Lady Ottoline Morrell was the foremost host of the Bloomsbury set, offering sustenance and friendship to Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Duncan Grant and her lover Bertrand Russell, to name but a few. This book is a revised and updated edition of the author's original biography of Ottoline first published in 1975 worldwide. It has been updated, with vignettes about her sources, including lunch at ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" / Charleston with Duncan Grant, and a ship's tumbler of sherry with David Garnett as a prelude to discussing "skeletons in Ottoline's cupboard"). Her sources in Texas where she read more than 8,000 letters to Ottoline including 2,500 letters from Bertrand Russell, can now be located in new footnotes. Darroch remains as impressed as ever by Ottoline's courage and determination to forgo the comfortable life of an aristocrat to mix with – and champion – some of the 20th century's leading artists and writers. The definitive biography.

As traditional social hierarchies fall away, ever steeper levels of economic inequality and the entrenchment of new class distinctions lend a new glamor to the idea of aristocracy: witness the worldwide popularity of Downton Abbey, or the seemingly insatiable public fascination with the private lives of the British royal family. This collection of new essays investigates the enduring attraction to the icon of the aristocrat and the spectacle of aristocratic society. It traces the ambivalent reactions the aristocracy provokes and the needs (political, ideological, psychological, and otherwise) it caters to in modern times when the economic power of the landed classes have been eroded and their political role curtailed. In this interdisciplinary collection, aristocracy is considered from multiple viewpoints, including British and American literature, European history and politics, cultural studies, linguistics, visual arts, music, and media studies.

The story of F. Scott Fitzgerald's creation of Jay Gatsby—war hero and Oxford man—at the beginning of the Jazz Age, when the City of Dreaming Spires attracted an astounding array of intellectuals, including the Inklings, W.B. Yeats, and T.S. Eliot. A diverse group of Americans came to Oxford in the first quarter of the twentieth century—the Jazz Age—when the Rhodes Scholar program had just begun and the Great War had enveloped much of Europe. Scott Fitzgerald created his most memorable character—Jay Gatsby—shortly after his and Zelda’s visit to Oxford. Fitzgerald’s creation is a cultural reflection of the aspirations of many Americans who came to the University of Oxford. Beginning in 1904, when the first American Rhodes Scholars arrived in Oxford, this book chronicles the experiences of Americans in Oxford through the Great War to the beginning of the Great Depression. This period is interpreted through the pages of The Great Gatsby, producing a vivid cultural history. Archival material covering Scholars who came to Oxford during Trinity Term 1919—when Jay Gatsby claims he studied at Oxford—enables the narrative to illuminate a detailed portrait of what a “historical Gatsby” would have looked like, what he would have experienced at the postwar university, and who he would have encountered around Oxford—an impressive array of artists including W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and C.S. Lewis.

In the wake of the Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, the world learned some big lessons. But not enough. Life eventually returned to normal, affluence and profligate activity increased - it was The Best of Times. But then the gap between the Haves and the Have-Nots grew. Finally, halfway through the 21st century urban riots, drone warfare and nuclear war, followed by the Ultimate Virus, wiped out the world's population - save a little colony on Australia's Bondi Beach, which sets about rebuilding a new world. Written before the COVID-19 pandemic, in response to the conjecture of Australian Professor Huw Price, Head of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University, that a mega virus was one of the major existential threats facing our society, this is a story of a great love affair, political intrigue, danger and heroic - and mock-heroic - endeavour, as well as a warning of what could be in store for us all.

Bertrand Russell’s research on logic is believed, alongside Wittgenstein’s and Moore’s works, to have fuelled the linguistic turn that characterized much of twentieth-century philosophy. This process originated in the refutation of British idealism and monism, providing a new interpretation of empiricism. But while his debt to traditional British empiricism has been the subject of study (including by Russell himself) and extensively investigated, the assumption that the British neo-idealist legacy was merely a polemical target of Russell and Moore’s realist pluralism has hindered a proper assessment of its influence – which, on the contrary, proves to be of theoretical significance. This essay attempts a documentary reconstruction – in part relying on the Bertrand Russell Archives – to better understand Russell’s relationship with the thought of F. H. Bradley and, indirectly but consequently, with the English idealist tradition.

Gender and warfare in the twentieth century is a collection of exciting, accessible and very readable essays that span the twentieth century, exploring the ways in which men and women have both represented warfare, and represented themselves as participants in warfare. A range of contributors from different disciplines explore these representations by examining a wide variety of sources: fiction, film, personal diaries, memoirs, non-fiction, letters, oral testimonies and more. The collection ranges from the trenches of the Western Front, through the shell-shocked inter-war years, the civil war in Spain and the disparate battle fronts of World War Two, to the complexities of Vietnam and the late century Hollywood workings and re-workings of these conflicts. The focus on gendered readings provides a thread that binds these essays together to create a comprehensive and interesting picture of the legacy of twentieth-century warfare at the beginning of the new millennium.