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This collection of 51 essays provides a history of amphibious landings that include European, Asian, and American operations. It describes in detail some of history's most significant amphibious assaults, as well as planned attacks that were never carried out.

Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716-1783) is the iconic figure at the head of the English landscape style, a tradition that has dominated landscape design in the western world. He was widely acclaimed for his genius in his own day and his influence on the culture of England has arguably been as great as that of Turner, Telford and Wordsworth. Yet, although Brown has had his biographers, his work has generated very little analysis. Brown was prolific; he has had a direct influence on half a million acres of England and Wales. The astonishing scale of his work means that he did not just transform the English countryside, but also our idea of what it is to be English and what England is. His work is everywhere, but goes largely unnoticed. His was such a naturalistic style that all his best work was mistaken for untouched nature. This has made it very difficult to see and understand. Visitors to Brown landscapes do not question the existence of the parkland he created and there has been little professional or academic analysis of his work. This book for the first time looks at the motivation behind Brown’s landscapes and questions their value and structure whilst at the same time placing him within the English landscape tradition. It aims primarily to make landscape legible, to show people where to stand, what to look at and how to see.

This book concerns the life and theatrical career of the great native-born English composer and musician of the eighteenth century, Thomas Augustine Arne (1710-1778), best known today as the composer of "Rule, Britannia." It will appeal to those interested in the mid-to-late eighteenth-century London and Dublin theatre, opera, and music scenes.

How was large-scale music directed or conducted in Britain before baton conducting took hold in the 1830s?

The life of this actor, manager, play­wright, and eighteenth-century gentle­man is here refracted through the volu­rninous correspondence and analyses of roles, plays, and performances in this, no doubt final, biography of David Garrick. As the direct result of modern scholar­ship accessible only since the 1960s, it is now possible to appraise fully the life of this remarkable person who was born in Lichfield 19February 1717, a child­hood friend of Samuel Johnson, who be­came the greatest English theatrical lu­minary who ever lived, and who when he died 20 January 1779was mourned by the nation and eulogized by Dr. Johnson as one whose death "eclipsed the gaiety of nations." For twenty-nine years (1747-1776) Garrick managed Drury Lane theatre, caring passionately for its well-being. His own acting set the pace for the per­formances, his discipline carried it on, and his theatrical innovations attracted the audiences on which the lives, hopes, and families of some 140actors, actress­es, singers, dancers, and others depend­ed. In addition, he wrote, adapted, or altered some 49 plays and wrote nearly 100 prologues. What emerges from this big, new critical biography is a fully drawn por­trait of an eighteenth-century gentleman, with a wide range of acquaintances, elegant socially, morally, and personal­ly, and an engaging conversationalist with and respecter of women of mark and with his closest friends. He was also, as the evidence now shows, the solid link with his own age and the great dramatic artists of the past, from the Restoration playwrights to Massinger, Jonson, Shakespeare, and early English dram­atists.

The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give, For we that live to please, must please to live. —Samuel Johnson, 1747 Democratic ferment, responsible for political explosions in the seventeenth century and expanded power in the eighteenth, affected all phases of English life. The theatre reflected these forces in the content of the plays of the period and in an increased awareness among playgoers that the theatre "must please to live." Drawing from a wealth of amusing and informative contemporary accounts, Leo Hughes presents abundant evidence that the theatre-going public proved zealous, and sometimes even unruly, in asserting its role and rights. He describes numerous species of individual pest—the box-lobby saunterers, the vizard masks (ladies of uncertain virtue), the catcallers, and the weeping sentimentalists. Protest demonstrations of various interest groups, such as footmen asserting their rights to sit in the upper gallery, reflect the behavior of the audience as a whole—an audience that Alexander Pope described as "the manyheaded monster of the pit." Hughes analyzes the changes in the audience's taste through the long span from Dryden's day to Sheridan's. He illustrates the decline in taste from the sophisticated, if bawdy, comedy of the Restoration Period to the sentimentalism and empty show of later decades. He attributes the increased emphasis on sentiment and spectacle to audience influence and describes the effects of audience demands on managers, playwrights, and players. He describes in detail the mixed assembly that frequented the theatre during this period and the greatly enlarged theatres that were built to accommodate it. Hughes concludes that it was the English people's basic love of liberty that allowed them to accept audience disruptions considered intolerable by foreign visitors and that the drama's patrons greatly influenced the quality of theatrical production during this long period.