This book, by one of the foremost living historians of seventeenth-century England, is a wholesale revision of his classic Authority and Conflict, England 1603-1658 (1986). Hirst has drawn on a decade of research that has appeared since the original book to produce a wholly fresh work. Centered around ambiguities of community in early modern England, the text enlivens debates over revisionism, puritanism, the church, and witchcraft while at the same time making sense of the complexities of crisis and continuity

This detailed study evaluates the particular qualities which typify Strehler's work: the lyrical realism which has become the hallmark of his mature style and his gift of interpretation and production.

The classic and controversial account of the origins of the Middle East conflict returns to print More than a decade before Israel's New Historians revolutionized the study of Israeli history, English journalist David Hirst wrote The Gun and the Olive Branch, a classic, myth-breaking general history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hirst, former Middle East correspondent of the Guardian, traces the origins of the terrible conflict back to the 1880s to show how Arab violence, although often cruel and fanatical, is a response to the challenge of repeated aggression. The Gun and the Olive...

The analysis of acousmatic music has traditionally been very difficult since there is no score to freeze the music in time. Analysis relies heavily on the act of concentrated listening. Since aural perception is so crucial to the analysis of acousmatic music, this book poses the questions:
Can a framework for the analysis of acousmatic music be derived from cognition theories, research on the auditory perception of everyday environmental sounds, and studies into the perception of Western tonal music? If so, what are the frameworks attributes?
From experimental data documented in the...

A definitive history of Lebanon, from one of the region's most celebrated and controversial journalists

O Beloved offers a unique insight into a soldier's experience of war through this collection of letters home to his wife, lavishly illustrated with over a hundred photographs and maps. Dr. David Hirst was a front-line combat surgeon who saw action in some of the fiercest battles of World War II, at Kasserine Pass and Hill 609 in North Africa and Cassino and Anzio in Italy. Despite that, these annotated letters attempt to mask the brutality and horror with everyday life in the field to keep from alarming those at home. Eventually, however, as the war grinds on, the letters darken. Dr. Hirst's...