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“Here is a welcome reminder that men can be gentlemen without turning into ladies—or louts.”—Michelle Malkin "Miner writes with wit and charm."—Wall Street Journal The Gentleman: An Endangered Species? The catalog of masculine sins grows by the day—mansplaining, manspreading, toxic masculinity—reflecting our confusion over what it means to be a man. Is a man’s only choice between the brutish, rutting #MeToo lout and the gelded imitation woman, endlessly sensitive and fun to go shopping with? No. Brad Miner invites you to discover the oldest and best model of manhood— the gentleman. In this tour de force of popular history and gentlemanly persuasion, Miner lays out the thousand-year history of this forgotten ideal and makes a compelling case for its modern revival. Three masculine archetypes emerge here—the warrior, the lover, and the monk—forming the character of “the compleat gentleman.” He cultivates a martial spirit in defense of the true and the beautiful. He treats the opposite sex with passionate respect. And he values learning in pursuit of the truth. Miner’s gentleman stands out for the combination of discretion, decorum, and nonchalance that the Renaissance called sprezzatura. He belongs to an aristocracy of virtue, not of wealth or birth, following a lofty code of manly conduct, which, far from threatening democracy, is necessary for its survival.

Daniel Defoe led an exciting and indeed precarious life. A provocative pamphleteer and journalist, a spy and double agent, a revolutionary and a dreamer, he was variously hunted by mobs with murderous intent and treated as a celebrity by the most powerful leaders of the country. Imprisoned many times, pilloried and reviled by his enemies, through it all he managed to produce some of the most significant literature of the eighteenth century. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions is the first biography to view Defoe's complex life through the angle of vision that is most important to us as modern readers--his career as a writer. Maximillian Novak, a leading authority on Defoe, ranges from the writer's earliest collection of brief stories, which he presented to his future wife under the sobriquet Bellmour, to his Compleat English Gentleman, left unpublished at his death. Novak illuminates such works as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, novels that changed the course of fiction in their time and have remained towering classics to this day. And he reveals a writer who was a superb observer of his times--an age of dramatic historical, political, and social change. Indeed, through his many pamphlets, newspapers, books of travel, and works of fiction, Defoe commented on everything from birth control to the price of coal, and from flying machines to the dangers of the plague. Beautifully and authoritatively written, this is the first serious, full-scale biography of Defoe to appear in a decade. It gives us, for the first time, a full understanding of the thought and personal experience that lie behind some of the great works of English literature.

Originally written for Debrett's Peerage, Douglas Sutherland's guide to that endangered species, the English Gentleman, was intended as an antidote to all the endless, dull little books on manners and etiquette. It offers a window on the rather perverse world of the genuine article.