A summer migrant to Europe from West Africa, the Little Tern is one of our most threatened and most captivating seabirds. This book is the story of one breeding season at the Beacon Ponds colony on the North Sea coast, near Spurn Point in East Yorkshire. In elegant and evocative prose it offers an intimate portrait of these endangered birds, covering everything from foraging and breeding to predators and conservation.The colony’s small size means that it can be monitored, protected...

Essential for students of theatre studies, Methuen Drama's Decades of Modern British Playwriting series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1950s to 2009 in six volumes. Each volume features a critical analysis and reevaluation of the work of four/five key playwrights from that decade authored by a team of experts, together with an extensive commentary on the period .Edited by Dan Rebellato, Modern British Playwriti...

This series contains what no other study guides can offer - extensive first-hand interviews with the playwrights and their closest collaborators on all of their major work, put together by top academics especially for the modern student market. As well as invaluable synopses, biographical essays and chronologies, these guides allow the student much closer to the playwright than ever before!In About Hare, Professor Richard Boon provides an in-depth study of one of t...

David Hare is one of the most important playwrights to have emerged in the UK in the last forty years. This volume examines his stage plays, television plays and cinematic films, and is the first book of its kind to offer such comprehensive and up-to-date critical treatment. Contributions from leading academics in the study of modern British theatre sit alongside those from practitioners who have worked closely with Hare throughout his career, including former Director of the National Thea...

The COVID-19 pandemic started more than a year ago, but until today, we did not have a definitive cure for this disease. The SARS-CoV-2 virus constantly mutated over time, infecting more people and causing tremendous stress on the existing scarcity of healthcare resources all around the world.Here, the experts from ground zero will share their first-hand experience of clinical trials looking for a cure for COVID-19, like the WHO's Solidarity Trial and the role of palliative care in...

J. B. Priestley is the first book to provide a detailed and up to date analysis of the enormous contribution made by this playwright, novelist, journalist and critic to twentieth century British theatre.Priestley was often criticised for being either too populist or too experimental and this study unpicks the contradictions of a playwright and theatre theorist popular with audiences but too often dismissed by critics; describing and analysing in detail not only his plays b...

Born in Thamesville, Ontario, a student at Queen’s University in Kingston in the 1930’s, and editor and later publisher of the Peterborough Examiner from the 1940s to the mid-1960s, playwright, essayist, critic, professor, and novelist Robertson Davies (1913-1995) was one of Canada’s pre-eminent literary voices for more than a half-century.Davies, with his generous beard and donnish manner, was the very epitome of the "man of letters," a term he abhorred. Best known for his Deptfor...

Some of the most innovative and spell-binding literature has been written for young people, but only recently has academic study embraced its range and complexity. This Companion offers a state-of-the-subject survey of English-language children's literature from the seventeenth century to the present. With discussions ranging from eighteenth-century moral tales to modern fantasies by J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, the Companion illuminates acknowledged classics and many more neglected w...

Named after a small neighborhood in London where its members settled as young adults, the Bloomsbury Group produced an impressive body of work that yielded British Post-Impressionist painting, literary modernism, the field of macroeconomics, and a new direction for public taste in art. This Companion offers a comprehensive guide to the intellectual and social contexts surrounding Bloomsbury and its coterie, which includes writer Virginia Woolf, economist Maynard Keynes, and art critic Roge...

The Irish novel has had a distinguished history. It spans such diverse authors as James Joyce, George Moore, Maria Edgeworth, Bram Stoker, Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Lady Morgan, John Banville, and others. Yet it has until now received less critical attention than Irish poetry and drama. This volume covers three hundred years of Irish achievement in fiction, with essays on key genres, themes, and authors. It provides critiques of individual works, accounts of important novelists, and h...

This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to the critical debates around the heritage film, from its controversial status in British cinema of the 1980s to its expansion into a versatile international genre in the 1990s and 2000s. This study explores the heritage film in light of questions of national identity in film and television, industry and funding, and history, gender and representation. Using a wide range of examples and including an in-depth analysis of three case studies ...

Virginia Woolf's writing has generated passion and controversy for the best part of a century. Her novels - challenging, moving, and always deeply intelligent - remain as popular with readers as they are with students and academics. The highly successful Cambridge Companion has been fully revised to take account of new departures in scholarship since it first appeared. The second edition includes new chapters on race, nation and empire, sexuality, aesthetics, visual culture and the public ...