In Their Own Write

"Death, drugs, drink, divorce, infidelity, jail, sex, celebrity, fame, obsession, jealousy, nervous breakdowns, industrial action, one or two fist-fights, typewriters flying through windows, back-biting, bitching and score-setting - oh, and Nick Kent's pink underpants - the real history of the music press is much more than just a dust-dry account of publishing launches and circulation fluctuations." "In Their Own Write is an oral history celebrating five decades of the "champs, chumps and charlatans" - as Charles Shaar Murray describes them in his foreword - who populated this most fertile of media breeding grounds. Featuring the inside take on Rolling Stone, Q, Melody Maker, Spin, NME, Creem, Mojo, Zigzag, Blender and Smash Hits from the likes of former music hacks Cameron Crowe, Tony Parsons, Julie Burchill and Chrissie Hynde, it leaves no page unturned."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Few subjects in European welfare history attract as much attention as the nineteenth-century English and Welsh New Poor Law. Its founding statute was considered the single most important piece of social legislation ever enacted, and at the same time, the coming of its institutions – from penny-pinching Boards of Guardians to the dreaded workhouse – has generally been viewed as a catastrophe for ordinary working people. Until now it has been impossible to know how the poor themselves felt about the New Poor Law and its measures, how they negotiated its terms, and how their interactions with the local and national state shifted and changed across the nineteenth century. In Their Own Write exposes this hidden history. Based on an unparalleled collection of first-hand testimony – pauper letters and witness statements interwoven with letters to newspapers and correspondence from poor law officials and advocates – the book reveals lives marked by hardship, deprivation, bureaucratic intransigence, parsimonious officialdom, and sometimes institutional cruelty, while also challenging the dominant view that the poor were powerless and lacked agency in these interactions. The testimonies collected in these pages clearly demonstrate that both the poor and their advocates were adept at navigating the new bureaucracy, holding local and national officials to account, and influencing the outcomes of relief negotiations for themselves and their communities. Fascinating and compelling, the stories presented in In Their Own Write amount to nothing less than a new history of welfare from below.

John Lennon's second collection of poems, stories and drawings back in print to mark its 50th Anniversary.

A lifetime of letters, collected for the first time, from the legendary musician and songwriter. John Lennon was one of the greatest songwriters the world has ever known, creator of "Help!", "Come Together", "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Imagine", and dozens more. But it was in his correspondences that he let his personality and poetry flow unguarded. Now, gathered for the first time in book form, are his letters to family, friends, strangers, and lovers from every point in his life. Funny, informative, wise, poetic, and sometimes heartbreaking, his letters illuminate a never-before-seen intimate side of the private genius. This groundbreaking collection of almost 300 letters and postcards has been edited and annotated by Hunter Davies, whose authorized biography The Beatles (1968) was published to great acclaim. With unparalleled knowledge of Lennon and his contemporaries, Davies reads between the lines of the artist's words, contextualizing them in Lennon's life and using them to reveal the man himself.

A fantastic write-in book that helps children learn to write their own stories. Includes lots of different writing activities including a fictional school journal, writing a comic strip, and forming a story around a picture. Packed with writing tips and a "storywriting toolkit" to inspire budding authors. Concealed spiral binding that allows the book to open flat but doesn't get in the way as you write. Perfectly complemented by Usborne's Write Your Own Story Word Book, an inspiring write-in book that helps children find the right words for engaging stories.

A Room of One’s Own is an essay written by Virginia Woolf. It was published in 1929 and is based on two lectures given by the author in 1928 at two colleges for women at Cambridge. In this famous essay, Woolf addressed the status of women, and women artists in particular. In this essay, the author also asserts that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write. According to Woolf, women’s creativity has been curtailed due to centuries of prejudice and financial and educational disadvantages. To emphasize her view, she offers the example of an imaginary gifted but uneducated sister of William Shakespeare, who, discouraged from all eventually kills herself. Woolf celebrates the work of women who have overcome that tradition and become writers, including Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily. In the final section Woolf suggests that great minds are neutral and argues that intellectual freedom requires financial freedom. The author entreats her audience to write not only fiction but poetry, criticism, and scholarly works as well.

Whether you want to dash off a limerick, ponder a sonnet or plot an epic poem, this write-in activity book is here to help. Each page is bursting with tips and inspiration for writing all kinds of poems - and inventing brand new styles too. With links to websites where you can listen to many of the poems in this book, and find more helpful writing tips.

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times