The universally acclaimed and award-winning Oxford History of Western Music is the eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin's provocative, erudite telling of the story of Western music from its earliest days to the present. Each book in this superlative five-volume set illuminates-through a representative sampling of masterworks-the themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to a significant period in the history of Western music. In Music in the Nineteenth Century , Richard Taruskin offers a panoramic tour of this magnificent century in the history music. Major themes addressed in this book include the romantic transformation of opera, Franz Schubert and the German lied, the rise of virtuosos such as Paganini and Liszt, the twin giants of nineteenth-century opera, Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi, the lyric dramas of Bizet and Puccini, and the revival of the symphony by Brahms. Laced with brilliant observations, memorable musical analysis, and a panoramic sense of the interactions between history, culture, politics, art, literature, religion, and music, this book will be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand this rich and diverse period.

Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law is a forum for some of the best new philosophical work on law, by both senior and junior scholars from around the world. The essays range widely over issues in general jurisprudence (the nature of law, adjudication, and legal reasoning), the philosophical foundations of specific areas of law (from criminal law to evidence to international law), the history of legal philosophy, and related philosophical topics that illuminate the problems of legal theory. OSPL will be essential reading for philosophers, academic lawyers, political scientists, and historians of law who wish to keep up with the latest developments in this flourishing field.

Compiled by a respected social historian, this unique anthology on the changing experience of work draws upon more than 500 writers from classical antiquity to modern times.

This marvelous collection of fairy tales, some moral, some satirical, some bizarre, reflects the popularity and scope of this enduring and versatile genre. Featuring tales written by figures as diverse as Charles Dickens and Ursula Le Guin, this anthology will appeal to the child that exists in every adult.

Edited by early music experts Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrott, this anthology of Christmas carols is the most comprehensive collection ever made, spanning seven centuries of caroling in Britain, continental Europe, and North America. Containing music and text of 201 carols, many in more than one setting, the book is organized in two sections: composed carols, ranging from medieval Gregorian chants to modern compositions, and folk carols, including not only traditional Anglo-American songs but Irish, Welsh, German, Czech, Polish, French, Basque, Catalan, Sicilian, and West Indian songs as well. Each carol is set in four-part harmony, with lyrics in both the original language and English. Accompanying each song are detailed scholarly notes on the history of the carol and on performance of the setting presented. The introduction to the volume offers a general history of carols and caroling, and appendices provide scholarly essays on such topics as fifteenth-century pronunciation, English country and United States primitive traditions, and the revival of the English folk carol. The Oxford Book of Carols, published in 1928, is still one of Oxford's best-loved books among scholars, church choristers, and the vast number of people who enjoy singing carols. This volume is not intended to replace this classic but to supplement it. Reflecting significant developments in musicology over the past sixty years, it embodies a radical reappraisal of the repertory and a fresh approach to it. The wealth of information it contains will make it essential for musicologists and other scholars, while the beauty of the carols themselves will enchant general readers and amateur songsters alike.

The essay is one of the richest of literary forms. Its most obvious characteristics are freedom, informality, and the personal touch--though it can also find room for poetry, satire, fantasy, and sustained argument. All these qualities, and many others, are on display in The Oxford Book of Essays. The most wide-ranging collection of its kind to appear for many years, it includes 140 essays by 120 writers: classics, curiosities, meditations, diversions, old favorites, recent examples that deserve to be better known. A particularly welcome feature is the amount of space allotted to American essayists, from Benjamin Franklin to John Updike and beyond. This is an anthology that opens with wise words about the nature of truth, and closes with a consideration of the novels of Judith Krantz. Some of the other topics discussed in its pages are anger, pleasure, Gandhi, Beau Brummell, wasps, party-going, gangsters, plumbers, Beethoven, potato crisps, the importance of being the right size, and the demolition of Westminster Abbey. It contains some of the most eloquent writing in English, and some of the most entertaining.