Bøger af Richard Griffiths

If there ever were a survey of top ten places to people watch, airports would undoubtedly be at the very top of the list. At any given time at any airport, you can find people from virtually every walk of life, traveling for any number of reasons. Where are they going? Is this the long-awaited family vacation? Are they headed home after a tiring but successful business trip? Are they off to visit sick relatives? Who are they with? Are they married? To each other? Regardless of their age, gender, marital status, social status, occupation, ethnicity, religious affiliation or sexual orientation, people are a never-ending source of entertainment to the onlooker, even if they do not realize it. Each traveler has his or her own fascinating story to tell, and without the benefit of hearing each one, the curious public is left with their own vivid imaginations to determine how each story goes. Find yourself and your own experiences in this interesting book about people watching in airports.

Tom Griffiths was born in Wednesbury, West Midlands, in 1938. A chorister at St Bartholomew's, he attended the local grammar school. After qualifying as an accountant and company secretary, Tom pursued a career in industry. He married Pat Douglass at St Bart's in 1960 and they had three sons, David, Richard and Jonathon. They still reside in the West Midlands. Tom Griffiths was emotionally shattered by the death of his sixteen year-old son, Richard, who died after a car accident. The shock and sense of loss he felt caused such emotional turmoil that it culminated in a black-out or sleep-walking 'accident' in a neighbour's house shortly before Richard's funeral. Consequently, Tom was in hospital when Richard was laid to rest. This book contains writings by Richard, recorded in his diary and school magazine, as well as by Tom. Readers will see that Richard was a thinker with a pronounced political and social awareness, a true child of his times, but one who was also very much in tune with the interests of his own generation. Richard loved rock music and he wrote lyrics for songs with meaning. He believed in world peace and was passionately concerned about cruelty to animals, land mines and similar issues. Tom Griffiths, understandably, had great difficulty coming to terms with the loss of his beloved son and, therefore, he set out on a quest to find greater truth in life through his belief in God and the scriptures. The work involved in writing the book, recording his emotional trauma, asking questions of his faith and reconciling his thoughts on the human condition through correspondence with theologians and others, represented a cathartic exercise which helped him to deal with his enduring grief. Those people who have also suffered bereavement will find the contents of his book helpful in dealing with life after the loss of a loved one. Readers who ask questions of life, regardless beliefs, religious, agnostic or atheistic, will find much of interest in this work because of its inherent truths and will almost certainly be touched by the essentially human story that underlies the philosophy.

This book aims to examine the techniques used by the polemicists of the Dreyfus Affair, as found in the newspapers, journals and books of the period. The nature of polemic and of the French press of the period are investigated to show how authors' choice of stylistic techniques show their aims.

Starting with an examination of various forms of prayer, this book looks at the poetic imagination as a way into private prayer. Based on the raw experience in almost all its aspects, each of the chapters in this book covering the Lentern season focuses on one poem or part of one poem.

Thus the study of a period preceeding discer nible growth in a sector of the economy may tell historians as much about the reasons for subsequent growth as a study of the growth period itself.

This is unfortunate not only because The Netherlands is an important part of Western Europe but because the experience of The Netherlands in the way in which it has attempted to resolve the economic and political problems confronting it may help to shed valuable light on similar issues facing other European countries.

Marshal Philippe Petain was, in the words of historian Andrew Roberts, 'the most controversial Frenchman of the twentieth century.' A truly distinguished soldier who rose from humble origins, he commanded French forces at Verdun in 1916 and became a national hero. But though by 1940 he had become French Deputy Prime Minister his political abilities were meagre. And after France fell to the Nazis it was Petain who signed the armistice and, from the spa town of Vichy, ruled over the Etat Francais Hitler had left him.Richard Griffiths tells this sorry story in outstanding detail, all the way to Petain's ignominious end, and not stinting to show his culpability in the Vichy persecution of French Jews and its suppression of the internal Resistance.'Petain, utterly obscure until the age of 58, was hurled to fame by his defence of Verdun in 1916. This saved his country's bacon (he would say her honour) at a crisis point of the Great War. Thereafter he became an almost monarchical figure, more revered than any living Frenchman, even after the disaster of 1940. But then, as head of the puppet Vichy government, he slid into ignominy after failing to square honour with military humiliation. Griffiths's durable biography... paints not a devil but a courageous, misguided man with a hole where others keep their political acumen.'Robin Blake, Independent

So topsy-turvy had attitudes become in certain circles that the accusation of being 'unquestionably the biggest war-monger in the world today' was levelled at Churchill not Hitler! This book intends to study the various forms of motivation which led to this phenomenon (pro-Nazi sympathies in Britain).

Patriotism Perverted is an exploration of British anti-Semitism in the last six months of peace and the first year of the Second World War. It shows how, against the backdrop of an endemic British 'social anti-Semitism', a virulent form of this tendency was able to emerge in the late Thirties in a variety of extremist movements. These movements gained their strength from the popular obsessions, in 1939, with Jewish responsibility for the approaching war (seen as 'The War of the Jews' Revenge'), and with the myth of the Judaeo-Bolshevik Plot. In many cases, these views were closely related with pro-Nazism and were often held by the most patriotic of people. For most, the outbreak of war was a signal to perform their patriotic duty. But there were others who found themselves in a considerable dilemma, torn between patriotism and their desire to subvert a war they believed Britain to have been tricked into undertaking. Researching many prominent figures of the day, including Captain Ramsay and Sir Oswald Mosley, Patriotism Perverted offers a fascinating insight into the views and activities of those in the various anti-Semitic and/or pro-Nazi circles in 1939.

This is the first book to examine in a systematic way the entrepreneurial society of the Welsh Valleys. Until now, almost everything written about the society created by the Welsh coal industry has been about the workers and the unions, and there has been a significant gap, which needed to be filled if a rounded picture of life in the south Wales valleys during the coal boom was to be achieved. The book looks at the various sources of wealth in the area - coal owning, railway building, possession of land in crucial areas, contracting, building, property development, shopkeeping - and at the various origins from which the first-generation entrepreneurs came. It then examines closely the networks of power and influence that built up among the second-generation entrepreneurs in the close and claustrophobic middle-class society of the Porth-Pontypridd area. Its method is to take one extended family central to that society, together with its vast network of friends and collaborators, and to examine in great detail, from original sources, the often hair-raising business methods of these people, as well as their conflicts of interest at times of industrial unrest. At the same time, the changes in Valleys life are mirrored in the history of this group: the original 'rags-to-riches' stories of so many of the first generation; the self-sufficient confidence of so many of the second generation, for whom the coal boom seemed bound to last for ever; and the gradual move, thereafter, out of the coal industry and down to the towns on the coast, just in time to avoid the decline of the industry.