The author deals with the supposed crisis many in England feel they are approaching as the prospect increases of Scotland's choosing to secede from the Union. He argues that rather than a devastating blow, it would allow England to concentrate on their own needs, prosperity and future.

Nor Shall My Sword: Reinvention of England

Politics & Social Sciences

SIMON HEFFER

Politics & Government

Weidenfeld&Nicolson

Shelf wear to dust jacket, page edges tanned. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

Vaughan Williams

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Northeastern Univ. Press

Written with full access to all Powell's public and private papers, this biography details Powell's Midlands childhood, his appointment at the age of 25 as Professor of Greek at the University of Adelaide, his writing of poetry, his love for an Irish woman and his Rivers of Blood speech.

Like the Roman: the life of Enoch Powell

Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell

History

Europe

Faber&Faber

A tweedy purveyor of folklore; too many larks ascending and too much Linden Lea: no composer's work has ever been more cruelly stereotyped than that of Ralph Vaughan Williams. The truth could hardly have been more different: that folksy feel masked the highest sophistication, that countrified air the most audacious experimentation. If, unlike his Germanizing contemporary Elgar, Vaughan Williams did indeed open the way to a distinctively English Music, his was an Englishness which owed nothing to narrow-mindedness or lack of artistic enterprise.   Fifty years after his death in 1958, Vaughan Williams' reputation is greater than ever before and there is a resurgence of interest in his music. Re-issued to coincide with this anniversary, Simon Heffer's perceptive book lends weight to the increasingly compelling case for Vaughan Williams' recognition as the most important English composer of the twentieth century.   'A vivid and appealing picture of an irresistibly likeable figure ... I enjoyed this little book enormously.' Spectator  'An affectionate, accurate and shrewd account of Vaughan Williams' life ... the author's astute commentary on it betokens close and knowledgeable acquaintance.' Sunday Telegraph

Arts & Photography

Music

In the first years of the twentieth century, Ralph Vaughan Williams led an English musical renaissance. Hubert Parry and Edward Elgar, the fathers of English music in the nineteenth century, took their lead from the German masters. Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst took theirs, exceptionally, from the neglected sources of folk song. The result was a distinctive English voice that changed the culture of a nation. After a long struggle to develop his talents, Vaughan Williams established himself as a composer whose music, through his promotion of folk song and editorship of the English Hymnal, made him a household name and caused his work - most famously The Lark Ascending, Greensleeves, the Tallis Fantasia and nine outstanding symphonies - to be loved by generations in Britain and around the world.

Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )

50 speeches from every period of British history from the medieval era to the present and a fascinating dip-in history title that will both inspire readers and give them a greater understanding of British history.

The speechmakers are: King Henry V; Queen Elizabeth I; King Charles I; Oliver Cromwell; Earl of Shelburne; Edmund Burke (3); Charles James Fox (2); William Pitt (2); Warren Hastings; William Wilberforce; R.B. Sheridan; Robert Peel; Charles Grey; Thomas Carlyle; Lord Palmerston; John Bright (2); Benjamin Disraeli; William Gladstone; James Campbell-Bannerman; F.E. Smith; David Lloyd George (2); Stanley Baldwin; King Edward VIII; King George VI; Winston Churchill (4); Aneurin Bevan; Harold Macmillan (2); Hugh Gaitskell (2); Nigel Birch; Harold Wilson; Enoch Powell (2); Michael Foot; Margaret Thatcher (2); Neil Kinnock; Geoffrey Howe; Charles Spencer; Tony Blair.

Great British Speeches. A Stirring Anthology Of Speeches From Every Period Of British History

Quercus

Simon Heffer's new book forms an ambitious exploration of the making of the Victorian age and the Victorian mind. Britain in the 1840s was a country wracked by poverty, unrest and uncertainty, where there were attempts to assassinate the Queen and her prime minister, and the ruling class lived in fear of riot and revolution. By the 1880s it was a confident nation of progress and prosperity, transformed not just by industrialisation but by new attitudes to politics, education, women and the working class. That it should have changed so radically was very largely the work of an astonishingly dynamic and high-minded group of people - politicians and philanthropists, writers and thinkers - who in a matter of decades fundamentally remade the country, its institutions and its mindset, and laid the foundations for modern society. Simon Heffer's first major new book since the success of Strictly English explores this process of transformation, and will delight readers of similar titles such as A. N. Wilson's The Victorians. It traces the evolution of British democracy and shows how early laissez-faire attitudes to the lot of the less fortunate turned into campaigns to improve their lives and prospects. It analyses the birth of new attitudes to education, religion and science. And it shows how even such aesthetic issues as taste in architecture were swept in to broader debates about the direction that the country should take. In the process, Simon Heffer looks at the lives and deeds of major politicians, from the devout and principled Gladstone to the unscrupulous Disraeli; at the intellectual arguments that raged among writers and thinkers such as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, and Samuel Butler; and at the 'great projects' of the age, from the Great Exhibition to the Albert Memorial. Drawing heavily on previously unpublished documents, he offers a superbly nuanced insight into life in an extraordinary era, populated by extraordinary people - and how our forebears' pursuit of perfection gave birth to modern Britain.

High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain

Random House Books

From Macaulay in the 19th century to Fukuyama in the late 20th, historians have often been lulled into thinking that things can only get better. Such belief in progress, argues leading political commentator Simon Heffer, may be typical of times of plenty, but it ignores a less palatable truth: that, since the beginnings of recorded history, the major events in international relations can be attributed to a single cause, the desire by rulers to assert or protect their power. Taking a panoramic view from the days of Thucydides up to the present, Heffer offers a fourfold analysis of the motive forces behind the pursuit of power: land, wealth, God and minds. If we understand these forces, he contends, we can more clearly understand why history is destined to repeat itself.

A Short History of Power [May 31, 2012] Heffer, Simon

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Notting Hill Editions

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by SIMON HEFFER. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by SIMON HEFFER

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by SIMON HEFFER. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Nor Shall My Sword: Reinvention of England

Vaughan Williams

Like the Roman: the life of Enoch Powell

Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell

Vaughan Williams

Vaughan Williams

Great British Speeches. A Stirring Anthology Of Speeches From Every Period Of British History

High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain

A Short History of Power [May 31, 2012] Heffer, Simon