This innovative book examines the careers of three performers whose professional lives together spanned the period from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, from the heyday of neoclassicism to the coming of realism. While the individual essays concentrate on the specific work of each actress, a wide-ranging introduction relates their collective achievement to social and cultural change. Vivid reconstructions of their interpretations and unique accounts of theatrical conditions place the art of three very different but pivotal figures in context.

Michael Booth wants to know how to cook. So, he burns his cookery books and, together with his young family, heads for a new life in Paris to enrol at the world's most famous cooking school, Le Cordon Bleu. Meanwhile, he and his family try to adjust to the challenges of life in Paris.

Cognitive theory provides a wealth of new ideas that illuminate Shakespeare, even as he illuminates them, and the theory of blending, or conceptual integration, strikingly corroborates and amplifies both classic and current insights of literary criticism.