Watching the English

Watching the English
Author: Kate Fox
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey
Total Pages: 455
Release: 2014-07-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1857889177

Updated, with new research and over 100 revisions Ten years later, they're still talking about the weather! Kate Fox, the social anthropologist who put the quirks and hidden conditions of the English under a microscope, is back with more biting insights about the nature of Englishness. This updated and revised edition of Watching the English - which over the last decade has become the unofficial guidebook to the English national character - features new and fresh insights on the unwritten rules and foibles of "squaddies," bikers, horse-riders, and more. Fox revisits a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and bizarre codes of behavior. She demystifies the peculiar cultural rules that baffle us: the rules of weather-speak. The ironic-gnome rule. The reflex apology rule. The paranoid pantomime rule. Class anxiety tests. The roots of English self-mockery and many more. An international bestseller, Watching the English is a biting, affectionate, insightful and often hilarious look at the English and their society.

The English Wife

The English Wife
Author: Adrienne Chinn
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2020-06-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0008314578

Two women, a world apart. A secret waiting to be discovered...

The Full English Opening

The Full English Opening
Author: Carsten Hansen
Publisher: New In Chess
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2018-07-20
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 9056917552

The English Opening (1.c4) is a popular choice at both club and master level, because it is a chess opening that suits all styles. As White you can play aggressively or opt for a more modest strategic approach, depending on what kind of middlegame positions you are looking for. The opening will serve you well in any mood, against any type of opponent, in any tournament situation. For a club player who wants to reap the benefits of this multipurpose opening, understanding is much more important than deep theoretical knowledge. ‘The Full English Opening’ is the first one-volume book that covers all variations. Carsten Hansen dedicates special attention to the transition into the early middlegame. You will learn how to define specific plans, lay out a strategic goal, and find positional and tactical targets. Supported by examples and exercises, you will be able to enjoy the greatest asset of the English Opening: its versatility.

The Rise of English

The Rise of English
Author: Rosemary C. Salomone
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2022
Genre: English language
ISBN: 0190625619

A sweeping account of the global rise of English and the high-stakes politics of languageSpoken by a quarter of the world's population, English is today's lingua franca- - its common tongue. The language of business, popular media, and international politics, English has become commodified for its economic value and increasingly detached from any particular nation. This meteoric "riseof English" has many obvious benefits to communication. Tourists can travel abroad with greater ease. Political leaders can directly engage their counterparts. Researchers can collaborate with foreign colleagues. Business interests can flourish in the global economy.But the rise of English has very real downsides as well. In Europe, imperatives of political integration and job mobility compete with pride in national language and heritage. In the United States and England, English isolates us from the cultural and economic benefits of speaking other languages.And in countries like India, South Africa, Morocco, and Rwanda, it has stratified society along lines of English proficiency.In The Rise of English, Rosemary Salomone offers a commanding view of the unprecedented spread of English and the far-reaching effects it has on global and local politics, economics, media, education, and business. From the inner workings of the European Union to linguistic battles over influence inAfrica, Salomone draws on a wealth of research to tell the complex story of English - and, ultimately, to argue for English not as a force for domination but as a core component of multilingualism and the transcendence of linguistic and cultural borders.

The English and Their History

The English and Their History
Author: Robert Tombs
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 1106
Release: 2016-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1101873361

Named a Book of the Year by the Daily Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement, The Times, Spectator, and The Economist The English first materialized as an idea, before they had a common ruler and before the country they lived in even had a name. From the armed Saxon bands that descended onto Roman-controlled Britain in the fifth century to the travails of the Eurozone plaguing the prime-ministership of today's multicultural England, acclaimed historian Robert Tombs presents a momentous and challenging history of a people who have a claim to be the oldest nation in existence. Drawing on a wealth of recent scholarship, Tombs sheds light on the strength and resilience of English governance, the deep patterns of division among the people who have populated the British Isles, the persistent capacity of the English to come together in the face of danger, and not the least the ways the English have understood their own history, have argued about it, forgotten it and yet been shaped by it. Momentous and definitive, The English and Their History is the first single-volume work on this scale for more than half a century.

Lady of the English

Lady of the English
Author: Elizabeth Chadwick
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2011-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1402250932

"Everyone who has raved about Elizabeth Chadwick as an author of historical novels is right."—Devourer of Books From New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Chadwick comes a gripping, never-before-told, medieval battle of the sexes that sheds light on one of medieval royalty's most fascinating women—Queen Matilda. 1135, England: Matilda, daughter of Henry I, knows that there are those who will not accept her as England's queen when her father dies. But the men who support her rival, and cousin, Stephen do not know the iron will that drives her. She will win her inheritance against all odds, and despite all men. Adeliza, Henry's widowed queen and Matilda's stepmother, is now married to a warrior who is fighting to keep Matilda off the throne. But Adeliza knows that Britain's crown belongs to a woman this time. Both women will stand and fight for what they know is right for England's royalty. But for Matilda, pride comes before a fall. And for Adeliza, even the deepest love is no proof against fate. Written with great historical accuracy, Lady of the English is a captivating novel of Medieval England. Fans of Philippa Gregory, Susanna Kearsley, Hilary Mantel, and Diana Gabaldon will be spellbound by this vividly detailed look into medieval history. Praise for Lady of the English: "Lady of the English is a riveting historical fiction novel with thrilling drama and characters that fairly leap off of the page."—Laura's Reviews "A detailed and very readable medieval era novel full of political intrigue and fascinating depictions of the people surrounding the throne of England."—Historical-Fiction.com "The story is vividly described with a depth of historical detail that is rarely matched by other novelists in the genre."—Historical Novel Review Blog

Pigeon English

Pigeon English
Author: Stephen Kelman
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2012-01-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1408826143

Newly arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister, eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku lives on the ninth floor of a block of flats on a London housing estate. The second best runner in the whole of Year 7, Harri races through his new life in his personalised trainers - the Adidas stripes drawn on with marker pen - blissfully unaware of the very real threat all around him. With equal fascination for the local gang - the Dell Farm Crew - and the pigeon who visits his balcony, Harri absorbs the many strange elements of his new life in England: watching, listening, and learning the tricks of inner-city survival. But when a boy is knifed to death on the high street and a police appeal for witnesses draws only silence, Harri decides to start a murder investigation of his own. In doing so, he unwittingly endangers the fragile web his mother has spun around her family to try and keep them safe. A story of innocence and experience, hope and harsh reality, Pigeon English is a spellbinding portrayal of a boy balancing on the edge of manhood and of the forces around him that try to shape the way he falls.

The English Heretic Collection

The English Heretic Collection
Author: Andy Sharp
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1913462102

From its inaugural Black Plaque in honour of Witchfinder General director Michael Reeves, this unique collection follows a veridical trajectory to the frontiers of belief. Reeves' film becomes a conspiratorial cauldron drawing in a host of tragic players in the end game of the Sixties. The Cornwall of Du Maurier's The Birds is ploughed to reveal the hidden psychic codes of our Blitz spirit. In a powerfully relevant occult rendering of a bruised Island, the myth of Churchill is dissected and re-animalised. New maps of hell are drawn by colliding the forensic vision of JG Ballard and Lovecraftian magic. Actors, witches and psychopaths maraud across a nightmare terrain of murderous henges and abandoned military bases; conflating creative research into a surreal documentary, history as hallucination. Geography becomes an alchemical alembic, a vale of soul-making distilled by the lysergic psychobiology of Stanislav Grof, the alcoholic lyricism of Malcolm Lowry, and the convulsive travelogues of the Marquis de Sade. If history is revealed as paranoid ritual, how do we escape its time traps to wild new imaginative geographies? The English Heretic collection is a darkly comical, urgently lyrical, mental escape hatch from the hells of our own making.

The English Major

The English Major
Author: Jim Harrison
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2009-10-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 155584829X

From the New York Times–bestselling author of Legends of the Fall: “Harrison spins the common chaff of a road trip into gold” (Tim McNulty, The Seattle Times). “It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn’t.” With these words, Jim Harrison begins a riotous, moving novel that sends a sixty-something man, divorced and robbed of his farm by a late-blooming real estate shark of an ex-wife, on a road trip across America. Cliff is armed with a childhood puzzle of the United States and a mission to rename all the states and state birds, the latter of which have been unjustly saddled with white men’s banal monikers up until now. His adventures take him through a whirlwind affair with a former student from his high-school-teacher days twenty-some years before, to a “snake farm” in Arizona owned by an old classmate, and to the high-octane existence of his son, a big-time movie producer who has just bought an apartment over the Presidio in San Francisco. Jim Harrison’s riotous and moving cross-country novel, The English Major, is the map of a man’s journey into, and out of, himself. It is vintage Harrison—reflective, big-picture American, and replete with wicked wit. “The English Major is to midlife crisis what The Catcher in the Rye is to adolescence.” —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times