An alternative view of the North West of England that delves into its stranger past. I Hate the Lake District offers a different vision of the rural environment from those found in much contemporary nature writing. Based on the author's trips around North West England, the book engages with nuclear power and nuclear war, slavery, imperialism, ghosts, love, God, cockroaches, and the sheer violence and contingency of “nature” itself—of which the human presence is merely a part. Each chapter starts with an account of a visit to a place in this remote part of England, the deep north, but digresses and wanders through multifarious themes and subjects. Among the sites Gere visits are the defunct nuclear power station at Sellafield, home of all British nuclear waste; Lake Coniston, where Donald Campbell died trying to break the water speed record; Hadrian's Wall, furthermost reach of the Roman Empire; the mysterious and deathly Morecambe Bay; sites of slavery in the North West; places where UFOs have been sighted, avant-garde artists created work, and Islamic terrorists trained; shantytowns where the navvies who built the railways lived with their families; and even the remains of Blobbyland in Morecambe. In I Hate the Lake District, Gere challenges the bourgeois pastoralism of popular nature writing and reveals the landscape of North West England as profoundly unnatural and strange.

An alternative view of the North West of England that delves into its stranger past. I Hate the Lake District offers a different vision of the rural environment from those found in much contemporary nature writing. Based on the author's trips around North West England, the book engages with nuclear power and nuclear war, slavery, imperialism, ghosts, love, God, cockroaches, and the sheer violence and contingency of “nature” itself—of which the human presence is merely a part. Each chapter starts with an account of a visit to a place in this remote part of England, the deep north, but digresses and wanders through multifarious themes and subjects. Among the sites Gere visits are the defunct nuclear power station at Sellafield, home of all British nuclear waste; Lake Coniston, where Donald Campbell died trying to break the water speed record; Hadrian's Wall, furthermost reach of the Roman Empire; the mysterious and deathly Morecambe Bay; sites of slavery in the North West; places where UFOs have been sighted, avant-garde artists created work, and Islamic terrorists trained; shantytowns where the navvies who built the railways lived with their families; and even the remains of Blobbyland in Morecambe. In I Hate the Lake District, Gere challenges the bourgeois pastoralism of popular nature writing and reveals the landscape of North West England as profoundly unnatural and strange.

One of the century's most influential philosophers assesses a movement that changed the course of history in this unedited transcript of his 1965 Mellon lecture series. "Exhilaratingly thought-provoking".--"Times London".

A memoir and cultural history the World’s End, a West London area once home to bohemian artists and punk rock and now an outpost of neoliberalism. Charlie Gere’s account of growing up in the World’s End area of West London during the Cold War combines local history, cultural history, memoir, and a strong sense of the apocalyptic. Once a rundown part of Chelsea at the wrong end of the King’s Road, the World’s End has long been a place for bohemian writers and artists, including Turner, Whistler, Beckett, Bacon, and Bacon’s muse Henrietta Moraes, all of whom evinced an appropriate apocalyptic sensibility. After World War II, in which the area suffered severe bombing, it became a center of the counterculture that emerged from what Jeff Nuttall called “Bomb Culture,” formed by the threat of nuclear annihilation. The famous boutique Granny Takes a Trip opened there in 1966, joined later on by Hung On You, Puss Weber’s Flying Dragon Tea Room, and the commune Gandalf’s Garden. The area also featured trepanning aristocrats and pet lions, among other eccentricities. In the 1970s, the World’s End was the center of punk rock. Gere’s parents arrived as part of a wave of gentrification, and Gere, born and brought up there, witnessed its social and cultural evolution. As an adolescent, he was traumatized by the prospect of nuclear war. He has lived long enough to see the World’s End now bearing the marks of out-of-control neoliberalism and its grotesque accompanying inequality. But this too shall pass as worlds end.

A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2017 One of NPR Fresh Air's "Books to Close Out a Chaotic 2017" NPR's Book Concierge Guide To 2017’s Great Reads “How lucky for us readers that Shapiro has been listening so perceptively for decades to the language of food.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR Fresh Air Six “mouthwatering” (Eater.com) short takes on six famous women through the lens of food and cooking, probing how their attitudes toward food can offer surprising new insights into their lives, and our own. Everyone eats, and food touches on every aspect of our lives—social and cultural, personal and political. Yet most biographers pay little attention to people’s attitudes toward food, as if the great and notable never bothered to think about what was on the plate in front of them. Once we ask how somebody relates to food, we find a whole world of different and provocative ways to understand her. Food stories can be as intimate and revealing as stories of love, work, or coming-of-age. Each of the six women in this entertaining group portrait was famous in her time, and most are still famous in ours; but until now, nobody has told their lives from the point of view of the kitchen and the table. What She Ate is a lively and unpredictable array of women; what they have in common with one another (and us) is a powerful relationship with food. They include Dorothy Wordsworth, whose food story transforms our picture of the life she shared with her famous poet brother; Rosa Lewis, the Edwardian-era Cockney caterer who cooked her way up the social ladder; Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady and rigorous protector of the worst cook in White House history; Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, who challenges our warm associations of food, family, and table; Barbara Pym, whose witty books upend a host of stereotypes about postwar British cuisine; and Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan, whose commitment to “having it all” meant having almost nothing on the plate except a supersized portion of diet gelatin.

Simmy has been adjusting to life in Windermere, running her florist shop, Persimmon's Petals, and trying to put her tragic past behind her. But just when she thinks her life is quietly coming together, it starts to unravel at the seams. She delivers a bouquet of flowers with a mysterious message attached to an elderly lady that brings sinister secrets to light. And when another old woman is found murdered in her own home, Simmy is drawn into the center of the investigation after the prime suspect names her as an alibi. As the murky lives of her neighbors tangle and swirl around her, Simmy must uncover the motive behind the murder before the killer strikes again …

Luke flung the light of his torch full onto the face of the immobile figure. Then he had the shock of his life. The man had no face! Where his face should have been was a sort of inhuman, uniform blank!' When a body is found at an isolated garage, Inspector Meredith is drawn into a complex investigation where every clue leads to another puzzle: was this a suicide, or something more sinister? Why was the dead man planning to flee the country? And how is this connected to the shady business dealings of the garage? This classic mystery novel is set amidst the stunning scenery of a small village in the Lake District. It is now republished for the first time since the 1930s with an introduction by the award-winning crime writer Martin Edwards.