Most Popular Books by David Roberts

The crisis of tradition early in the twentieth century?signaled by the collapse of perspective in painting and tonality in music and evident in the explosive ferment of the avant-garde movements?opened a new stage of modern art, which aesthetic theory is still struggling to comprehend. David Roberts situates the current aesthetic and cultural debates in a wider historical frame which extends from Hegel and the German Romantics to Luk¾cs and Adorno, Benjamin and Baudrillard. Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno is the first detailed analysis in English of Theodor Adorno?s seminal Philosophy of Modern Music, which can be seen as a turning point between modern and postmodern art and theory. Adorno''s diagnosis of the crisis of modernist values points back to Hegel''s thesis of the end of art and also forward to the postmodernist debate. Thus the paradoxes of Adorno?s negative aesthetics return to haunt the current discussion by representatives of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, Anglo-American Marxism, and French poststructuralism. Going beyond Adorno''s dialectic of musical enlighten-ment, Roberts proposes an alternative model of the enlightenment, of art applied to literature and exemplified in the outline of a theory of parody. In its critique of Adorno, Art and Enlightenment clears the way for a reconsideration of twentieth-century artistic theory and practice and also, in offering a model of postmodern art, seeks to disentangle critical issues in the discussion of the avant-garde, modernism, and postmodernism.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

An accessible and engaging introduction to Restoration drama, this book looks at the texts, performances, playhouses and people of seventeenth-century theatre.

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This is the eBook of the printed book and may not include any media, website access codes, or print supplements that may come packaged with the bound book. Understand the key events and themes of English history This two-volume narrative account of English history draws on the most up-to-date primary and secondary research, encouraging students to interpret the full range of England’s social, economic, cultural, and political past. A History of England, Volume 2 (1688 to the Present), focuses on the key events and themes of English history since 1688. Topics include Britain’s emergence as a great power in the 18th century, the American War for Independence, the Industrial Revolution, and the economic crisis of the 1970s.

A murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne August 1939, the last hot days of a perfect English summer as the certainty of war descends. Newlyweds Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne are determined to spend these last days of peace quietly in their new house in a sleepy Sussex village - a honeymoon of sorts. But fight against it as he might, for Edward it turns out to be a busman''s holiday. When poet Byron Gates is bizarrely murdered after the village fete - executed, in fact, his head chopped off on a wooden block - Edward is asked to investigate. Alas, murder is not yet done with Verity and Edward, for even in the hallowed studios of Broadcasting House, murder dares to rear its ugly head. Before Verity can take up her new foreign posting, there are more deaths and the intrepid couple embark on one of their most dangerous investigations to date. Praise for David Roberts: ''A gripping, richly satisfying whodunit with finely observed characters, sparkling with insouciance and stinging menace'' Peter James ''A really well-crafted and charming mystery story'' Daily Mail ''A perfect example of golden-age mystery traditions with the cobwebs swept away'' Guardian

The essentials on finding a job in Japan plus invaluable background information on its history, language, way of life, culture, manners etc.

This seminal work is the first fully to engage human security with power in the international system. It presents global governance not as impartial institutionalism, but as the calculated mismanagement of life, directing biopolitical neoliberal ideology through global networks, undermining the human security of millions. The book responds to recent critiques of the human security concept as incoherent by identifying and prioritizing transnational human populations facing life-ending contingencies en mass. Furthermore, it proposes a realignment of World Bank practices towards mobilizing indigenous provision of water and sanitation in areas with the highest rates of avoidable child mortality. Roberts demonstrates that mainstream IR''s nihilistic domination of security thinking is directly responsible for blocking the realization of greater human security for countless people worldwide, whilst its assumptions and attendant policies perpetuate the dystopia its proponents claim is inevitable. Yet this book presents a viable means of achieving a form of human security so far denied to the most vulnerable people in the world.

This book explores the demise of the grand narrative of European modernity. That once commanding narrative located the meaning of the past in the present and the meaning of the present in an ever-receding future. Today, instead, the present defines both the past and the future. The ‘contemporary’ has replaced ‘modern’ and ‘post-modern’ self-understandings. The times of the past and the future have been transformed into versions of ‘now’ while the present has acquired its own history. History of the Present describes the emergence of this ‘contemporary’ historical consciousness across a wide spectrum of cultural phenomena ranging from historiography to heritage and museum studies, and from the globalization of the novel to the rise of science fiction. The culture of the ‘contemporary’ appears particularly clearly in the merging of high and low culture along with art and fashion. This book will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural and social theory, museum and heritage studies, and literary history and criticism.

The aim of this book is to provide the scientific background to using the formation of chemical categories, or groups, of molecules to allow for read-across i.e. the prediction of toxicity from chemical structure. It covers the scientific basis for this approach to toxicity prediction including the methods to group compounds (structural analogues and / or similarity, mechanism of action) and the tools to achieve this. The approaches to perform read-across within a chemical category are also described. Chemical Toxicity Prediction provides concise practical guidance for those wishing to apply these methods (in risk / hazard assessment) and will be illustrated with case studies. This is the first book that addresses the concept of category formation and read-across for toxicity prediction specifically. This topic has really taken off in the past few years due to concerns over dealing with the REACH legislation and also due to the availability of the OECD (Q)SAR Toolbox. Much (lengthy and complex) guidance is available on category formation e.g. from the OECD and, to a lesser extent, the European Chemicals Agency but there is no one single source of information that covers all techniques in a concise user-friendly format.

A murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne. With Winston Churchill receiving unauthorised information on Britain''s rearmament program, the Foreign Office brings in Lord Edward Corinth to investigate the leaks. However, Edward rapidly abandons the investigation to concentrate on the murder of a Foreign Office official, who might have been one of Churchill''s sources. All too soon, he finds himself entangled in a web of deception threatening the very security of the United Kingdom. All too soon there is a second murder. Setting out for Spain to find the victim''s son, Edward joins his friend Verity Browne, whom he fears is in extreme peril. Verity is reporting on the Civil War and is headed for Guernica, where a source has informed her that an attack will take place. But Edward and Verity arrive in the small town just in time to witness a merciless aerial bombardment on the civilian population. And the danger isn''t over yet, as near-certain death awaits Edward in London, where nothing - not even the woman he loves - is what is seems. Praise for David Roberts: ''Roberts just keeps getting better with each book ... highly recommended for fans of Love in a Cold Climate and Gosford Park'' Publishers Weekly ''A really well-crafted and charming mystery story'' Daily Mail ''A perfect example of golden-age mystery traditions with the cobwebs swept away'' Guardian

A murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne When the Nazis seize Austria in March 1938, Verity Browne is one of the first to be deported from Vienna as a well-known anti-Fascist. Before she leaves, she is able to arrange for a young Jew, George Dreiser, to escape to England. But where he expects to find safety, he finds danger and sudden death instead. Lord Edward Corinth also finds death where he least expects it: in the grounds of Lord Mountbatten''s country house. There his nephew Frank stumbles on a corpse. Although the police are satisfied that the man died of natural causes, Edward''s niece persuades Edward that all is not as it seems... In this classic investigation, Verity and Edward find that death comes more often than not to the innocent, and that many lives are left to the mercy of strangers. Praise for David Roberts: ''A gripping, richly satisfying whodunit with finely observed characters, sparkling with insouciance and stinging menace'' Peter James ''A really well-crafted and charming mystery story'' Daily Mail ''A perfect example of golden-age mystery traditions with the cobwebs swept away'' Guardian

The Bold family seems fairly normal: they live in a nice house, the parents have good jobs, and they all love to have fun. One slight difference: they''re hyenas. That''s right—they''re covered in fur, have tails tucked into their clothes, and really, really like to laugh. For years, the Bolds have kept their true identities under wraps. But now the neighbors are getting suspicious, and the Bolds are getting homesick. During a trip to the local wildlife park, they meet an old hyena who is going to be put down, and the Bolds have to act fast to save him—without revealing their secret!

Roberts dissects 10 famous exploration hoaxes, ranging chronologically from Cabot''s disputed voyage down the east coast of North America in 1508 to Donald Crowhurst suicidal bid to win the Times singlehanded sailboat circumnavigation race in 1968.

The eighth murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne.

This book illustrates the limits to the 1990s UNTAC peacekeeping intervention in Cambodia and raises a critical challenge to the assumptions underpinning key tenets of the ''Liberal Project'' as a mechanism for resolving complex, severe struggles for elite political power in developing countries. The book highlights the limitations of externally imposed power-sharing. In the case of Cambodia, the imagined effect was a coalition that would share power democratically. However, this approach was appropriate only for resolving the superpower conflict that had created Cambodia''s war. Rather than bringing long-term peace to Cambodia, Roberts argues, it created the temporary illusion of a democratic system that in fact recreated the military conflict and housed it in a superficial coalition. The book challenges assumptions regarding the inevitability of the globalization of liberalism as a means of ordering non-western societies. It explains the failure of democratic transition in terms of the impropriety and weakness of the plan which preceded it, and in terms of the elite''s traditional reliance on absolutism and resistance to the concept of ''Opposition''.

Establishing science fiction as its own distinct and increasingly important narrative form, this book explores how the genre challenges pervasive perceptions of society as they appear in the conventional modern novel. Inspired by, and building upon, Georg Lukács''s criticism of the orthodox novel for its depiction of life as alienating and disjointed, Milner, Murphy and Roberts demonstrate that science fiction steps beyond this contemporary form to be a more constructive form of literature, one able to conceive of society as complete, integrated and well-rounded. Taking stock of three kinds of science fiction which lie outside the scope of the modern novel – theological/ ontological science fiction, the science fiction of future history and epic science fiction – this book demonstrates the genre''s unique capacity to encapsulate the whole world, persons and events, things and objects in a glance, and address the motive behind the longing for meaningful totality. With reference to a vast array of works by authors such as Michel Houellebecq, Elias Canetti, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Marge Piercy, Iain M. Banks, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Dirk C. Fleck, Philip K. Dick, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro, this book offers a compelling argument for rethinking the position and potential of the science fiction novel and to challenge the way we perceive our culture.

George Farquhar (1677–1707) is one of the most successful and enduringly popular Restoration playwrights. His two masterpieces, The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux'' Stratagem, are still regularly performed today. Yet aspects of Farquhar''s biography, and in particular his Irish roots and family life, have remained obscure. This is the first study to treat Farquhar''s works as documents of migration and the fragmented identity that resulted. Told in reverse chronological order, beginning with Farquhar''s last and best-known works, it reveals previously undiscovered material about his life and connections. Born in Londonderry, Farquhar arrived in London at the end of the 1690s but struggled throughout his life to find acceptance in the English literary culture. David Roberts explores how Farquhar used comedy to negotiate his Anglo-Irish Protestant identity while perpetually being treated as an outsider. George Farquhar: A Migrant Life Reversed challenges traditional critical thinking on historiographic approaches to scholarly biography and offers a complex but highly readable account of the interpenetrating pasts, presents and futures of the migrant writer.

A murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne Returning from Prague with suspected tuberculosis, Verity Browne checks into a private clinic on Henley-on-Thames - the perfect place for her new fiancé, Lord Edward Corinth, to keep an eye on her. While Verity recuperates at the clinic, Edward is called to investigate a series of murders. Edward''s dentist, Dr Eric Silver has been found murdered, shortly after sharing with Edward his suspicions about the deaths of three of his elderly patients. Dr Silver thinks the three deaths have an entomological connection: General Lowther had had a heart attack drinking a wine called Clos des Mouches; Hermione Totteridge, a well-known gardener, had been poisoned by the new insecticide with which she had been experimenting; and James Herold had been stung to death by his bees. Edward''s investigation comes to a thrilling climax during what many believe will be the last Henley Royal Regatta before a new European war, and both Edward and Verity are threatened by someone, or something, wicked. Praise for David Roberts: ''A classic murder mystery [...] and a most engaging pair of amateur sleuths'' Charles Osborne, author of The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie ''A really well-crafted and charming mystery story'' Daily Mail ''A perfect example of golden-age mystery traditions with the cobwebs swept away'' Guardian

First published in 1979. This book studies the social outlook which historians today call paternalism. It was an ideology which informed social attitudes at all levels of society and expressed itself in countless ways. In this work, David Roberts provides a comprehensive examination of the revival, amplification, and transformation of the ideals of paternalism as a social remedy in the Early Victorian Period. This title will be of interest to students of history.

Arranged alphabetically by band name for ease of reference, Rock Chronicles offers a fascinating, encyclopedic study of the ever-shifting line-ups, appearances, labels, and sounds of 250 of the best-known and most important rock acts of the past fifty years. Esteemed music author David Roberts offers an insightful review of every group, giving the lowdown on every member - whatever their role in the band, however short-lived their time with them, and however well-known. A photograph of every band member from every line-up supplements the engaging text, and founder and current members are picked out visually for immediate recognition. Innovative, color-coded infographics provide an overview of every aspect of each band''s story, so that readers can see at a glance which musicians featured in each formation, which instruments they played, which label the act was with when, the dates their albums were released, and who played on them. For the ten most commercially successful albums total sales figures are given. And for the 50 biggest acts, a stunning display of iconic photographs charts the artists'' dramatic changes of appearance, relating each iconic ''look'' to the album of the same period. Interspersed throughout the book are six graphic decade features. Each one presents a detailed family tree for that era''s greatest acts, revealing which year every band formed, and to which other bands they are related through line-up changes. Plus, at the end of the book, there''s a fact-filled, cross-referenced performer directory, listing all the bands each performer played in and when. Comprehensive, information-packed, and compelling to read, Rock Chronicles is the essential reference for everyone who loves rock.

Routledge Library Editions:Syria brings together as one set, or individual volumes, a series of previously out-of-print classics from a variety of academic imprints. With a variety of titles covering Syria''s politics, history and culture, this setprovides in one place a wealth of important reference sources from a wide range of authors expert in the field.

In an increasingly VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) business world, it is more important than ever for organizations to build resilience into their everyday practice. Business Resilience is a practical guide to making organizations more resilient and improving current practices by building on what the organization does well. It explains how managers should constantly monitor their business environment and adapt their priorities depending on the level of disruption - from gradual innovation and improvement in good times to swarming on a single problem during a crisis. Based on the authors'' new models for resilience and progress, this book includes frameworks and tools which can be tailored to any organization and used as stand-alone improvements or combined across teams and departments. These practices avoid unnecessary change but enable rapid and sustainable improvements in product development, service delivery and customer value. Learn how to survive and thrive in any environment with this actionable approach to making progress at pace and effectively embedding business resilience.

Biography of Stephen Stills, singer-songwriter, who played guitar, keyboards and drums on the six-million-selling Crosby, Stills & Nash debut album.

Beautiful lithographs and journal excerpts from an expedition to the Holy Land, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.