BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
JANUARY-JUNE 2025
KEY TITLES
New from the world’s most pre-eminent philosopher,
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
Žižek’s Essays will showcase the best of Žižek’s thought and writing in short, punchy, pocket-sized entries, each addressing some of the most urgent issues facing society: from authenticity in the age of AI to war and ecological collapse.
Published 31st October 2024
Coming 20th March 2025
“To confront the great challenges today, it is crucial to learn to draw the proper lines of division. Through this new essay series, bridging the gap between philosophical thought and political commentary, it is my aim and hope to address some of these biggest areas of division, from the idea of progress to freedom and justice.”
Slavoj Žižek
Introduction
As we gear up for 2025, we’re delighted to present our lead JanuaryJune titles with you, encompassing original non-fiction, our flagship series including the BFI Film Classics, Object Lessons, the 33 1/3s and the recent spin-off series Genre, as well as paperbacks and new editions.
As I write to you from our office in London’s Bedford Square, I am particularly looking forward to Clive Bloom’s London Uncanny: A Gothic Guide to the Capital in Weird History and Fiction, an exploration of gothic London, tracing its hidden history and darkest fictitious depictions from the 18th century to the present day. Perfect as we leave summer behind and head into crisper nights.
Continuing with the wintry theme, we’re also publishing Pub by Philip Howell in the Object Lessons series which takes the iconic British institution apart, reassessing both its history and cultural significance. The book is publishing in the 10th anniversary year of when the series first launched –cheers to that!
The period additionally sees the publication of the second book in the new Žižek Essay’s series, Zero Point. This series showcases the best of Slavoj Žižek’s thought and writing in a short, punchy collections of essays and was launched in October 2024 with Against Progress. I look forward to seeing what typically idiosyncratic ideas he addresses in subsequent issues.
Lastly I wanted to mention The Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Breaking the Rules and the Dangers of Inclusion by the brilliant Kevin Guyan, which is the first book to foreground the importance of systems – and their associated documents, policies and administrative practices – as a battleground for LGBTQ equalities in the UK. It is a ground-breaking study and I can’t wait for it to be out and available in the world.
All the best.
Pooja Aggarwal, Director of Academic and Professional Publishing
Original Non-Fiction
Slow Train Coming
Bob Dylan’s Girl from the North Country and Broadway's Rebirth
Todd Almond
Despite historic, seemingly insurmountable setbacks of four openings, Bob Dylan and Conor McPherson’s musical Girl from the North Country became a critical Broadway hit. Hailed as an experience “as close as mortals come to heaven on earth,” by The New York Times, the musical weaves two dozen songs from the legendary catalogue of Bob Dylan into a story of Duluth during the Great Depression, to create a future American classic.
The play opened on Broadway in the middle of an unprecedented moment. Consequently, Slow Train Coming is a book about pressing on in the face of extreme adversity. Todd Almond’s behind-the-scenes oral history weaves his personal first-hand account of starring in the show with exclusive interviews and reflections from fellow cast members and the creative team.
Together they follow the show from its beginnings at New York’s Public Theater where it emerged as an underdogof-a-show, through a fraught jump to Broadway against a backdrop of the emerging Covid-19 pandemic and the longest shutdown in Broadway history, which resulted in the theatre industry’s subsequent fight for survival.
Told through personal stories, anecdotes from the cast, production shots, behind-the-scenes photos, and insights from the creators, this book is both an inside look at a perilous moment of one of America’s proudest institutions, Broadway, and a true story of American grit and determination lived by the company of this quirky musical-that-could.
Todd Almond is an acclaimed performer, songwriter, and playwright. His performance in Girl from the North Country was called “stunning” by The Washington Post and “roof-raising, uplifting, and invigorating” by Hollywood Reporter. Currently, Todd can also be seen starring in Gossip Girl on HBO Max.
23 January 2025
280 pages
Hardback: 9781350407381 | £25.00
Imprint: Methuen Drama
“Todd Almond is one of our best and brightest songwriters. I look forward to anything that comes out of his brain.”
– Lin-Manuel Miranda
06 February 2025
168 pages | 30 black and white illustrations
Hardback: 9781350397057 | £20.00
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Snapshots
An Album of Essay and Image
Edited by: Dinah Lenney
If pictures are worth a thousand words, what kinds of words might they inspire? What stories would they tell and would they be joyful or sad, elegant or savage?
Snapshots features 36 such meditations from a diverse group of writers, each of whom draws on a photograph from their personal archive to inspire a short essay.
Intimate and powerful, these reflections exhibit a range of sensibilities and experiences, offering unique insight into the lives and interests of both established and emerging authors. Expressing a dynamic array of styles, relationships, landscapes, and preoccupations, Snapshots is an album for our life and times.
The book includes pieces from the writers below:
- Emilie Pascale Beck - Suzanne Berne - Aimee Bender
- Sven Birkerts - Kate Carroll De Gutes - Stuart Dybek
- Alex Espinoza - Lynell George - Amy Gerstler - Tod Goldberg - Hannah Howard - Vanessa Hua - Pico Iyer
- Wayne Koestenbaum - Major Jackson - Leslie Jamison
- Dinah Lenney - Alex Marzano-Lesnevich - Aimee LiuSonja Livingston - Attica Locke - Dinty W. Moore - Mara Naselli - Naomi Shihab Nye - Ivy Pochoda - Adriana E. Ramirez - Sejal Shah - Brandon Shimoda - Jessica Silvester - Aisha Sabatini Sloan - Susan Straight - Grace Talusan
- Abigail Thomas - Clifford Thompson - David L. UlinDiana Wagman
Dinah Lenney is a longtime nonfiction editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and she herself has published several books in the genre, including Coffee (as part of the Bloomsbury Object Lessons series), The Object Parade and Bigger than Life, and co-edited Brief Encounters: A Collection of Literary Nonfiction with the late Judith Kitchen. Dinah's essays and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post among many other publications.
If the Song Doesn't Work, Change the Dress
The Illustrated Memoirs of Broadway Costume Designer
Patricia Zipprodt
Patricia Zipprodt with Arnold Wengrow
Iconic Broadway costume designer Patricia Zipprodt (1925-99) tells her own colourful story from a tumultuous childhood in Depression-era Chicago to Bohemian New York in the 1950s, becoming one of the 20th century's most celebrated designers.
Told with Zipprodt's acerbic humour and wit, If the Song Doesn't Work, Change the Dress charts her journey to 1950s Greenwich Village, America's literary and artistic Bohemia. The book tracks her career as it plunges into the developing Off-Broadway movement, and charts her personal and professional failures and successes collaborating with the biggest artists of the day - Jerome Robbins, Hal Prince, and Bob Fosse - Which makes her one of the most recognisable, and award-winning, designers of 20th-century theatre.
This illustrated memoir includes pictures from Zipprodt's own archive including from some of the most significant shows of the 20th century. Zipprodt’s posthumous collaborator, theatre design historian Arnold Wengrow, draws from her archive at the New York Public Library and Museum of the Performing Arts, amplifing her recollections with letters, oral histories, and interviews she gave over the years to offer a portrait of an artist consistently working against the grain.
Patricia Zipprodt (1925-99) was one of Broadway's pioneering costume designers.
Arnold Wengrow served as an associate editor for Theatre Design and Technology (TD&T).
06 February 2025
216 pages | 100 colour illustrations
Hardback: 9781350430655 | £25.00
Imprint: Methuen Drama
20 February 2025
232 pages | 20 black and white illustrations
Hardback: 9781350424036 | £20.00
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
“Clive Bloom has long been one of the U.K.'s principal authorities on the Gothic, and this study of the uncanny and the eldritch in London’s past combines an ironclad historicity with a storyteller's grip. The book functions on a variety of levels in consummate fashion, and the writing style is immensely readable. Readers are unlikely to view the Capital and its eerie past in the same way ever again.”
– Barry Forshaw, Literary Critic and Author
London Uncanny
A Gothic Guide to the Capital in Weird History and Fiction
Clive Bloom
From Kensington to the East End, under candle light, gas lamp and then Neon signs, London is both a bustling physical metropolis and a stirring psychic encounter. The most depraved depictions of the city in fiction, film, poetry, television and theatre have irrevocably merged with the reality of its dark history, creating a phantasmagoria defined by murder, vice and the unnatural. In this panoptic look at England’s capital at its most eerie and macabre, Clive Bloom takes a tour of Gothic London's uncanny literature, arcane events and its infamous and imagined geographies.
From David Bowie to T S Eliot, Thomas de Quincey to Aleister Crowley, the prophetess Joanna Southcott to the 'ghosts' of Abba and the characters of Neil Gaiman’s London Below, these are the figures that populate a city lost in fog and blind alleys, where the dead can be raised, the living sacrificed and the clandestine thrive. Suturing together fact and fantasy, London Uncanny presents the urban landscape of the capital as a space of wonder and madness, haunted by its past and haunting the present. Stalking through disease and degeneracy, death and murder, spiritualism, lunacy and the occult, Bloom crafts a singular, integrated concept of a London where dreams and nightmares meet.
Clive Bloom is Professor in Residence at the Larkin Centre for Poetry and Creative Writing at Hull University, UK. A feature writer for The Financial Times, The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Irish Times and the London Evening Standard, Bloom is the author of many books on topics from literature to politics, including the political histories of London Violent City and Riot City. He has won a Bram Stoker Award and has been shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award twice.
100 Queer Films Since Stonewall
Chelsea McCracken and Matt Connolly
100 Queer Films identifies 100 films that shaped the trajectory of queer cinema, connected with larger movements, and showcased the artistry of queer filmmaking. In addition to those films that already hold significant places in queer film canons, this volume examines often-overlooked titles. By highlighting hidden gems alongside well known classics, this book makes a valuable, accessible contribution to queer film studies.
While queer films have existed since the beginning of cinema, this book focuses on films released after the Stonewall uprising in 1969. Stonewall is considered a turning point for queer politics and representation, and the 50 years since that event have generated an explosion of queer creativity.
The book describes significant formal elements of each film and connects them to their interrelated contexts. By moving in chronological order, it introduces a contemporary history of queer film and provides an overview of major developments in LGBTQ communities, cultures, and politics. This volume presents a framework for understanding the value of queer film.
Chelsea McCracken is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at SUNY Oneonta, USA. Her research interests include LGBTQ media, American independent cinema, and media industries, and she has published work in Screen, Media History, and Asian Cinema.
Matt Connolly is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Department of English at Minnesota State University, Mankato, USA. His scholarly work on LGBTQ cinematic history has been published in Cinema Journal and Spectator.
01 May 2025
224 pages | 100 black and white and colour illustrations
Paperback: 9781839025075 | £19.99
Imprint: British Film Institute
20 March 2025
192 pages
Paperback: 9781350537842 | £9.99
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Zero Point Slavoj Žižek
On 17 October 2023, Slavoj Žižek spoke at the Frankfurt Book Fair. His speech was interrupted by local politicians, backed by police and in subsequent weeks, he was accused of anti-Semitism, of relativization, and unforgivable Hamas sympathizing.
Zero Point is an intimate window into Žižek's response to that moment, to his critics, as well as to the unfolding horror in Gaza. It is a chronological collection of writings, sometimes fragmentary in which a thinker who is no stranger to controversy grapples with truth, grief, history and death. Spanning geography and history in a bid to understand the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, Žižek both issues and responds to a challenge to resist the slide towards total catastrophe—to go deeper in the face of disorientation and despair.
Žižek’s Essays showcase the best of Slavoj Žižek’s thought and writing in short, punchy collections of essays. Carefully curated to chart the intellectual journeys of one of the world’s prominent philosophers, each book brings together writings addressing the most urgent issues facing the contemporary subject. Written with Žižek’s characteristic verve, expansiveness, erudition and imagination, the essays combine the enduring Žižekian preoccupations of Marxism, psychoanalysis, contemporary politics and film with emerging themes—particle physics, new theories of history, authenticity in the age of AI, war and ecological collapse in all its catastrophic forms. Žižek’s Essays invite both seasoned readers and new discoverers to experience thinking life, politics and history through the idiosyncratic and topsy-turvy brilliance of the ultimate philosopher for a world turned upside down.
Slavoj Žižek is a Hegelian philosopher, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, and a Communist. He is International Director at the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities, University of London, UK, Visiting Professor at the New York University, USA, and Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
The Rainbow Trap
Queer Lives, Breaking the Rules and the Dangers of Inclusion
Kevin Guyan
The Rainbow Trap is the first book to foreground the importance of systems – and their associated documents, policies and administrative practices – as a key battleground for LGBTQ equalities in the UK.
Looking across digital and non-digital systems, Guyan investigates five industries – the police, borders, film and television, tech and global brands – and exposes a hidden rule book that constructs, categorises and commodifies LGBTQ identities.
While many organisations, businesses and workplaces talk a lot about diversity and inclusion, the internal workings of most systems remain unchanged. Efforts to ‘fix’ broken systems tend to follow a narrow set of options: elevate queer individuals to senior roles, add more ‘diverse’ people into organisations, acknowledge historical injustices, gather better evidence and address biases. But these solutions aren’t working.
Whether it is queer families fighting for each parent to be named on their child’s birth certificate, lesbian couples offered an inferior selection of mortgage rates, bisexual asylum seekers asked to provide ‘proof’ of their sexuality, or gay actors forced to out themselves to meet diversity quotas, LGBTQ people encounter systems that are designed around a default person who is cisgender and straight.
Everyone loses when systems repeatedly fail to reflect the world around us and make bad decisions based on biased assumptions. How we choose to engage with these systems – or if we choose to engage – is fundamental to everyone’s future.
Kevin Guyan is a Research Fellow in the School of Culture & Creative Arts at the University of Glasgow, UK. In 2022, he published his first book Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action (Bloomsbury Academic).
12 June 2025
224 pages
Hardback: 9781350429680 | £20.00
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
“An indispensable part of every cineaste's bookcase” – Total Film
“Possibly the most bountiful book series in the history of film criticism.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film Comment
“Magnificently concentrated examples of flowing freeform critical poetry.” – Uncut Celebrating film for over 30 years
The BFI Film Classics series introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film's 'classic' status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author's personal response to the film.
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
(Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki)
Catherine Russell
Mikio Naruse's When A Woman Ascends The Stairs (1960) combines high melodrama with modernist film language, telling the story of Keiko, a bar hostess struggling to succeed in Tokyo's Ginza district.
Catherine Russell's study of the film provides an indepth analysis of Naruse's distinctive filmmaking, from his use of two-shots in confined spaces, unique lighting techniques, and his "invisible" and "rhythmic" editing style. She analyses the recurring motif of a woman’s whitestockinged feet climbing stairs, considering how this symbolizes the social dynamics of the high-class Japanese sex industry that sustains hostess bar culture.
Russell goes on to argue that the film is a “late” woman’s film which engages with the institutional barriers to woman’s success in postwar Japan. She situates the film within the trajectory of Naruse's career and analyses how his social critique is balanced with an aestheticization of a harsh and brutally gendered world, creating an affective tension that is symptomatic of Naruse's own position as an industrial worker.
Catherine Russell is Professor of Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University, Canada. She is author of Classical Japanese Cinema Revisited (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011) and The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity (2008).
03 April 2025
104 pages | 60 black and white illustrations
Paperback: 9781839026430 | £12.99
Imprint: British Film Institute
03 April 2025
104 pages | 60 black and white illustrations
Paperback: 9781839027550 | £12.99
Imprint: British Film Institute
People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag)
Jon Hughes
Directed by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, and with a script by Billy Wilder, People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag) (1930) is now widely recognised as a landmark of Weimar cinema, which influenced Italian Neorealism and the New Wave cinemas of the 1960s, and set the template for ‘indie’ filmmaking as we now know it. This is the first study in English of this multifaceted film, which not only launched the careers of renowned filmmakers, but which continues to influence contemporary culture, with references to it in popular television (Babylon Berlin), a playful remake, and a new score by experimental pop group Múm. Jon Hughes' study places the film in its historical context – Berlin in the Weimar Republic – and untangles the fascinating story of the making of People on Sunday, drawing on new archival research to challenge some of the misconceptions that surround it. Hughes provides fresh interpretations of the film’s depiction of space and its play with contemporary gender and sexual politics, and situates it within both Weimar cinema and the later output of the filmmakers.
Jon Hughes is a Reader in German and Cultural Studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and the author of Max Schmeling and the Making of a National Hero in Twentieth-Century Germany, (2017) and Facing Modernity: Fragmentation, Culture and Identity in Joseph Roth’s Writing of the 1920s (2006).
Some Like It Hot
Steven Cohan
Billy Wilder's classic screwball comedy Some Like it Hot (1959), starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe, tells the story of two struggling Jazz musicians who accidentally witness a mob massacre in Chicago who then, disguised as women, join a female band to escape the gangsters' pursuit. Despite the film's popular reception, with Academy Award nominations for Wilder and star Jack Lemmon, the film gained notoriety for its crossdressing plot and gender-bending comedy.
Steven Cohan's study of the film disentangles its production history and subsequent notoriety from the film itself, reconsidering the ways in which it playfully challenged generic and gender conventions of the 1950s. He provides an in depth analysis of the film's near perfect comedic structure, Wilder's aesthetic choices and self-reflexive star performances by Curtis, Lemmon and Monroe.
He goes on to consider the film's queerness, as well as its promotion and reception in 1959. Contextualizing the film within its contemporary moment, he argues its textual richness, one that allows it to be viewed differently across generations, securing its lasting influence in popular culture.
Steven Cohan is Dean's Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University, USA and President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. His books include Sunset Boulevard (BFI Film Classics, 2022), Hollywood by Hollywood: The Backstudio Picture and the Mystique of Making Movies (2018), The Sound of Musicals (BFI 2010), CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (BFI TV Classics, 2008), Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical (2005), Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (1997), and Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative (1988, co-authored with Linda M. Shires).
01 May 2025
104 pages | 60 black and white illustrations
Paperback: 9781839027314 | £12.99
Imprint: British Film Institute
29 May 2025
104 pages | 60 colour illustrations
Paperback: 9781839023040 | £12.99
Imprint: British Film Institute
Wanda
Elena Gorfinkel
Actor-turned-director Barbara Loden’s only feature length film, Wanda (1970), tells the story of a struggling workingclass woman, Wanda Goronski, as she faces a troubled life, a failing marriage, and a sense of detachment from society. The film received critical acclaim upon its release and was the only American film chosen for the Venice Film Festival in 1970. Today, it is recognised as one of the most significant films made by a woman director.
Elena Gorfinkel’s study of the film examines Loden’s unconventional approach to storytelling, including long takes and a meandering narrative. Drawing on interviews, oral history and archival sources, she charts the film’s lasting aesthetic and political potency. She considers the tension between acting and directing in Loden’s manipulation and management of gesture, posture, voice and habitus, comparing her performance of Wanda in relation to independent and arthouse strategies and developments in de-dramatisation.
Gorfinkel goes on to situate the film within Loden’s career as a whole, discussing the recollections of her key collaborators and drawing on new archival research. She argues its significance to 1970s American film culture and its continuing influence on contemporary film practice.
Elena Gorfinkel is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King's College London, UK. She is the author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s (2017), the co-editor of Global Cinema Networks (2018) and of Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (2011).
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Jaimey Fisher
Miloš Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was met with widespread critical and commercial success on its release in 1975. The third highest grossing film of the year, it won five major Academy Awards including best director and best actor.
Jaimey Fisher's study deconstructs how One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was simultaneously typical and extraordinary for its New Hollywood era. Analyzing the film's controversial adaptation from Ken Kesey's bestselling 1962 novel, he contextualizes it in relation to the relatively uncomplicated adaptations of A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Godfather (1972) and The Exorcist (1973).
Through a close reading of key scenes depicting electroconvulsive (“shock”) therapy and lobotomies, Fisher analyzes the film's critique of the American mental health infrastructure and its influence in instigating a broader rethinking of trauma, mental illness and institutionalization in the 1960s and 1970s within the context of the anti-psychiatry movement. He goes on to examine the racial implications of re-centering the film's narrative around Randle Patrick McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), and what this meant for the character of Indigenous patient “Chief” Bromden (Will Sampson Jr.). While the latter was the primary person and perspective through which the novel was narrated, his role was significantly diminished within the film.
Finally, outlining the film's high-profile afterlife, Fisher underscores its unique position in US cinema and cultural history.
Jaimey Fisher is Professor of German and Cinema and Digital Media at the University of California, Davis, USA. He is author of German Ways of War (2022), Treme (2019), Christian Petzold (2013) and Disciplining Germany (2007).
18 September 2025
104 pages | 60 colour illustrations
Paperback: 9781839026669 | £12.99
Imprint: British Film Institute
12 June 2025
104 pages | 60 colour illustrations
Paperback: 9781839026850 | £12.99
Imprint: British Film Institute
Riddles of the Sphinx
Kimberly Lamm
Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) follows the life of Louise (played by Dinah Stabb), a white middle-class woman living in London in the 1970s who is transforming her place in patriarchal culture. The film is recognised as one of the most important avantgarde films to have emerged from Britain during the 1970s and a classic of feminist cinema.
Kimberly Lamm’s study of the film examines its kaleidoscopic array of cinematic strategies and poetic devices and how it explores issues of female representation, the place of motherhood within society and motherdaughter relationships. Lamm delves into the context of the film's production and reception, considering its significance as the second collaboration between Mulvey and Wollen, and the ways in which it was inspired by Mulvey's work on "the male gaze".
She goes on to position Riddles as an essay film, analysing its formal experimentations, including the use of direct address and found footage, the rejection of continuity editing and its groundbreaking, haunting electronic score by Mike Ratledge of Soft Machine. Finally, considering the voice of the Sphinx, Lamm highlights how Mulvey and Wollen work with sound and images to reconfigure visual pleasure and create conditions in which the full range of women’s voices can be listened to, heard, and valued.
Kimberly Lamm is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Duke University, USA. She is author of Addressing the Other Woman: Textual Correspondences in Feminist Art and Writing (2018).
Black Girl (La noire de...)
Vlad Dima
Ousmane Sembène was one of the greatest, most groundbreaking filmmakers in the history of cinema, an acclaimed novelist, and the most renowned African director of the 20th century. Black Girl was his brilliant, blistering debut. Released in 1966, it won the Prix Jean Vigo at the Cannes Film Festival that year. The film is about a young Senegalese woman, played powerfully by M’Bissine Thérèse Diop, who moves to France to work for a wealthy white family as a nanny, but quickly discovers that life in their apartment is a prison, both figuratively and literally; but it is also a searing, nuanced critique of the lingering colonialism in the supposedly postcolonial world.
Vlad Dima's study of Black Girl argues that the film helped to map the future of African cinema. He situates it within its postcolonial context, considering its adaptation from the eponymous short story first published in 1962. He examines the performances of Mbissine Thérèse Diop (Diouana), Anne-Marie Jelinek (Madame) and Robert Fontaine (Monsieur), considering the ways in which they embody or subvert postcolonial, French archetypes, and then goes on to examine the technical aspects of Sembene's filmmaking, such as his innovative use of framing and aural composition. Finally, he traces the film's lasting influence on African cinema, from Sembène’s own Xala (1975), to Safi Faye’s Mossane (1996), Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen Geï (2001), Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Saignantes (2005), and Mati Diop's Atlantics (2019).
Vlad Dima is Professor and Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University, USA. His books include Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambety's Films (2017), The Beautiful Skin: Football, Fantasy, and Cinematic Bodies in Africa (2020), and Meaninglessness: Time, Rhythm, and the Undead in in Postcolonial Cinema (2022). He has published numerous articles, mainly on French and francophone cinemas, but also on francophone literature, comics, American cinema, and television.
12 June 2025
104 pages | 60 black and white illustrations
Paperback: 9781839027352 | £12.99
Imprint: British Film Institute
“Though short, at roughly 25,000 words apiece, these books are anything but slight.”
– New Statesman
“Perfect for slipping in pocket and pulling out when life is on hold.”
– Toronto Star
“Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series never misses.”
– The Millions
Object Lessons is a series of concise, collectable, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Each book starts from a specific inspiration: an historical event, a literary passage, a personal narrative, a technological innovation—and from that starting point explores the object of the title, gleaning a singular lesson or multiple lessons along the way.
Featuring contributions from writers, artists, scholars, journalists, and others, the emphasis throughout is lucid writing, imagination, and brevity. Object Lessons paints a picture of the world around us, and tells the story of how we got here, one object at a time.
Pub
Philip Howell
The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In this unique book, Philip Howell takes the public house as an object, or rather as a series of objects: he takes the pub apart and examines its constituent elements, from pub signs to the bar staff to the calling of “time.” But Pub also explores the hidden features of the pub, such as corporate control, cultural acceptance and exclusion, and the role of the pub in communities.
Philip Howell is Professor in Historical Geography at the University of Cambridge, UK.
09 January 2025
160 pages
Paperback: 9798765102312 | £9.99
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
“Erudite, quirky, and amusing.” – Sebastian Faulks
06 February 2025
160 pages
Paperback: 9798765114773 | £9.99
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Saxophone
Mollie Hawkins
The saxophone is a contradictory instrument that has rooted itself in the soil of pop culture. It’s the “devil’s horn,” it’s the voice of jazz—an extension of the player’s soul—it is a character trait of U.S. Presidents, YouTube sensations, and cartoon characters. It has both enhanced and ruined songs, it is sensuous yet abrasive, and it is the only instrument widely excluded from symphonies and orchestras, never quite being taken seriously. As an object that is symbolic of living on the margins of society, the saxophone has never been kind to its players.
Blending research, cultural criticism, and personal narrative about her saxophonist father, who lived on the margins until his unexpected death, Saxophone explores more than just the history of this expressive instrument. It illuminates the dark paths that our passions can lead us down. Mollie Hawkins turns the lens around to ask us all: what does it mean to devote your life to such an object— even if it kills you? Can music hold such power over us?
Mollie Hawkins holds an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars. She also studied at Bread Loaf in the summer of 2023 because she can't get enough of Vermont, apparently. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Marie Claire, Salon, Bustle, HelloGiggles, PoemMemoirStory (PMS), and others. Originally from rural Alabama, she now lives and wears a lot of sunscreen in Los Angeles.
Lawn
Giovanni Aloi
A quintessential feature in Western gardens and landscaping, the lawn is now at the center of a climate change controversy. The large carbon footprint maintenance, its unquenchable thirst for fertilizers, weedkillers, and water, and the notorious unfriendliness towards all forms of wildlife have recently attracted criticism and even spurred an anti-lawn movement.
Lawn untangles the colonial-capitalist threads that keep our passion for mown grass alive despite mounting evidence that we’d be better off without it. The lawn is aesthetically and ideologically versatile. From museums and hospitals to corporate headquarters and university campuses, it has become the verdant lingua franca of institutions of all kinds. Its formal homogeneity and neatness imply reliability, constancy, and solicit our trust. But beneath the lawn lies a stratification of intricate ideological and ecological issues that over time have come to define our conception of nature.
Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. He currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA and is the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (www. antennae.org.uk). Aloi is the author of Art & Animals (2011), Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (2018), Why Look at Plants? The Vegetal Emergence in Contemporary Art (2019), Lucian Freud – Herbarium (2019), and Posthumanism in Art and Science (2020). He has contributed to BBC radio programs, worked at Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries in London, and currently is USA correspondent for Esse Magazine. Aloi has curated exhibitions in the US and Europe and is co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press series Art after Nature.
20 February 2025
160 pages
Paperback: 9798765108789 | £9.99
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
01 May 2025
160 pages | 1 black and white illustration
Paperback: 9798765121825 | £9.99
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Restaurant
Brian Duff
Former restaurant critic Brian Duff examines the restaurant at a critical moment. In the last few decades restaurants and food culture have achieved extraordinary cultural purchase. A well-executed appetizer or entrée became important achievements, chefs became heroes and thought leaders, dining out became theater, plating became art, and the supertaster became the savant.
But in recent years the restaurant has faced crisis upon crisis: revelations of sexism and harassment, racism and low pay, unsafe and unfair conditions of labor, and Covid. Having taken a pandemic era break from our habits of eating out, might we return to the table with a new awareness, and a forgetfulness regarding old habits? Restaurant takes a deep dive into the drives, desires, and anxieties associated with dining out and suggests that, because of the meaning we find in good food, the restaurant offers unique opportunities to change the quality of our engagement with others and create shared meaning across the table.
Brian Duff is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of New England, USA. He is the author of The Parent as Citizen: A Democratic Dilemma (2011). His writing has appeared in The New Yorker and he has written restaurant reviews and food articles for The Portland Phoenix and The Boston Phoenix.
“A brilliant series … each one a work of real love.”
– NME
“Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough.”
– Rolling Stone
“For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books.”
– Pitchfork
33 1/3 is a series of short books about popular music, focusing on individual albums by artists ranging from James Brown to Celine Dion and from J Dilla to Neutral Milk Hotel.
06 February 2025
128 pages
Paperback: 9798765106679 | £9.99
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Yo La Tengo's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
Elliott Simpson
Hailed as a “quiet masterpiece” upon release, Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out proposed a radical new future for rock music. Released at a time when the music industry was changing dramatically thanks to the rise of online file sharing, it suggested that the only way for a band to survive was to listen to themselves.
A delicate and hushed album, its songs explore the quiet battles that take place every day and the beauty that can emerge from the ordinary. In many ways, this is reflective of the story of the band that made it – self-managed for most of their career and having maintained the same lineup since 1992, Yo La Tengo almost resemble a suburbsbased nuclear family.
And Then Nothing… argues that great art does not come from suffering, but instead, steady, unglamorous work. It is an album that helped forge a new mythology for rock and roll: one not built on sex, drugs and debauchery, but instead the quiet lives of people living in peaceful suburban homes. From the nothingness of the everyday, something incredible can emerge.
Elliott Simpson is a Bristol-based writer. Elliott has written for publications including Louder Than War, Tap the Feed and Bristol in Stereo, producing reviews of concerts, albums, and festivals and carrying out artist interviews.
John Cale's Paris 1919
Mark Doyle
John Cale’s enigmatic masterpiece, Paris 1919, appeared at a time when the artist and his world were changing forever. It was 1973, the year of the Watergate hearings and the oil crisis, and Cale was at a crossroads. The white-hot rage of his Velvet Underground days was nearly spent; now he was living in Los Angeles, working for a record company and making music when time allowed. He needed to lay to rest some ghosts, but he couldn’t do that without scaring up others. Paris 1919 was the result.
In this vivid, wide-ranging book, Mark Doyle hunts down the ghosts haunting Cale’s most enduring solo album. There are the ghosts of New York – of the Velvets, Nico, and Warhol – that he smuggled into Los Angeles in his luggage. There is the ghost of Dylan Thomas, a fellow Welshman who haunts not just Paris 1919 but much of Cale’s life and art. There are the ghosts of history, of a failed peace and the artists who sought the truth in dreams. And there are the ghosts of Christmas, surprising visitors who bring a nostalgic warmth and a touch of wintry dread. With erudition and wit, Doyle offers new ways to listen to an old album whose mysteries will never fully be resolved.
Mark Doyle is Professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He is the author of The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached (2020), Communal Violence in the British Empire (Bloomsbury 2016), and Fighting Like the Devil for the Sake of God (2009).
06 February 2025 144 pages Paperback: 9798765106792 | £9.99
Bloomsbury Academic
06 February 2025
128 pages
Paperback: 9798765106914 | £9.99
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Sinead O’Connor's Universal Mother
Adele Bertei
With Universal Mother, Sinead O’Connor explores childhood trauma and her experiences as a woman, mother, target of scorn, and ultimate phoenix.
Released in the winter of 1994, Universal Mother was the first recorded work from O’Connor since her duo of protests in 1992 (Saturday Night Live, Madison Square Garden). The sadistic blowback she faced for publicly outing the child abuse of the Catholic Church and its cover-up would have destroyed most. Where Sinead might go next, or if she’d ever record again, was the question. It’s a testament to her integrity and extraordinary courage that she was able to resurrect with this extraordinary album.
The album takes us on a deeply personal, yet universal journey of womanhood, from the archetypal bad mother to the good and the kind. A feminist statement from Germaine Greer sets the tone, followed by O’Connor letting loose a storm of rage against her abusive mother in “Fire on Bablyon”—a salvo so explosive, it need not be repeated. Other than a song called “Red Football” and a call-out of the truth behind the Irish potato famine, O’Connor is not interested in rage or revenge. With Universal Mother, she offers us a tender, evocative collection of grief and empathy in song. Her miraculous voice is the vessel—the broken, sacred voice of Mother Ireland.
Adele Bertei was a founding member of musical insurrectionists No New York's Contortions and a personal assistant to Brian Eno. Bertei was lead singer for the Bloods, which is considered the first out, queer, all womenrock band. She has appeared in several indie films, most notably as a lead character Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames She has toured with, written songs for, and recorded as a backing vocalist for artists as diverse as Tears for Fears, Thomas Dolby, Sandra Bernhard, Culture Club, Scritti Politti, and Whitney Houston. Her duet with Thomas Dolby on “Hyperactive!” was a top-twenty hit in the UK, as was her single with Jellybean Benitez, “Just a Mirage.”
Ministry's The Land of Rape and Honey
Jason Pettigrew
This is the definitive chronicle of Ministry’s 1988 industrial rock release, The Land of Rape and Honey, that details the zeitgeist where post-punk, metal, funk and straight-up noise converge.
Featuring interviews with Al Jourgensen, Paul Barker, Chris Connelly, Jello Biafra, Adrian Sherwood, deadmau5, Fear Factory and many more famous fans and pundits, this deeply sourced book traces back the climate surrounding Ministry’s first two full length releases before examining the vision, methods and controversies that helped ascend LORAH to its rightful legend status. LORAH may be the one common title members of Nine Inch Nails, AFI and ZZ Top have in their collections, be it phonograph or phone. And the story behind it remains fascinating.
Ministry mainstay Jourgensen got a taste of bitter recordbiz backwash early on with his first major label bow for Arista (1983’s With Sympathy), and then vowed never to drink from that cup again. His pursuit of artistic freedom culminated in Ministry’s 1988 release, the record that left an entry wound on the world’s assorted underground scenes while helping to foment the industrial rock revolution that inspired a countless number of bands across all sonic frontiers.
Jason Pettigrew is a freelance journalist based in Pennsylvania, USA and a monthly contributor for SPIN. He is former Editor-in-Chief of Alternative Press.
01 May 2025
Bloomsbury Academic
Genre: A 33 1/3 Series is a series of short books that guide you through the musical sub-genres that have intrigued, perplexed, or provoked you.
1970s Jazz Fusion
Matthew Reed Baker
The once derided musical hybrid that is 1970s Jazz Fusion has since become one of the most influential genres of music in jazz, rock, soul, and hip-hop.
This book is a celebration of one of the most adventurous but unappreciated eras in popular music, wherein the traditional sounds of jazz were melded and mashed up with funk, soul, hard rock, and electronics. Even as they were accused of selling out and contaminating traditional jazz, artists like Miles Davis, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra made some of the most creative and invigorating music of the era. 1970s Jazz Fusion also dives deep into waters often neglected by jazz histories: the pop-chart successes of fusioneers like Donald Byrd, Patrice Rushen, George Benson, and Grover Washington Jr.; the musical and marketing innovations of record labels like CTI and ECM; and the jazz experimentation of rock and soul stars like Joni Mitchell, Earth Wind & Fire, Santana, and Steely Dan. Full of the musicians’ personal stories and anecdotes, this book also provides a discussion of their albums and the cultural context for their music. That context also includes how these albums have been passed down through generations and have reverberated through the music of today, inspiring both hip-hop and electronic artists through sampling and contemporary jazz and soul artists who are less constrained by traditional genres.
Though recorded decades ago, jazz fusion remains culturally vital and sonically thrilling to this very day.
Matthew Reed Baker has been a writer and editor for almost three decades. He was the research and arts editor at Boston Magazine for 14 years, where he is still a contributing editor. He has written for The Boston Globe Magazine, ForbesLife, and National Journal, and he is also the author of New England Cocktails, a book about travel, history, and mixology. He lives with his wife, two children, and their cat in the Boston area and Midcoast Maine, USA.
01 May 2025
160 pages
Paperback: 9798765119525 | £14.99
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
01 May 2025
176 pages
Paperback: 9798765119068 | £14.99
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Tropicália
Ana Leorne
This comprehensive portrait of Tropicália, from influences to results, from context to main players, and everything in between also explores how Tropicália helped reinvent Brazil's cultural identity in a post-colonial world.
The genre's conceptual core comes from a unique mix of native and foreign influences: Tropicália doesn't repudiate the international pop panorama, but instead aligns with the era by assuming itself as its undeniable product. The book discusses the strangling military dictatorship and its resulting censorship serving as the sociopolitical backdrop, and Tropicália's incisive criticism of imperialism through symbolism and allegory. It also reveals an enthusiastic desire for propelling culture (and counterculture in particular) forward, repudiating senseless conservatisms and niche intellectualisms in favour of a broader reach of Brazilian music.
While Bossa Nova nurtured a snobbish audience rooted in jazz and MPB spoke to a multicultural yet oppressed nation, Tropicália invested in a crossover instigated by the progressive youth who refused to glorify a past it didn't identify with and whose outdated codes it didn't intend to perpetuate.
Ana Leorne is a Paris-based writer, artist, musician, and researcher. She holds a BA in Fine Arts, an MA in Film Studies, and a PhD in Visual Cultures. Formerly associate editor at The 405 and digital media executive at MTV Portugal, her work has appeared in Bandcamp, Grammys, SFGate, SPIN, The Guardian, and many others. She's also the author of This is the Strangest Life I've Ever Known: A Psychological Portrait of Jim Morrison (2023).
Paperbacks and New Editions
23 January 2025
264 pages
Paperback: 9781350464841 | £14.99
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
“Pacey but sober, witty … but often very stark – that nevertheless left me feeling so optimistic.”
– Zoe Williams, The Guardian
“Eloquent … It is timely stuff.”
– Tom Clark, Times Literary Supplement
“There is too much useful information and too many perceptive insights in this book to detail here. Read it yourself; I highly recommend it.”
– John Green, Morning Star
“If I had to stick a book in a time capsule to explain UK left movement politics to future generations, it'd be this one.”
– Clive Lewis, MP
This is Only the Beginning The Making of a
New
Left, From Anti-Austerity to the Fall of Corbyn
Michael Chessum
The 2010s were a decade of foodbanks, riots, and the rebirth of political alternatives. Looking to escape a future of rising debt, falling living standards and climate meltdown, a set of movements were born across the globe, led by students, workers and the tent cities of Occupy.
A new wave of optimistic, radical young people were building mass movements outside the political bubble, rejecting the neo-liberal consensus and the enrichment of the 1%, and laying the foundations of a new left. Eight years later, Bernie Sanders was favorite to clinch the Democratic Party nomination, and Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum had taken over the Labour Party in Britain, promising ‘a new kind of politics’.
But as the new left poured into Labour, it was overwhelmed by older, institutional forces on both left and right. Four years after Corbyn became leader, after bitter-infighting and a Brexit-fuelled strategic crisis, it all fell apart.
This is the inside story of how the left came back to life in the 2010s, from a man who found himself at the centre of events - featuring unparalleled access and a range of interviews with key left-wing figures. Influential journalist and activist Michael Chessum explains how this movement was built, why it failed, and what it needs to do now.
Michael Chessum is a journalist and activist. He has written for The Guardian and The Observer, The New Statesman, The Independent, Vice, Novara, The London Review of Books and many others. In 2016-17, he was a member of Momentum's first Steering Committee, serving as its Treasurer, and worked as a press officer and speechwriter on Jeremy Corbyn's second leadership campaign. As National Organiser for the left wing antiBrexit group Another Europe is Possible, he became a dissident within Corbynism and a prominent voice in the public debate on Brexit and migrants' rights.
The Nobel Family
Swedish Geniuses in Tsarist Russia
Bengt Jangfeldt
The name Nobel is mainly associated with the Nobel prize. However, Alfred Nobel was only one of a family of conspicuously gifted individuals. The Nobels, who moved from Sweden to Russia in the 1830s, ran one of Russia’s biggest machine factories and founded the Russian oil industry. Using thousands of Nobel family letters and other documents shared here for the first time, Bengt Jangfeldt provides a fascinating and authoritative multi-generational chronicle charting the family exploits. The author describes how the father, Immanuel Nobel, a polymath architect, inventor, and engineer set the family on a path to financial success amidst a backdrop of imperial Russian industrial growth. He tells the story of how Immanuel’s sons, Robert and Ludvig, and his grandson, Emanuel, developed the family business into a powerful industrial empire with a progressive agenda in the fields of worker’s welfare, profitsharing and charity. When the Revolution struck in 1917, the family’s industrial empire as well as their huge personal wealth were swept away in one go. As a result they had to flee the country where they had been active for 80 years and return to Sweden.
During a time of immense change in Russia and right across Europe, the story of the Nobels stands out as one of both brilliance and resilience, with family firmly at its heart.
Bengt Jangfeldt is an author and historian. His biography Axel Munthe: The Road to San Michele (I.B. Tauris) was published in 2008 and won the Swedish Academy’s prize for biography. The author has twice been awarded the August Prize (the Swedish equivalent of the Pulitzer) for best non-fiction book of the year.
Harry D. Watson is a graduate in Scandinavian Studies of University College London, UK.
20 February 2025
424 pages | 88 black and white and 10 colour illustrations
Paperback: 9781350529168 | £14.99
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
ONE OF THE FINANCIAL TIMES' BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
“This eloquent book … reads like an official history … [A] punchy historical story [is] at the heart of this very readable tale.”
– Lesley Chamberlain, Financial Times
“A meticulously researched and factfilled tome … The Nobel Family provides not only a comprehensive history of an individual dynasty but also a wide-ranging analysis of industrial enterprise in Russia, Scandinavia and Germany over a period brought abruptly to a close by the Russian Revolution.”
– Patricia Fara, Literary Review
“Informative and engaging.”
– John Inge, The Church Times
24 April 2025
200 pages | 25 black and white illustrations
Paperback: 9781350524699 | £16.99
Imprint: The Arden Shakespeare
“[A] page-turning story”
– Lauris Maguire, Times Literary Supplement
“A terrific addition to the Shakespeare library ... eye-opening.”
– Michael Billington, Country Life
“[Schoch] proves himself an impressive detective with a nose for a good story
… Entertaining in its own right and also helpful as a reminder of the life and work of the great man.”
– Philip Fisher, British Theatre Guide
“A lively account of Shakespeare’s Birthplace.”
– Glyn Paflin, The Church Times
“Fascinating … A detailed and highly compelling story that involves so much more than bricks and mortar.”
– The Stratford-Herald
Shakespeare’s House
A Window onto his Life and Legacy
Richard Schoch
Richard's Schoch's compelling history of Shakespeare's birthplace reveals the value we place on the building and on the man himself.
In the wide realm of Shakespeare worship, the house in Stratford-upon-Avon where William Shakespeare was born in 1564 – known colloquially as the ‘Birthplace’ – remains the chief shrine. It’s not as romantic as Anne Hathaway’s thatched cottage, it’s not where he wrote any of his plays, and there’s nothing inside the house that once belonged to Shakespeare himself. So why, for centuries, have people kept turning up on the doorstep? Richard Schoch answers that question by examining the history of the Birthplace and by exploring how its changing fortunes over four centuries perfectly mirror the changing attitudes toward Shakespeare himself.
Based on original research in the archives of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, and featuring two black and white illustrated plate sections, this book traces the history of Shakespeare’s birthplace over four centuries. Beginning in the 1560s, when Shakespeare was born there, it ends in the 1890s, when the house was rescued from private purchase and turned into the Shakespeare monument that it remains today.
Richard Schoch is Professor of Drama at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. He is the author of seven books, including Shakespeare in the Theatre: Sir William Davenant and the Duke’s Company (The Arden Shakespeare, 2022) (with Amanda Winkler), A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance (2021), Not Shakespeare (2002) and Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage (1998). He led the AHRC research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’ (2017-2020), in partnership with the Folger Shakespeare Library and Shakespeare’s Globe.
The Future of Language
How Technology, Politics and Utopianism are Transforming the Way we Communicate
Philip Seargeant
Will language as we know it cease to exist? What could this mean for the way we live our lives?
Shining a light on the technology currently being developed to revolutionise communication, The Future of Language distinguishes myth from reality and superstition from scientifically-based prediction as it plots out the importance of language and raises questions about its future.
From the rise of artificial intelligence and speaking robots, to brain implants and computer-facilitated telepathy, language and communications expert Philip Seargeant surveys the development of new digital ‘languages’, such as emojis, animated gifs and memes, and investigates how conventions of spoken and written language are being modified by new trends in communication.
From George Orwell’s fictional predictions in Nineteen Eighty-Four to the very real warnings of climate activist Greta Thunberg, Seargeant explores language through time, traversing politics, religion, philosophy, literature, and of course technology, in the process. Tracing how previous eras have imagined the future of language, from the Bible to the works H. G. Wells, and from Star Wars to Star Trek, the book reveals how perfecting language and communication has always been a vital component of utopian dreams of the future.
Questioning the potential ramifications of recent and future developments in communication on society and its ideals, The Future of Language is a no holds barred investigation into the state of civilisation and the impact that changes in language could have on our lives.
Philip Seargeant is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the Open University, UK. His recent publications include The Art of Political Storytelling (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) and The Emoji Revolution (2019).
17 April 2025
256 pages
Paperback: 9781350538474 | £14.99
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
“You leave this book … with a renewed belief in language as “inherently creative”, offering what Noam Chomsky called “infinite expression by finite means”, and still our best way of expressing the sensory infinitude of being alive.”
– Peter Williams, New Statesman
“In his scholarly, must-read book, Seargeant makes us think about the underpinnings of these convenient tools and what they portend for language, one of the cornerstones of human identity.”
– Vijaysree Venkatraman, New Scientist
15 May 2025
400 pages | 20 colour illustrations
Paperback: 9781350522237 | £19.99
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
“[A] vivid travelogue.”
– New Statesman
“Has much to offer.”
– The Spectator
“Sparks the imagination.”
– BBC History Magazine
“A fascinating study.”
– BBC History Revealed Magazine
“Essential reading.”
– All About History
“Valiant, valuable and entertaining.”
– Times Literary Supplement
The Nile History's Greatest River
Terje Tvedt
The greatest river in the world has a long and fascinating history. Professor Terje Tvedt, one of the world's leading experts on the history of waterways, travels upstream along the river’s mouth to its sources. The result is a travelogue through 5000 years and 11 countries, from the Mediterranean to Central Africa. This is the fascinating story of the immense economic, political and mythical significance of the river. Brimming with accounts of central characters in the struggle for the Nile – from Caesar and Cleopatra, to Churchill and Mussolini, and on to the political leaders of today, The Nile is also the story of water as it nourished a civilization.
Terje Tvedt is Professor of Geography at the University of Bergen and Professor of Political Science and of Global History at the University of Oslo, Norway. He has published extensively on water related topics and presented three successful television documentaries on water, shown in 150 countries worldwide. He is also the Series Editor of the pioneering History of Water Series, published by I.B. Tauris.
Heat
Nick James
Robert de Niro and Al Pacino have acted opposite each other only once, in Heat, Michael Mann's operatic 1995 heist thriller. De Niro is Neil McCauley, a skilled professional thief at the centre of a tight-knit criminal team; Pacino is Vincent Hanna, the haunted, driven cop determined to hunt him down. Boasting a series of meticulously orchestrated setpieces that underline Mann's sense of scale and architecture, Heat also presents a rhapsody to Los Angeles, as Hanna closes in on his prey.
For Nick James, the pleasures and virtues of Heat are mixed and complex. Its precise compositions and minimalist style are entangled with a particular kind of extravagant bombast. And while its vision of male teamwork is richly compelling it comes close to glorifying machismo. But these complexities only add to the interest of this hugely ambitious and accomplished film, which confirmed Mann's place in the front rank of American film-makers.
In his afterword to this new edition, published to coincide with the film's 30th anniversary, Nick James reflects upon its lasting impact and on Michael Mann's subsequent filmmaking career.
Nick James has written for The Guardian, The Observer, The London Review of Books and American Vogue, and was for a time TV Editor at London's City Limits magazine. He was editor of Sight and Sound for over twenty years.
12 June 2025
104 pages | 60 colour illustrations
Paperback | Second edition
9781839027895 | £12.99
Imprint: British Film Institute
12 June 2025
248 pages
Paperback: 9781350522220 | £12.99
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
“With authority and skill … McGlynn gives what now ranks as the most reliable, up-to-date account of the use and misuse of history and memory in post-Soviet Russia.”
– Tony Barber, Financial Times
“Insightful and creative.”
– Washington Post
“McGlynn’s informative study of Russia’s “memory wars” shows just how easily performance, media narratives and cultural priming can slip into real violence.”
– Bradley A. Gorski, Times Literary Supplement
“Memory Makers makes for fascinating reading … [It] should be required reading for anyone wishing to engage in Russian politics, scholars, journalists, policy-makers alike.”
– Usman Butt, Middle East Monitor
Memory Makers
The Politics of the Past in Putin's Russia
Jade McGlynn
Why aren’t ordinary Russians more outraged by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? Inside the Kremlin’s own historical propaganda narratives, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine makes complete sense. From its World War II cult to antiWestern conspiracy theories, the Kremlin has long used myth and memory to legitimize repression at home and imperialism abroad, its patriotic history resonating with and persuading large swathes of the Russian population.
In Memory Makers, Russia analyst Jade McGlynn takes us into the depths of Russian historical propaganda, revealing the chilling web of nationwide narratives and practices perforating everyday life, from after-school patriotic history clubs to tower block World War II murals. The use of history to manifest a particular Russian identity has had grotesque, even gruesome, consequences, but it belongs to a global political pattern – where one’s view of history is the ultimate marker of political loyalty, patriotism and national belonging. Memory Makers demonstrates how the extreme Russian experience is a stark warning to other nations tempted to stare too long at the reflection of their own imagined and heroic past.
Jade McGlynn is a Researcher in the War Studies department at King’s College London, UK. She is the author of Russia’s War (2023) and editor of two volumes on memory politics and history in Eastern Europe. She holds a PhD from the University of Oxford, UK, where she previously worked as a Lecturer in Russian. Jade’s research focusses on national identity, memory, media and popular culture in Russia and Ukraine. She is a frequent contributor to international media, including BBC, CNN, DW, Foreign Policy, The Times, The Telegraph and The Spectator.
Détente
The Chance to End the Cold War
Richard Crowder
Between 1968 and 1975, there was a subtle thawing of relations between East and West, for which Brezhnev coined the name Détente, and – perhaps – a chance to end the Cold War. The leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union, Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, hoped to forge a new relationship between East and West.
Yet, the greatest changes of the era took place outside the sphere of international diplomacy. The 1960s brought social collision across the world, from the anti-war protests in America to the student demonstrations on the streets of Paris, and Mao Zedong's Red Guards in China. A new generation, whom advertising executives dubbed the babyboomers, brought new attitudes to towards sex, gender, race, the environment and religion.
In this book, Richard Crowder explores the years of Détente, and introduces us to the key players of the era, whose stories form the narrative of this book.
Richard Crowder is a UK diplomat and has worked for the Foreign Office since 1996 in a range of roles at home and overseas, most recently serving as the Deputy High Commissioner in Pakistan. Richard is also an independent historian and studied Classics at the University of Oxford, UK, and Public Administration at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, USA. His previous book, Aftermath: The Makers of the Postwar World, was published by I.B. Tauris in 2015.
26 June 2025
272 pages
Paperback: 9781350430730 | £19.99
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
“A sweeping and evocative account of the Cold War’s thaw… It’s fast-moving, engaging and authoritative in equal measure. 5 stars.”
– All About History
“Richard Crowder’s broad-ranging account of ‘détente’, the comparative relaxation of Cold War tension which lasted from the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to the American withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975, shows in colourful, lively and meticulous detail how Nixon and Brezhnev constructed fragile barriers against mutual annihilation, even while one was coping with a violently divided America and the other with an increasingly dysfunctional Soviet Union.” – Rodric Braithwaite
OBJECT LESSONS
Celebrating 10 years of exploring the hidden lives of ordinary things
Featuring contributions from writers, artists, scholars, journalists and others, Object Lessons paints a picture of the world around us and tells the story of how we got here, one object at a time.
Here are our bestsellers…
“Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series never misses.”
– The Millions
bloomsbury.com/object-lessons
“Though short, at roughly 25,000 words apiece, these books are anything but slight.”
– New Statesman
