Kirjahaku

Since his death in 1950, George Orwell has been canonised as England's foremost political writer, and the standard-bearer of honesty and decency for the honourable 'Left'. In this controversial polemic, Scott Lucas argues that the exaltation of Orwell, far from upholding dissent against the State, has sought to quash such opposition. Indeed, Orwell has become the icon of those who, in the pose of the contrarian, try to silence public opposition to US and U K foreign policy in the 'War on Terror'. Lucas's lively and readable critique of public intellectuals including Christopher Hitchens, Michael Walzer, David Aaronovitch, and Johann Hari - who have all invoked Orwellian honesty and decency to shut down dissent - will appeal to anyone disillusioned with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"This book...broadens our understanding of the post-World War II confrontation between the United States and the USSR and serves as a strong stimulus for the study of the contribution to the clash of ideas, using documents from former Communist archives." --Ilya V. Gaiduk, American Historical Review Freedom's War is the first book to examine comprehensively the American pursuit of the liberation of Eastern Europe from the end of World War II until the failure of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. It shows how the American vision of freedom led to interventions in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and it details the massive propaganda campaign to persuade people at home and abroad of the virtues of U.S. possession of the atomic bomb. Most significantly, Freedom's War explores in detail the most important legacy of the Cold War: the forging of a network linking government and private groups, from labor unions to women's organizations to academics in the crusade against Communism. Beginning with the declaration of the Truman Doctrine, Lucas argues that the Cold War was a total war that required the contribution of all sectors of American society. From its groundbreaking study of U.S. efforts to "liberate" Eastern Europe to its explanation of the ill-fated intervention in Vietnam, Freedom's War is an essential book for students and general readers alike.

This work offers a bold reassessment of a major work of sixteenth-century English literature. Perhaps no other work of secular poetry was as widely read in Tudor England as the historical verse tragedy collection ""A Mirror for Magistrates"". For over sixty years (1559-1621), this compendium of monologues presented in the voices of fallen political figures from England's past remained almost constantly in print, offering both exemplary warnings to English rulers and inspiring models for literary authors, including Spenser and Shakespeare. In a striking departure from previous scholarship, Scott Lucas shows that modern critics have misconstrued the purpose of the tragic verse narratives of the Mirror, approaching them primarily as uncontroversial meditations on abstract political and philosophical doctrines. Lucas revises this view, revealing many of the Mirror tragedies to be works topically applicable in form and politically contentious in nature. Lucas returns the earliest poems of ""A Mirror for Magistrates"" to the troubled context of their production, the tumultuous reign of the Catholic Queen Mary (1553-1558). As Protestants suffering from the traumatic collapse of King Edward VI's 'godly' rule (1547-1553) and from the current policies of Mary's government, the Mirror authors radically reshaped their poem's historical sources in order to craft emotionally moving narratives designed to provide models for interpreting the political failures of Edward VI's reign and to offer urgent warnings to Marian magistrates. Lucas' study also reveals how, in later poems, the Mirror authors issued oblique appeals to Queen Elizabeth's officers, boldly demanding that they allow the realm of 'the literary' to stand as an unfettered discursive arena of public controversy. Lucas thus provides a provocative new approach to this seminal but long-misunderstood collection, one that restores the Mirror to its rightful place as one of the greatest works of sixteenth-century English political literature.