Peter Davidson

Archipelago is one of the most important and influential literary magazines of the last twenty years. Running to twelve editions, it was edited by Andrew McNeillie, with the assistance later of James McDonald Lockhart, and began as an attempt to reimagine the relationships between the islands of Ireland and Britain. Archipelago has brought together established and emerging artists in creative conversations that have transformed the study of islands, coasts and waterways. It journeys from the Shetlands to Cornwall, from the Aran Islands to the coast of Yorkshire, tracing the cultures of diverse zones through some of the best in contemporary writing about place and people. This collection gathers poetry, prose and visual art in clusters grouped around the Irish and British archipelago, with contributions from an array of significant artists. It includes newly commissioned work as well as an interview between Andrew McNeillie and Robert Macfarlane on the development of Archipelago across the years.

Relics, dreams, voyages is a closely focused sequence of studies of worldwide connections in all the arts in the baroque period. Drawing on original research in libraries, collections, and archives in five countries, and in as many languages, this book draws many astonishing, unfamiliar and beautiful texts, things and events, into a cartography of the secret and strange patterns of baroque cultures worldwide. The visual arts are examined across a wide temporal and geographical span, and many subversive iconographies are decoded: at the French and English courts, in remote Scotland, in Nagasaki, in Valladolid. This books offers a new, extraordinary cultural geography of the baroque world, opening doors to many rich and strange cultural artefacts, from 'China to Peru.'

Relics, dreams, voyages is a closely focused sequence of studies of worldwide connections in all the arts in the baroque period. Drawing on original research in libraries, collections, and archives in five countries, and in as many languages, this book draws many astonishing, unfamiliar and beautiful texts, things and events, into a cartography of the secret and strange patterns of baroque cultures worldwide. The visual arts are examined across a wide temporal and geographical span, and many subversive iconographies are decoded: at the French and English courts, in remote Scotland, in Nagasaki, in Valladolid. This books offers a new, extraordinary cultural geography of the baroque world, opening doors to many rich and strange cultural artefacts, from 'China to Peru.'

This is a mighty book of Norths: northern geographies, histories, lights; a place of definition, frost and cold. There is an unfaltering Recusant spirit about these poems, a survival through defeat and a sense of underlying permanences. Each poem has an occasion: some of the occasions are personal meetings, conversations, which unlock shared scenes and themes; some are historical in origin, their past often one of early Christian faith or religious conflict. The poems abound in art, in specific lived detail, particulars of landscape, and in a harsh weather which is not unlike time itself in its effect on the living and ageing imagination. Each poem requires a different metre, a different pace; each form is carefully attuned to its occasion.

This is the calamitous, at times hilarious, story of Detective Inspector Doddie Macfarlane's attempt to lead his chaotic team of homicide detectives in their mission to solve the mysterious murder of much-loved pediatrician Dr. George Ross. His Inverness-based team is led on many a wild goose chase throughout the beauty of the Scottish Highlands before stumbling on the most unlikely of scenarios. You will laugh aloud at the antics of the police psychiatrist, Dr. Martin "Mental" Nunn, and be aghast at the black humour of "Deadpan" Dick McIvor, the pathologist. There is also the driven DS Monica Richards, the disastrous constables Smith and Davidson, and the shy Ulsterman Dermot Long. This is an amusing romp at the bottom of which is a tragic murder.

This is the calamitous, at times hilarious, story of Detective Inspector Doddie Macfarlane's attempt to lead his chaotic team of homicide detectives in their mission to solve the mysterious murder of much-loved pediatrician Dr. George Ross. His Inverness-based team is led on many a wild goose chase throughout the beauty of the Scottish Highlands before stumbling on the most unlikely of scenarios. You will laugh aloud at the antics of the police psychiatrist, Dr. Martin "Mental" Nunn, and be aghast at the black humour of "Deadpan" Dick McIvor, the pathologist. There is also the driven DS Monica Richards, the disastrous constables Smith and Davidson, and the shy Ulsterman Dermot Long. This is an amusing romp at the bottom of which is a tragic murder.

Homecoming, haunting, nostalgia, desire: these are some of the themes evoked by the beguiling motif of the lighted window in literature and art. In this innovative combination of place-writing, memoir and cultural study, Peter Davidson takes us on atmospheric walks through nocturnal cities in Britain, Europe and North America, and revisits the field paths of rural England. Surveying a wide range of material, the book extends, chronologically, from early romantic painting to contemporary fiction, and geographically, from the Low Countries to Japan. It features familiar lighted windows in English literature (in the works of poets such as Thomas Hardy and Matthew Arnold and in the novels of Virginia Woolf, Arthur Conan Doyle and Kenneth Grahame) and examines the painted nocturnes of James Whistler, John Atkinson Grimshaw and the ruralist Samuel Palmer. It also considers Japanese prints of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; German romanticism in painting, poetry and music; Proust and the painters of the French belle époque; René Magritte’s 'L’Empire des Lumières'; and North American painters such as Edward Hopper and Linden Frederick. By interpreting the interactions of art, literature and geography around this evocative motif, Peter Davidson shows how it has inspired an extraordinary variety of moods and ideas, from the romantic period to the present day.

"Pete's Pandemic" is all of our stories yet none of our stories. It is one man's attempt to understand the new reality caused by the coronavirus. We all have had to come to terms with very different lives. This is Jimmy Tolmie's attempt to manage his stress through humour, reflection, philosophy, reminiscence and current events. At times self-conscious, periodically stream-of-consciousness, occasionally controversial, Jimmy has struggled to find a way out of his stress through the medium of daily writings to friends. His book reflects 100 days of quarantine and then lockdown. It is an attempt to find common ground, to emerge on the other side with ethics and equanimity intact. It is hoped that the reader will find some point of contact between his or her own perspectives and those of the writer.

"Pete's Pandemic" is all of our stories yet none of our stories. It is one man's attempt to understand the new reality caused by the coronavirus. We all have had to come to terms with very different lives. This is Jimmy Tolmie's attempt to manage his stress through humour, reflection, philosophy, reminiscence and current events. At times self-conscious, periodically stream-of-consciousness, occasionally controversial, Jimmy has struggled to find a way out of his stress through the medium of daily writings to friends. His book reflects 100 days of quarantine and then lockdown. It is an attempt to find common ground, to emerge on the other side with ethics and equanimity intact. It is hoped that the reader will find some point of contact between his or her own perspectives and those of the writer.

‘The nation-state is the enemy of the baroque.’ This is the point of departure of this radical, even revolutionary, re-examination of the cultural history of the early-modern world. Drawing on sources in six languages, many of them hitherto unavailable to the English-speaking reader, and touching on the visual arts, architecture, music and literature, this study frees the word ‘baroque’ from being a term of periodisation into being the descriptor for a network of circulation of ideas, words, plants, arts and energies which encompassed the totality of the early-modern world.This challenging book also forces a reconsideration of many of the prejudices of the Anglophone perception of cultural history and in doing so opens to the reader a world of wonders: the allegorical dramas of Ireland and Belgrade; the arquebusier angels of Cuzco painting; the operas and festival music of Bolivia; the vertiginous architectural fantasies of the Jacobite exiles.

Featuring 60 beautiful and detailed maps, Atlas of Empires tells the story of how and why the great empires of history came into being, operated, and ultimately declined, and discusses the future of the empire in today's globalized world. Atlas of Empires tells the story of how and why the great empires of history came into being, operated and ultimately declined, and discusses the future of the empire in today's globalized world. Featuring 60 beautiful and detailed maps of the empires' territories at different stages of their existence and organized thematically to reflect the different driving forces behind empires throughout history (such as faith, nomadic culture, nationhood and capitalism), each section discusses the rise and fall of the empires that existed in a region: their government and society, wealth and technology, war and military force, and religious beliefs. From the earliest empires of the Sumerians and the Pharaohs to the modern empires of the USSR and the European Union, this is a story that reveals how empires are created and organized, how later empires resolve the problems of governance faced by earlier empires, and how the political and cultural legacies of ancient empires are still felt today.

Now available in paperback, The Last of the Light is a meditation on twilight in the Western arts and imagination, in thought, painting and literature. It takes us across the threshold of day into dusk, an uncertain world haunted by Romantic poets and painters, as well as exploring the twilight lives of minority and ‘overshadowed’ communities. The melancholy of smoky English autumn evenings is balanced by the midnight summer sun of northern latitudes, and the darkly oppressive heat of August in mid-twentieth-century Spain is ranged against the spectral grandeur of winter in London.This ambitious account of the arts of the evening deftly combines prose-poetry, memoir, philosophy and art history. Intertwining personal, cultural and artistic histories, it is a richly rewarding book written in a unique voice.

Have you ever looked at a coin in the palm of your hand and wondered where it has been, what it has seen and heard, and what stories it could tell? Well, in a nutshell, that is what PENNY is about as this very special one-cent piece passes through the hands of ordinary people, the famous, the infamous, the saints, and the sinners and hangs out in churches, honkytonks, and everywhere in between. This book tells the stories of the people whose hands PENNY passes through. Why is this particular penny so special? Well, because it was the final penny ever minted of 95% copper, on October 22, 1982. After that, all one-cent pieces are pathetic and puny, consisting of 97.5% zinc with only a touch of copper thrown in. That's why.After reading PENNY, you might never again be able to pass by a penny lying on the ground without at least giving a thought to picking it up and putting it in your pocket. Every book should be dedicated to someone or something, and this book is dedicated to the penny pinchers of the world. Okay, also to the penny hoarders. PENNY is Peter Davidson's twenty-eighth published book.

As with the compass needle, so people have always been most powerfully attracted northwards; everyone carries within them their own concept of north. The Idea of North is a study, ranging widely in time and place, of some of the ways in which these ideas have found expression. Offering engaging meditation on solitude, absence and stillness, Davidson shows north to be a goal rather than a destination, a place of revelation that is always somewhere ultimate and austere.

The Last of the Light is a meditation on twilight in the Western arts and imagination, in thought, painting and literature. We entera multifaceted twilight world, filled with the gloom haunted by Romantic poets and painters and the twilight lives of minority and 'overshadowed' communities. The melancholy of smoky English autumn evenings is balanced by the midnight sun of northern European summers; the oppressive heat of August in mid-twentieth-century Spain is ranged against the shadowy grandeur of winter in London.Peter Davidson touches on diverse literary and artistic traditions as he considers the borderlands of the light and the dark: the'invention of evening' in Roman antiquity; the science of the Victorian evening sky; the urban twilights of Whistler, Poussinand Tiepolo.A meditative account of the atmospheric and shadowy in art, literature and thought by the author of The Idea of North, this will appeal to all those who are interested in ambiguous, penumbral zones in art, philosophy and writing.

This is an advanced textbook on the subject of turbulence, and is suitable for engineers, physical scientists and applied mathematicians. The aim of the book is to bridge the gap between the elementary accounts of turbulence found in undergraduate texts, and the more rigorous monographs on the subject. Throughout, the book combines the maximum of physical insight with the minimum of mathematical detail. Chapters 1 to 5 may be appropriate as background material for an advanced undergraduate or introductory postgraduate course on turbulence, while chapters 6 to 10 may be suitable as background material for an advanced postgraduate course on turbulence, or act as a reference source for professional researchers. This second edition covers a decade of advancement in the field, streamlining the original content while updating the sections where the subject has moved on. The expanded content includes large-scale dynamics, stratified & rotating turbulence, the increased power of direct numerical simulation, two-dimensional turbulence, Magnetohydrodynamics, and turbulence in the core of the Earth