Georgian Britain experienced a cultural renaissance in the form of the Enlightenment, the establishment of an empire & the beginning of the first industrial revolution.

This engagingly written new work highlights Britain's long-underestimated and pivotal role in disseminating the ideas and culture of the Enlightenment. Moving beyond the numerous histories centered on France and Germany, the acclaimed social historian Roy Porter explains how monumental changes in thinking in Britain influenced worldwide developments. Here is a "splendidly imaginative" work that "propels the debate forward ... and makes a valuable point" (New York Times Book Review).

“This brisk, decorous, and incisive history . . . would have delighted its namesake as much as it will delight and instruct contemporary readers.” —Roger Kimball, Editor and publisher, The New Criterion Dedicated fans of Jane Austen’s novels will delight in accompanying historian Jeremy Black through the drawing rooms, chapels, and battlefields of the time in which Austen lived and wrote. In this exceedingly readable and sweeping scan of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, Black provides a historical context for a deeper appreciation of classic novels such as Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. While Austen’s novels bring to life complex characters living in intimate surroundings, England in the Age of Austen provides a fuller account of what the village, the church, and the family home would really have been like. In addition to seeing how Austen’s own reading helped her craft complex characters like Emma, Black also explores how recurring figures in the novels, such as George III or Fanny Burney, provide a focus for a historical discussion of the fiction in which they appear. Jane Austen’s world was the source of her works and the basis of her readership, and understanding that world gives fans new insights into her enduring literature. “Superb. . . . Essential reading for the Austen enthusiast.” —William Gibson, Oxford Brookes University “England in the Age of Austen recovers a world before the Victorians that brings one of our greatest authors into clearer focus.” —William Anthony Hay, Mississippi State University “An absolute ‘must’ for the legions of Jan Austen fans . . . an extraordinarily well written history, impressively detailed, and a seminal work of original scholarship.” —Midwest Book Review

What was life on a great aristocratic estate such as Thomas Coke's Holkham in Norfolk like? Where did the money come from? How does an up and coming young aristocrat make his way in the often murky world of royal and political circles? Using the extraordinary riches of the Holkham archives, D.P. Mortlock recreates in stunning detail the lives of the great and the little people of eighteenth-century England. He brings us those who peopled the world of Thomas Coke; the lords and ladies, the mobile middle-classes, the money-lenders, the country parsons, the arrogant footmen and the footpads. Mortlock's book brings to life a lost world of aristocratic splendour and the illuminated lives of hundreds of ordinary people. Coke's lasting monument is undoubtedly the great house he created at Holkham in Norfolk, at the heart of which is money, and money is at the heart of this book. From the carefully detailed marriage settlement arranged in 1718 when Coke married Lady Margaret Tufton, to the shilling which Coke had to borrow from a footman in an emergency, the financial dealings were recorded in fascinating detail, as were the lives of the people of the age.

In the 1930s he established himself as a wide-ranging Shakespearean actor. His marriage in 1940 to Vivien Leigh (his second wife) seemed to complete the image of the romantic star. From the mid-40s he excelled in directing himself in Shakespeare on film, such as his dramatically-shot Henry V (1944), with its timely excesses of patriotism. When the new wave of British drama began in the late 1950s, Olivier was immediately part of it. As an actor of such wide range, and a successful producer and director, Olivier was a natural choice to bring the National Theatre into existence in 1963. Together with his new wife Joan Plowright (they had married in 1961), he built up a brilliant company and repertoire at the Old Vic. Olivier became the first actor to be given a peerage.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book analyzes how news discourse was shaped over time by external factors, such as the historical context, news production, technological innovation and current affairs, and as such both conformed to and deviated from generic conventions. Using data from a newspaper corpus, it offers the first empirical study into the development of style in early mass media. In this analysis, media style appears as a dynamic concept which is highly sensitive to innovative approaches towards making news not only informative but also entertaining to read. This cutting-edge survey will be of interest to academics researching corpus linguistics, media discourse and stylistics.