development in Practice, provides accounts from researchers and practitioners working with women in countries from Afri...