This illustrated history analyzes celluloid depictions of the IRA from the 1916 Easter Rising to the peace process of the 1990s. Topics include America's role in creating both the IRA and its cinematic image, the organization's brief association with the Nazis, and critical reception of IRA films in Ireland, Britain and the United States.

This book provides an original perspective on the West's most enduring social and cultural institution. The author covers all the vital themes contributing to the modern Christmas: its Anglo-German origins and the idea of the bourgeois Christmas expressing family virtues; the need for a touchstone with the past in an age of rapid expansion and thus the myth of Merrie England; the revival of English music: in short, all the elements making up the modern Christmas.

The role of Bomber Command in the Second World War is still shrouded in mystery. This book provides a new story of the campaign and is both a military history and an investigation as to how the modern image has come about. There have been hundreds of books about the RAF and Bomber Command ranging from highly researched histories, technical studies of the aircraft, to popular works; as well as countless films, television shows and newspaper reportage. Mark Connelly draws together all the strands to look at the image created by this outpouring. Reaching for the Stars shows why Bomber Command,...

Three generations of critics have commented on the parallels between George Orwell and his favorite novelist, George Gissing. -I am a great fan of his, - Orwell wrote in 1948, proclaiming -that England has produced very few better novelists.- This in-depth study reveals that Orwell drew heavily on the Gissing novels he admired in shaping his own. Gissing's "New Grub Street" and "The Odd Women" directly influenced Orwell's Depression-era novels "Keep the Aspidstra Flying" and "A Clergyman's Daughter." Even Orwell's most imaginative work, "Animal Farm," mirrors Gissing's own novel of a failed...