Most Popular Books by David Cairns

A noted music critic weaves a brilliantly engaging narrative which puts Mozart''s operas in the context of his life, showing how they illuminate his creativity as a whole.

Berlioz, Volume I, previously published only in Britain, is now available to American readers in a revised edition, together with the eagerly awaited, new Volume II. These two volumes together comprise a monumental biographical achievement, sure to stand as the definitive Berlioz biography.

Covers the life of the French composer, including his struggle to establish himself in Paris and how his work was created.

The biography of Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) describes with unprecedented intimacy, affection, and respect the life of one of France''s greatest artists. Vol 1: 30 photos. Vol. 2: 50 photos.

Step back in time to 1863, when Melbourne was a melting pot of opportunity, ambition... and murder. The Gold Rush is in full swing, transforming Melbourne and the northern gold towns like Ballarat and Bendigo into a dazzling, yet dangerous, frontier. The promise of wealth lures prospectors from far and wide, but where there is gold, there is also crime. In this intoxicating backdrop, meet Findo Gask and Erroll Rait, an intriguing duo with an unyielding sense of justice. When Gask and Rait stumble upon a man wrongly accused of murder, their quest to set things right plunges them headfirst into a web of deceit. Little do they know their search for the truth will lead them straight into the treacherous heart of a shadowy, unscrupulous secret criminal society. A race against time to expose a ruthless conspiracy... This malevolent society is spreading its sinister tentacles throughout Melbourne, stopping at nothing—even murder—to achieve its dark goals. At the heart of their obsession is a single prize: the location of a hidden hoard of gold stolen years earlier in a daring robbery. As Findo and Erroll risk it all to exonerate the innocent, they must navigate a world where gold fever runs rampant and the line between right and wrong is perilously blurred. “The Case of the Wandering Corpse” is a meticulously researched historical mystery that truly transports you to the 19th-century Gold Rush. This fast-paced, pulse-pounding adventure gallops along at a breakneck pace, ensuring you are left guessing at every twist and turn.

Precarity is a concern that affects researchers in academia across the world. Despite being experienced and highly qualified, many endure working conditions more traditionally associated with people lacking skills and credentials. This book explores this perverse situation, focusing on Portugal, with a view to explaining how precarity starts and then continues for the entire duration of a research career. Using 100 interviews conducted with researchers from across Portugal in 2022-2023, covering a wide range of scientific fields, the book gives these people the opportunity to explain why they became researchers and how they have coped with precarity during the early career stages, and at intermediate and advanced levels. As a sociological study, the book draws on the theoretical concepts of ambivalence, liminality and cruel optimism to help map the parameters of precarity, while the evidence demonstrates its often visceral personal and professional impacts, reaching the conclusion that believing research needs to be a precarious profession must be challenged within higher education institutions and at policy level.

Is it really possible that you have stumbled across a secret lost for centuries? A secret that that could change the world order? From the bustling gold rush and the streets of Melbourne in 1864 to the ancient city of Edinburgh in Scotland, three friends flee from a secret society out for revenge, only to find themselves at the centre of a swirling modern-day Jacobite plot and a ‘stop at nothing’ British Secret Service. Major Findo Gask and his Sherlockian friend, Errol Rait, hunted by a murderous secret society, are forced to make a clandestine escape from Melbourne back to Gask’s hometown of Edinburgh. While in hiding, Gask visits a second-hand bookshop which launches him on a puzzling trail with several twists and turns. And deadly consequences. Rait, Gask and Mary Mitchell find themselves pitted against the full might of the British Empire’s secret services and a centuries-old Knights Templar Lodge of the Freemasons with a secret to guard and an explosive plan to replace Queen Victoria on the throne with the true King. Murder, kidnap, torture, death stalk their trail. Gask and Rait alone have the key to avert a constitutional crisis and the violent conflict that would follow. But can they survive to unlock the puzzle? Immerse yourself in the 1860s with deeply researched real background events and an intermingling with real characters of the day. This is the third book in the Major Gask series – the introductory novel was a five-star read by Reader’s Choice Book Awards. Readers of the Major Gask mysteries have become time travellers trapped in an adventure – “..left me unable to put it down until my eyes were fuzzy and I had to sleep. First thing the following morning after dog duties etc I had to return to it”….. “The setting of the mining camp was so well done with such detail, I had to finish the chapter because I thought I had mud all over me after finishing the last sentence of the chapter”. If you enjoy a Sherlock Holmes adventure or the atmosphere in a Dickens story – this will be right up your street. Will Findo be successful or will the Templars or the Secret Service triumph? You will be unprepared for the heart-thumping ending. Travel back in time and join the adventure.

in 1853, the Australian colonies were rocked by the audacious robbery of a fortune in gold being escorted from the goldfields to Melbourne. Soon 400 men were searching the bush to track the gang down including aboriginal trackers. Unsuccessfully. The leader, Joe Grey was never caught and disappeared - or did he? Some of the bushrangers intended to escape on the Madagacar, a ship that left Melbourne and was never seen again. What happened to it? Mystery upon mystery.

How would you respond if your death sentence was commuted to life on an island prison half a world away? Robert Bright and Mary Ann Goulding are beginning life on the island prison of Van Diemen’s Land, serving their sentences under the strict control of a martinet Governor. Two real people caught up in the hopelessness of an unequal, class-ridden society who fight back as the new nation of Australia is forged. The Helots’ Tale, Redemption – is part II of a deeply-researched two-part novel that transports the reader back in time, weaving intriguingly amongst the real people and real events of an age when the British Empire was in full flow. It describes the adventures of two of the 160,000 souls transported to the new world colonies of Australia in the 1800s. If you have enjoyed the novels of Charles Dickens you will be interested in more than one reviewer’s comments such as: “many echoes of Dickens in the detail, language and well-researched background of this story” and other reviews: ★★★★★ “I couldn’t put it down” ★★★★★ “Fascinating and very well researched” ★★★★★ “Wonderfully descriptive narrative makes for a most immersive and engaging reading experience” Did they beat the system?

This book explores the relationship between youth labour market marginality and political participation, focusing on the example of Portugal and the role played by austerity policies in shaping patterns of activism. Through integrating primary and secondary empirical evidence with key ideas from classical and contemporary Sociology, the authors illustrate some of the key features of youth unemployment and job precariousness, also highlighting trends in formal and informal activist activities. Central to Youth Unemployment and Job Precariousness is the argument that following the onset of the economic crisis, there has been the birth of what we the authors term ''an austerity generation'', comprised of young people facing difficulties in the labour market and uncertain futures. The book also highlights the difficulties young people have in making a political response to austerity, as well as their hopes for the future, including the need to raise consciousness about youth labour market marginalization and to return to more accountable forms of democracy.

This book looks at the changes that have taken place in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, following the lockdown of societies and imposition of border controls in an attempt to limit the spread of the virus. Using empirical evidence from Portugal, a geopolitically important point of intersection within Europe and between Global South and Global North, the book examines consequences of the apparent end of mobility expansionism, developing a refreshing theoretical concept of ‘immobility turn.’ Focusing on the tourist industry, universities hosting international students and migration agencies, the book offers invaluable insights about how the pandemic affected institutions and individuals’ lives, informing policy-making processes on a global level.

"Writing Ireland is a provocative and wide-ranging examination of culture, literature and identity in nine-teenth- and twentieth-century Ireland. Moving beyond the reductionist reading of the historical moment as a backdrop to cultural production, the authors deploy contemporary theories of discourse and the constitution of the colonial subject to illuminate key texts in the cultural struggle between the colonizer and the colonized. The book opens with a consideration of the originary moment of the colonial relationsip of England and Ireland through re-reading of works by Shakespeare and Spenser. Cairns and Richards move then to the constitution of the modern discourse of Celticism in the nineteenth century. A fundamental re-reading of the period of the Literary Revival through the works of Yeats, Synge, Joyce and O''Casey locates them in a social moment illuminated by detailed considerations of poems, playwrights and polemicists such as D. P. Moran, Arthur Griffith, Patrick Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh. Writing Ireland examines the psychic, sexual and social costs of the decolonisation struggle in the society and culture of the Irish Free State and its successor. Beckett, Kavanagh and O''Faolain registered the enervation and paralysis consequent upon sustaining a repressive view of Irish identity. The book concludes in the contemporary moment, as Ireland''s post-colonial culture enters crisis and writers like Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and Seamus Deane grapple with the notion of alternative identities. Writing Ireland provides students of literature, history, cultural studies and Irish studies with a lucid analysis of Ireland''s colonial and post-colonial situation on which an innovative methodology transcends disciplinary divisions."--