This book describes how young Black men on a disadvantaged housing estate in London navigate the estate’s expectations for their behaviour as they operate within a street code that endorses violence, knife-carrying and challenging masculinity. This street code informs the men’s masculine identities by promoting values of misogyny, violence and the possession of expensive material objects while subduing any performance or features deemed as weak or feminine. Chapters detail the daily pressu...

This book combines over 20 years of front-line crisis prevention and intervention experience and lessons learned, into 80+ easy to understand and easy to implement verbal de-escalation techniques. These techniques are designed to help you calm challenging or aggressive individuals, safely and professionally. Perfect for teachers, mental health workers, at-risk youth workers, corrections, security, law enforcement officers, human resources and parents, this book should not be missed.

Dame Beryl Bainbridge was one of the most popular and recognisable English novelists of her generation. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, and her critically acclaimed novels The Dressmaker (1973), The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), An Awfully Big Adventure (1990), Every Man For Himself (1996) and Master Georgie (1998), confirmed her status as one of the major literary figures of the past fifty years.A unique voice in fi...

The Bells of Bruges is a study of obsessive love which is steeped in the melancholy beauty of Bruges. There are three loves in the life of Joris Borluut, the town carillonneur of Bruges. He marries the fiery Barbara, whose dark beauty is a reminder of Belgium's Spanish heritage. Repelled by her harshness and violence, he starts an affair with her sister, the gentle, soulful, fair-haired Godelieve. When her sister discovers their affair, Godelieve enters a Beguine convent and Joris devotes ...

Like Froude's biography of Carlyle, Holroyd's Shaw, and Ellmann's Joyce, Robert Baldick's Life of J.-K. Huysmans has become not just a standard reference work, to be consulted as regularly as the writing of the author whose life it chronicles, but a work of literature in its own right. First published fifty years ago, Baldick's classic biography presents a compelling narrative of Huysmans' life and work in all its various phases - from the Naturalism of the 1870s to the Decadence of the 18...

Certain Artists makes for compelling reading. Huysmans' idiosyncratic assessments throw light on his aesthetic preoccupations, past and present, and hint at the spiritual journey he was about to undertake. It includes over 140 black and white illustrations, as well as an introduction, setting the book in the context of its time, comprehensive notes, and a glossary of the artists mentioned.First published in 1889, but never before translated into English, this second collection of J...

First published in 1876, Marthe was an important landmark in J.K. Huysmans's literary career: it was the 28-year old writer's first excursion into the novel form and propelled him into the growing ranks of the Naturalist movement, then beginning to take shape under Zola�s direction. Marthe was one of the first French novels to tackle head-on the subject of prostitution, a theme that was to become a central preoccupation in the work of many novelists, painters and poets. Set in and around...

Certain Artists makes for compelling reading. Huysmans’ idiosyncratic assessments throw light on his aesthetic preoccupations, past and present, and hint at the spiritual journey he was about to undertake. It includes over 140 black and white illustrations, as well as an introduction, setting the book in the context of its time, comprehensive notes, and a glossary of the artists mentioned. First published in 1889, but never before translated into English, this second collection of J.-K. Hu...

J.-K. Huysmans� Stranded (En Rade 1887), published just three years after the iconoclastic Against Nature, sees him again breaking new ground and pushing back the boundaries of the novel form. Stamped throughout with his characteristic black humour, Stranded is one of Huysmans� most innovative, most imaginative works. Jacques� waking reveries and daydreams are balanced by a succession of dreams and nightmares that explore the seemingly irrational, often grotesque, world of unconsciou...

Against Nature is Huysmans's great fin-de-siècle novel anticipating many of the strains of modernism in its appreciation of Baudelaire, Moreau, Redon, Mallarmé and Poe. 'It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I had to say.' As J -K Huysmans announced in 1884, Against Nature was fated to be a novel like no other. The hero, des Esseintes, is a neurasthenic aristocrat who has turned hi...

One of Huysmans' objects in writing L'Oblat was to present a vivid but accurate account of the life of a French religious community at the beginning of the century. He wished, in fact, to emulate the Flemish sculptors who, in the figurines in Dijon Museum which are described in the book, had represented "the monastic humanity of their time, merry or melancholy, phlegmatic or fervent".' Robert Baldick in The Life of J.-K. Huysmans 'The Oblate of 1903 is the last of his Durtal novels, and pe...

The misfortunes of Jean Folantin, a downtrodden clerk working for the Ministry of the Interior in Paris, form the subject of J.-K. Huysmans’ blackly comic novella, Drifting (À vau-l’eau). At first glance, Folantin’s problems seem to be a world away from those of Jean Floressas des Esseintes, the aristocratic anti-hero of Huysmans’ Decadent classic Against Nature, written just two years later in 1884. But the two men share more than just a first name: like des Esseintes, Folantin is in the ...