Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, the two greatest operatic composers of their time, had everything and nothing in common. Their achievements were comparable, but their personalities, their approaches to music and drama, and their complex legacies made them incompatible. Verdi thought of art as a comfort to mankind; it pleased Wagner to believe that the nervous intensity of his operas might drive listeners mad. Is it impossible as Peter Conrad asks in this book, the first to investigate t...

In this dazzling book, the story of the spectacular rise and subsequent waning of American influence across the world since 1945 is told by cultural critic and historian Peter Conrad. Politics, war and commerce form the inevitable backdrop to his tale, but Conrad also treats us to a kaleidoscopic presentation of America's unstoppable creativity: its output of great, good and enjoyably bad art, of jeans and jazz, fast food and fridges, space travel, comic books and motorbikes, technologies ...

'Dickensian is a language, not an adjective. Conrad speaks it fluently.' -- Spectator World'Marvellous... the best book on Dickens since G.K. Chesterton's. -- A. N. Wilson, The OldieA kaleidoscopic investigation of Dickens's imagination and the world he created.See Dickens as never before in this creative biography, which delves into his novels, journalistic essays and letters to reveal his strange...

People who saw the first moving pictures at the end of the nineteenth century were delighted by a new art that communicated without words yet they were also alarmed to be witnessing events in a strange, mute, spectral realm, where the laws of time and space were suspended and magical transformations could occur. Some early commentators hailed cinema as a blessing and praised it for resurrecting the dead; others likened it to a hypnotic trance or a hallucinogenic drug. The medium has always...

Title: Against the OddsIn the heart of Harlem, Devon Walker's journey begins with the legacy of his father, Marcus—a man who taught him the value of loyalty, hard work, and perseverance. From the backseat of Daniel Sutton's town car to the towering heights of the New York financial world, Devon carves his own path, defying expectations and breaking barriers.Bridges and Boundaries is a tale of ambition, family, and the resilience needed to navigate ...

Bloomsbury presents Dickens the Enchanter: Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller by Peter Conrad, read by David Rintoul and Peter ConradA kaleidoscopic investigation of Dickens’s imagination and the world he created.See Dickens as never before in this creative biography, which delves into his novels, journalistic essays and letters to reveal his strange, hilarious but obsessive personal character and the audacit...

Over the past half-century, the social terrain of health and illness has been transformed. What were once considered normal human events and common human problems—birth, aging, menopause, alcoholism, and obesity—are now viewed as medical conditions. For better or worse, medicine increasingly permeates aspects of daily life.Building on more than three decades of research, Peter Conrad explores the changing forces behind this trend with case studies of short stature, social anxiety, ...

This is a new and expanded edition of a classic case-study in the medicalization of ADHD, originally published in 1976. The book centres on an empirical study of the process of identifying hyperactive children, providing a perceptive and accessible introduction to the concepts and issues involved. In this revised edition, Peter Conrad sets the original study in context, demonstrating the continuing relevance of his research. He highlights the issues at stake, outlining recent changes in ou...

It dominates our lives. It is the twentieth-century medium. And yet we're all a little sheepish when it comes to television, disowning it by disavowal or by inventing subtle, innocuous disguises for it. Why is this? In this book, first published in 1982, Peter Conrad argues that our unease stems from the way that the medium works: it absorbs the messages it transmits, it invents a reality of its own and ends by luring the world into the confines of its box. Television's achievemen...

In his book Imagining America (originally published in 1980), Peter Conrad shows how the English literary imagination over the course of a century devised for itself a contradictory series of ideal or alarming Americas which it then sets out to actualize. For Mrs Trollope, Americans are unkempt brutes, throwbacks to savagery; for H. G. Wells, they are a future race of cerebral technocrats. Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke want to redeem them by corrupting them with the insidious gosp...

Despite our cultures proclaimed respect for scientific reason, we live in a society that is no less bedazzled-and bedevilled-by myth than those of our remote ancestors. Roland Barthes first examined the mythical resonances of consumer products in the 1950s. Far from being demystified, consumerism has since morphed into a universal religion, its compulsory ritual of shopping essential to our economic survival. Myth has also invaded the political realm, as terrorists brandish black flags and...

This classic text on the nature of deviance, originally published in 1980, is now reissued with a new Afterword by the authors. In this new edition of their award-winning book, Conrad and Schneider investigate the origins and contemporary consequences of the medicalization of deviance. They examine specific cases—madness, alcoholism, opiate addiction, homosexuality, delinquency, and child abuse—and draw out their theoretical and policy implications. In a new chapter, the authors address de...