Mark Simpson

Alastair Sim was an enigmatic character both on and off the screen. His idiosyncratic style of acting in films such as The Belles of St Trinian's endeared him to a cinema-going audience desperate to escape the day-to-day dreariness of an invasive, bureaucratic post-war Britain. In private, he was a curiously contradictory character, prejudiced and yet tolerant, thoughtful but sometimes inconsiderate. To examine the life of this extraordinary man, this biography contains original contributions from around thirty actors and actresses, including Sir Ian McKellen and Ronnie Corbett.It is supported by extensive research, including interviews with the playwright Christopher Fry, the television producer John Howard Davies and actors who appeared on stage with Alastair as far back as the 1940s. This book also explores Alastair's life outside of films, including his marriage to Naomi Sim (whom he first met when she was twelve), his career as an elocution teacher, his extensive work on stage (including his theatrical endeavours with James Bridie), his championship of youth and his stalwart refusal to sign autographs. Alastair Sim offers a rare and fascinating insight into the life of one of Britain's most respected and best-loved actors.

Redefines travel in the United States during the antebellum, postbellum, and early modernist periodsIn America, travel has regularly been associated with romantic notions of freedom, exploration, and possibility. Focusing on a broad range of movement in the nineteenth century, Trafficking Subjects challenges this conventional view, demonstrating the complexity of the politics of mobility in American culture.The texts that Mark Simpson consults are drawn from a wide range of genres and foreground social and cultural phenomena from slave revolt to fugitive escape, imperial expedition to neocolonial tourism, and market circulation to tramping protest. Utilizing works as diverse as Gray's The Confessions of Nat Turner and London's Martin Eden, Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Edmonds's Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, Simpson traces the vexed dynamics of movement and its representation in the nineteenth-century United States, developing a theory of mobility as social contest. Questions of national subjectivity and belonging, especially as inflected by race, gender, and social class, bear centrally on his analysis of how mobility as a social and cultural resource comes to be distributed, invested, directed, and determined. Trafficking Subjects helps us to see what it can mean to become subject to America, in all the conflicted senses of that phrase.

This report provides a detailed picture of the processes that shape 'poor transitions'. The authors argue that understanding social exclusion and devising effective policies to reduce it requires immersion in the experiences of the socially excluded. Specifically, the report charts the longer-term transitions and outcomes of young adults who had grown up in a context of social exclusion as they reached their mid- to late-twenties; aids understanding of the key influences on social inclusion and exclusion for this age group; examines the young adults' extended participation in education, training and employment, their experiences of family life, and criminal and drug-using careers and draws out the implications for policy and practice interventions. Poor transitions is aimed at academics, policy makers, practitioners and general readers interested in an in-depth account of the biographical experiences of the socially excluded.