With friends gathered around, the travelling minstrel Valdevo Baudelaire shares some of his most adventurous tales, tales of gallantry, great courage, strife, and woe, of tricks and mischief, heroes and villains, and light and darkness. Dragons, fairies, humans, dwarves, and elves alike come together to fight the deadly, demonic army of a dark lord, while kings contest for rule, powerful wizards help those in need, magical swords empower the brave, and knights vie for love and honour. Full of wisdom and fun, this collection of short stories will bring readers into a high fantasy world of epic portions. So, embrace your mystical side and let your imagination wander as you kickback and enjoy reading The Tales of Rithanon.

With friends gathered around, the travelling minstrel Valdevo Baudelaire shares some of his most adventurous tales, tales of gallantry, great courage, strife, and woe, of tricks and mischief, heroes and villains, and light and darkness. Dragons, fairies, humans, dwarves, and elves alike come together to fight the deadly, demonic army of a dark lord, while kings contest for rule, powerful wizards help those in need, magical swords empower the brave, and knights vie for love and honour. Full of wisdom and fun, this collection of short stories will bring readers into a high fantasy world of epic portions. So, embrace your mystical side and let your imagination wander as you kickback and enjoy reading The Tales of Rithanon.

Political correctness is the antithesis of education. Education is about opening the mind and encouraging thought and that will sometimes include ideas which might be characterised as dangerous. Notions of political correctness are about corralling thought and banishing ideas which don't fit prevailing prejudices and ideologies. Political correctness has no place in beneficial education. -- Alan Jones - Radio and TV commentator and journalist.

This book is a major new study - dealing with notions of film music as a device that desires to control its audience, using a most powerful thing: emotion. The author emphasises the manipulative and ephemeral character of film music dealing not only with traditional orchestral film music, but also looks at film music's colonisation of television, and discusses pop music in relation to films, and the historical dimensions to ability to possess audiences that have so many important cultural and aesthetic effects. It challenges the dominant but limited conception of film music as restricted to film by looking at its use in television and influence in the world of pop music and the traditional restriction of analysis to 'valued' film music, either from 'name' composers' or from the 'golden era' of Classical Hollywood. Focusing on areas as diverse as horror, pop music in film, ethnic signposting, television drama and the soundtrack without a film- this is an original study which expands the range of writing on the subject.

Alan Dundes, in this casebook of an anti-Semitic legend, demonstrates the power of folklore to influence thought and history. According to the blood libel legend, Jews murdered Christian infants to obtain blood to make matzah. Dundes has gathered here the work of leading scholars who examine the varied sources and elaborations of the legend. Collectively, their essays constitute a forceful statement against this false accusation. The legend is traced from the murder of William of Norwich in 1144, one of the first reported cases of ritualized murder attributed to Jews, through nineteenth-century Egyptian reports, Spanish examples, Catholic periodicals, modern English instances, and twentieth-century American cases. The essays deal not only with historical cases and surveys of blood libel in different locales, but also with literary renditions of the legend, including the ballad “Sir Hugh, or, the Jew’s Daughter” and Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale.” These case studies provide a comprehensive view of the complex nature of the blood libel legend. The concluding section of the volume includes an analysis of the legend that focuses on Christian misunderstanding of the Jewish feast of Purim and the child abuse component of the legend and that attempts to bring psychoanalytic theory to bear on the content of the blood libel legend. The final essay by Alan Dundes takes a distinctly folkloristic approach, examining the legend as part of the belief system that Christians developed about Jews. This study of the blood libel legend will interest folklorists, scholars of Catholicism and Judaism, and many general readers, for it is both the literature and the history of anti-Semitism.

Adolphe Quetelet was an influential astronomer and statistician whose controversial work inspired heated debate in European and American intellectual circles. In creating a science designed to explain the "average man," he helped contribute to the idea of normal, most enduringly in his creation of the Quetelet Index, which came to be known as the Body Mass Index. Kevin Donnelly presents the first scholarly biography of Quetelet, exploring his contribution to quantitative reasoning, his place in nineteenth-century intellectual history, and his profound influence on the modern idea of average.

In this book the authors argue that cancel culture and political correctness are destroying free speech and Western civilisation's institutions and way of life. A topical and informative anthology exploring the origins and impact of cancel culture and political correctness on Western societies.

Engages with rock and pop music's use in films both on an aesthetic and industrial level, embracing historical context and close analysis.

Bringing together some of the most influential international scholars on the subject, this anthology provides a detailed, diverse and accessible perspective on music in the cinema.