The Venusberg of the title story is, of course, Bangkok and environs, its Tannhauser an ex-GI who discovers it’s best not to come back. As in Occidental Adam, Oriental Eve, Cadet’s principal theme is the meeting of two cultures, and in this and the other ten stories, his protagonists are seen at frightening, baffling, bizarre and occasionally extremely funny moments in those meetings. A former volunteer remembers the few minutes’ up-country violence that changed his life – an expatriate painter follows the regressive course of the ‘primrose path’ through Bangkok’s night-clubs – a dying tycoon sees heaven and hell in the familiar metropolitan setting – a resourceful country girl discovers a remarkable if chilling remedy for the poverty oppressing her – while down in Pataya, when the US Navy pays a visit, a no-less-resourceful city lady averts potential psycho-nuclear disaster…or so she tells us. John Cadet is well-qualified to write of East and Southeast Asia. He has made his home there, teaching and engaging in journalism, as well as researching Thai literature, since 1961. The shorter of his stories have appeared in newspapers and magazines throughout the region and beyond, mostly under the pen-name Charles Browne. The short stories, along with a number of his longer works, are now appearing on the Internet. His study of the Thai epic, The Ramakien, in multiple editions, was published world-wide by Kodansha International. “Cadet has something worthwhile to say. (his) characters – from lissome students to diplomatic mediocrities = embody human frailties which make them…real. Venusberg Revisited … is thoroughly recommended and deserves to be widely read.” (Bangkok Post Newspaper)

One of Australia’s leading travel authors, John Borthwick has gathered here the best of his years of Thailand adventures, plus a swag of vivid tales from his wanderings in India, Xinjiang, the Himalayas, Borneo, Bali, Laos, Vietnam and the Philippines.

List of Illustrations Preface Introduction: Sites of Desire/Economies of Pleasure in Asia and the PacificLenore Manderson, Margaret Jolly. Ch. 1: Educating Desire in Colonial Southeast Asia: Foucault, Freud and Imperial Sexualities Ann Staler Ch. 2: Contested Images and Common Strategies: Early Colonial Sexual Politics in the Massim Adam Reed Ch. 3: Gaze and Grasp: Plantations, Desires, Indentured Indians, and Colonial Law in Fiji John D. Kelly Ch. 4: From Point Venus to Bali Ha'i: Eroticism and Exoticism in Representations of the Pacific Margaret Jolly Ch. 5: Parables of Imperialism and Fantasies of the Exotic: Western Representations and Thailand - Place and Sex Lenore Manderson Ch. 6: Primal Dream: Masculinism, Sin and Salvation in Thailand's Sex Trade Annette Hamilton Ch. 7: Kathoey > Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Dropping him in the middle of everything from three-day tribal weddings, elephant polo follies and pristine islands to Pattaya’s bacchanalian nightlife, Thailand has kept John and his pen constantly on the move.

The author of the award-winning Matisse: A Life gives us the definitive biography of writer Anthony Powell--and takes us deep into the heart of twentieth-century London's literary life. Insightful, lively, and enthralling, this biography is as much a brilliant tapestry of a seminal era in London’s literary life as it is a revelation of an iconic literary figure. Best known for his twelve-volume comic masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time, the prolific writer and critic Anthony Powell (1905–2000) kept company between the two world wars with rowdy, hard-up writers and painters—and painters’ models—in the London where Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis loomed large. He counted Evelyn Waugh and Henry Green among his lifelong friends, and his circle included the Sitwells, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Philip Larkin, and Kingsley Amis. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, Hilary Spurling—herself a longtime friend of Powell’s as well as an award-winning biographer—has produced a fresh and powerful portrait of the man and his times.

Observations of aspects of Thailand encountered during the author's stay there. Includes description of a monk's ordination, Shan and Karen rebels, sacrifices to a local guardian deity, etc.

These lively, fascinating stories by Gwyn Thomas are set in 'Meadow Prospect' - a typical South Wales valleys town during the 20's and 30's. An otherwise bleak scenario of mass unemployment, poverty, ill-health, and rough prospects, is transformed by Thomas into these compassionate and often hilarious tales full of the energy, humour and resilience of the Welsh 'Voters' coping with hard times. In stories like 'The Face Of Our Jokes', Thomas records some of the hazards of life in 'Meadow Prospect'. Walls were thin and life was loud. There were no secrets. Anybody found minding his own business was denounced as a freak or watched by the police. One of the reasons for the birth of our great choral tradition was that the people in the ten houses to either side of you could hear exactly what you were saying, and having a group of people singing around you was the only way of ensuring a private conversation.

Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.

"Curious Myths of the Middle Ages" is an extremely interesting 19th-century analysis of a handful of medieval legends and beliefs. Each chapter retells a myth and then reviews similar myths from various cultures to track their origins. In this book, a reader can find fantastic stories of the courts of pagan goddesses hidden inside mountains, men condemned to perpetual wandering without the welcome rest of death, and the continued terrestrial existence.