This biography of Malcolm Muggeridge traces the varied life of one of the most brilliant and controversial men of the twentieth century. The author, Ian Hunter, was given full access to all of Muggeridge's unpublished material, letters, and diaries. The result is an objective, well-researched, and honest account that is sometimes at variance with Muggeridge's own recollection of events. Ian Hunter captures the humor, the intellect, the rawness of perception, the abandoned honesty of a man engaged in knowing himself, his world, and his God. Malcolm Muggeridge was not merely a "vendor of words," as he invariably described himself, but was also a celebrated author, broadcaster, lecturer, debater, traveller, journalist and television personality, a one-time ardent admirer of the Soviet system, a World War II intelligence agent, and a former agnostic turned committed Christian. To many people, however, Malcolm Muggeridge was admired above all for his superb use of the English language. It is to the credit of Ian Hunter that after reading this biography one has a clearer understanding of an extraordinary man. Dr. Ian Hunter is professor emeritus at the University of Western Ontario. His articles and reviews have appeared in many Canadian and American poublications. He edited two collections of Muggeridge's writings: Things Past and The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge; he also wrote a biography of Muggeridge's friend, Hesketh Pearson (Nothing to Repent: The Life of Heskerth Pearson).

This award-winning foreign correspondent’s vivid account of Central Asia’s recent history “reads like a novel but is the stuff of hard-won journalism” (Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan). Here are the stories of two revolutions, a massacre of unarmed civilians, a civil war, a drug-smuggling highway, brazen corruption schemes, contract hits, and larger-than-life characters who may be villains, heroes, or possibly both. Restless Valley is a gripping, contemporary chronicle of Central Asia from a veteran journalist with extensive experience in the region. Both Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan have struggled with the challenges of post-Soviet, independent statehood, and both became entangled in America’s Afghan campaign when the United States built military bases within their borders. Meanwhile, the region was becoming a key smuggling hub for Afghanistan’s booming heroin trade. Through the eyes of local participants—the powerful and the powerless—Shishkin reconstructs how Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan have ricocheted between extreme repression and democratic strivings; how alliances with the United States and Russia have brought mixed blessings; and how Stalin’s legacy of ethnic gerrymandering continues to incite conflict today. “The weird, the strange, the corrupt, and the grand are all evident . . . [Shishkin] relentlessly pursues and then tells the stories of the most corrupt and powerful and also the most sincere and admirable characters who inhabit these mountains.” —Ahmed Rashid, The New York Review of Books

What Kind of a Thing Is a Middle English Lyric? considers issues pertaining to a corpus of several hundred short poems written in Middle English between the twelfth and early fifteenth centuries. The chapters draw on perspectives from varied disciplines, including literary criticism, musicology, art history, and cognitive science. Since the early 1900s, the poems have been categorized as “lyrics,” the term now used for most kinds of short poetry, yet neither the difficulties nor the promise of this treatment have received enough attention. In one way, the book argues, considering these poems to be lyrics obscures much of what is interesting about them. Since the nineteenth century, lyrics have been thought of as subjective and best read without reference to cultural context, yet nonetheless they are taken to form a distinct literary tradition. Since Middle English short poems are often communal and usually spoken, sung, and/or danced, this lyric template is not a good fit. In another way, however, the very differences between these poems and the later ones on which current debates about the lyric still focus suggest they have much to offer those debates, and vice versa. As its title suggests, this book thus goes back to the basics, asking fundamental questions about what these poems are, how they function formally and culturally, how they are (and are not) related to other bodies of short poetry, and how they might illuminate and be illuminated by contemporary lyric scholarship. Eleven chapters by medievalists and two responses by modernists, all in careful conversation with one another, reflect on these questions and suggest very different answers. The editors’ introduction synthesizes these answers by suggesting that these poems can most usefully be read as a kind of “play,” in several senses of that word. The book ends with eight “new Middle English lyrics” by seven contemporary poets.

In this collection, her second, Hilary Davies demonstrates again the ferocity of imagination that characterised her first, The Shanghai Owner of the Bonsai Shop (1991). Her interrogations of faith and friendship bring to life, in a language strikingly rooted in the physical world, spiritual concerns that span centuries. There is a moral seriousness in these poems which confronts doubt and fear, and survival itself, asserting at all times an unsentimental belief in the redemptive power of the human capacity to love. This is particularly so in the two main sequences, which recreate the lives of the cave dwellers in prehistoric France, and the doomed love affair of Abelard and H�loise.

In this volume, Fein presents highly emotional Middle English lyrics to a new audience of students and teachers of the Middle Ages. These Middle English poems, drawn widely from two hundred years of literary tradition, lead readers in devotion to God by invoking an emotional response to God's love. In this meditative tradition, readers would be brought closer to intellectually understanding God through their affective responses. With its copious footnotes, introductions, and glosses, this volume is ideal for classes on medieval spirituality and English lyrical poetry alike.