The neophiliacs: A study of the revolution in English life in the fifties and sixties

Travel

Booker, Christopher

Europe

Collins

THE NEOPHILIACS

History

Pimlico

This is the story behind a sensational historical controversy - the allegation that, in forcibly handing over 70,000 Cossacks and Yugoslavs to be massacred by the Communists in the summer of 1945, the British army in Austria, guided by a "conspiracy" involving Harold Macmillan, was party to a major "war crime". When these charges were first made they were widely accepted, not least by the BBC which broadcast no fewer than nine documentaries on the handovers. In 1989 the controversy culminated in a High Court action, in which Lord Aldington was awarded the highest libel damages in British legal history. This book also tells the extraordinary story of how an exhaustive investigation into the events of 1945 finally revealed just how all those previously-published accounts had turned history upside down. What happened in Austria was tragic. But there was no conspiracy. Macmillan's role was irrelevant. Many "massacres" described in lurid detail never took place. As Booker describes how the story of the repatriations came to be presented in such a distorted fashion, his book turns into a study of people's willingness to cling on to a "make believe" version of history, even when all the facts have proved it wrong.

A Looking-Glass Tragedy

International Publishers Marketing

Examines the major events and preoccupations of the seventies--from the women's movement, to terrorism, to the energy crisis--in terms of the history and future of human race

The Seventies: The Decade That Changed the Future

Stein & Day Pub

The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories

From The Epic of Gilgemesh to Jaws and Schindler's List, Christopher Booker examines in detail the stories that underlie literature and the plots that are basic to story telling through the ages. In this magisterial work he examines the plots of films, opera libretti and the contemporary novel and short story. Underlying the stories he examines are Seven Basic Plots: rags to riches; the quest; voyage and return; the hero as monster; rebirth and so on. Booker shows that the images and stories serve a far deeper and more significant purpose in our lives than we have realised. In the definition of these basic plots, Booker shows us we are entering a realm in which the recognition of the plots proves only to be the gateway. We are in fact uncovering a kind of hidden universal language: a nucleus of situations and figures which are the very stuff from which stories are made. With Booker's exploration, there is literally no story in the world which cannot be seen in a new light: we have come to the heart of what stories are about and why we tell them. Here, Christopher Booker moves on from some of the themes he outlined in his hugely bestselling book The Neophiliacs. Seven Basic Plots is unquestionably his most important book to date.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Continuum Intl Pub Group

As the European Union moves next year towards adopting the constitution which will mark its final emergence as a "United States of Europe." The Great Deception shows how the most ambitious political project of our time has, for more than 50 years, been based on a colossal confidence trick--the systematic concealment from the peoples of Europe of what the aim of this project has always been since its inception in the late 1940s. As it reveals for the first time the true story behind the long-term plan to build a politically united Europe, the authors show how all previous attempts to reconstruct the history of this project--whether written by Europhiles of Eurosceptics--have got it wrong, at almost every step along the way. With all the suspense of a detective story, drawing on thousands of books, paper and official documents, many of which have only become publicly available in the past few years, the book traces how a handful of determined visionaries set out more than half a century ago to weld the countries of Europe into a single political state. The Great Deception should immediately become a standard reference work for all students of politics. Yet so disturbing is the picture that emerges that, at a time when Britain's future in the EU is a subject of national debate, it will also spark much wider concern.

The Great Deception: A Secret History of the European Union

North, Richard

Modern society has regularly, in recent years, been gripped by a series of headline making "scares" - from mad cow disease to SARS -- which have become one of the most conspicuous and damaging features of our modern world. This book is the first to tell the inside story of each of the major scares of the past two decades, showing how they have followed a remarkably consistent pattern. It analyzes the crucial role played in each case by scientists how have misread or manipulated the evidence; by media and lobbyists who eagerly promote the scare without regard to the facts; and finally by the politicians and officials who come up with an absurdly disproportionate response, leaving us all to pay the price, which may run into billions of dollars. Scared to Death culminates in a chillingly detailed account of the story behind what the authors believe has become the greatest scare of them all: the belief that the world faces disaster through manmade global warming. In a final chapter, the authors take on its proponents such as Al Gore in a devastating critique of the consensus on global warming and its consequences.

Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Mental Health

Continuum

This book tells for the first time the inside story of the most audacious political project of modern times: the plan to unite Europe under a single 'supranational' government. From the 1920s, when the blueprint for the European Union was first conceived by a British civil servant, this meticulously documented account takes the story right up to current moves to give Europe a political constitution, already planned 60 years ago to be the 'crowning dream' of the whole project. The book shows how the gradual assembling of a European government has amounted to a 'slow motion coup d'etat', based on a strategy of deliberate deception, into which Britain's leaders, Macmillan and Heath, were consciously drawn. Drawing on a wealth of new evidence, scarcely an episode of the story does not emerge in startling new light, from the real reasons why de Gaulle kept Britain out in the 1960s to the fall of Mrs Thatcher. The book chillingly shows how Britain's politicians, not least Tony Blair, have consistently been outplayed in a game the rules of which they never understood. But it ends by asking whether, from the euro to enlargement, the 'project' has now overreached itself, as a gamble doomed to fail. Since their collaboration began in 1992, Christopher Booker, a Sunday Telegraph columnist, and Richard North, who worked for four years in Brussels and Strasbourg as a senior researcher, have won a unique reputation for their expertise on Britain's relationship to the European Union. Their previous publications included The Mad Officials (1994), The Castle of Lies (1996) and a best-selling report on Britain's 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic. But they regard The Great Deception as the book they have been waiting to write for ten years. Published to coincide with the launch of Giscard D'Estaing's new European Constitution in November, this work suggests that the United States of Europe has been based on a colossal confidence trick.

Great Deception: The Secret History of the European Union

Bloomsbury Academic

This remarkable and monumental book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of 'basic stories' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling. But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how and why we are 'programmed' to imagine stories in these ways, and how they relate to the inmost patterns of human psychology. Drawing on a vast array of examples, from Proust to detective stories, from the Marquis de Sade to E.T., Christopher Booker then leads us through the extraordinary changes in the nature of storytelling over the past 200 years, and why so many stories have 'lost the plot' by losing touch with their underlying archetypal purpose. Booker analyses why evolution has given us the need to tell stories and illustrates how storytelling has provided a uniquely revealing mirror to mankind's psychological development over the past 5000 years. This seminal book opens up in an entirely new way our understanding of the real purpose storytelling plays in our lives, and will be a talking point for years to come.

From salmonella in eggs to BSE, from the Millennium Bug to bird ‘flu, from DDT to passive smoking, from asbestos to global warming, ‘scares' have become one of the most conspicuous and damaging features of our modern world. This book for the first time tells the inside story of each of the major scares of the past two decades, showing how they have followed a remarkably consistent pattern.
 It analyses the crucial role played in each case by scientists who have misread or manipulated the evidence; by the media and lobbyists who eagerly promote the scare without regard to the facts; and finally by the politicians and officials who come up with an absurdly disproportionate response, leaving us all to pay a colossal price, which may run into billions or even hundreds of billions of pounds.
 The book culminates in a chillingly detailed account of the story behind what it shows has become the greatest scare of them all: the belief that the world faces disaster through man-made global warming. In an epilogue the authors compare our credulity in falling for scares to mass-hysterias of previous ages such as the post-mediaeval ‘witch craze', describing our time as a ‘new age of superstition'.&gt;

Historical Study & Educational Resources

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Books by Booker, Christopher

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Booker, Christopher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The neophiliacs: A study of the revolution in English life in the fifties and sixties

THE NEOPHILIACS

A Looking-Glass Tragedy

The Seventies: The Decade That Changed the Future

The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories

The Great Deception: A Secret History of the European Union

Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth

Great Deception: The Secret History of the European Union

The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories

Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth