Here are 100 books that Stand-up Paddleboarding in Great Britain fans have personally recommended if you like
Stand-up Paddleboarding in Great Britain.
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Like many others, I had an early fascination for pop music, which moved on to rock music as I grew older. I would love to know more about the artists or music figures who made such emotional and stunning music that made the world better and more exciting. British rock and roll music has made a massive impact on the Western life that we all know and love. These five books are the best ones for me, and while all are unique, they have humor and interesting details and let me gain knowledge about these iconic figures.
I loved this book because I was able to find out more about this lynchpin of the indie music World of the 80s and 90s that I grew up in. Primal Scream was responsible for some iconic tunes, and learning more about Bobby was insightful and entertaining. I discovered so much that I didn’t know about the band’s musical journey and Bobby's influences.
'Gillespie is rock and roll's Oliver Twist. A punk rock fairytale, razor sharp on class struggle, music, style, and a singular view of the world resulting in one of the world's great bands. Couldn't put down' Courtney Love
Born into a working-class Glaswegian family in the summer of 1961, TENEMENT KID begins in the district of Springburn, soon to be evacuated in Edward Heath's brutal slum clearances. Leaving school at 16 and going to work as a printers' apprentice, Bobby's rock n roll epiphany arrives like a bolt of lightning shining from Phil Lynott's…
I am an Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I taught history for many years at several UK universities, and I was the Director of Studies in History at Churchill College, Cambridge. I am the author of six books, including Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches and Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction. His latest book, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World, will be published in November by Penguin. I live in Cambridge, England, and I am married with three children.
The distinctive selling-point of this work is summed up by its sub-title: a focus on law, politics and religion as causal factors, not just for humdrum witchcraft accusations but for major, sustained witch-hunts. Brian Levack has made a huge contribution to our understanding of witch-hunting, and here brings his specialist expertise to bear on Scotland, which experienced the most intense, and devastating panics anywhere in the British Isles (and worse even than most places in continental Europe).
Historians have long learned not to see witch-hunts as hysterical spasms of pre-Enlightenment ‘superstition’. Demonology was a serious subject in the sixteenth and seventeeen centuries, and was logically coherent within the mentalities of the time. Witchcraft, then, wasn’t some insane sideshow to the dominant legal, political and religious issues of the day, but central to those issues.
Embedding witchcraft in these mainstream contexts is essential to understanding what it once meant, not just…
Witch-Hunting in Scotland presents a fresh perspective on the trial and execution of the hundreds of women and men prosecuted for the crime of witchcraft, an offence that involved the alleged practice of maleficent magic and the worship of the devil, for inflicting harm on their neighbours and making pacts with the devil.
Brian P. Levack draws on law, politics and religion to explain the intensity of Scottish witch-hunting. Topics discussed include:
the distinctive features of the Scottish criminal justice system
the use of torture to extract confessions
the intersection of witch-hunting with…
I’ve been researching and teaching the history of the novel since I was a graduate student in Cambridge in the late 1980s, and along the way, I’ve published trade editions of several classics beyond those recommended here, including Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe,Richardson’s Pamela, Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Beckford’s Vathek. It’s a great opportunity to take a break from specialist academia and reach a broader community of readers, as I’ve also tried to do in a recent introductory book about Jane Austen. I now teach at the University of Toronto, where I’m blessed with amazing students on two of my favourite undergraduate courses, “The Rise of the Novel” and “Austen and Her Contemporaries.”
Tobias Smollett, Scotland’s greatest novelist before Scott and Stevenson, was dying in a villa on the Ligurian coast when his masterpiece Humphry Clinkercame out in London in 1771. Yet every page is written with astounding verve, immersing readers in the vibrant chaos of eighteenth-century Britain, the sights and sounds of its teeming cities and health resorts—even, in several virtuoso passages of gross-out description, its nauseating smells and tastes. Like Richardson before him, Smollett gives his narrative over to multiple voices, this time to riotously comic effect. Five Anglo-Welsh tourists (splenetic Bramble, scathing Tabitha, witty Jery, romantic Lydia, their hilariously unpredictable servant Win) travel the length and breadth of a nation in the throes of urbanization and commercial modernity, by turns disgusted and enchanted, constantly failing to agree on what they see. Illicit romances play out in the background, but Smollett’s main interest is in the turbulent dynamism of four-nations…
William Thackeray called it "the most laughable story that has ever been written since the goodly art of novel-writing began." As a group of travellers visit places in England and Scotland, they provide through satire and wit a vivid and detailed picture of the contemporary social and political scene. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to…
I guess my real interest in writing about the good and bad in crime and politics and the good and bad characters involved started with my first job as a junior in a local newspaper. The 60s was a time of great change. I was in the right place at the right time and got involved in reporting local government politics. I graduated later to cover Britain’s role within the EU in Brussels. I was fascinated, not so much by the politics but by the politicians and fellow news reporters involved. They inspired the creation of my fictional character, Pete West, a hardboiled political columnist.
Read as a teenager, this book hooked me into mystery thrillers. It has everything from murder to political intrigue to a spy ring.
The book is a chase thriller with twists, turns, and surprises. Written in 1930, the work had the feel of a ‘boy's own’ adventure story with a man on the run hunting German spies and clues leading to the 39 steps and victory.
Richard Hannay has just returned to England after years in South Africa and is thoroughly bored with his life in London. But then a murder is committed in his flat, just days after a chance encounter with an American who had told him about an assassination plot which could have dire international consequences. An obvious suspect for the police and an easy target for the killers, Hannay goes on the run in his native Scotland where he will need all his courage and ingenuity to stay one step ahead of his pursuers.
I’m an Australian writer and journalist. I’ve written several humour books, as well as a history of Australia in the 1960 and 1970s called The Land Before Avocado. I also write for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Washington Post and present a radio show on ABC Radio Sydney. Of the books I’ve written, the one that’s closest to my heart is my memoir Flesh Wounds.
A young boy, already knowing he’s gay, is growing up in a Scottish slum. The rest of the household consists of people who are drunk, violent, and unemployed. Then, watching the TV, tiny Damian sees Margaret Thatcher, the then British Prime Minister, emerging from the smoke and destruction caused by the IRA’s bombing of the 1984 Conservative Party Conference. Maggie doesn’t have a hair out of place. This little ill-treated boy, sitting on his filthy couch, thinks: “If only she could come here, she’d sort this lot out....” Maggie & Me is so fresh, unlikely, and hilarious, I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t be moved by the story.
A unique, tender and witty memoir of surviving the tough streets of small town Scotland during the Margaret Thatcher years
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'Shocking and funny in equal measure, and will have you weeping with laughter and sorrow' Independent on Sunday
'A work of stealthy genius' Maggie O'Farrell
'Certain memoirs catch a moment and seem to define it, bottle it ... hugely entertaining' Sunday Times
It's 12 October 1984. An IRA bomb blows apart the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Miraculously, Margaret Thatcher survives. In small-town Scotland, eight-year-old Damian Barr watches in horror as his mum rips her wedding ring off and packs…
I am an academic historian who has had a passion for the wars of the three kingdoms for over three decades. I have been reading books about the civil wars in Britain and Ireland since I was ten years old. I have been a member of the re-enactment society The Sealed Knot and the Cromwell Association. I published my first monograph on the wars of the three kingdoms in 2018. The monograph views the conflict from a three kingdoms perspective through the eyes of the Scottish Covenanters and their English allies. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
This is an integrated and detailed account of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms across Britain and Ireland, the English Republic and the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660. It is written in an engaging and lively style and concisely integrates the large body of scholarship that emerged with the new British histories in the 1990s and early 2000s.
This is the definitive history of the English Civil War, set in its full historical context from the accession of Charles I to the Restoration of Charles II. These were the most turbulent years of British history and their reverberations have been felt down the centuries. Throughout the middle decades of the seventeenth century England, Scotland, and Ireland were convulsed by political upheaval and wracked by rebellion and civil war. The Stuart monarchy was in abeyance for twenty years in all three kingdoms, and Charles I famously met his death on the scaffold.
I am a Professor of early-modern British History at the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, who was a specialist in the Tudor period, especially the life and reign of Elizabeth I. However, while doing research over the past six years, I became excited by the politics, religion, and culture of the Jacobean period. James I’s reign had been a topic I taught in a week to undergraduates, but I realised that I didn’t do justice to this rich and important period. Not only is it fascinating in its own right, but James’s reign had a huge impact on a long stretch of British and world history.
I like to get stuck into specialized studies to extend and deepen my historical knowledge. This recent monograph, based on research in Denmark, England, and Scotland, taught me a great deal about how Queen Anna used visual and material culture to forge her own identity and bring prestige to the Jacobean monarchy.
I very much enjoyed reading Field’s descriptions of Anna’s clothes, jewelry, and collecting practices, all of which displayed the queen’s pan-European identity and interests. As a scholar, I am particularly interested in the public image of kings and queens, so this book greatly appealed to me.
Approaching the Stuart courts through the lens of the queen consort, Anna of Denmark, this study is underpinned by three key themes: translating cultures, female agency and the role of kinship networks and genealogical identity for early modern royal women. Illustrated with a fascinating array of objects and artworks, the book follows a trajectory that begins with Anna's exterior spaces before moving to the interior furnishings of her palaces, the material adornment of the royal body, an examination of Anna's visual persona and a discussion of Anna's performance of extraordinary rituals that follow her life cycle. Underpinned by a wealth…
Writing this biography was an extraordinary experience for me. I have been writing about the arts for more than forty years. Over the decades I was Associate Editor of Ballet Review and dance critic for The New York Sun. Talking to Alla Osipenko provided singular insight into the culture and politics of the Soviet Union, as well as the individual artistry and psychology of this great ballerina. I left every interview with her feeling elated. By the time my biography was published in 2015, I also knew/met/had interviewed many of the people she described and could write from some degree of first-hand knowledge.
I think it was the first biography I ever purchased. At age ten or eleven, I read in it, but now I’m reading it all the way through, and I’m pleased to say that even at that tender age, I gravitated to the best!
Fraser stops the narrative when she wants to discourse upon a particular issue or attribute and always considers her own take on events and characters worthy of elegant interjection.
She’s not afraid to discuss relevant but not strictly solemn issues, such as whether Mary was considered beautiful and the tragic queen’s love of dancing and cross-dressing.
“A book that will leave few readers unmoved.”–San Francisco Chronicle
She was the quintessential queen: statuesque, regal, dazzlingly beautiful. Her royal birth gave her claim to the thrones of two nations; her marriage to the young French dauphin promised to place a third glorious crown on her noble head.
Instead, Mary Stuart became the victim of her own impulsive heart, scandalizing her world with a foolish passion that would lead to abduction, rape and even murder. Betrayed by those she most trusted, she would be lured into a deadly game of power, only to lose to her envious and unforgiving…
Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by the early modern era–and I was always drawn to the big personalities and events: Henry VIII and his wives, Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. But, having made a career out of studying the era and its literature, I found that the drama didn’t end with Elizabeth in 1603 (and certainly not with Mary either when she fled Scotland or when she was executed in 1587). In fact, things became even more colorful under the riotous reign of King James. This led me to want to reassess his life and reign with a focus on the things that had historically been brushed over.
Steven J. Reid’s comprehensive study of James’s youth and rise to real power is as well-researched as it is readable. Most people are only familiar with the older James when he was king of England—the tired stereotype of the doddering, prematurely-aged old king.
But his early life and reign in Scotland were fraught with drama and high politics–all of which helped make James James.
Shortlisted for the Saltire Society Scottish History Book of the Year Award
James VI and I was arguably the most successful ruler of the Stewart Dynasty in Scotland, and the first king of a united Great Britain. His ableness as a monarch, it has been argued, stemmed largely from his Scottish upbringing. This book is the first in-depth scholarly study of those formative years.
It tries to understand exactly when in James' 'long apprenticeship' he seized political power and retraces the incremental steps he took along the way. It also poses new answers to key questions about this process. What…
I’m a queer writer whose latest novel explores destiny’s role in love, and what it means for love to triumph. I’m completely addicted to reading queer romances, and my favourite dynamics are always couples whose love beats the odds. I am a queer Australian writer of fantasy, as well as a video game designer. I live in Sydney with my partner and our two furry children.
This is a book I saw cropping up every so often, but I was worried it would be too history-heavy (which can be a massive plus, but I was looking for something more heavy on the romance side!)
But when an artist friend of mine painted a very beautiful man, I had to know where he was from—and this was that book! It’s set in 1333, England is at war with Scotland, and already we have a beautiful tension set up.
Harry is a young untested knight eager for glory who is roped into a mission in Scotland where a massacre occurs, all to retrieve a young man, wild and angry, who is then put into Harry’s care. There’s so much mystery around this young man and his and Harry’s relationship has to overcome first their heritages, then the expectations of their societies.
1333. Edward III is at war with Scotland. Nineteen-year-old Sir Harry de Lyon yearns to prove himself, and jumps at the chance when a powerful English baron, William Montagu, invites him on a secret mission with a dozen elite knights. They ride north, to a crumbling Scottish keep, capturing the feral, half-starved boy within and putting the other inhabitants to the sword.
But nobody knows why the flower of English knighthood snuck over the border to capture a savage, dirty teenage boy. Montagu gives the boy to Harry as his squire, with only two rules: don't let him escape, and…
