Waterstones Welsh Book of the Month - November 2021The '70s wasn't all glam rock and flares, punk and pogo-ing…In Painting the Beauty Queens Orange, the women who lived the decade reveal what it meant to push boundaries, claim your identity, and carve out your place amidst the winter of discontent, the scorching summer of '76 and the rise of Thatcherism.One young woman says a forced goodbye to her newborn baby. Another grasps new opportunities...

The wave of unrest which took place in 1840s Wales, known as ‘Rebeccaism’ or ‘the Rebecca riots’, stands out as a success story within the generally gloomy annals of popular struggle and defeat. The story is remembered in vivid and compelling images: attacks on tollgates and other symbols of perceived injustice by farmers and workers, outlandishly dressed in bonnets and petticoats and led by the iconic anonymous figure of Rebecca herself. The events form a core part of historical study and...

Why have both pop and politics in Britain become the preserve of an unrepresentative elite? From chav-pop pantomimes to retro-chauvinist 'landfill indie', the bland, homogenous and compromised nature of the current "alternative" sector reflects the interests of a similarly complacent and privileged political establishment. In particular, political and media policing of female social and sexual autonomy, through the neglected but significant gendered dimensions of the discourse surrounding ...

The UK alternative rock band, Manic Street Preachers, were and remain one of the most interesting, significant, and best-loved bands of the past thirty years. Their third album The Holy Bible (1994) is generally acknowledged to be their most enduring and fascinating work, and one of the most compelling and challenging records of the nineties. Triptych reconsiders The Holy Bible from three separate, intersecting angles, combining the personal with the political, history with memory, and pop...

The United Kingdom; Great Britain; the British Isles; the Home Nations: such a wealth of different names implies uncertainty and contention - and an ability to invent and adjust. In a year that sees a Scottish referendum on independence, Linda Colley analyses some of the forces that have unified Britain in the past.She examines the mythology of Britishness, and how far - and why - it has faded. She discusses the Acts of Union with Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and their limitations,...

Noisy, confrontational, and controversial, industrial music first emerged in the mid-1970s around bands and performance groups that combined avant-garde electronic music with the provocative attitude and abrasive style of punk rock. In Assimilate, S. Alexander Reed provides the first ever critical history of this fascinating and enigmatic genre, charting its trajectory from Throbbing Gristle's founding of the record label Industrial Music in 1976, to its peak in popularity with the success...

First published as part of the best-selling The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew's Very Short Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Britain is a sharp but subtle account of remarkable economic and social change and an even more remarkable political stability. Britain in 1789 was overwhelmingly rural, agrarian, multilingual, and almost half Celtic. By 1914, when it faced its greatest test since the defeat of Napoleon, it was largely ...

"This is criticism at its best." —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles TimesWriting in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Maggie Nelson has emerged as one of our foremost cultural critics with this landmark work about representations of cruelty and violence in art. From Sylvia Plath’s poetry to Francis Bacon’s paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono’s performance art, Nelson’s nuanced exploration across the artistic landscape ultimatel...

Narrative has been central to human life for millennia, and the twentieth century has been preeminently the age of the story. Mass culture and mass leisure have enabled us to spend far more time absorbing stories, real and imaginary, than any of our ancestors. Whether or not this has been to our benefit is one of the questions raised by journalist and 1999 CBC Massey lecturer Robert Fulford. Narrative, Fulford points out, is how we explain, how we teach, how we entertain ourselves - often ...

Domesticity is generally treated as an aspect of women’s history. In this fascinating study of the nineteenth-century middle class, John Tosh shows how profoundly men’s lives were conditioned by the Victorian ideal and how they negotiated its many contradictions.Tosh begins by looking at the experience of boyhood, married life, sex, and fatherhood in the early decades of the nineteenth century—illustrated by case studies representing a variety of backgrounds—and then contrasts th...

Michael Haneke is one of the most important directors working in Europe today, with films such as Funny Games (1997), Code Unknown (2000), and Hidden (2005) interrogating modern ethical dilemmas with forensic clarity and merciless insight. Haneke's films frequently implicate both the protagonists and the audience in the making of their misfortunes, yet even in the barren nihilism of The Seventh Continent (1989) and Time of the Wolf (2003) a dark...

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...