Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places. W.H. Auden, dedication to Stephen Spender, 1932 Stephen Spender wrote almost a million words of journal entries between his September Journal in 1939 and his death in 1995. In choosing from these voluminous journals for the new edition, the editors have tried to provide a picture of the various lives Spender brought together in autobiographical form. The earlier 1985 edition of the Journals was overseen by the author, and it privileged his thoughts about poetry - his own and other people's. The new edition includes the final ten years of Spender's life and provides access to the more intimate thoughts and feelings of the private man, but equally documents his life as a public intellectual who played a part in shaping the European literary and intellectual culture of his age. As we look back on the dramatic events of the twentieth century, we find that Spender was involved in many of them: the reconstruction of Germany and the construction of Europe (as Unesco's first Literary Councillor), the development of the cultural Cold War (as editor of Encounter), the founding of Israel, the anti-Vietnam movement in America. The Journals provide a personal version of sixty turbulent years of the twentieth century, hovering between diary, autobiography and history.

Masculinity, Class and Same-Sex Desire in Industrial England, 1895-1957 explores the experiences of men who desired other men outside of the capital. In doing so, it offers a unique intervention into the history of sexuality but it also offers new ways to understand masculinity, working-class culture, regionality and work in the period.

In this fascinating and entertaining second volume, Christopher Simon Sykes explores the life and work of Britain's most popular living artist. David Hockney is one of the most influential and best-loved artists of the twentieth century. His career has spanned and epitomized the art movements of the past five decades. Picking up Hockney's story in 1975, this book finds him flitting between Notting Hill and California, where he took inspiration for the swimming pool series of paintings; creating acclaimed set designs for operas around the world; and embracing emerging technologies—the Polaroid camera and fax machine in the seventies and eighties and, most recently, the iPad. Hockney's boundless energy extends to his personal life too, and this volume illuminates the glamorous circles he moves in, as well as his sometimes turbulent relationships. Christopher Simon Sykes has been granted exclusive and unprecedented access to Hockney's paintings, notebooks, and diaries, and a great number of them are reproduced here. Featuring interviews with family, friends, and Hockney himself, this is a lively and revelatory account of an acclaimed artist and an extraordinary man.

David Hockney reflects upon life and art as he experiences lockdown in rural Normandy in this inspiring book which includes conversations with the artist and his latest artworks. On turning eighty, David Hockney sought out rustic tranquility for the first time: a place to watch the sunset and the change of the seasons; a place to keep the madness of the world at bay. So when Covid-19 and lockdown struck, it made little difference to life at La Grande Cour, the centuries-old Normandy farmhouse where Hockney set up a studio a year earlier, in time to paint the arrival of spring. In fact, he relished the enforced isolation as an opportunity for even greater devotion to his art. Spring Cannot Be Cancelled is an uplifting manifesto that affirms art’s capacity to divert and inspire. It is based on a wealth of new conversations and correspondence between Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford, his long-time friend and collaborator. Their exchanges are illustrated by a selection of Hockney’s new Normandy drawings and paintings alongside works by Van Gogh, Monet, Bruegel, and others. We see how Hockney is propelled ever forward by his infectious enthusiasms and sense of wonder. A lifelong contrarian, he has been in the public eye for sixty years, yet remains entirely unconcerned by the view of critics or even history. He is utterly absorbed by his four acres of northern France and by the themes that have fascinated him for decades: light, color, space, perception, water, trees. He has much to teach us, not only about how to see . . . but about how to live.

The public lynching of George Floyd re-exposed the rotten underbelly of America and this, together with the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black and Brown communities, the global Black Lives Matter protests, and the racist, xenophobic demagoguery of Donald Trump, resurrected the old debates about medical racism, race relations, implicit bias, vaccine nationalism/vaccine imperialism, structural inequality, police brutality, vaccine hesitancy, unethical human experimentation, vaccine diplomacy, qualified immunity, conspiracy theories, and social justice. Then in 2020 the American Medical Association formally declared racism a public health crisis, defined racism as a social determinant of health, and embraced the idea of medical schools teaching medical students about racism. Alas, the nursing curriculum is somewhat silent on these questions. Decolonizing the nursing curriculum, long overdue, is therefore imperative. This book explores the question of decolonizing the nursing curriculum from the angles of postcolonial theory, critiquing the Western literary canon, American history, literary criticism, African literature, cultural criticism, Afrocentric theory, democracy, African-American literature, and critical race theory.

A pivotal twentieth-century composer, Samuel Barber earned a long list of honors and accolades that included two Pulitzer Prizes for Music and the public support of conductors like Arturo Toscanini, Serge Koussevitzky, and Leonard Bernstein. Barber’s works have since become standard concert repertoire and continue to flourish across high art and popular culture. Acclaimed biographer Howard Pollack (Aaron Copland, George Gershwin) offers a multifaceted account of Barber’s life and music while placing the artist in his social and cultural milieu. Born into a musical family, Barber pursued his artistic ambitions from childhood. Pollack follows Barber’s path from his precocious youth through a career where, from the start, the composer consistently received prizes, fellowships, and other recognition. Stylistic analyses of works like the Adagio for Strings, the Violin Concerto, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for voice and orchestra, the Piano Concerto, and the operas Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra, stand alongside revealing accounts of the music’s commissioning, performance, reception, and legacy. Throughout, Pollack weaves in accounts of Barber’s encounters with colleagues like Aaron Copland and Francis Poulenc, performers from Eleanor Steber and Leontyne Price to Vladimir Horowitz and Van Cliburn, patrons, admirers, and a wide circle of eminent friends and acquaintances. He also provides an eloquent portrait of the composer’s decades-long relationship with the renowned opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Informed by new interviews and immense archival research, Samuel Barber is a long-awaited critical and personal biography of a monumental figure in twentieth-century American music.

Demonstrates how spatial and temporal dislocation were defining traits of the artistic response to the urban bombing campaigns of the Second World War. Studying a range of writers, as well as film, photography, and art, it argues that for civilian populations, aerial bombardment distorts the experience of time itself.