The daughter of a wealthy railway magnate, Paula Power inherits De Stancy Castle, an ancient castle in need of modernization. She commissions George Somerset, a young architect, to undertake the work. Somerset falls in love with Paula but she, the Laodicean of the title, is torn between his admiration and that of Captain De Stancy, whose old-world romanticism contrasts with Somerset's forward-looking attitude. Paula's vacillation, however, is not only romantic. Her ambiguity regarding religion, politics and social progress is a reflection of the author's own. This new Penguin Classics edition...

The book begins with Matthew Arnold s Dover Beach and its withdrawing sea of faith as time and again Schad finds the figure of the Christian to be beached, a fish out of water a queer fish, in fact. This, then, is a book that is all at sea beginning with Charles Darwin s voyage to the extreme point of Christendom that was South America, and ending with James Joyce and Jacques Derrida in the same boat, the same ruined, but sea-going, boat that is the 20th-century Western Church. In between: Karl Marx is to be found in 1848 watching the waves of revolution withdraw in Berlin; Sigmund Freud...

In this book on Arthur Hugh Clough, John Schad celebrates Clough the anti-poet, a poet whose dedication to the strange world of continental thought makes him a most un-Victorian Victorian.

Someone called Jacques Derrida, someone called him on the phone, someone who was dead this was August 22nd 1979. A mystery, he thought; but it is a mystery that began more than ten years earlier, in 1968, when Derrida, a philosopher, visits Oxford and there, before the very eyes of the Philosophy Sub-Faculty, he dies, several times. Murder, he thought. And so I shall investigate, and begin with a sign that the philosopher says he left within a book from the thirteenth century, a strange fortune-telling book that he had found in the oldest part of Oxford s Bodleian Library. In the book are a...

Someone called Jacques Derrida, someone called him on the phone, someone who was dead this was August 22nd 1979. A mystery, he thought; but it is a mystery that began more than ten years earlier, in 1968, when Derrida, a philosopher, visits Oxford and there, before the very eyes of the Philosophy Sub-Faculty, he dies, several times. Murder, he thought. And so I shall investigate, and begin with a sign that the philosopher says he left within a book from the thirteenth century, a strange fortune-telling book that he had found in the oldest part of Oxford s Bodleian Library. In the book are a...

The book begins with Matthew Arnold s Dover Beach and its withdrawing sea of faith as time and again Schad finds the figure of the Christian to be beached, a fish out of water a queer fish, in fact. This, then, is a book that is all at sea beginning with Charles Darwin s voyage to the extreme point of Christendom that was South America, and ending with James Joyce and Jacques Derrida in the same boat, the same ruined, but sea-going, boat that is the 20th-century Western Church. In between: Karl Marx is to be found in 1848 watching the waves of revolution withdraw in Berlin; Sigmund Freud...

In this important study that begins with the claim that the fundamental idea governing the institution of the University is a will to freedom, author Thomas Docherty argues that the question of freedom lies at the heart of what is academic English at the beginning of the 21st century. Tracing a history of the modern European University from Vico onwards and including Hume, Rousseau, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Newman, Alain, Benda, and Jaspers, the author argues the academy s will to freedom is grounded in study of the eloquence that has shaped literate and humane values. He goes on to...

'Each century', wrote Charles Dickens ' is] more amazed by the century following it than by all the centuries before'. "Victorians in Theory" explores the startling conceit that nineteenth-century poetry is amazed by twentieth-century literary theory. In a daring and exciting departure from critical convention, Schad re-reads poststructuralist theory through Victorian poetry. Each chapter pairs a poet with a theorist: Robert Browning meets Jacques Derrida; Christina Rossetti encounters Luce Irigaray; Matthew Arnold is after Michel Foucault; Gerald Manley Hopkins dreams with Jacques Lacan; and...

Judge Baltasar Garzon achieved international prestige in 1998 when he pursued the perpetrators of crimes committed in Argentina against Spanish citizens and began proceedings for the arrest of the Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet. But when he transferred his attention to his Spanish homeland he was put on trial for opening an investigation into crimes committed by Francoists. As result he now (February 2012) finds himself on the point of being expelled from the judiciary. The Garzon case is neither so absurd nor so difficult to understand if the record of the Spanish judiciary is examined...