Author: Karl Shaw File Type: epub An uproarious, eye-opening history of Europes notorious royal houses that leaves no throne unturned and will make you glad you live in a democracy.Do you want to know which queen has the unique distinction of being the only known royal kleptomaniac? Or which empress kept her dirty underwear under lock and key? Or which czar, upon discovering his wifes infidelity, had her lover decapitated and the head, pickled in a jar, placed at her bedside?Royally dishing on hundreds of years of dubious behavior, Royal Babylon chronicles the manifold appalling antics of Europes famous families, behavior that rivals the characters in an Aaron Spelling television series. Here, then, are the insane kings of Spain, one of whom liked to wear sixteen pairs of gloves at one time the psychopathic Prussian soverigns who included Frederick William and his 102-inch waist sex-fixated French rulers such as Philip Duke DOreleans cavorting with more than a hundred mistresses and, of course, the delightfully drunken and debauched Russian czars - Czar Paul, for example, who to make his soldiers goose-step without bending their legs had steel plates strapped to their knees. But whether Romanov or Windsor, Habsburg or Hanover, these extravagant lifestyles, financed as they were by the royals badgered subjects, bred the most wonderfully offbeat and disturbingly unbelievable tales - and Karl Shaw has collected them all in this hysterically funny and compulsively readable book. Royal Babylon is history, but not as they teach it in school, and it underlines in side-splitting fashion Queen Victorias famous warning that it is unwise to look too deeply into the royal houses of Europe.

Author: Zygmunt Bauman File Type: pdf The term collateral damage has recently been added to the vocabulary of military forces to refer to the unintended consequences of armed interventions, consequences that are unplanned but nevertheless damaging and often very costly in human and personal terms. But collateral damage is not unique to the world of armed intervention - it is also one of the most salient and striking dimensions of contemporary social inequality. The inflammable mixture of growing social inequality and the rising volume of human suffering marginalized as collateral is becoming one of the most cataclysmic problems of our time. For the political class, poverty is commonly seen as a problem of law and order - a matter of how to deal with individuals, such as unemployed youths, who fall foul of the law. But treating poverty as a criminal problem obscures the social roots of inequality, which lie in the combination of a consumerist life philosophy propagated and instilled by a consumer-oriented economy, on the one hand, and the rapid shrinking of life chances available to the poor, on the other. In our contemporary, liquid-modern world, the poor are the collateral damage of a profit-driven, consumer-oriented society - aliens inside who are deprived of the rights enjoyed by other members of the social order.In this new book Zygmunt Bauman - one of the most original and influential social thinkers of our time - examines the selective affinity between the growth of social inequality and the rise in the volume of collateral damage and considers its implications and its costs. **

Author: S. E. Wilmer File Type: pdf This book examinesperformative strategies that contest nationalist prejudices in representing the conditions of refugees, the stateless and the dispossessed.In the light of the European Union failing to find a political solution to the current migration crisis,it considers a variety of artistic works that have challenged the deficiencies in governmental and transnational practices, as well as innovative efforts by migrants and their hosts to imagine and build a new future.Itdiscusses a diverse range of performative strategies, moving from a consideration of recent adaptations of Greek tragedy, to performances employing fictive identification, documentary dramas, immersive theatre, over-identification and subversive identification, nomadism and political activism. This study will appeal to those interested in questions of statelessness, migration, and the problematic role of the nation-state. **Review Stephen Wilmer has for some time been among the most prominent scholars internationally in studying this important relationship between theatrical production and concept of the nation, and like many of my colleagues I have found his work of enormous help in dealing with these deeply intertwined cultural expressions...Just as the work of Steve Wilmer has been central during the past decade to an understanding of the phenomenon of the national theatre, so his new book provides essential insight into the new social and theatrical phenomenon of statelessness, which is both the opposite of nationalism and paradoxically a malign result of it. All students of theatre as a social form will find this new work, as they did Steves previous ones, invaluable in understanding and exploring this new manifestation. (Marvin Carlson, Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre, Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern Studies, City University of New York, USA) From the Back Cover This book examinesperformative strategies that contest nationalist prejudices in representing the conditions of refugees, the stateless and the dispossessed.In the light of the European Union failing to find a political solution to the current migration crisis,it considers a variety of artistic works that have challenged the deficiencies in governmental and transnational practices, as well as innovative efforts by migrants and their hosts to imagine and build a new future.Itdiscusses a diverse range of performative strategies, moving from a consideration of recent adaptations of Greek tragedy, to performances employing fictive identification, documentary dramas, immersive theatre, over-identification and subversive identification, nomadism and political activism. This study will appeal to those interested in questions of statelessness, migration, and the problematic role of the nation-state.

Author: Pierre Mabille File Type: epub A surrealist exploration of the marvelous in ancient, classic, and modern works from around the world Long considered one of the most significant and original books to have come out of the surrealist movement Reveals the marvelous in works from William Blake, Edgar Allen Poe, William Shakespeare, Chretien de Troyes, and Arthur Rimbaud legends and folktales from around the world classics from Ovid, Plato, and Apuleius Masonic ritual texts, Mesopotamias Epic of Gilgamesh, the Popol-Vuh, Lewis Carolls Alice through the Looking Glass, Solomons Song of Songs, and Goethes Faust First published in French as Miroir du merveilleux in 1940, Mirror of the Marvelous has long been considered one of the most significant and original books to have come out of the surrealist movement and Anais Nin suggested it as a source of inspiration, far ahead of its time. Drawing on sacred and modern texts that share a quality of the marvelous, Pierre Mabille defines the marvelous as the point at which inner and outer realities are joined and the individual is simultaneously one with himself and with the world, thus recovering the true sense of the sacred. He shows how the marvelous goes beyond simply being a synonym for the fantastic to engage the entire emotional realm. Mabille cites a far-reaching range of texts, from the classic to the obscure, from Egyptian myth to Voodoo initiation ceremonies, from the ancient epic to the modern poem, from the creation myth to more contemporary visions of apocalypse. He includes surrealist analyses of works from William Blake, Edgar Allen Poe, William Shakespeare, Chretien de Troyes, and Arthur Rimbaud legends and folktales from Egypt, Iceland, Mexico, Africa, India, and other cultures classics from Ovid, Plato, and Apuleius Masonic ritual texts, Mesopotamias Epic of Gilgamesh, the Popol-Vuh, Lewis Carolls Alice through the Looking Glass, Solomons Song of Songs, and selections from Goethes Faust. Mirror of the Marvelous actively defines the flame of the marvelous by showing its presence in those works where it burns the brightest.**ReviewOne of those monumental works which to leave unread would be to renounce, once and for all, any hope of comprehending the surrealist spirit. (Andre Breton, author of Manifestoes of Surrealism) Pierre Mabilles Mirror of the Marvelous reflects on the strangely beautiful and often terrifying domains of visionary reality as expressed in world literature. His collection of classically unusual tales and sympathetic insightful interpretations provides the reader with an oasis for the Divine Imagination. Mabilles association with the Surrealists helped link their aesthetic with the great tradition of Western occult symbolism. I am thrilled that Inner Traditions has brought Mirror of the Marvelous to the English-speaking world at last. (Alex Grey, artist and author of Net of Being and Sacred Mirrors) About the Author Pierre Mabille (1904-1952) was a doctor, writer, and editorial director of the famous art review Minotaure. Working as a surgeon in the Caribbean during World War II he was appointed French Cultural Attache to Haiti at the wars end and helped establish the Haitian Bureau of Ethnology. Mabille is one of the most important writers to have participated in the surrealist movement, advancing surrealist concerns into the areas of medicine, hermetic traditions, and social structures. His major works include La construction de lHomme, Therese de Lisieux, Egregores ou la vie des civilisations, and Conscience Pictoral, Conscience Lumineuese.