Manchester University Press – The Bell Bookshop

Dirtbag Dreams

Emma — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The first book to share the untold story of this unique sport, from its origins in the Victorian era to the present day.Over the past two decades, mountain, ultra and trail running has experienced a massive boom in participation, media attention and corporate consumerism. Once little more than an oddball recreation for mountain athletics romantics, the sport has become a mass activity in ways that were previously unimaginable.In Dirtbag dreams, Carl Morris offers the first complete account of mountain, ultra and trail running in North America and Britain. Revealing the sport’s eccentric Victorian origins, he traces its development through 200 years of history, travelling from the Sierra Nevada and the English Lake District to the streets of London and New York.Packed with gripping races and colourful characters, Dirtbag dreams is the essential companion for anyone who wants to understand this unique endurance sport.

Songs of Seven Dials

Emma — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The untold story of a remarkable neighbourhood and the battle to define modern London.Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Seven Dials was one of London’s most diverse neighbourhoods, home to migrant and working-class communities, bohemian clubs and cafes. But business leaders and city planners had other ideas.Beginning with a rancorous libel trial of 1927, in which a Sierra Leonean cafÃ¯ ¿ ½ owner and his wife confronted the racist newspaper that destroyed their business, Matt Houlbrook reveals the surprising history of this remarkable neighbourhood. He traces how tensions that simmered on the streets and finally exploded in court betrayed the politics of urban ‘improvement’ and the ‘colour bar’. Underlying the trial was a series of troubling questions that would define Britain in the twentieth century – about race, class and the boundaries of belonging, gentrification and the kind of city London would become.Imaginative, powerful and deeply moving, Songs of Seven Dials is an important new history of London in the 1920s and 1930s.

Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 1736-1951

Emma — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This classic study remains the definitive account of witchcraft and magic in the centuries following the witch trials.The Witchcraft Act of 1736 brought an end to witch trials in Britain. But just because the law had changed didn’t mean people had stopped believing. Fear of witches and faith in magic persisted, and people suspected of witchcraft continued to appear in court until the early twentieth century, though by then it was their persecutors who were being put on trial. In this book, Owen Davies traces the history of witches and magic in Britain from 1736 to 1951, when the Fraudulent Mediums Act finally erased the concept of witchcraft from the statute books. He reveals the grip that the supernatural continued to exert on the people of England and Wales in a period when the forces of progress were thought to have vanquished such beliefs.Exploring how the population coped with the threat of witches once there was no longer any legal redress, and how accusations of witchcraft took shape during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Davies provides a fascinating glimpse into a lingering world of supernatural belief.

She Played and Sang

Emma — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A fascinating study of the role that music played in Jane Austen’s life.Like her much-loved heroine Emma Woodhouse, Jane Austen ‘played and sang’. Music occupied a central role in her life, and she made brilliant use of it in her novels to illuminate characters’ personalities and highlight the contrasts between them.Delving into the Austen family music books, Gillian Dooley discovers a treasure trove of evidence that unveils a previously underappreciated facet of Austen’s world. She unravels the author’s musical connections with family and friends, revealing the intricate ties between her fiction and the melodies she performed.With these revelations, Austen’s musical legacy comes to life, granting us a deeper understanding of her artistic prowess and the influences that shaped her literary masterpieces.

Barbara Comyns

Emma — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A ground-breaking biography of a cult British novelist.The extraordinary twentieth-century writer Barbara Comyns led a life as captivating as the narratives she spun. This pioneering biography reveals the journey of a woman who experienced hardship and single-motherhood before the age of thirty but went on to publish a sequence of novels unique in the English language. Comyns turned her hand to many jobs in order to survive, from artist’s model to piano restorer. Unpublished letters reveal an occasionally desperate but resourceful and witty woman whose life ranged from enduring poverty when young to mixing with spivs, spies and high society. While working as a housekeeper in her mid-thirties, Comyns began transforming the bleak episodes of her life into compelling fictions streaked with surrealism and deadpan humour. The Vet’s Daughter (1959), championed by Graham Greene, brought her fame, although her use of the gothic and macabre divided readers and reviewers. This biography excavates Comyns’s life and reclaims her fiction, providing a timely reassessment of her literary contribution. It sheds new light on a remarkable author who deftly captured the complexities of human life.

Between the salt and the ash

Emma — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A writer’s quest to understand the deep past and uncertain future of his homeland. After inheriting the miner’s safety lamp that belonged to his great-grandfather, Jake Morris-Campbell sets out on a pilgrimage across his homeland. Travelling from the Holy Island of Lindisfarne to Durham Cathedral, he asks what new ways might be made through the old north. This region, a hub of early Christian Britain and later strongly defined by industry and class, now faces an uncertain future. But it remains a unique and starkly beautiful part of the country, with a deep history that is intimately entwined with the idea of Englishness. Jake’s journey along the ‘Camino of the North’ sees him explore the shifting nature of individual and regional identity across thirteen-hundred years of social change. At the same time, it challenges him to reconsider his own calling as a writer and how it relates to the lives of the people he meets along the way. Between the salt and the ash asks what stories the North East can tell about itself in the wake of Christianity and coal. Rejecting the damaging trope of ‘left behind’ communities, Jake uncovers neglected seams of culture and history, while offering a heartfelt celebration of the place he calls hyem.

The Strand

Emma — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The first history of one of London’s most extraordinary streets.Running along the Thames’s northern shore and spanning three-quarters of a mile from Trafalgar Square to Temple Bar, the Strand has been a witness to London’s growth and change from the earliest years of the city’s existence.In The Strand: A biography, Geoff Browell and Eileen Chanin uncover the deep history of this remarkable street. Tracing its origins in the Roman era, they reveal how it grew in importance as authority shifted from church to aristocracy, then to commerce, media and law. Over time, everything that mattered converged on the Strand: tradition and ceremony clashed with rebellion and destitution. By 1910, the street was known as the ‘centre of the world’.Drawing on remarkable archival discoveries, Browell and Chanin present the most complete and compelling history of the Strand ever written. Filled with surprising, untold stories, The Strand: A biography is a must-read for lovers of one of the world’s greatest cities.

Tea on the terrace

Emma — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Tea on the terrace takes the reader on a fascinating journey down the Nile with legendary Egyptologists. Spending time with these remarkable men and women at their hotels and on their boats, the book reveals that a great deal of important archaeological work took place away from field sites and museums. Arriving in Alexandria, travellers moved on to Cairo before heading south for Luxor, the site of the Ancient Egyptian city of Thebes. The book follows a cast that includes Theodore Davis, Emma Andrews, James Breasted, Wallis Budge, Maggie Benson and Howard Carter, listening in on their conversations and observing their activities. It reveals that hotels in particular became crucial spaces for launching careers, building and strengthening scientific networks and generating new ideas. Combining archaeological tourism with the history of Egyptology, and drawing on a vast array of archival materials, Tea on the terrace takes the reader behind the scenes of familiar stories, showing Egyptologists’ activities in a whole new light.

Murky waters

Emma — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Murky waters challenges the refined image of spa towns in eighteenth-century Britain by unveiling darker and more ambivalent contemporary representations. It reasserts the centrality of health in British spas by looking at disease, the representation of treatment and the social networks of care woven into spa towns. The book explores the great variety of medical and literary discourses on the numerous British spas in the long eighteenth century and offers a rare look at spas beyond Bath. Following the thread of ‘murkiness’, it explores the underwater culture of spas, from the gender fluidity of users to the local and national political dimensions, as well as the financial risks taken by gamblers and investors. It thus brings a fresh look at mineral waters and a pinch of salt to health-related discourses.