A revealing look at how the Orpheus myth helped Renaissance writers and thinkers understand the force of eloquenceIn ancient Greek mythology, the lyrical songs of Orpheus charmed the gods, and compelled animals, rocks, and trees to obey his commands. This mythic power inspired Renaissance philosophers and poets as they attempted to discover the hidden powers of verbal eloquence. They wanted to know: How do words produce action? In The Trials of Orpheus, Je...

A central feature of English Renaissance humanism was its reverence for classical Latin as the one true form of eloquent expression. Yet sixteenth-century writers increasingly came to believe that England needed an equally distinguished vernacular language to serve its burgeoning national community. Thus, one of the main cultural projects of Renaissance rhetoricians was that of producing a "common" vernacular eloquence, mindful of its classical origins yet self-consciously...

Shakespeare Studies is an annual peer-reviewed volume featuring the work of performance scholars, literary critics and cultural historians. The journal focuses primarily on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but embraces theoretical and historical studies of socio-political, intellectual and artistic contexts that extend well beyond the early modern English theatrical milieu. In addition to articles, Shakespeare Studies offers opportunities for extended intellectual exch...

Bedding the hot hotel clerk seems easy, but when they are interrupted by the gardener, Jenny is left alone to face a shameful punishment.Will Jenny get the action she’d wanted all day? Or will the old gardener simply spank her and send her home unsatisfied?

'Terrific . . . fabulously rich and insightful.' Dominic Sandbrook'Intense, involved, absorbing.' Frances WilsonCharles II was thirty when he crossed the Channel in fine May weather in 1660. His Restoration was greeted with maypoles and bonfires, like spring after long years of Cromwell's rule. But there was no going back, no way he could 'restore' the old. Certainty had vanished. The divinity of kingship fled with his father's beheading. 'H...

"A detailed and thoroughly engrossing examination of the Restoration's first decade" and King Charles II ( The Wall Street Journal ).The Restoration was a decade of experimentation: from the founding of the Royal Society for investigating the sciences to the startling role of credit and risk; from the shocking licentiousness of the court to failed attempts at religious tolerance. Negotiating all these, Charles II, the "sli...

For Mark, it has always been all about Jenny, then Jenny's estranged father comes into their lives.Mark has been raising his niece since she was a small child. Abandoning his own life in the big city, he settles in a small town and devotes himself to Jenny. When Mark's sister dies in an accident, Mark is given full custody of his precocious twelve-year-old niece. Just when he thinks the worst is over, he finds out that his sister left instructions to contact Jenny's father, a man s...

"All is well now that I've taken care of that son of a bitch. He wanted to touch my milky, little, innocent cow, but daddy knows how to take care of such jerks. My sole made it clear to him what happens when someone tries to touch something of mine. And especially my little, milky angel, all swollen and rounded, ready to give daddy tons of juicy milk."Irina is the next-door neighbor of Mr. Ian, a rich man who likes to spend his days watching and spying on his beautiful nei...

Twenty years ago, I was too smart and too poor to be cool. Now I’m laughing my way to the bank—the bank I’m CEO of. Nothing can touch me.Except maybe him.We met at summer camp. We made out under the stars. Then he stabbed me in the back.They say revenge is a dish best served cold. But I’m gonna go with hot.Alexander Evangelista is a millionaire with all the trappings: houses all over the world and hot guys lined up wheneve...

How would first contact—on earth, in space, on another planet—transform our understandings of technology, philosophy, and what it means to be human? What kind of cognitive dissonance would society experience, if we discovered a previously unrecognized sentience on Earth?What would life be like if it originated in a frigid ocean beneath an impenetrable shell of ice? Or on a world whose haze obscures any view of the universe beyond? Or on an unfathomable scale in the...

A biography of the enigmatic and beloved author of Alice in Wonderland .Foreword by Edward Wakeling, former chairman of the Lewis Carroll SocietyLewis Carroll was brilliant, secretive and self contradictory. He reveled in double meanings and puzzles, in his fiction and his life. Journalist Jenny Woolf's The Mystery of Lewis Carroll shines a new light on the creator of Alice in Wonderl...

We’re all stories in the end…In this exciting collection you’ll find all-new stories spinning off from some of your favourite Doctor Who moments across the history of the series. Learn what happened next, what went on before, and what occurred off-screen in an inventive selection of sequels, side-trips, foreshadowings and first-hand accounts – and look forward too, with a brand new adventure for the Thirteenth Doctor.Each story expands in ...