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A HISTORY OF LONDON

Name: A HISTORY OF LONDON
Author: Stephen Inwood
ISBN: 0-7867-0613-9

by Stephen Inwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1999

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An accurate and capably told history of London, thoroughly researched and presented in exhaustive detail. Inwood, a principal lecturer in history at England’s Thames Valley University, begins his economic and social history with London’s founding as an outpost of the Roman Empire and continues to the present. He is chiefly concerned with where and how Londoners worked and led their daily lives. Ideally situated geographically, London has always been most important as a center of trade and commerce. It has also served as a social, cultural, religious, and intellectual center, providing its citizens with stimulation that could be found nowhere else in the British realm. The author’s main focus is on the various trades, professions, and social groups, their interactions with one another, the Crown, and the local government as embodied in the city’s aldermen and lord mayor. London’s frequent transformations in building and design have been due chiefly to the devastating fires that have wreaked temporary havoc on its landscape. Key to the city’s eminence, as well as to its steady population growth through WWII, has been the large numbers of foreigners who made it cosmopolitan even in the Middle Ages. Although London’s significance to Britain’s history cannot be overstated, Inwood tends to understate it by losing sight of the context in which London’s history has occurred. This shortcoming makes the book a hard read. Better maps would have made the overwhelming detail more intelligible, and a summing up at the end of chapters or sections would have helped give relevance to the multitudinous facts. In all, though, Inwood makes use of the most recent material available, including new archaeological finds, and gives us a reliable sourcebook to which we can turn with confidence when needed. (32 pages b&w illustrations, 10 maps) (Book-of-the- Month/History Book Club selection)

Pub Date: May 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-7867-0613-9

Page Count: 1136

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999

Categories:

HISTORY | WORLD | GENERAL NONFICTION

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

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A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.

In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.