A kaleidoscopic story of myth, Spiritualism, and the Victorian search for Utopia from one of the brightest and most original non-fiction writers at work today. In 1872 there was a bizarre eruption of religious mania in Hampshire's New Forest. Its leader was Mary Ann Girling, a Suffolk farmer's daughter who claimed to be the female Christ and whose sect, the Children of God, lived in imminent anticipation of the Millennium. It was rumoured that Mrs Girling mesmerised her supporters, literally hypnotising them to keep them in her power, other reports claimed that the sect danced naked, and murdered their illegitimate offspring in their Utopian home at 'New Forest Lodge.' Through Mary Ann's story and the spiritual vortex around her, Philip Hoare takes us deeper into the pagan heart of the New Forest. In the neighbouring village of Sway, an eccentric barrister, Andrew Peterson, conducted seances in which the spirit of Christopher Wren instructed Peterson to build a 300 foot concrete tower to alleviate local unemployment. Wren, although dead for two centuries, even issued Peterson with the exact plans for the foundations and the formula for the concrete. It rose like some spiritualist lighthouse towering over the trees, and looming over the Shaker encampment and Mrs Girling's Children of God. At the same time, on the other side of the forest, in the grand country house of the Cowper-Temples, further experiments into the realms of the Victorian uncanny were under way. William Cowper-Temple, a supporter of Mary Ann Girling, vegetarian, anti-blood sport activist and member of Parliament, had joined his wife Georgiana in her Spiritualist quest. A third pair of hands came to table, those of John Ruskin -- the great Victorian artist, scientist, poet and philosopher -- who sought the dead spirit of his beloved Rose La Touche. His explorations into the after-life would eventually send him insane. Through this unique biography of the New Forest Philip Hoare paints a strange, and little-known, portrait of Victorian England -- a fascinating story of disorder in an avowed age of reason.

England's Lost Eden : Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

Business & Money

Philip Hoare

Economics

Fourth Estate Ltd.

England's Lost Eden

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Harper-perennial

An extraordinary journey into the underwater world of the whale. Moby Dick is a book made mythic by its whale; but the reverse is also true. After Melville published his book in 1851, no one saw whales in quite the same way again. Melville created a modern myth out of an already legendary beast. But what is the true nature of the whale? Why does it fascinate us? All his life, Philip Hoare has been obsessed with these creatures, from the huge skeletons in London's Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves. Whales haunt him, as they seem to elide with dark fantasies of sea-serpents and other antediluvian monsters that swim in our collective unconscious. In 'Leviathan', he seeks to locate and identify that obsession. Why does the whale so vividly inhabit our imaginations? Is it a symbol of Edenic innocence in a time of threatened species and climate change? Or an older emblem of evil, the grotesque fish which swallowed Jonah? Travelling around the globe in search of the whale, Philip Hoare sheds light on our perennial fascination with the strange creatures of the sea, whose nature remains tantalizingly undiscovered.

Leviathan or, The Whale

Fourth Estate

HardCover. Pub Date :2012-12-31 Pages: 384 Language: English A startling new book. his most personal to date. from Philip Hoare. winner of the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for 'Leviathan' The sea surrounds us It gives.. us life. provides us with the air we breathe and the food we eat. It is ceaseless change and constant presence. It covers two-thirds of our planet. Yet caught up in our everyday lives. we barely notice it.In 'The Sea Inside '. Philip Hoare sets out to rediscover the sea. its islands. birds and beasts He begins on the south coast where he grew up. a place of almost monastic escape From there he travels to the other side of the world -.. the . Azores. Sri Lanka. New Zealand - in search of encounters with animals and people Navigating between human and natural history. he asks what these stories mean for us now.Along the way we meet an amazing cast; from scientists...

The Sea Inside

HarperCollins, UK

'Rich and strange from the tip of its title to its deep-sunk bones' Robert Macfarlane From the author of Leviathan, or, The Whale, comes a composite portrait of the subtle, beautiful, inspired and demented ways in which we have come to terms with our watery planet. In the third of his watery books, the author goes in pursuit of human and animal stories of the sea. Of people enchanted or driven to despair by the water, accompanied by whales and birds and seals - familiar spirits swimming and flying with the author on his meandering odyssey from suburbia into the unknown. Along the way, he encounters drowned poets and eccentric artists, modernist writers and era-defining performers, wild utopians and national heroes - famous or infamous, they are all surprisingly, and sometimes fatally, linked to the sea. Out of the storm-clouds of the twenty-first century and our restive time, these stories reach back into the past and forward into the future. This is a shape-shifting world that has never been certain, caught between the natural and unnatural, where the state between human and animal is blurred. Time, space, gender and species become as fluid as the sea. Here humans challenge their landbound lives through art or words or performance or myth, through the animal and the elemental. And here they are forever drawn back to the water, forever lost and found on the infinite sea.

RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

Science & Math

Nature & Ecology

HARPER/COLLINS

Risingtidefallingstar

The Whale

Biological Sciences

Ecco Press

In January 1918 the Imperialist newspaper made the startling claim that Britain was losing the war because the German secret service was blackmailing 47,000 sexual deviants in the British establishment. This account reveals how the ensuing libel trial drew Oscar Wildes friends into a posthumous battle for his reputation, and illuminates a twilight world of MPs and dancing girls, drug clubs in London and transvestites in the trenches.

Wilde's Last Stand

Military

Portico

Noel Coward

Biographies & Memoirs

Mandarin

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Books by Philip Hoare