Most Popular Books by Robert Crawford

No writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns. Wonderfully readable, The Bard catches Burns''s energy, brilliance, and radicalism as never before. To his international admirers he was a genius, a hero, a warm-hearted friend; yet to the mother of one of his lovers he was a wastrel, to a fellow poet he was "sprung . . . from raking of dung," and to his political enemies a "traitor." Drawing on a surprising number of untapped sources--from rediscovered poetry by Burns to manuscript journals, correspondence, and oratory by his contemporaries--this new biography presents the remarkable life, loves, and struggles of the great poet. Inspired by the American and French Revolutions and molded by the Scottish Enlightenment, Burns was in several senses the first of the major Romantics. With a poet''s insight and a shrewd sense of human drama, Robert Crawford outlines how Burns combined a childhood steeped in the peasant song-culture of rural Scotland with a consummate linguistic artistry to become not only the world''s most popular love poet but also the controversial master poet of modern democracy. Written with accessible elan and nuanced attention to Burns''s poems and letters, The Bard is the story of an extraordinary man fighting to maintain a sly sense of integrity in the face of overwhelming pressures. This incisive biography startlingly demonstrates why the life and work of Scotland''s greatest poet still compel the attention of the world a quarter of a millennium after his birth.

disAPPOINTED: There is always room for improvement in all of us! Your outlook and perceptions of life''s various situations determine the person you will become or have became. disAPPOINTED will help you redefine the struggles you have had in life. It will help you discover your determination to recover, and help you manifest your own strength and courage through Jesus Christ. It aids you in seeing the lesson for the blessing by reminding you when you are disAPPOINTED that God said "Didn''t I Say Appointed!"

These continue to nourish the verse of sophisticated post-British ''barbarian'' poets such as Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, Douglas Dunn, Les Murray and Derek Walcott. More than that, they are bound up with the contemporary literature and politics of Britain after devolution."--BOOK JACKET.

We all know what religion is - or do we? Confronted with religious pluralism and cultural diversity, it manifests itself in many forms. What is Religion? serves not only as an introduction to the different belief systems flourishing throughout the modern world, but asks us to consider how the very boundaries of faith might be drawn now and in the future. How might religion interact with political ends, or permeate culture, society and everyday life? Is the post-secular world in thrall to ''religions'' of its own kind - materialism, humanism, medicine, science? And what logic separates ''common-sense'' or academic knowledge from the immutable but unstable boudaries of faith? Which is the more certain? What does it mean to believe? Combining clear accounts of contemporary global religious practice with an incisive philosophical interrogation of the dynamics and aims of belief, What is Religion? offers a fresh and wide-ranging introduction to the perennial human questions of ritual, faith, ethics and salvation.

Young Eliot: From St. Louis to "The Waste Land" was hailed as “exceptional” and “assiduous” (The New York Times). Robert Crawford’s meticulous, incisive scholarship continues in Eliot After "The Waste Land", an invaluable record of the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet, and troubled man. After being kept from the public for more than fifty years, the letters between T. S. Eliot and his longtime love and muse Emily Hale were unsealed in 2020. Drawing on these intimate exchanges and on countless interviews and archives, as well as on Eliot’s own poetry and prose, the award-winning biographer Robert Crawford completes the narrative he began in Young Eliot. Eliot After “The Waste Land”, the long-awaited second volume of Crawford’s magisterial, meticulous portrait of the twentieth century’s most significant poet, tells the story of the mature Eliot during his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, including his complex interior life. Chronicling Eliot’s time as an exhausted bank employee after the publication of The Waste Land through the emotional turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s and his years as a firewatcher in bombed wartime London, Crawford shows us the public and personal experiences that helped inspire Eliot’s later masterpieces. Crawford describes the poet’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, his separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood and his happy second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, his editorship at Faber and Faber, his Nobel Prize, his great work Four Quartets, and his adventures in the theater. Crawford presents this complex and remarkable man not as a literary monument but as a human being: as husband, lover, and widower; as banker, editor, playwright, and publisher; and most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art amid personal disasters.

Textual Non Sense is mischievous, minimalist, and revolutionary: a short fuse intended to spark a fundamental re-thinking of how we engage with notions of canon. Classic texts are mangled, quotes are mis-attributed, and great authors are misidentified as Robert Crawford brings literature and chaos theory together in a romance made on Tinder. William Shakespeare of the School of Literature and Bookmaking introduces a survey of writers'' struggles. John Buchan provides his guide to writing a best-seller (blotting paper plays a key role). Professor Mike Foucault employs Big Data to investigate the new discipline, ‘Creaticism'', or ''Critive Writing.'' Humour and literary criticism tend to go together like apples and arsenic. Textual Non Sense argues that humour is an essential corrective--a missing ingredient to a cure for the arthritis and calcification of academic literary criticism. "Absolutely the most important book of our era." -- Virginia Wool "I just can’t wait for the American edition!" -- Emily Dickinson Beyond Criticism Editions is the reincarnation of the Beyond Criticism book series, originally published by Bloomsbury and now part of Boiler House Press'' own experiments with the radical new forms that literary criticism might take in the 21st century.

Primitive and metropolitan life nourished T. S. Eliot''s imagination and emerged as recurrent themes in his work. Examining these twin concerns, Robert Crawford sheds new light on the poet''s achievement--particularly those works that culminated in The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes--and clarifies Eliot''s relentless obsession with "savages" and sophisticates.

"A biography of T. S. Eliot from his birth in St. Louis in 1888 to his publication of The Waste Land in 1922"-- Provided by publisher.

From Treasure Island to Trainspotting, Scotland''s rich literary tradition has influenced writing across centuries and cultures far beyond its borders. Here, for the first time, is a single volume presenting the glories of fifteen centuries of Scottish literature. This is a marvelous and lively literary history that will appeal to general readers, Scots, and travelers alike.

Biography of the 20th Governor of Texas.