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The Compleat Motherfucker.
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I write fiction, mostly historical mysteries, and non-fiction, generally about the English language. Both aspects of my writing reflect an interest in the past and how it continually shapes the present. The roots of English go back thousands of years to Latin, Anglo-Saxon, French, and many other sources. Yet the newest term to the vast storehouse of language may have been added only last week. Recently I’ve been writing about oaths, swear words, and bad language.
Silverton starts with the moment when one of the Sex Pistols used a
four-letter word live on afternoon TV in 1976. It’s an appropriate
beginning for a highly entertaining ramble through the dirtier byways
of the English language, encompassing historical research, pop culture , and personal anecdotes, and showing just how ingrained bad language is
in everyday life. His enjoyment and approval spring from every page.
When the Sex Pistols swore live on tea-time telly in 1976, there was outrage across Britain. Headlines screamed. Christians marched. TVs were kicked in. Thirty years on, all those words are media-mainstream - bandied about with impunity on TV and in the papers. This is the story of our bad language and its three-decade journey from the fringes of decency to the working centre of a more linguistically liberal nation. Silverton takes a clear, comprehensive and witty look at swearing and the impact of its new acceptability on our language, our manners and our society. He considers how we have…
I write fiction, mostly historical mysteries, and non-fiction, generally about the English language. Both aspects of my writing reflect an interest in the past and how it continually shapes the present. The roots of English go back thousands of years to Latin, Anglo-Saxon, French, and many other sources. Yet the newest term to the vast storehouse of language may have been added only last week. Recently I’ve been writing about oaths, swear words, and bad language.
It may seem odd to include a novel in a feature about swear words but
Lawrence’s famous/notorious book Includes several taboo terms. True,
these relate to sex rather than swearing but there is considerable
overlap between the two. This is the long-banned account of the affair
between Constance Chatterley, a lady, and Mellors, the gamekeeper on
her husband’s estate. Lawrence knew it would not be published openly
in Britain in his lifetime. The watershed Old Bailey case in 1960
cleared the book of obscenity and (depending on your point of view)
opened the floodgates of filth or ushered us towards the sunlit
uplands of the permissive society.
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LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER was banned on its publication in 1928, creating a storm of controversy. Lawrence tells the story of Constance Chatterley's marriage to Sir Clifford, an aristocratic and an intellectual who is paralyzed from the waist down after the First World War. Desperate for an heir and embarrassed by his inability to satisfy his wife, Clifford suggests that she have an affair. Constance, troubled by her husband's words, finds herself involved in a passionate relationship with their gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. Lawrence's vitriolic denunciations of industrialism and class…
I write fiction, mostly historical mysteries, and non-fiction, generally about the English language. Both aspects of my writing reflect an interest in the past and how it continually shapes the present. The roots of English go back thousands of years to Latin, Anglo-Saxon, French, and many other sources. Yet the newest term to the vast storehouse of language may have been added only last week. Recently I’ve been writing about oaths, swear words, and bad language.
This American title is at the more academic end of books on swearing
and oaths. Mohr shows how obscenity evolves over time. Words now
considered indecent were acceptable in the Middle Ages while careless
invocations of God and Jesus were taboo (that’s not to say they
weren’t used). The very title of the book neatly illustrates a
difference between US and British culture, with the asterisk being
used to soften potential offence in the States. By contrast in the UK, the word usually appears naked and unashamed on the cover (as in
Frankie Boyle’s My Shit Life So Far).
Almost everyone swears, or worries about not swearing, from the two year-old who has just discovered the power of potty mouth to the grandma who wonders why every other word she hears is obscene. Whether they express anger or exhilaration, are meant to insult or to commend, swear words perform a crucial role in language. But swearing is also a uniquely well-suited lens through which to look at history, offering a fascinating record of what people care about on the deepest levels of a culture-what's divine, what's terrifying, and what's taboo.
I write fiction, mostly historical mysteries, and non-fiction, generally about the English language. Both aspects of my writing reflect an interest in the past and how it continually shapes the present. The roots of English go back thousands of years to Latin, Anglo-Saxon, French, and many other sources. Yet the newest term to the vast storehouse of language may have been added only last week. Recently I’ve been writing about oaths, swear words, and bad language.
Jonathon Green is the doyen of dirty words. Or, more respectfully, he
is the premier lexicographer of the graphic, the dubious, and the
obscene. For decades Green has been trawling obscure publications and
other outré sources for examples of slang in the English language, and
publishing dictionaries that are unmatched in their scope and detail.
No term, however racist, sexist, classist, or any other kind of -ist,
is too small to go unnoticed. In Odd Job Man, a mixture of
autobiography and ruminations on bad language, Green describes himself
as an ‘anatomist of the underbelly cutting not into ripe cadavers but
into riper language.’ It’s a life’s work.
For thirty years Jonathon Green has been collecting slang - the indefinable language of the gutter, the brothel, the jail, the barroom - producing a succession of dictionaries, most recently the three-volume Green's Dictionary of Slang, that have been recognised as the most comprehensive and authoritative ever compiled. In this fascinating memoir Green reveals that he first began collecting slang in the 1970s, noticing that the contemporary authorities (notably Eric Partridge) preferred the past to the present, unaware of the huge array of new slang being coined by the counter-culture. He ponders why he still does this strange, lonely job,…
I'm an Australian who fell in love with Africa in my 30s. I've now written 20 thrillers set in Africa and several non-fiction biographies. My wife and I have travelled extensively on the continent and now spend at least half our lives in Africa, and the remainder in Australia. I'm passionate about Africa's people, wildlife, and fragile natural environment. While my books focus on some of the continent's problems – especially the illegal trade in wildlife – I'm a sucker for a happy ending and find no shortage of positive, inspirational people on my travels who serve as the inspiration for the good guys and girls in my stories.
I'm sometimes compared to the late, great, Wilbur Smith, who wrote dozens of books set in Africa. I think that if there is a similarity, then my books are probably most like Wilbur's earlier novels, where he tended to write about contemporary southern Africa (as I do now). My favourites were his stand-alone novels, including The Dark of the Sun about a group of mercenaries who have to rescue a train load of civilians during the fighting in the former Belgian Congo in the 1960s. It was made into a movie back in the day (The Mercenaries), and later provided the inspiration for the Bruce Willis film, Tears of the Sun.
An action-packed thriller by global bestselling author, Wilbur Smith.
'A master storyteller' - Sunday Times
'Wilbur Smith is one of those benchmarks against whom others are compared' - The Times
'No one does adventure quite like Smith' - Daily Mirror
The highest prize comes at the highest price . . .
Captain Bruce Curry has a simple enough mission: to lead his mercenary soldiers to rescue a town cut off by rebel fighting in the Belgian Congo. But events quickly take a turn for the worse as it becomes clear that the town's diamond supplies are the real focus of…
Funny stuff happens all the time in my wafty, solo-travelling life. Sometimes that funny stuff will only become apparent after the proverbial dust has settled and I’m no longer in imminent danger or at my wit’s end: the hilarity of a situation reveals itself when I’m telling the story. Travelling alone puts you in a vulnerable position of being open to ‘the moment’ far more so than when you are travelling with someone else. I get a sense of place and people and write about what happens true to my voice which is intrinsically connected to my funny bone—an intention to capture culture through accurate observation and tragi-comic humour.
Apart from being a wonderfully talented actor, Richard E. Grant is a fantastic writer.
This 1996 book is a raw and honest account of his early acting career from landing his springboard role in the cult classic With Nails to working with some of the giants in Hollywood from Steve Martin and Bruce Willis to Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
Each chapter is a film role, and Grant seems to float through the various hiccoughs and hilarity with a self-effacing charm. His perspective of being the observer, seeing everything from the sidelines; of someone who perhaps shouldn’t really be there, is the essence of his writing.
Richard E. Grant captures the crazy of Hollywood film culture in the narrative and snippets of conversation, nuance of character, situation, and place.
'An exceptionally vivid and penetrating insight into Hollywood film-making ...What most of us want is gossip about stars, and this is something the book delivers in spades ...Qualifies for that exclusive niche reserved for film star memoirs that are worth much more than a casual flick on the bookshop shelf' Jonathan Coe, Observer 'It's a star-packed savagely observed delight, and as a vivid psychological insight into one actor's complete experience of a film, it really does stand alone' Empire 'In these dashing diaries of his recent years in the movies, Grant shares with candour his wonder at this aberrant universe…
We write mysteries set during the Golden Age of Hollywood that feature costume designer Edith Head, so naturally, we love books about film history. We’ve found that some of the best books to tackle the subject aren’t biographies of individuals or profiles of film studios but case studies of single films. Concentrating on one movie and all of the personnel and creative decisions behind it allows an author to explore every aspect of filmmaking and explain how it really works…even when the film in question doesn’t.
We believe you can learn more from failure than success. Misfires don’t come much bigger than the 1990 adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s blockbuster novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. The movie busted nary a block, which only makes director Brian De Palma’s willingness to open up the process to reporter/critic Salamon more remarkable.
This visits every department—including our favorite, costume design—and underscores that no one knows if a movie will be a smash or a flop while they’re making it, so cast and crew work just as hard on both. We love the story of second-unit director Eric Schwab seizing the opportunity to prove himself.
When Brian De Palma agreed to allow Julie Salamon unlimited access to the film production of Tom Wolfe's best-selling book The Bonfire of the Vanities , both director and journalist must have felt like they were on to something big. How could it lose? But instead Salamon got a front-row seat at the Hollywood disaster of the decade. She shadowed the film from its early stages through the last of the eviscerating reviews, and met everyone from the actors to the technicians to the studio executives. They'd all signed on for a blockbuster, but there was a sense of impending…
In my career as an academic librarian, I was often asked to teach students to think about the credibility of the information they incorporate into their academic, professional, personal, and civic lives. In my teaching and writing, I have struggled to make sense of the complex and nuanced factors that make some information more credible and other information less so. I don’t have all the answers for dealing with problematic information, but I try hard to convince people to think carefully about the information they encounter before accepting any of it as credible or dismissing any of it as non-credible.
Though written by an academic philosopher, the highly readable On Bullshit weighs in at a breezy eighty pages.
What I love about this book is the way the author differentiates the bullshitter, who attempts to persuade without any regard for the truth, from the liar, who cares about the truth but tries to hide it. Frankfurt goes on to make a strong case for why bullshit is far more dangerous than lying.
In an age where bullshitters get more far attention than they deserve, this is even more relevant than when it was first published in the social-media-free year of 1986.
A #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means…
I have always loved crime fiction, especially those where justice is served. I love crime stories where ordinary people doing their jobs triumph over evil. But so many crime stories are riddled with profanity, sex, and gratuitous violence. Over the last few years, I’ve searched for books that satisfy my need to read about justice but do it cleanly and in such a way that the story is not compromised. Oh, by the way, I’m also a writer of crime fiction and try to stay true to both justice over evil and telling stories in a clean but realistic way.
This book is raw, brutal, and a tough read, but it’s also clean, and that’s what I appreciated most about Walker’s telling of a girl’s story who is stuck in sex trafficking. Yes, it is another sex-trafficking book, but for me, it is a masterful insight from the point of view of those caught in it or caught by it.
Besides being a raw account of sex trafficking trauma, it’s also a compelling story that kept me wanting to read to find out what would happen. It’s a thriller and has many moments of high suspense. Watching Emma move through the phases of “the life” broke my heart but also opened my eyes.
I applaud Mr. Walker for this book. It could not have been easy to write, but I’m glad he did.
At only seventeen, Emma is used, abused, and discarded. She runs a thousand miles away from shame and judgment and falls into a stranger's arms. One careless mistake, and she plummets into the hellish world of sex-trafficking. "The life" takes everything from her, starting with her name. Deep in that darkness, Emma must find herself and find a way out. Her story is a tantalizing suspense that awakens hope.
I have always loved crime fiction, especially those where justice is served. I love crime stories where ordinary people doing their jobs triumph over evil. But so many crime stories are riddled with profanity, sex, and gratuitous violence. Over the last few years, I’ve searched for books that satisfy my need to read about justice but do it cleanly and in such a way that the story is not compromised. Oh, by the way, I’m also a writer of crime fiction and try to stay true to both justice over evil and telling stories in a clean but realistic way.
This is another book that deals with the subject of sex trafficking, which is why I was drawn to it.
From the first scene, I was immediately pulled in, fascinated that the protagonist, Jamie Austen, is a lone woman in a foreign land, rescuing helpless victims of this awful scourge. Her courageous and spunky character grew on me. Toler throws in a wonderful twist with a romantic element that Jamie Austen does not want or need but falls for anyway.
This is another example of how an author can deal with difficult subjects yet keep the book clean.
Why are all the best CIA spies always men? They aren't.
Combine the spycraft of Bourne, the toughness of Reacher, and the beauty of a Charlie's Angel and you have Jamie Austen. America's beloved heroine.
The Jamie Austen Spy Thrillers must be good. They've been number one on Amazon in ten different countries.
Jamie's latest adventure takes her to Belarus. Three hundred girls are missing. She is the only one who can save them. Award winning author, Terry Toler, tells this gripping story that will keep you on the edge of your seat.
