Portents Pill Popping Almighty Strops

London has entered the Eighties and skies are darkening everywhere as violence starts to flood into the capital. Together they embark on a global love story which is both moving and funny. But as they travel to Paris, Provence, Israel and New York, malevolence and violence threatens to overtake them. Eventually they must confront the demons now surrounding them – some of which, they realise to their horror – have been of their own making.

We are some time in the near future in London which is being besieged by violence and anarchy with huge conflagrations in almost every suburb. Whatever could have gone wrong has gone wrong. Football supporters have been banned from all grounds and soccer matches are now played only for the television cameras. Official attempts to control the mounting crime wave include secret labour camps and televised corporal punishment. The black populations in such as Brixton and Hackney are confined to walled ghettoes in a bid to control street riots and they are only let out to shop on Saturday afternoons. Packs of wild dogs roam the streets, attacking tramps and in Parliament they are debating forcible castration to all sex offenders because of the mounting rape attacks. By night television news helicopters cruise above the ruined streets reporting on any outbreaks of violence because ‘people need to know what’s going on in their streets’. Far worse than any of that Keith Richards, the only surviving member of the Rolling Stones, is negotiating to buy Windsor Castle. Enter (unsteadily) Binky Bines, urbane gossip columnist and bon viveur trying to wrest one last bit of fun out of a dying civilisation. But there’s plenty of time to gather together a few morsels for his column as he works his way through the best champagne vintages and is introduced to the glories of high tech sex. Meanwhile one of his colleagues, Julian Webb, always just a call away from a headline, is on the track of some nasty Soho operators who are busy making ever more piles of money making ‘snuff’ moves involving the real murders of young people in Shoreditch. Back in the newsroom of the Globe Ernest ‘The Mekon’ Jullick sits orchestrating the crumbling music of a society impaling itself on its own savagery. He keeps demanding stories which reflect the violence of the times but, so far, he has only come across a bow-and-arrow story in Nottingham. If this new style thuggery hasn’t yet spread it surely will. The Electronic Harvest is an Orwellian attack on the modern media which is leading us all straight to hell. Above all this novel will throw into burning focus the whole argument of whether the media merely reflects the bad news or whether it actually creates it.

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

This carefully crafted ebook: "ULYSSES (Modern Classics Series)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It is considered to be one of the most important works of modernist literature, and has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement". Ulysses chronicles the peripatetic appointments and encounters of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. Ulysses is the Latinised name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic poem Odyssey, and the novel establishes a series of parallels between its characters and events and those of the poem (the correspondence of Leopold Bloom to Odysseus, Molly Bloom to Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus to Telemachus). Joyce divided Ulysses into 18 chapters or "episodes". At first glance much of the book may appear unstructured and chaotic; Joyce once said that he had "put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant", which would earn the novel "immortality". James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses, the short-story collection Dubliners, and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegans Wake.