Best Selling Books by Melvyn Bragg

Here is the riveting story of the English language, from its humble beginnings as a regional dialect to its current preeminence as the one global language, spoken by more than two billion people worldwide. In this groundbreaking book, Melvyn Bragg shows how English conquered the world. It is a magnificent adventure, full of jealousy, intrigue, and war—against a hoard of invaders, all armed with their own conquering languages, which bit by bit, the speakers of English absorbed and made their own. Along the way, its colorful story takes in a host of remarkable people, places, and events: the Norman invasion of England in 1066; the arrival of The Canterbury Tales and a “coarse” playwright named William Shakespeare, who added 2,000 words to the language; the songs of slaves; the words of Davy Crockett; and the Lewis and Clark expedition, which led to hundreds of new words as the explorers discovered unknown flora and fauna. The Adventure of English is an enthralling story not only of power, religion, and trade, but also of a people and how they changed the world.

''Bragg gives short shrift to pretension of any kind, while remaining stalwart in his search for knowledge. His methodology in In Our Time is... not unlike that of a man throwing a stick at a dog: he chucks his questions ahead, and if the chosen academic fails to bring it right back, he chides them. He retains enough of his bluff Cumbrian origins not to be taken in by gambolling and tweedy high spirits.'' - Will Self, from a February 2010 issue of London Review of Books In Our Time has been the cornerstone of broadcasting every Thursday morning on BBC Radio 4 for the past twenty years, with over 800 episodes since its launch in October 1998. Presented by one of Britain’s greatest champions of the arts, Melvyn Bragg, the show explores ideas across history, religion, philosophy, science and culture. With a vast array of contributors from the world of academia, such as Mary Beard, Angie Hobbs and Diarmaid MacCulloch, it is one of Radio 4’s most successful programmes, attracting a weekly live audience exceeding 2 million listeners, and, per episode, it is one of the world’s most downloaded podcasts. To honour this majoranniversary of BBC broadcasting, this beautifully illustrated book provides a lively and colourful guide to fifty of the most captivating discussions from the past two decades of In Our Time, as chosen by Melvyn and the producer Simon Tillotson and influenced by listeners who have recommended their favourite programmes from those years. Highlights include ‘Romulus and Remus’, ‘The Death of Elizabeth I’, ‘Ada Lovelace’, ‘The Gin Craze’, the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ and ‘The Salem Witch Trials’, and there are additional behind-the-scenes insights, peppered with Melvyn Bragg’s remarks both on and off air. This is a captivating gift for all fans and a celebration of this iconic series.

A lifetime of restraint and placid affection erupts when a retired bank manager falls for a youngh girl. Set in Cumbria, this is an intensely moving evocation of an overwhelming passion and its destructive kernel of jealousy.

The Seventh Seal is probably Bergman''s best-known work and the film that most clearly bears the director''s unmistakeable signature. The opening scene sets the tone: a stony beach under a leaden sky, the knight alone with his thoughts, then the approach of black-clad Death, whom the knight invites to play a game of chess. Bergman''s medieval allegory of faith and doubt is dark with the horrors of witch-burnings and the plague. But it is also shot through with bright flashes of peace and joy, symbolised in the milk and wild strawberries offered to the knight by an innocent family of actors. In his compelling appreciation, Melvyn Bragg describes his own first encounter as a student with this extraordinary film, and how it revealed to him another cinema, quite different from the Hollywood he had grown up with. He recounts too his later meeting with Bergman himself, and how the marks of the director''s powerful personality are everywhere in this troubling and inspiring masterpiece.

Following The Soldier’s Return, heralded as “a novel written in fine steel sentences and granite paragraphs” by the Washington Post, and the equally brilliant A Son of War, Melvyn Bragg brings “one of the finest sagas of postwar Britain” (London Sunday Telegraph) to a stunning conclusion. Set in the 1950s, this absorbing novel follows the intertwined fates of people crossing boundaries in their lives. Alive with a wide cast of characters, Crossing the Lines vividly portrays the spirit and atmosphere of the mid-century and the profound changes taking place at the time, in morals, religion, music, and social class. Moving and evocative, this masterly novel and the two that have preceded it are rightfully hailed as contemporary classics.

A Son of War presents Melvyn Bragg’s second installment in what the Sunday Telegraph calls “one of the finest literary sagas of postwar Britain.” Continuing the story of the Richardson family begun in the award-winning The Soldier’s Return, this powerful novel depicts how the terrible upheavals of World War II reverberated in the peace that followed. After returning from the campaign in Burma, Sam Richardson was determined to leave his small hometown of Wigton for the promised land of Australia. Yet now, a few months later, he has settled for a job in Wigton’s paper factory, and believes he has put both his aspirations and his memories of the war behind him. His wife, Ellen, knows better, realizing how close their marriage has come to disaster. Caught between them, their young son Joe strives to fulfill their conflicting expectations for him, as he faces the challenges of childhood and adolescence and confronts his own demons. Crafted with admirable understatement and acute insight into the twists and turns of the heart, this is a worthy successor to the highly praised The Soldier’s Return. A Son of War portrays a family forever altered by an experience subsequent generations can scarcely imagine, yet whose individual hopes, compromises, and quiet triumphs form the fabric of everyday, universal life. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Melvyn Bragg''s first ever memoir - an elegiac, intimate account of growing up in post-war Cumbria, which vividly evokes a vanished world. ''The best thing he''s ever written . . . What a world he captures here. You can almost smell it'' Rachel Cooke, Observer ''Wonderfully rich, endearing and unusual . . . a balanced, honest picture'' Richard Benson, Mail on Sunday In this elegiac and heartfelt memoir, Melvyn Bragg recreates his youth in the Cumbrian market town of Wigton: a working-class boy who expected to leave school at fifteen yet who gained a scholarship to Oxford University; who happily roamed the streets and raided orchards with his gang of friends until a breakdown in adolescence drove him to find refuge in books. Vividly evoking the post-war era, Bragg draws an indelible portrait of all that formed him: a community-spirited northern town, still steeped in the old ways; the Lake District landscapes that inspired him; and the many remarkable people in his close-knit world. ''A charming account of a lost era, full of details and often lyrical descriptions of people and places . . . fascinating and often moving'' Christina Patterson, Sunday Times

''A novel which has something to say and which says it well and truthfully'' Evening Standard In the shadow of Hadrian''s Wall, two young men chafe at the constraints of rural life and yearn to break free from the courses set for them: John Foster, driven hard by his tyrannical, ambitious father on their tenant farm, and Arthur Langley, reluctant inheritor of his father''s waning estate. Though class has long kept their neighbouring families apart, the pair form an intense friendship - until John makes the mistake of falling for Arthur''s mercurial sister. ''The effect of the book is massive. Characterisations are loving, deep and perceptive'' Sunday Times

''Melvyn Bragg''s account of the passionate and painful love affair between the 12th century radical theologian, Peter Abelard, and the brilliant young convent-educated Eloise springs magnificently to life . . . Thrilling.'' Piers Plowright, Tablet Paris in 1117. Heloise, a brilliant young scholar, is astonished when the famous, radical philosopher, Peter Abelard, consents to be her tutor. But what starts out as a meeting of minds turns into a passionate, dangerous love affair, which incurs terrible retribution. Nine centuries later, Arthur is in Paris to recreate the extraordinary story of Heloise and Abelard in a novel. To his surprise, his daughter visits and agrees to help, challenging his portraits of a couple who seem often inscrutable, sometimes breathtakingly modern. It soon emerges she is on her own mission to discover more about her parents'' fractured relationship - and that Arthur''s connection to his subject is more emotional than he cares to admit.

Richard Burton: star. The roaring boy from the Welsh coal valleys who came to sport on the banks of the old Nile, playing great Antony to Elizabeth Taylor''s Cleopatra. From the West End to Hollywood, from Camelot to Shakespeare, he drank, dazzled and despaired, playing out his life on the public stage. But there was another, quieter, off-stage Richard Burton, a face hidden from the multitude. Melvyn Bragg, allowed free access to the never-before-revealed Burton private notebooks, and with the cooperation of friends who have never spoken about him before, has brought together the private and public sides for the first time. Rich is the complete Richard Burton: a revelation.

Some of the greatest minds of science are profiled in a series of engaging portraits, including Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Curie, Freud, Einstein, James Watson, and Francis Crick.

Right from the start, when the train carrying British soldier Sam Richardson home to Wigton after his service in the Burma campaign breaks down two miles from town and he and his army comrades have to walk home, it is clear we are in the hands of a compassionate, clear-sighted writer. Bragg''s work has been compared to that of Hardy and D.H. Lawrence, not without some justice. His smalltown people are closely and warmly observed, but without a shred of sentimentality, and although this story is familiar¢a man home from a dehumanizing war finds it hard to readjust¢it has seldom been imbued with such rueful humanity. For Sam, England after WWII, and after the sufferings he and his men endured in the frightful jungle campaigns, is stuffy and limiting; soon he starts dreaming of wider horizons. His adored wife, Ellen, however, is happily rooted in the little northern town where she grew up; their small son, Joe, who has hardly known his father, is bewitched but also terrified of him. How the family works out its fate in the shabby postwar years is Braggs story, and he makes of it something at once endearing and heroic. So many scenes, the regimental reunion, Joe''s efforts to win friends among the tough town kids, a final scene at a railway station as heartrending as the movie Brief Encounter, linger in the mind. The book is a small classic, deeply touching and true. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

A lifetime of restraint and placid affection erupts when a retired bank manager falls for a young girl, as far removed from him in background and experience as in age. Set in Cumbria, this is an intensely moving evocation of an overwhelming passion and its destructive kernel of jealousy.

A compelling story of passion, loyalty and the dangers of an obsessive relationship by the Booker Prize-longlisted and bestselling author Melvyn Bragg Half-French and with an agile, inquiring mind, Rosemary Lewis cannot help being out of the ordinary in Thurston, the Cumbrian market town where she grows up between the wars. An early, bruising failure in love drives her inwards to the solace of books until she meets Edgar - vigorous, down to earth and determined to win her. Charting their life together, this powerful novel probes with exceptional acuity the heights and tortured depths of a bond that becomes a shackle. ''Rosemary is an outstanding creation'' Sunday Telegraph ''A vigorous but never crude study of female sexuality, it is distinguished by passages of prose which have precisely the sort of leaping life that Lawrence held up before himself as an ideal all through his career'' Guardian

Melvyn Bragg''s highly acclaimed, bestselling historical novel, the story behind one of the 19th century''s greatest scandals. ''This is the story of an impostor and bigamist, a self-styled Colonel Hope, who travels to the North, where eventually he marries "The Maid of Buttermere", a young woman whose natural beauty inspired the dreams and confirmed the theories of various early nineteenth-century writers . . . It is a fine story . . . This is historical fiction with a human face'' Peter Ackroyd, The Times ''A skilled, ornate and convincing examination of a nineteenth-century scandal in Bragg''s own Cumbria'' Thomas Keneally ''A triumph . . . I am overwhelmingly impressed'' Beryl Bainbridge ''Bragg achieves the most difficult of feats, the telling of the changing perceptions and ideals of a radical age . . . He is also as powerful as ever in his description of nature'' Sunday Times

In this gripping novel, Melvyn Bragg brings an extraordinary episode in English history to fresh, urgent life. At the end of May 1381, the fourteen-year-old King of England had reason to be fearful: the plague had returned, the royal coffers were empty and a draconian poll tax was being widely evaded. Yet Richard, bolstered by his powerful, admired mother, felt secure in his God-given right to reign. But within two weeks, the unthinkable happened: a vast force of common people invaded London, led by a former soldier, Walter Tyler, and the radical preacher John Ball, demanding freedom, equality and the complete uprooting of the Church and state. And for three intense, violent days, it looked as if they would sweep all before them. Now is the Time depicts the events of the Peasants'' Revolt on both a grand and intimate scale, vividly portraying its central figures and telling an archetypal tale of an epic struggle between the powerful and the apparently powerless.

The Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller celebrating 400 years of the King James Bible. The King James Bible has often been called the Book of Books both in itself and in what it stands for. Since its publication in 1611 it has been the best selling book in the world, and many believe, had the greatest impact. The King James Bible has spread the Protestant faith. It has also been the greatest influence on the enrichment of the English language and its literature. It has been the Bible of wars from the British Civil War in the seventeenth century to the American Civil War two centuries later and it has been carried into battle in innumerable conflicts since then. Its influence on social movements - particularly involving women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - and politics was profound. It was crucial to the growth of democracy. It was integral to the abolition of slavery and it defined attitudes to modern science, education and sex. As THE ADVENTURE OF ENGLISH explored the history of our language, so THE BOOK OF BOOKS reveals the extraordinary and still-felt impact of a work created over 400 years ago.

Based on Melvyn Bragg''s stirring novel of rural and industrial working life early in the twentieth century, The Hired Man tells of one family''s - Bragg''s grandparents'' - journey from land laborers to colliers and back to the land. The superb score is a marvelous succession of chorales, operatic duets and vigorous foot stomping rhythms.5 women, 14 men

Melvyn Bragg''s acclaimed epic novel is set at the tumultuous dawn of Christianity in Britain and Ireland. It is a stunning story of adventure and spirituality, war and romance, but it is deeply rooted in Bragg''s historical studies of the Dark Ages, and it throws into question our modern-day conceptions of faith, hope, and true love. Two people destined to be lovers sacrifice themselves for what they believe to be a greater destiny. For the warrior Padric, a charismatic British prince, it is the salvation of his people and homeland from warring Northumbrian overlords; for Bega, a bewitching Irish princess, it is carrying out her self-imposed commitment to spread the word of God. She, bearing a fragment of the true cross, is gifted with miraculous powers; he is a swordsman without peer. Their disparate missions send them apart as they travel throughout the frigid wilderness of a primitive England beset by terror and villainy. Faith is pitched against doubt, spiritual fulfillment against physical desire, romantic ideals against political expediency and pragmatism against theory. The Sword and the Miracle rose quickly to the top of the British bestseller lists, heralded by critics as an absorbing, wonderfully evocative work, several cuts above contemporary attempts at historical fiction. The reader will find an exciting narrative informed by insight, knowledge and understanding.

"A passionate but ultimately tragic love affair starts when two students - one French, one English - meet at university at the beginning of the sixties. From its tentative, unpromising early stages, the relationship develops into a life-changing one, whose profound impact continues to reverberate forty years later."--BOOK JACKET.

Episode uit het leven van drie mannen, afkomstig uit een Noordengels arbeidersgezin, die in verschillende omstandigheden ieder hun problemen te verwerken krijgen.

Part One: The History (What do we know?) This brief historical introduction to William Tyndale explores the social, political and religious factors that formed the original context of his life and writings, and considers how those factors affected the way he was initially received. What was his impact on the world at the time and what were the key ideas and values connected with him? Part Two: The Legacy (Why does it matter?) This second part explores the intellectual and cultural ‘afterlife’ of William Tyndale, and considers the ways in which his impact has lasted and been developed in different contexts by later generations. Why is he still considered important today? In what ways is his legacy contested or resisted? And what aspects of his legacy are likely to continue to influence the world in the future? The book has a brief chronology at the front plus a glossary of key terms and a list of further reading at the back.

Jimmie Johnston first became a Labour MP in Cumbria when there was a brave new post-war world to build. Now, in the late 70s, another general election looms but he is no longer so optimistic. And as he fights to keep his seat, his family begins to fracture around him and scandal threatens. In this absorbing and fast-paced novel, Melvyn Bragg''s portrait of the mood and politics of the era remains as pertinent today as on its original publication.