Showing results by publisher "Bloomsbury Publishing Plc" in European

From Pickwick to Scrooge, Copperfield to Twist, how did Dickens find the perfect names for his characters? What was Dickens' favourite way of killing his characters? When is a Dickens character most likely to see a ghost? Why is Dickens’ trickery only fully realised when his novels are read aloud? In 13 entertaining and wonderfully insightful essays, John Mullan explores the literary machinations of Dickens’ eccentric genius, from his delight in clichés to his rendering of smells and his outrageous use of coincidences.

Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books - selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude - have been described as ‘virtuoso performances’ and ‘small masterpieces'. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche.

An urgent and unforgettable collection of stories, Show Them a Good Time explores types - men and women, their assigned roles and meanings - in modern society. A young, broke Irish woman narrates her relationship with a successful comedian in New York; two hapless university students take to the stage in a bid to assert their autonomy; a school teacher makes her way through a series of dead-end dates, gamely searching for love or distraction as the world teeters towards ruin.

The year 2021 marks the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri. His, like ours, was a world of moral uncertainty and political violence, all of which made not only for the agony of exile but for an ever deeper meditation on the nature of human happiness. In Why Dante Matters, John Took offers - by way of three of Dante’s works in particular - an account, not merely of Dante’s development as a poet and philosopher, but of his continuing presence to us as a guide to man’s wellbeing as man.

Polarbear is one of the most influential poets of his generation. The work collected here is the work that made his name. These poems have racked up hundreds of thousands of views online, lodging themselves in the hearts and minds of readers and audiences alike. His particular gift is for the many kinds of music a line can contain. He marries the intricate, compulsive, rhyming strategies of rap with the shanachie's gift for telling a story and the saxophonist's flair for bending the possibilities of sound.