THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND WHAT - CLARKE STEPHEN - Random UK

The entertaining biography of Edward VII and his playboy lifestyle, by Stephen Clarke, author of 1000 Years of Annoying the French and A Year in the Merde

Despite fierce opposition from his mother, Queen Victoria, Edward VII was always passionately in love with France. He had affairs with the most famous Parisian actresses, courtesans and can-can dancers. He spoke French more elegantly than English. He was the first ever guest to climb the Eiffel Tower with Gustave Eiffel, in defiance of an official English ban on his visit. He turned his French seduction skills into the diplomatic prowess that sealed the Entente Cordiale. A quintessentially English king? Pas du tout! Stephen Clarke argues that as 'Dirty Bertie,' Edward learned all the essentials in life from the French.

'Why should researchers be interested in our own feelings and emotions as we carry out research? Emotion is what it is to exist, to be human, and is present in every sphere of our lives. All activities are infused with emotion, even those that are constructed as 'rational', because rationality and emotionality are interpenetrated and entwined: we are not only rational or only emotional, because all thinking is tinged with feeling, and all feeling is tinged with thinking. This book illuminates the emotional processes of doing social and organizational research, and the implications of this for the outcomes of research. With contributions from leading academics and research practitioners, it addresses the significant issue of the sometimes intense emotional experiences involved in doing research and the implications it has for the theory and practice of social research. By examining the nature of feelings and emotions, it explores how we might understand researchers' emotions and experiences, and consider the often powerful feelings encountered in a variety of research contexts. Topics discussed include: power relations; psycho-social explanations of researcher emotions; paradoxical relations with research participants and the sometimes disturbing data that is gained; research supervision; the politics of research; gender; publishing, undergoing vivas and presenting at conferences. This book will therefore be a valuable companion to researchers and research students from the start of their career onwards'--

SUM shows us forty wonderfully imagined possibilities of life beyond death.In one afterlife you may find that God is the size of a microbe and is unaware of your existence. In another, your creators are a species of dim-witted creatures who built us to figure out what they could not. In a different version of the afterlife you work as a background character in other people’s dreams. Or you may find that the afterlife contains only people whom you remember, or that the hereafter includes the thousands of previous gods who no longer attract followers. In some afterlives you are split into your different ages; in some you are forced to live with annoying versions of yourself that represent what you could have been; in others you are re-created from your credit card records and Internet history. Many versions of our purpose here are proposed; we are mobile robots for cosmic mapmakers, we are reunions for a scattered confederacy of atoms, we are experimental subjects for gods trying to understand what makes couples stick together. These tales—at once witty, wistful and unsettling—are rooted in science and romance and awe at our mysterious existence while asking the key questions about death, hope, technology, immortality, love, biology and desire that expose radiant new facets of our humanity.

FRANCAIS JE VOUS HAIME - CLARKE STEPHEN - Interforum