Bøger af John Brewer

A vibrant, diverse history of Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples in the age of Romanticism

500 Races, Routes and Adventures contains all the information and practical advice needed to enjoy the best and most unusual running experiences around the world--all gathered in one place, a veritable bucket list for runners. Taking an exciting journey around the world, the book details the best routes, locations, and races worth running on all seven continents (including Antarctica!). Each run is described in vivid detail and presented alongside impressive full-color photography with route/race stats. Entries are written by runningexperts from around the world and categorized into type: road, trail, mountain, desert, winter, nighttime, multi-terrain, urban as well as team and relay runs in addition to novelty runs and festivals. Each entry is plotted onto continent maps as well as easy to use month-by-month race finders. Races are indexed both by type and location, for easy navigation. Whether planning a 5k charity fun run in the local park, a first marathon, a solitary off-road mountain adventure, or an extreme round-the-world ultramarathonchallenge, this information-packed, heavily illustrated book is a one-stop source of inspiration for runners at every level.

One April evening in 1779, Martha Ray, the pretty mistress of a famous aristocrat, was shot dead at point-blank range by a young clergyman who then attempted to take his own life. Instead he was arrested, tried and hanged. In this fascinating new book, John Brewer, a leading historian of eighteenth-century England, asks what this peculiar little story was all about. Then as now, crimes of passion were not uncommon, and the story had the hallmarks of a great scandal--yet fiction and fact mingled confusingly in all the accounts, and the case was hardly deemed appropriate material for real history. Was the crime about James Hackman's unrequited love for the virtuous mother of the Earl of Sandwich's illicit children? Or was Ray, too, deranged by passion, as a popular novel suggested? In Victorian times the romance became a morality tale about decadent Georgian aristocrats and the depravity of wanton women who consorted with them; by the 1920s Ray was considered a chaste mistress destroyed by male dominance and privilege. Brewer, in tracing Ray's fate through these protean changes in journalism, memoir, and melodrama, offers an unforgettable account of the relationships among the three protagonists and their different places in English society--and assesses the shifting balance between storytelling and fact, past and present that inheres in all history.

'The book is a distinguished work - of importance to students of governmental development generally. It is written in a fluent, non-technical manner that should reach a wide audience.' American Historical Review