This concise history seeks to explain what happened, how it transpired, and what it all meant. Causation is nearly as nettlesome a problem as contingency. In his masterpiece War and Peace, a draft of which he completed in 1863, Leo Tolstoy observed, “It is beyond the power of the human intellect to encompass all the causes of any phenomenon. But the impulse to search into causes is inherent in man’s very nature.”
This book is about the things which could unite, rather than divide, poets during the English Civil Wars: friendship, patronage relations, literary admiration, and anti-clericalism. The central figure is Andrew Marvell, renowned for his "ambivalent" allegiance in the late 1640s. Little is known about Marvell's associations in this period, when many of his best-known lyrics were composed. The London literary circle which formed in 1647 under the patronage of the wealthy royalist Thomas Stanley included "Cavalier" friends of Marvell such as Richard Lovelace but also John Hall, a Parliamentarian propagandist inspired by reading Milton.
Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11526.37 | Fiction literature | 17 August 2011
2
Scarlet Feather
They met in cooking school and became fast friends with a common dream. Now Cathy Scarlet and Tom Feather hope to take Dublin by storm with their newly formed catering company, aptly dubbed "Scarlet Feather." Not everyone, however, shares their optimism. Cathy's mother-in-law disapproves of both Cathy and her new "hobby," while Cathy's husband, Neil, pays no mind to anything- except his work as a civil rights lawyer. And then there's Tom's family, who expect him to follow in his father's footsteps, and an ambitious girlfriend who's struggling with career dreams of her own.
Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11526.37 | Fiction literature | 13 August 2011
3
Civil to Strangers
When Barbara Pym died in 1980 she left a considerable amount of unpublished material. This volume contains an early novel, CIVIL TO STRANGERS, three novellas and an autobiographical essay, 'Finding a Voice', Pym's only written commentary on her writing career. In CIVIL TO STRANGERS the lives of a young couple, Cassandra Marsh-Gibbon and her self-absorbed writer husband Adam, are thrown into upheaval when a mysterious Hungarian arrives in their village.
An ambitious, original work, The Politics of Sociability is Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann's exploration of the social and political significance of Freemasonry in German history. Drawing on de Tocqueville's theory that without civic virtue there is no civil society, and that civic virtue unfolds only through the social interaction between citizens, Hoffmann examines the critical link between Freemasonry and the evolution of German civil society in the late nineteenth century. The practice of Masonic sociability reflected an enlightened belief in the political significance of moral virtue for civil society
