Biography (29)

• Biography
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• History

A Portrait of Samuel Hartlib: In Search of Universal Betterment

• Charles Webster

The 2013 digitization of the vast Hartlib Papers archive highlighted the pressing need for a comprehensive modern study of Samuel Hartlib (1600–1662), a central figure in seventeenth-century intellectual life. Though educated in Eastern Europe, Hartlib spent his adult life in London, where he became a prolific correspondent and chronicler. His Ephemerides, spanning 1634 to 1660, and his extensive correspondence with leading thinkers across Britain and Protestant Europe offer an unparalleled window into the era’s religious, political, and scientific ferment.

• Biography
• Music

Meta-Xenakis: New Perspectives on Iannis Xenakis’s Life, Work, and Legacies

• Sharon Kanach
• Peter Nelson

Meta-Xenakis offers readers a comprehensive collection of insights into the history, works and legacy of Iannis Xenakis, one of the twentieth century’s most significant creative figures. It presents a transcontinental engagement with his life and output, focusing as much on the impact of the questions he posed as on the accomplishments of his body of work.

• Biography
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Mathematics
• Science: History of Science

Augustus De Morgan, Polymath: New Perspectives on his Life and Legacy

• Karen Attar
• Adrian Rice
• Christopher Stray

When Augustus De Morgan died in 1871, he was described as ‘one of the profoundest mathematicians in the United Kingdom’ and even as ‘the greatest of our mathematicians’. But he was far more than just a mathematician. Because much of his voluminous written output on various subjects was scattered throughout journals and encyclopaedias, the breadth of his interests and contributions has been underappreciated by historians. Now, renewed interest in De Morgan’s life and work has coincided with the digitization of his extensive library, revealing the extent to which he pioneered and influenced the development of not merely mathematics but also logic, astronomy, the history of mathematics, education, and bibliography.

• Biography
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

Trix: The Other Kipling

• Barbara Fisher

This volume represents the first biography of Alice MacDonald Kipling Fleming (1868-1948), known as Trix. Rarely portrayed with sympathy or accuracy in biographies of her famous brother Rudyard, Trix was a talented writer and a memorable character in her own right whose fascinating life was unknown until now. In telling Trix’s story, Barbara Fisher rescues her from the misrepresentations, trivializations, and outright neglect of Rudyard’s many biographers.

• Biography
• European Studies: Eastern European Studies
• History

Feliks Volkhovskii: A Revolutionary Life

• Michael Hughes

Michael Hughes’s groundbreaking new biography provides a vivid history of this notable but hitherto neglected figure of both the political and literary worlds. Based on ten years of research in archives across the world and drawing on sources in multiple languages, this masterful biography explores how Feliks Volkhovskii’s life illuminates broader intellectual and historical questions about the Russian revolutionary movement. It is essential reading for anyone interested in late Imperial Russia and the Russian revolution.

• Biography
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• History
• Science: History of Science

Reign of the Beast: The Atheist World of W. D. Saull and his Museum of Evolution

• Adrian Desmond

In the 1830s, decades before Darwin published the Origin of Species, a museum of evolution flourished in London. Reign of the Beast pieces together the extraordinary story of this lost working-man's institution and its enigmatic owner, the wine merchant W. D. Saull. A financial backer of the anti-clerical Richard Carlile, the ‘Devil's Chaplain’ Robert Taylor, and socialist Robert Owen, Saull outraged polite society by putting humanity’s ape ancestry on display. He weaponized his museum fossils and empowered artisans with a knowledge of deep geological time that undermined the Creationist base of the Anglican state. His geology museum, called the biggest in Britain, housed over 20,000 fossils, including famous dinosaurs. Saull was indicted for blasphemy and reviled during his lifetime. After his death in 1855, his museum was demolished and he was expunged from the collective memory. Now multi-award-winning author Adrian Desmond undertakes a thorough reading of Home Office spy reports and subversive street prints to re-establish Saull's pivotal place at the intersection of the history of geology, atheism, socialism, and working-class radicalism.

• Biography
• European Studies
• Folklore and Ethnology
• History
• Politics and Sociology

(An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War

• Zsuzsa Millei
• Nelli Piattoeva
• Iveta Silova
• Mnemo ZIN

What was it like growing up during the Cold War? What can childhood memories tell us about state socialism and its aftermath? How can these intimate memories complicate history and redefine possible futures? These questions are at the heart of the (An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War. This edited collection stems from a collaboration between academics and artists who came together to collectively remember their own experiences of growing up on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Looking beyond official historical archives, the book gathers memories that have been erased or forgotten, delegitimized or essentialized, or, at best, reinterpreted nostalgically within the dominant frameworks of the East-West divide. And it reassembles and (re)stores these childhood memories in a form of an ‘anarchive’: a site for merging, mixing, connecting, but also juxtaposing personal experiences, public memory, political rhetoric, places, times, and artifacts. Collectively, these acts and arts of collective remembering tell about possible futures―and the past’s futures―what life during the Cold War might have been but also what it has become.

• Biography
• European Studies: German Studies
• History

No Life Without You: Refugee Love Letters from the 1930s

• Franklin Felsenstein

The letters and journals of Ernst Moritz and Vera Hirsch Felsenstein, two German Jewish refugees caught in the tumultuous years leading to the Second World War, form the core of this book. Abridged in English from the original German, the correspondence and diaries have been expertly compiled and annotated by their only son who preserves his parents’ love story in their own words. Their letters, written from Germany, England, Russia, and Palestine capture their desperate efforts to save themselves and their family, friends and businesses from the fascist tyranny. The book begins by contextualizing the early lives of Moritz and Vera.

• Biography
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• History
• Women and Gender Studies

Eliza Orme’s Ambitions: Politics and the Law in Victorian London

• Leslie Howsam

Why are some figures hidden from history? Eliza Orme, despite becoming the first woman in Britain to earn a university degree in Law in 1888, leading both a political organization and a labour investigation in 1892, and participating actively in the women’s suffrage movement into the early twentieth century, is one such figure.

• Biography
• History
• Politics and Sociology
• Women and Gender Studies

Breaking Conventions: Five Couples in Search of Marriage-Career Balance at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

• Patricia Auspos

This rich history illuminates the lives and partnerships of five married couples – two British, three American – whose unions defied the conventions of their time and anticipated social changes that were to come in the ensuing century. In all five marriages, both husband and wife enjoyed thriving professional lives: a shocking circumstance at a time when wealthy white married women were not supposed to have careers, and career women were not supposed to marry.

• Biography
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Science: History of Science

The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young

• Andrew Robinson
• Martin Rees

No one has given the polymath Thomas Young (1773-1829) the all-round examination he so richly deserves—until now. Celebrated biographer Andrew Robinson portrays a man who solved mystery after mystery in the face of ridicule and rejection, and never sought fame.

• Biography
• Education
• Women and Gender Studies

Susan Isaacs: A Life Freeing the Minds of Children

• Philip Graham

This revised and expanded edition of Susan Isaacs: A Life Freeing the Minds of Children by Philip Graham, provides a comprehensive biography of a highly influential educationist and psychoanalyst. The book covers Isaacs’ childhood through to the end of her life, making it of great interest to historians of British education and of psychoanalysis as well as to practicing early years teachers and psychoanalysts.

• Biography
• Visual Arts
• Women and Gender Studies

Women and Migration(s) II

• Kalia Brooks
• Cheryl Finley
• Ellyn Toscano
• Deborah Willis

Women and Migration(s) II draws together contributions from scholars and artists showcasing the breadth of intersectional experiences of migration, from diaspora to internal displacement. Building on conversations initiated in Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History, this edited volume features a range of written styles, from memoir to artists’ statements to journalistic and critical essays. The collection shows how women’s experiences of migration have been articulated through art, film, poetry and even food.

• Biography
• History
• Media Studies and Journalism

The Diaries of Anthony Hewitson, Provincial Journalist, Volume 1: 1865–1887

• Andrew Hobbs

Anthony Hewitson was a typical Victorian journalist, working in one of the largest sectors of the periodical press, provincial newspapers. His diaries, written between 1862 and 1912, lift the veil of anonymity hiding the people, processes and networks involved in the creation of Victorian newspapers. Andrew Hobbs’s introduction and footnotes provide background and analysis of these valuable documents. This full scholarly edition offers a wealth of new information about reporting, freelancing, sub-editing, newspaper ownership and publishing, and illuminates aspects of Victorian periodicals and culture extending far beyond provincial newspapers.

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

William Sharp and “Fiona Macleod”: A Life

• William F. Halloran

Drawing extensively on his letters, his wife Elizabeth Sharp’s Memoir, and accounts by friends and associates, this biography provides a lucid and intimate account of William Sharp’s life, from his rejection of the dour religion of his Scottish boyhood, his turn to spiritualism, to his role in the Scottish Celtic Revival in the mid-nineties.

• Biography
• Education
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Women and Gender Studies

Mary Warnock: Ethics, Education and Public Policy in Post-War Britain

• Philip Graham

This biography illuminates the life and thought of Baroness Mary Warnock, whose active years spanned the second half of the twentieth century, a period during which opportunities for middle-class women rapidly and vastly improved.

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies

A Victorian Curate: A Study of the Life and Career of the Rev. Dr John Hunt

• David Yeandle

'A Victorian Curate: A Study of the Life and Career of the Rev. Dr John Hunt' is an absorbing personal account of the corruption and turmoil in the Church of England at this time. It will appeal to anyone interested in this history, the relationship between science and religion in the nineteenth century, or the role of the curate in Victorian England.

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

The Life and Letters of William Sharp and "Fiona Macleod": Volume 3: 1900-1905

• William F. Halloran

Sharp wrote "I feel another self within me now more than ever; it is as if I were possessed by a spirit who must speak out". This three-volume collection brings together Sharp’s own correspondence – a fascinating trove in its own right, by a Victorian man of letters who was on intimate terms with writers including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, and George Meredith – and the Fiona Macleod letters, which bring to life Sharp’s intriguing "second self".

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Health
• Women and Gender Studies

Margery Spring Rice: Pioneer of Women’s Health in the Early Twentieth Century

• Lucy Pollard

This book vividly presents the story of Margery Spring Rice, an instrumental figure in the movements of women’s health and family planning in the first half of the twentieth century. Margery Spring Rice, née Garrett, was born into a family of formidable female trailblazers – niece of physician and suffragist Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and of Millicent Fawcett, a leading suffragist and campaigner for equal rights for women. Margery Spring Rice continued this legacy with her co-founding of the North Kensington birth control clinic in 1924, three years after Marie Stopes founded the first clinic in Britain.

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

The Life and Letters of William Sharp and "Fiona Macleod": Volume 2: 1895-1899

• William F. Halloran

With an introduction and detailed notes by William F. Halloran, this richly rewarding collection offers a wonderful insight into the literary landscape of the time, while also investigating a strange and underappreciated phenomenon of late-nineteenth-century English literature. It is essential for scholars of the period, and it is an illuminating read for anyone interested in authorship and identity.

• Biography
• Literature
• Visual Arts
• Women and Gender Studies

Essays on Paula Rego: Smile When You Think about Hell

• Maria Manuel Lisboa

In these powerful and stylishly written essays, Maria Manuel Lisboa dissects the work of Paula Rego, the Portuguese-born artist considered one of the greatest artists of modern times. Focusing primarily on Rego’s work since the 1980s, Lisboa explores the complex relationships between violence and nurturing, power and impotence, politics and the family that run through Rego’s art.

• Biography
• Politics and Sociology
• Visual Arts
• Women and Gender Studies

Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History

• Deborah Willis
• Ellyn Toscano
• Kalia Brooks Nelson

The essays in this book chart how women’s profound and turbulent experiences of migration have been articulated in writing, photography, art and film. As a whole, the volume gives an impression of a wide range of migratory events from women’s perspectives, covering the Caribbean Diaspora, refugees and slavery through the various lenses of politics and war, love and family.

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

The Life and Letters of William Sharp and “Fiona Macleod”: Volume 1: 1855–1894

• William F. Halloran

Sharp wrote "I feel another self within me now more than ever; it is as if I were possessed by a spirit who must speak out". This three-volume collection brings together Sharp’s own correspondence – a fascinating trove in its own right, by a Victorian man of letters who was on intimate terms with writers including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, and George Meredith – and the Fiona Macleod letters, which bring to life Sharp’s intriguing "second self".

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: German Studies
• Literature

The Red Countess: Select Autobiographical and Fictional Writing of Hermynia Zur Mühlen (1883-1951)

• Hermynia Zur Mühlen
• Lionel Gossman

This new, expanded edition contains: Zur Mühlen’s autobiographical memoir, The End and the Beginning; The editor’s detailed notes on the persons and events mentioned in the autobiography; A selection of Zur Mühlen’s short stories and two fairy tales; A synopsis of Zur Mühlen’s untranslated novel Our Daughters the Nazi Girls; An essay by the Editor on Zur Mühlen’s life and work; A bibliography of Zur Mühlen’s novels in English translation; A portfolio of selected illustrations of her work by George Grosz and Heinrich Vogeler; A free online supplement with additional original material

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: German Studies
• Literature

The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel, Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry

• Roger Paulin

This is the first attempt to combine an account of Schlegel’s life and times with a critical evaluation of his work and its influence. Through the study of one man's rich life, incorporating the most recent scholarship, theoretical approaches, and archival resources, while remaining easily accessible to all readers, Paulin has recovered the intellectual climate of Romanticism in Germany and traced its development into a still-potent international movement.

• American and Latin American Studies
• Biography
• Literature
• Philosophy

Mr. Emerson's Revolution

• Jean McClure Mudge

This volume traces the life, thought and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a giant of American intellectual history, whose transforming ideas greatly strengthened the two leading reform issues of his day: abolition and women’s rights. A broad and deep, yet cautious revolutionary, he spoke about a spectrum of inner and outer realities—personal, philosophical, theological and cultural—all of which gave his mid-career turn to political and social issues their immediate and lasting power.

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Law
• Literature

Coleridge's Laws: A Study of Coleridge in Malta

• Barry Hough
• Howard Davis
• Lydia Davis

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known as a great poet and literary theorist, but for one quite short period of his life he held real political power – acting as Public Secretary to the British Civil Commissioner in Malta in 1805. Meticulously researched, this book provides detailed analysis of the laws drafted by Coleridge, together with the first published translations of them. Drawing upon newly discovered archival materials, the authors shed new light on Coleridge’s sense of political and legal morality, showing how Coleridge’s actions whilst in a position of power differed markedly from the idealism he advocated before taking office.

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: German Studies
• History

Brownshirt Princess: A Study of the 'Nazi Conscience'

• Lionel Gossman

In the years after WWI, Princess Marie Adelheid of Lippe-Biesterfeld collaborated with Heinrich Vogeler, an artist who later joined the Communist party, and Ludwig Roselius, a successful businessman, to produce a volume of poetry entitled ‘Gott in Mir’. In this original and inspiring study, Lionel Gossman explores the revolutionary ideological context that made possible this extraordinary collaboration between three such different personalities. He also examines the subsequent life of Princess Adelheid who, until her death in 1993, continued to support the ideals of Nazism. In doing so, Gossman provides deep insights into the sources and character of the ‘Nazi Conscience’.

• Biography
• European Studies
• History
• Literature

That Greece Might Still Be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence

• William St Clair

When in 1821, the Greeks rose in violent revolution against Ottoman rule, waves of sympathy spread across western Europe and the USA. Inspired by a belief that Greece had a unique claim on the sympathy of the world, more than a thousand Philhellenes set out to fight for the cause. This meticulously researched and highly readable account of their aspirations and experiences has long been the standard account of the Philhellenic movement and essential reading for students of the Greek War of Independence, Byron and European Romanticism. Its relevance to more modern conflicts is also becoming increasingly appreciated.