After the Battle of the Lys in April 1918, Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig said of the 147th (Territorial) Brigade:'I desire to express my appreciation of the very valuable and gallant services performed by troops of the 49th (West Riding) Division since the entry of the 147th Brigade into the Battle of Armentires. The courage and determination showed by this division has played no small part in checking the enemys advance and I wish to convey to General Cameron and all the officers and men...

In this illuminating book, Stephen Barber redefines the Fourth Industrial Revolution for our politics, our societies and those who seek to lead. The book argues that this is a rare opportunity to reappraise how we organise our economy, how we make decisions and how our leaders behave. Told through a series of extraordinary adventures stretching from the past and reaching into our future, the book demonstrates that the most important determinant of what comes next is not so much digital cha...

Offering a critical analysis of the UK political system, Tragedy of Riches argues that politicians over the past twenty years have changed our economic destiny for the worse. The corresponding demise of ideology means that there can be no great improvement in the British economy without fundamental political change.Stephen Barber introduces the concept of the ‘mixed economic settlement’; the argument that the policy mix in which Europe and the United States operates is for...

Caligula: most notorious of the Roman Emperors, who seduced his own sister, installed a horse in the Roman Senate, turned his palace into a brothel, married a prostitute, tortured and killed hundreds of innocent citizens on a whim, and committed countless other acts of madness, cruelty and deviancy. Award-winning writers Stephen Barber and Jeremy Reed document in full the atrocities of Caligula and also the other mad Emperors, particularly the deranged Commodus and Heliogabalus, the teenag...

SADISTS?OF?THE?RISING?SUN focuses on the unique cruelty and capacity for slaughter displayed by Japan, from the beginning of the 1930s, with the origins of its atrocity-focused incursions into East Asia, until the devastation of its cities and incineration of its population by firestorms in 1945. During that period, Japan determinedly undertook the twentieth-century’s supreme mission of Imperially-sanctioned butchery, combining the bacteriological obliteration of entire cities with the c...

The Vienna Aktion Group formed the most provocative, insurgent and challenging of all the worldwide art movements of the 1960s. Their sexually-charged and anti-social actions exacted a profound and irreparable upheaval in the way in which art was conceived. Using their own bodies as raw material, the Aktion Group undertook experiments in cruelty that disassembled the human body and its acts into compacted gestures of blood, meat and excreta. The films of the Vienna Aktion Group - made both...

EXTERMINATORS?OF?THE?YEAR?ZERO focuses on the dictator Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime of revolutionary human erasure in Cambodia †an implosive, volatile genocide exacted within Pol Pot's own country, and pursued with relentless, obsessional determination. At the end of his four years of dictatorial power, Pol Pot left behind a unique legacy †Cambodia, on its liberation from his reign of terror, comprised zones of immense killing fields and wastelands, with towering pyramids of huma...

Shortly before the destruction of Tokyo by a devastating tsunami, the gorgeous media-manipulator Angeliko Slavsko flies into the city to perpetrate an outrageous series of sexual acts and provocations, the evidence of which is to be projected from every giant image-screen on Tokyo's illuminated avenues. Aided by a gang of ecstasy-crazed Tokyo girls, Angeliko cuts a sexual swathe through the city's subterranea, encountering and fucking a vast array of the city's freaks, apocalypse-cultists,...

Are you fascinated by the Aeneid, puzzled by the poetry of Catullus, or intrigued by Ovid's mythic transformations? Whether you're a student, a teacher, or a lifelong learner, Aeneas in the Underworld and Other Essays offers a deeply informed yet highly readable guide through some of Latin literature's greatest masterpieces.In this engaging and scholarly collection, Stephen Barber, a longtime student of English and Latin literature, addresses the questions that many readers have an...

'The word glory, to English ears, usually means no more than a kind of mazy bright blur. But the maze should be, though it generally is not, exact, and the brightness should be that of a geometrical pattern.' —Charles WilliamsCharles Williams was one of the most versatile writers of his time, being a poet, novelist, dramatist, theologian and biographer. As a member of the Inklings group in Oxford during the Second World War he was friends with C. S. Lewis and Tolkien. Enthusiasts f...

Storm is increasingly the default setting for our lives. It is as if the next environmental, medical, social or political calamity is mere moments away. Of course, Storm is the dramatic expression of nature's wild side, yet it is also the defining characteristic of our age. We are constantly reminded that the precious ecosystems of our fragile planet are under threat as never before. At the same time our social and political systems are fracturing - in the famously prophe...

Pier Paolo Pasolini's final year of life before his brutal murder is an extreme, intensive and accumulating period. While propelling himself into a position of polemical violence and political danger with his Pirate's Writings for prominent newspapers, he also gave numerous interviews that prefigured and even imagined his oncoming death, wrote essays and fragments, and conceived and shot his most brilliant and inspirational film, "Salò", while preparing its equally provocative follow-up, ...