Fools for God

North, Richard

Religion & Spirituality

HarperCollins, Publishers

This book suggests that the Old English epic Beowulf was composed in the winter of 826-7 as a requiem for King Beornwulf of Mercia on behalf of Wiglaf, the ealdorman who succeeded him. The place of composition is given as the minster of Breedon on the Hill in Leicestershire and the poet is named as the abbot, Eanmund. As well as pinpointing the poem's place and date of composition, Richard North raises some old questions relating to the poet's influences from Vergil and from living Danes. Norse analogues are discussed in order to identify how the poet changed his heroic sources while three episodes from Beowulf are shown to be reworked from passages in Vergil's Aeneid. One chapter assesses how the poem's Latin sources might correspond with what is known of Breedon's now-lost library while another seeks to explain Danish mythology in Beowulf by arguing that Breedon hosted a meeting with Danish Vikings in 809. This fascinating and challenging new study combines careful detective work with meticulous literary analysis to form a case that no future investigation will be able to ignore.

The Origins of Beowulf: From Vergil to Wiglaf

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

Oxford University Press

Richard North offers a complete revision of our view of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian paganism and mythology in the pre-Viking and Viking age. He discusses the pre-Christian gods of Bede's history of the Anglo-Saxon conversion with reference to a god known as Ingui. Using expert knowledge of comparative literary material from Old Norse-Icelandic and other Old Germanic languages, North reconstructs the slender Old English evidence in an imaginative and original treatment of poems such as "Deor" and "The Dream of the Rood."

Heathen Gods in Old English Literature (Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, Series Number 22)

Cambridge University Press

Richard North offers a complete revision of our view of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian paganism and mythology in the pre-Viking and Viking age. He discusses the pre-Christian gods of Bede's history of the Anglo-Saxon conversion with reference to a god known as Ingui. Using expert knowledge of comparative literary material from Old Norse-Icelandic and other Old Germanic languages, North reconstructs the slender Old English evidence in an imaginative and original treatment of poems such as "Deor" and "The Dream of the Rood."

Wild Britain: The Century book of marshes, fens & broads

Science & Math

Biological Sciences

Century Pub.

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

History

Booker, Christopher

Europe

Continuum Intl Pub Group

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

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

Great Western Railway Structure Colours 1912-1947

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Books by North, Richard