A collection of notes and texts reflective of the author's personal voice for the selective audience.

The female spy has long exerted a strong grip on the popular imagination. With reference to popular fiction, film and television Violent Femmes examines the figure of the female spy as a nexus of contradictory ideas about femininity, power, sexuality and national identity. Fictional representations of women as spies have recurrently traced the dynamic of women’s changing roles in British and American culture. Employing the central trope of women who work as spies, Rosie White examines cultural shifts during the twentieth century regarding the role of women in the professional workplace. Violent Femmes examines the female spy as a figure in popular discourse which simultaneously conforms to cultural stereotypes and raises questions about women's roles in British and American culture, in terms of gender, sexuality and national identity. Immensely useful for a wide range of courses such as film and television studies, English, cultural studies, women’s studies, gender studies, media studies, communications and history, this book will appeal to students from undergraduate level upwards.

In The Skorzeny Papers, the author reveals the details of the post-World War II activities of former SS Commando Otto Skorzeny. Considered by British and American Allied forces as “the most dangerous man in Europe,” Skorzeny planned and led numerous daring missions throughout the war. The story in this book was extracted by Major Ganis from Skorzeny’s personal papers. The evidence reveals that Skorzeny gradually and methodically became involved in US intelligence and covert operations during the Cold War. But Skorzeny’s network had a greater point of destiny in November 1963, when it was utilized to carry out the most tragic mission in history. This story would have been lost had Skorzeny not kept meticulous records of his businesses and contacts, which were fronts for US covert activity. In the end, The Skorzeny Papers reveal the intriguing web of secret organizations and people linked to the events culminating in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

A warmly witty account of the three years a man spent teaching life lessons to his high school dropout son by showing him the world's best (and occasionally worst) films. At the start of this brilliantly unconventional family memoir, David Gilmour is an unemployed movie critic trying to convince his fifteen-year-old son Jesse to do his homework. When he realizes Jesse is beginning to view learning as a loathsome chore, he offers his son an unconventional deal: Jesse could drop out of school, not work, not pay rent - but he must watch three movies a week of his father's choosing. Week by week, side by side, father and son watched everything from True Romance to Rosemary's Baby to Showgirls, and films by Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma, Billy Wilder, among others. The movies got them talking about Jesse's life and his own romantic dramas, with mercurial girlfriends, heart-wrenching breakups, and the kind of obsessive yearning usually seen only in movies. Through their film club, father and son discussed girls, music, work, drugs, money, love, and friendship - and their own lives changed in surprising ways.

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year People speak different languages, and always have. The Ancient Greeks took no notice of anything unless it was said in Greek; the Romans made everyone speak Latin; and in India, people learned their neighbors' languages—as did many ordinary Europeans in times past (Christopher Columbus knew Italian, Portuguese, and Castilian Spanish as well as the classical languages). But today, we all use translation to cope with the diversity of languages. Without translation there would be no world news, not much of a reading list in any subject at college, no repair manuals for cars or planes; we wouldn't even be able to put together flat-pack furniture. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across the whole of human experience, from foreign films to philosophy, to show why translation is at the heart of what we do and who we are. Among many other things, David Bellos asks: What's the difference between translating unprepared natural speech and translating Madame Bovary? How do you translate a joke? What's the difference between a native tongue and a learned one? Can you translate between any pair of languages, or only between some? What really goes on when world leaders speak at the UN? Can machines ever replace human translators, and if not, why? But the biggest question Bellos asks is this: How do we ever really know that we've understood what anybody else says—in our own language or in another? Surprising, witty, and written with great joie de vivre, this book is all about how we comprehend other people and shows us how, ultimately, translation is another name for the human condition.