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Author: Andrew J. Williams Publisher: Manchester University Press ISBN: 9780719047879 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
Francisco Gómez de Sandoval, Duke of Lerma (1553-1625) is the last major unknown statesman in modern European history. Patrick Williams brings him dramatically to life and challenges the assumptions that historians have made about him and about Spanish history at a time of profound crisis, inviting a re-evaluation of the phenomenon of government by favourites in this seminal period of European history.Lerma served Philip III as his favourite and first minister between 1598 and 1618. His power dazzled contemporaries; one petitioner telling Philip that he had come to see him 'because I could not get an appointment with the Duke of Lerma'. Within a decade of assuming office Lerma had raised his family from humiliating poverty to great riches and was the greatest patron of the arts in Europe. His use of power provoked intense debate about the nature of corruption in government. Yet Lerma remained deeply ambivalent about his position. Determined to follow family tradition and retire into religious life to secure the salvation of his soul, he secured a cardinalate in 1617, ending his life as a prince of the Church.
Author: Andrew J. Williams Publisher: Manchester University Press ISBN: 9780719047879 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
Francisco Gómez de Sandoval, Duke of Lerma (1553-1625) is the last major unknown statesman in modern European history. Patrick Williams brings him dramatically to life and challenges the assumptions that historians have made about him and about Spanish history at a time of profound crisis, inviting a re-evaluation of the phenomenon of government by favourites in this seminal period of European history.Lerma served Philip III as his favourite and first minister between 1598 and 1618. His power dazzled contemporaries; one petitioner telling Philip that he had come to see him 'because I could not get an appointment with the Duke of Lerma'. Within a decade of assuming office Lerma had raised his family from humiliating poverty to great riches and was the greatest patron of the arts in Europe. His use of power provoked intense debate about the nature of corruption in government. Yet Lerma remained deeply ambivalent about his position. Determined to follow family tradition and retire into religious life to secure the salvation of his soul, he secured a cardinalate in 1617, ending his life as a prince of the Church.
Author: Andrew Williams Publisher: Manchester University Press ISBN: 1847794890 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 364
Book Description
The main purpose of this book is to explain how (mainly) American, but also British and other Western, policy makers have planned and largely managed to create an international order in their own image, the so-called ‘New World Order’. It shows how this seismic shift in international relations has developed through the major global wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It uses a wide variety of historical archival material to give the background to the current and historical American obsession with creating the world order, one that both reflects the American national interest but also can be said to have established the major security, economic, organisational and normative pillars of our epoch. In addition it provides excellent background reading for the current debate about American foreign policy and the origins of ‘neo-conservatism’ in international relations. This edition updates a very successful first edition of the title, with additional material to take into account changes in the global order since 2001 and the beginning of the ‘War on Terror’.
Author: Michael McCaul Publisher: ISBN: 1101905417 Category : Cyberterrorism Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
"The sitting chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, who receives daily intelligence about threats materializing against America, depicts in real time the hazards that [he believes] are closer than we realize. From cyberwarriors who can cripple the Eastern seaboard to radicalized Americans in league with Islamic jihadists to invisible biological warfare, many of the most pressing dangers are the ones [he feels] we've heard about the least--and are doing the least about"--Amazon.com.
Author: J. K. Rowling Publisher: Little, Brown ISBN: 0316369144 Category : Self-Help Languages : en Pages : 81
Book Description
J.K. Rowling, one of the world's most inspiring writers, shares her wisdom and advice. In 2008, J.K. Rowling delivered a deeply affecting commencement speech at Harvard University. Now published for the first time in book form, VERY GOOD LIVES presents J.K. Rowling's words of wisdom for anyone at a turning point in life. How can we embrace failure? And how can we use our imagination to better both ourselves and others? Drawing from stories of her own post-graduate years, the world famous author addresses some of life's most important questions with acuity and emotional force.
Author: Lisa Rado Publisher: University of Virginia Press ISBN: 9780813919805 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, as changing cultural representations of gender roles and categories made differences between men and women increasingly difficult to define, theorists such as Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Sigmund Freud began to postulate a third, androgynous sex. For many modern artists, this challenge to familiar hierarchies of gender represented a crisis in artistic authority. Faced with the failure of the romantic muse and other two-sex tropes for the imagination, James Joyce, H. D., William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and other modernist writers of both sexes became attracted to a culturally specific notion of an androgynous imagination. In The Modern Androgyne Imagination, Lisa Rado explores the dynamic process through which these writers filled the imaginative space left by the departed muse. For Joyce, the androgynous imagination meant experimenting with the idea of a "new womanly man." H. D. personified her "overmind" as the androgynous Ray Bart. Faulkner supplanted the muse with the hermaphrodite. And Woolf became a kind of psychic transsexual. Although they selected these particular tropes for different reasons, literary men and women shared the desire to embody perceived strengths of both sexes and to transcend sexual and artistic limitation altogether. However, courting this androgynous imagination was a risky act. It often evoked the dynamics, even the specific vocabulary, of the sublime, which Rado characterizes as a perilous confrontation with and attempted identification between self and the transcendent other--that powerful, androgynous creative mind--through which they hoped to generate authority and find inspiration. This empowerment toward which Joyce, H. D., Faulkner, and Woolf gesture in texts such as Ulysses, HERmione, The Sound and the Fury, and Orlando is rarely achieved. Joyce and Faulkner were unable to silence their fears of feminization and the female body, while H. D. and Woolf remained troubled by the threat of ego incorporation and self-erasure that the androgynous model of the imagination portends. Still, their pursuit of new imaginative tropes yields important insights into the work of these writers and of literary modernism.
Author: Albert Read Publisher: Union Square & Co. ISBN: 1454958146 Category : Self-Help Languages : en Pages : 282
Book Description
In this insightful and life-affirming book, Albert Read puts the imagination back at the forefront of our lives as a “muscle” that is boundless in its potential, infinitely rewarding, and central to human achievement. This beautifully written book explores one subject, imagination, through the lens of history and memoir, with some prescriptive aspects to it as well. The author posits that imagination, while elusive, is not just for artists and creatives, it is a muscle—an essential faculty of the mind to be trained and developed over a lifetime. Spanning prehistoric times through to the twenty-first century, from the earliest cave paintings to Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions to Steve Jobs’s approach to office design, it touches on art, music, film, literature, science, and entrepreneurship, to examine how the imagination has evolved—in shape, power, and pace—through the millennia. Albert Read reveals how we can harness the imagination in our day-to-day lives and why, in the new age of technology, it is more pressing than ever that we do so. He explores where to find ideas, how to foster skills in observation and connection, and how to be more attentive to the fluxes of our own minds. After all, as Read expertly outlines, the imagination is our supreme gift, our biggest opportunity, our greatest source of fulfillment and our most vital asset for the future. The book is illustrated throughout with approximately 60 images.
Author: B. J. Leggett Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807166189 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 191
Book Description
“If one no longer believes in God (as truth),” Wallace Stevens once wrote, “it is not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else. . . . I say that one's final belief must be in a fiction.” Stevens addressed the concept of a "supreme fiction" throughout much of his career, but many critics feel that his poems never realized that concept beyond a theoretical possibility. B. J. Leggett argues that Stevens did indeed achieve the supreme fiction in his often overlooked late poems. To share in the poet's vision, though, Leggett finds that readers must understand the ingenious intertext that runs through this culminating body of work. After three volumes of difficult and abstract poetry, Stevens in the last five years of his life reverted to a style that is refreshingly personal and accessible. Leggett gives close examination to The Rock, which is the closing section of Stevens's Collected Poems, and to the uncollected poems published as Opus Posthumous, supplying readers with the motifs, conventions, texts, and fictions—or intertext—on which these works' significance depends. He ultimately shows that there is a kind of master narrative in Stevens's late poems, one that is not always explicitly present but that is based on the supreme fiction. It is here that Stevens gives form to his belief. Leggett traces the development of this fiction and demonstrates how knowledge of its presence dramatically changes the reading of key poems. His discussion of Schopenhauer's influence on Stevens, together with rich analyses of major poems, challenges to conventional interpretations, and speculation on the direction Stevens's poetry might have taken had he lived longer, all make for provocative reading. Late Stevens is a book for anyone who thought they knew this poet.
Author: Mary Kelly Black Publisher: Xlibris Corporation ISBN: 1462802001 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
These journal entries comprise two volumes of selections (Vol. I, 1973-1982, Vol. II, 1983-2003). Volume I includes an Introduction and some biographical memories. As Stephane Mallarme considered literature the antithesis of journalism, a journal is often the antithesis of a diary. It is of less interest to record moods and events, or barriers to self-realization, than to have ideas and insights about these. As a journal-keeper, I am generally disinterested in diurnal details, unless these form the compost of deeper exploration or revelation, seeking insight into my condition, not simply its description. A journal, therefore, is often more complex and difficult than a diary, far less personal in depictions of daily fortune, using everyday experiences as a stepstool (at the least) to peer beyond the walls of psychological enclosure. I did not choose the journal form to mask the personal, to belittle or avoid it, but to reflect my most intimate assessment of the personal as contributing to something greater: comprehension. It is not enough merely to record the frustrations, joys or barriers of living, without appraising these for what they represent and suggest, where we learn not merely reiterate. The ideal criteria of selection and discrimination apply not only to ones journal, but to life as well, adding a mythological drama and perspective that immersion alone does not permit. In some ways, journalizing is similar in impulse to the pastoral ethos or motif familiar in contemplative writing from Virgil to Thoreau: one withdraws from active society, toward natural or rural settings, in search of some form of respite, then returns to tell of their discoveries. Some critics have seen this as the organizing design of most North American fables--in fact, as the American mythology, seeking to heal the serious schism between our natural psyche and its more devastated environment; that is, a search for a middle ground (or via media) between the primitive and the technologically complex. This volume of journal selections resembles that motif, focusing on the withdrawal phase of a generally recuperative metaphysical cycle. Such solitude is intentional, a critical phase in the live/withdraw/live-again cycle of spiritual refreshment. A recuperative isolation can be experienced daily, if one is discriminating in how their time is spent, but is usually gained more intensely over long, purposefully reclusive periods. The motivations for my withdrawal were several, perhaps the strongest a propensity (as described of another Irish writer) for being nearly overcome by the variety of life. If not overcome, certainly fatigued by events in and of themselves. A reflective silence seemed essential to examine the roots of this propensity. An ideal of pure time, free of most distractions (human or otherwise), was also necessary for writing of the sort that interested me, the personally contemplative or mystical. Only through such reflection could I ever achieve a meaningful connection with the more active life that surrounded me. The predominant experience of solitude--especially in a society where the value of withdrawal is suspect or sporadic--is the figurative isolation one experiences throughout the entire cycle of withdrawal and re-emergence. It is generally difficult for lovers of action to comprehend this attraction to non-doing. One of the aims of solitude is to reunite philosophy and religion, or rather philosophy and awe, to not accept the social impoverishment of these universal needs for knowledge and worship. The asceticism of retreat was not solely the traditional and philosophical appeal of simplicity, but the freedom from income-producing and time-consuming work it permitted. For the solitary, however, an ideal of pure time must be united with an ideal of intimate association, if the mystical quest is to be emotionally as well a
Author: Robert I. Desourdis Publisher: Artech House ISBN: 1596933909 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 441
Book Description
Supported by over 90 illustrations, this unique book provides a detailed examination of the subject, focusing on the use of voice, data, and video systems for public safety and emergency response. This practical resource makes in-depth recommendations spanning technical, planning, and procedural approaches to provide efficient public safety response performance. You find covered the many approaches used to achieve interoperability, including a synopsis of the enabling technologies and systems intended to provide radio interoperability. Featuring specific examples nationwide, the book takes you from strategy to proper implementation, using enterprise architecture, systems engineering, and systems integration planning.
Author: Gene Reeves Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 0861719239 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 386
Book Description
Stories are ancient and wondrous tools with the mysterious power to transform lives. And the stories and parables of the Lotus Sutra-one of the world's great religious scriptures and most influential texts-are among the most fascinating and dramatic. In this fun, engaging, and plain-English book, Gene Reeves-the translator of Wisdom's critically acclaimed and bestselling edition of the Lotus Sutra-presents the most memorable and remarkable of the Lotus Sutra's many stories and parables, along with a distillation of his decades of reflection on them in an accessible, inspiring, and naturally illuminating way. The Stories of the Lotus Sutra is the perfect companion to Reeve's breathtaking translation of this scriptural masterpiece as well as a thoroughly enjoyable stand-alone volume for those who want to bring the inspiring teachings of the bodhisattva path into their daily lives.
Author: Andrew J. Williams
Author: Andrew J. Williams
Author: Andrew Williams
Author: Michael McCaul
Author: J. K. Rowling
Author: Lisa Rado
Author: Albert Read
Author: B. J. Leggett
Author: Mary Kelly Black
Author: Robert I. Desourdis
Author: Gene Reeves