With his characteristic enthusiasm and erudition, Peter Ackroyd follows his acclaimed London: A Biography with an inspired look into the heart and the history of the English imagination. To tell the story of its evolution, Ackroyd ranges across literature and painting, philosophy and science, architecture and music, from Anglo-Saxon times to the twentieth-century. Considering what is most English about artists as diverse as Chaucer, William Hogarth, Benjamin Britten and Viriginia Woolf, Ackroyd identifies a host of sometimes contradictory elements: pragmatism and whimsy, blood and gore, a passion for the past, a delight in eccentricity, and much more. A brilliant, engaging and often surprising narrative, Albion reveals the manifold nature of English genius.

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

' ''Poet, young and busy, seeks cheap spacious rooms somewhere. Excellent references available . . .'' so reads a self-penned ad, a very early entry from Pete Doherty's journals. From the early books a fascinating and very entertaining picture emerges of the young poet, broke in London, serving popcorn at the Prince Charles Cinema, ruminating on Britpop, listening to Scott Walker, but dreaming of creating a band infused with 'the spirit of Albion'. The later books reflect Pete's rise to fame, his changing world, and are full of artwork, photographs, notes and thoughts. It is intimate, honest stuff, very readable and very funny in places; pretty dark in others. All in all it's the work of a serious artist, a complete antidote to most things written about Doherty. These twenty-odd books - edited and condensed into one volume - are filled with poems, drawings, personal reflections, lyrics and collages, and is a powerfully compelling collection.

A searing, satirical portrait of a divided England in a connected age - a 1984 for our times.

The days of magic and adventure are fading away, giving way to the age of industry and science. As the aged last Hero sits upon the throne of Albion, two friends-the privileged Thomas and his loyal servant, John- set out for the East in search of a legendary beast: the vicious, rarely-seen balverine. But their desire for adventure may be their ultimate undoing-because their quarry has just found them...

A chronicle of violent fury and compassion, written when Surrealism was still vigorous and doing battle with psychotic "reality," The Journal of Albion Moonlight is the American monument to engagement.

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Although the invasion had achieved its objectives and placed the Germans in an excellent position for the resumption of warfare in the spring, within three weeks of the operation, the Bolsheviks took power in Russia (November 7, 1917) and Albion faded into obscurity as the war in the East came to a slow end.

On the day that Aldair found that his world had abruptly turned upside down, his history-changing quest began. And he did not even then know that it was to be a quest. Aldair had been a true acolyte of the Faith when it happened. And then he found himself an accursed outcast, the one against whom all hands were raised. His only friends were those who had been his most vicious enemies. His only course led to the lands of horror. And his final goal had to be that most forbidden of all lands, the dwelling place of the dead, that island of total terror known as Albion. Neal Barrett's novel is an adventure in an unexpected futurity equal in inventive surprises to his highly praised Stress Pattern.

A woman stands at the edge of a cliff, looking out to sea and the horizon. Dancers welcome the sun in a circle of stones. A dowsing road turns without warning. A church bell. Footsteps. Old Weird Albion is America writer Justin Hopper's dark love song to the English South; a poetic essay interrogating the high, haunted landscape of the South Downs Way; the memories, myths and forgotten histories from Winchester to Beachy Head. When someone disappears, when someone leaps from a cliff and is all-but-erased from memory, what traces might we find in the crumbling chalk of the cliff face; in the wind that buffets the edge of this Albion? A skewed alternative to Bill Bryson, Hopper casts himself as the outsider as he wanders the English countryside in pursuit of mystical encounters. His journey sees him joining New Age eccentrics and accidental visionaries on the hunt for crop circles and druidic stones, discussing the power of nature with ecotherapists and pagans, tracing the ruins of abandoned settlements and walking the streets of eerie suburbs. Through a startling revelation of his own family history, Hopper turns part detective, part memoirist, tracking the footsteps of his grandfather's first wife, Doris; piecing together her forgotten history.