Friedrich Engels is one of the most attractive and contradictory figures of the nineteenth century. Born to a prosperous mercantile family in west Germany, he spent his career working in the Manchester cotton industry, riding to the Cheshire hounds, and enjoying the comfortable, middle-class life of a Victorian gentleman. Yet Engels was also the co-founder of international communism - the philosophy which in the 20th century came to control one third of the human race. He was the co-author of The Communist Manifesto, a ruthless party tactician, and the man who sacrificed his best years so Karl Marx could write Das Kapital. Tristram Hunt relishes the diversity and exuberance of Engels's era: how one of the great bon viveurs of Victorian Britain reconciled his raucous personal life with this uncompromising political philosophy.

The Frock-coated Communist: The Life and Times of the Original Champagne Socialist

Biographies & Memoirs

Hunt, Tristram

Historical

Penguin Uk

Ten Cities That Made an Empire

From Tristram Hunt, award-winning author of The Frock-Coated Communist and leading UK politician, Ten Cities that Made an Empire presents a new approach to Britain's imperial past through the cities that epitomised it Since the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and the end days of Empire, Britain's colonial past has been the subject of passionate debate. Tristram Hunt goes beyond the now familiar arguments about Empire being good or bad and adopts a fresh approach to Britain's empire and its legacy. Through an exceptional array of first-hand accounts and personal reflections, he portrays the great colonial and imperial cities of Boston, Bridgetown, Dublin, Cape Town, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Bombay, Melbourne, New Delhi, and twentieth-century Liverpool: their architecture, culture, and society balls; the famines, uprisings and repressions which coursed through them; the primitive accumulation and ghostly bureaucracy which ran them; the British supremacists and multicultural trailblazers who inhabited them. From the pioneers of early America to the builders of modern India, from west to east and back again, Hunt follows the processes of exchange and adaptation that collectively moulded the colonial experience and which in their turn transformed the culture, economy and identity of the British Isles. This vivid and richly detailed imperial story, located in ten of the most important cities which the Empire constructed, demolished, reconstructed and transformed, allows us a new understanding of the British Empire's influence upon the world and the world's influence upon it. Praise for The Frock-Coated Communist: 'Beautifully written and consistently engaging' - Independent 'An excellent book ... Hunt has a mastery of 19th-century British culture and European political thought' - Robert Service, Sunday Times 'Thoughtful and engaging' - Telegraph Review

History

World

The Radical Potter

Josiah Wedgwood, perhaps the greatest English potter who ever lived, epitomized the best of his age. From his kilns and workshops in Stoke-on-Trent, he revolutionized the production of ceramics in Georgian Britain by marrying technology with design, manufacturing efficiency and retail flair. He transformed the luxury markets not only of London, Liverpool, Bath and Dublin but of America and the world, and helping to usher in a mass consumer society. Tristram Hunt calls him 'the Steve Jobs of the eighteenth century'.\nBut Wedgwood was radical in his mind and politics as well as in his designs. He campaigned for free trade and religious toleration, read pioneering papers to the Royal Society and was a member of the celebrated Lunar Society of Birmingham. Most significantly, he created the ceramic 'Emancipation Badge', depicting a slave in chains and inscribed 'Am I Not a Man and a Brother?' that became the symbol of the abolitionist movement.\nTristram Hunt's hugely enjoyable new biography, strongly based on Wedgwood's notebooks, letters and the words of his contemporaries, brilliantly captures the energy and originality of Wedgwood and his extraordinary contribution to the transformation of eighteenth-century Britain.

The Radical Potter : Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain /anglais

Leaders & Notable People

Building Jerusalem: The Rise And Fall of the Victorian City

"Hunt tells this complex, epic story with dazzling clarity and organizational brilliance . . . I know nothing equaling its scope and ambition."--Phillip Lopate, Los Angeles Times Ever since Charles Dickens first described Coketown in Hard Times, the nineteenth-century city has connoted deprivation, pollution, and criminality. Yet, as historian Tristram Hunt argues in this powerful new history, the Coketowns born of the Industrial Revolution were canvasas for ambitious urban innovators who would influence the shape of cities for generations. Drawing on diaries, newspapers, and classic works of fiction, Hunt shows how the Victorians translated their energy and imagination into an astonishingly grand architecture, tranforming even the factories of Manchester and Birmingham into sites of freedom and art. Surveying the great civic creations, from town halls to city squares, sidewalks, and even sewers, Hunt reveals a story of middle-class power and the liberating mission of city life. The Victorians vowed to emulate the city-states of Renaissance Italy, and succeeded--until wealthy metropolises degenerated into dangerous inner cities in the twentieth century.

Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City

Science & Math

Penguin

Victorian cities, so long the object of derision as a byword for deprivation, are now celebrated as an urban ideal. They are widely heralded among modern planners and politicians for their active citizenship, local democracy, and civic spirit. This is a history of the ideas that shaped not only London, but Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield and other power-houses of 19th-century Britain. It charts the controversies and visions that fostered Britain’s greatest civic renaissance. Tristram Hunt explores the horrors of the Victorian city, as seen by Dickens, Engels and Carlyle; the influence of the medieval Gothic ideal of faith, community and order espoused by Pugin and Ruskin; the reaction led by Macaulay and Mill, who were repelled by the faux medievalism of the early Victorian years and who championed progress and industry; the pride in self-government, identified with the Saxons as opposed to the Normans; the identification with the city republics of the Italian renaissance – commerce, trade and patronage; the change from the civic to the municipal, and greater powers over health, education and housing, especially in Joe Chamberlain’s Birmingham; and finally at the end of the century, the retreat from the urban to the rural ideal, led by William Morris and the garden-city movement of Ebenezer Howard.

Middle East

Weidenfeld Nicolson Ltd

The English Civil War : At First Hand

A new history of the English Civil War which uses first-hand contemporaneous accounts to bring the period and its characters to life. As well as the most famous and lively documents, diaries and court cases of the period, the author has uncovered less known sources which added together will present a fascinating new angle on the years between 1637 and 1652 when Cromwell's Roundheads and Charles I's Cavaliers fought over Anglican reforms and Scottish rule. Written by Tristram Hunt, the up-and-coming celebrity historian, and lavishly illustrated, this is both the perfect introduction to the English Civil War and a companion for anyone wanting to delve deeper into its history.

Weidenfeld&Nicolson

The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

The Frock Coated Communist: A Revolutionary Life

Allen Lane.

Almost a quarter of a million lives were lost as King and Parliament battled for their religious and political ideals in the English Civil War. England was divided between Cavaliers and Roundheads engaged in bitter struggles from Preston to Lostwithiel, Pembroke to York. Armies were on the march, villages were decimated and great dynasties destroyed: fathers and sons, uncles and cousins were pitted against each other in defence of their loyalties. The civil war led to the execution of a king, the beginnings of sectarian division in Ireland, savage clan warfare in Scotland and the roots of English socialism. Tristram Hunt avoids adding to the many, mostly transitory interpretations of the civil war and instead offers a timeless narrative based on the first-hand accounts of those who witnessed these traumatic events. In doing so he brings out the voices of the civil war generation - those who lost sons, who witnessed massacres and who fought for an ideal. In this book we see their motivations, fears and misery as the horror of war overwhelmed them. From Cromwell's letters to the memoirs of a Roundhead wife the civil war era is brought to life in all its terrible and fascinating glory.

The English Civil War at First Hand

Europe

A remarkable new biography from one of Britain’s leading young historians that recovers the co-founder of communism from the shadows of historyFriedrich Engels is one of the most intriguing and contradictory figures of the nineteenth century. Born to a prosperous Prussian mercantile family, he spent his life working in the Manchester cotton industry, riding to the Cheshire hounds, and enjoying the comfortable upper-middle-class existence of a Victorian gentleman. Yet Engels was also, with Karl Marx, the founder of international communism, which in the twentieth century came to govern one-third of the human race. He was the coauthor of The Communist Manifesto, a ruthless party tactician, and the man who sacrificed his best years so that Marx could write Das Kapital. His searing account of the Industrial Revolution, The Condition of the Working Class in England, remains one of the most haunting and brutal indictments of the human costs of capitalism. Far more than Marx’s indispensable aide, Engels was a profound thinker in his own right—on warfare, feminism, urbanism, Darwinism, technology, and colonialism. With fierce clarity, he predicted the social effects of today’s free-market fundamentalism and unstoppable globalization. Drawing on a wealth of letters and archives, acclaimed historian Tristram Hunt plumbs Engels’s intellectual legacy and shows us how one of the great bon viveurs of Victorian Britain reconciled his exuberant personal life with his radical political philosophy. Set against the backdrop of revolutionary Europe and industrializing England—of Manchester mills, Paris barricades, and East End strikes—Marx’s General tells a story of devoted friendship, class compromise, ideological struggle, and family betrayal. And it tackles head-on the question of Engels’s influence: was Engels, after Marx’s death, responsible for some of the most devastating turns of twentieth-century history, or was the idealism of his thought distorted by those who claimed to be his followers? An epic history and riveting biography, Marx’s General at last brings Engels out from the shadow of his famous friend and collaborator.

Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

Professionals & Academics

Metropolitan Books

From Manchester's deadly cotton works to London's literary salons, a brilliant exploration of how the Victorians created the modern city Since Charles Dickens first described Coketown in Hard Times, the nineteenth-century city, born of the industrial revolution, has been a byword for deprivation, pollution, and criminality. Yet, as historian Tristram Hunt argues in this powerful new history, the Coketowns of the 1800s were far more than a monstrous landscape of factories and tenements. By 1851, more than half of Britain's population lived in cities, and even as these pioneers confronted a frightening new way of life, they produced an urban flowering that would influence the shape of cities for generations to come. Drawing on diaries, newspapers, and classic works of fiction, Hunt shows how the Victorians translated their energy and ambition into realizing an astonishingly grand vision of the utopian city on a hill--the new Jerusalem. He surveys the great civic creations, from town halls to city squares, sidewalks, and even sewers, to reveal a story of middle-class power and prosperity and the liberating mission of city life. Vowing to emulate the city-states of Renaissance Italy, the Victorians worked to turn even the smokestacks of Manchester and Birmingham into sites of freedom and art. And they succeeded--until twentieth-century decline transformed wealthy metropolises into dangerous inner cities. An original history of proud cities and confident citizens, Building Jerusalem depicts an unrivaled era that produced one of the great urban civilizations of Western history.

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

Books by Hunt, Tristram

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

The Frock-coated Communist: The Life and Times of the Original Champagne Socialist

Ten Cities That Made an Empire

The Radical Potter : Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain /anglais

Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City

Building Jerusalem: The Rise And Fall of the Victorian City

The English Civil War : At First Hand

The Frock Coated Communist: A Revolutionary Life

The English Civil War at First Hand

Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City