Kirjahaku

The Description for this book, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth, will be forthcoming.

The Satan of "Paradise Lost" has fascinated generations of readers. This book attempts to explain how and why Milton's Satan is so seductive. It reasserts the importance of Satan against those who would minimize the poem's sympathy for the devil and thereby make Milton orthodox. Neil Forsyth argues that William Blake got it right when he called Milton a true poet because he was "of the Devils party" even though he set out "to justify the ways of God to men". In seeking to learn why Satan is so alluring, Forsyth ranges over diverse topics - from the origins of evil and the relevance of witchcraft to the status of the poetic narrator, the epic tradition, the nature of love between the sexes, and 17th-century astronomy. He considers each of these as Milton introduces them: as Satanic subjects. Satan emerges as the main challenge to Christian belief. It is Satan who questions and wonders and denounces. He is the great doubter who gives voice to many of the arguments that Christianity has provoked from within and without. And by rooting his Satanic reading of Paradise Lost in Biblical and other sources, Forsyth retrieves not only an attractive and heroic Satan but a Milton whose heretic

The Satan of Paradise Lost has fascinated generations of readers. This book attempts to explain how and why Milton's Satan is so seductive. It reasserts the importance of Satan against those who would minimize the poem's sympathy for the devil and thereby make Milton orthodox. Neil Forsyth argues that William Blake got it right when he called Milton a true poet because he was "of the Devils party" even though he set out "to justify the ways of God to men." In seeking to learn why Satan is so alluring, Forsyth ranges over diverse topics--from the origins of evil and the relevance of witchcraft to the status of the poetic narrator, the epic tradition, the nature of love between the sexes, and seventeenth-century astronomy. He considers each of these as Milton introduces them: as Satanic subjects. Satan emerges as the main challenge to Christian belief. It is Satan who questions and wonders and denounces. He is the great doubter who gives voice to many of the arguments that Christianity has provoked from within and without. And by rooting his Satanic reading of Paradise Lost in Biblical and other sources, Forsyth retrieves not only an attractive and heroic Satan but a Milton whose heretical energies are embodied in a Satanic character with a life of his own.

John Milton has usually been regarded as 'the other great poet' in English literature, after Shakespeare. He is the only one of the world's great poets also to have been actively engaged in politics. John Milton was born in 1608 and in the late 1630s he travelled to the Continent where he met, among others, Galileo and Grotius. A staunch republican, he served as Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell during the Commonwealth. After the restoration of Charles II his life was probably saved by his fame as a poet. He was thrice married, his first two wives dying after childbirth. This serious yet accessible biography by a renowed Milton scholar tells the story of Milton's fascinating and troubled life on both the personal and political level.

In Shakespeare the Illusionist, Neil Forsyth reviews the history of Shakespeare's plays on film, using the basic distinction in film tradition between what is owed to Méliès and what to the Lumière brothers. He then tightens his focus on those plays that include some explicit magical or supernatural elements—Puck and the fairies, ghosts and witches, or Prospero's island, for example—and sets out methodically, but with an easy touch, to review all the films that have adapted those comedies and dramas, into the present day. Forsyth's aim is not to offer yet another answer as to whether Shakespeare would have written for the screen if he were alive today, but rather to assess what various filmmakers and TV directors have in fact made of the spells, haunts, and apparitions in his plays. From analyzing early camera tricks to assessing contemporary handling of the supernatural, Forsyth reads Shakespeare films for how they use the techniques of moviemaking to address questions of illusion and dramatic influence. In doing so, he presents a bold step forward in Shakespeare and film studies, and his fresh take is presented in lively, accessible language that makes the book ideal for classroom use.

A true crime story worth its weight in gold Shortly before 7am on Saturday 26 November 1983, an armed gang burst into the Brink's-Mat security warehouse near London's Heathrow Airport. They expected to find a million pounds in foreign currency. To their surprise, they found gold bullion worth 26 million. Making off with the gold, the gang committed what was at the time the largest robbery in the world, and unwittingly set off an extraordinary, decades-long chain of events. The Brink's-Mat robbery led to the birth of international large-scale money laundering, provided the dirty money that fuelled the London Docklands property boom, changed British policing, and sparked a series of violent murders that continued until 2015. As such, the Brink's-Mat job was the most significant robbery of all time, yet its full, epic story has never been told in its entirety.

BBC TV and Radio's Bob Servant, self-styled 'hero of Dundee', addresses life's problems for you, and offers practical solutions you won't find anywhere else.