This is the first volume in any language that collects Hannah Arendt's remarkable series of essays and notes on literary figures and cultural questions.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) spent the last fourteen years of his life writing "la recherche du temps perdu." Moncrieff's translation strives to capture the extraordinary blend of muscular analysis with poetic reverie that typifies Proust's style.

“This is a truly character-driven novel that explores how people define themselves, the creation of family and home, and the importance of memory and language. . . . Fans of historical epics won’t be able to put this book down.”—Historical Novel Society “Emotionally satisfying. . . . A remarkable character portrait.”—Publishers Weekly The author of The Secret Women tells the story of a brave and enduring woman as indomitable as Ernest Gaines’ legendary Miss Jane Pittman, in a breathtaking novel that combines the epic romance and adventure of Outlander, the sweeping drama of Roots, and the haunting historical power of Barracoon. Things Past Telling is a remarkable historical epic that charts one unforgettable woman’s journey across an ocean of years as vast as the Atlantic that will forever separate her from her homeland. Born in West Africa in the mid-eighteenth century, Maryam Prescilla Grace—a.k.a “Momma Grace” will live a long, wondrous life marked by hardship, oppression, opportunity, and love. Though she will be “gifted” various names, her birth name is known to her alone. Over the course of 100-plus years, she survives capture, enslavement by several property owners, the Atlantic crossing when she is only eleven years of age, and a brief stint as a pirate’s ward, acting as both a spy and a translator. Maryam learns midwifery from a Caribbean-born wise woman, whose “craft” combines curated techniques and medicines from African, Indigenous, and European women. Those midwifery skills allow her to sometimes transcend the racial and class barriers of her enslavement, as she walks the razor’s edge trying to balance the lives and health of her own people with the cruel economic mandates of the slave holders, who view infants born in bondage not as flesh-and-blood children but as investment property. Throughout her triumphant and tumultuous life Maryam gains and loses her homeland, her family, her culture, her husband, her lovers, and her children. Yet as the decades pass, this tenacious woman never loses her sense of self. Inspired by a 112-year-old woman the author discovered in an 1870 U.S. Federal census report for Ohio, loosely based on the author’s real-life female ancestors, spanning more than a hundred years, from the mid-eighteen-century to the end of America’s Civil War, and spanning across the globe, from what is now southern Nigeria to the islands of the Caribbean to North America and the land bordering the Ohio River, Things Past Telling is a breathtaking story of a past that lives on in all of us, and a life that encompasses the best—and worst—of our humanity.

Few subjects have aroused more controversy in recent years than that of empire, and that of the British Empire in particular. Few other subjects are of greater importance to today’s world. How the British Empire was created and maintained, and the impact it had on both the colonised and the colonisers, have been the source of long-running and heated debates amongst historians, politicians and in the media. For several decades it has been analysed from numerous different perspectives, providing a wide range of differing interpretations. Over recent years, new studies have extended the scope of imperial history into previously ignored fields that have significantly added to our understanding. Imperial history can, therefore, no longer be regarded as the exclusive realm of the political historian, or the reserve of an essentially British approach. The British Empire was complex. Each of the far-flung components that made it up had its own particularities. At various times and in various places it took on different forms and had different meanings. It affected people across the globe in a multitude of ways. This inevitably produces a multi-facetted picture. The large number of actors, in Britain and in the colonised world, who played a part in its history adds to this impression. As a consequence, it is difficult to come up with one, all-encompassing, history of the British Empire. All these aspects of the British Empire are apparent in the story of how it ended. What precisely decolonisation was, how it came about, and what it meant for the British and for those who gained their independence, varied considerably from one part of the Empire to another, and from one period to another. How these changes came about, how independence was won across the colonial world, and how it was resisted, are dealt with here across a selection of different case studies. Understanding how the British Empire collapsed tells us a great deal about what this Empire was and about its legacy in today’s world.

Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World, first published in 1720 and considered a sequel to The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, is a collection of essays written in the voice of the Crusoe character. Expressing Defoe’s thoughts about many moral questions of the day, the narrator takes up isolation, poverty, religious liberty, and epistemology. Defoe also used this volume to revive his interest in poetry, not the satiric poetry of the early eighteenth century, but the more inspirational verse that appeared in some of his later works. Serious Reflections also includes an imaginative flight in which Crusoe wanders among the planets, a return to the moon voyage impulse of Defoe’s 1705 work The Consolidator. Illuminating the ideas and philosophy of this most influential of English novelists, it is invaluable for any student of the period.

Focusing on the Cold War and the post-Cold War eras, R. Gerald Hughes explores the continuing influence of Appeasement on British foreign policy and re-evaluates the relationship between British society and Appeasement, both as historical memory and as a foreign policy process. The Postwar Legacy of Appeasement explores the reaction of British policy makers to the legacies of the era of Appeasement, the memory of Appeasement in public opinion and the media and the use of Appeasement as a motif in political debate regarding threats faced by Britain in the post-war era. Using many previously unpublished archival sources, this book clearly demonstrates that many of the core British beliefs and cultural norms that had underpinned the Chamberlainite Appeasement of the 1930s persisted in the postwar period.