Non-Combatants and Others

Non-Combatants and Others

Rose Macaulay

Fiction / Memoir / Religion

Rose Macaulay's anti-war writing collected in one fascinating and thought-provoking volume. Non-Combatants and Others (1916) is a classic of pacifist writing and was one of the first novels to be written and published in Britain during World War I that set out the moral and ideological arguments against war. Scathing and heart-breaking, it finds a way for pacifists to work for an end to conflict. Also included is some of Macaulay's journalism for The Spectator, Time & Tide, The Listener and other magazines from the mid-1930s to the end of World War II, detailing the rise of fascism and the civilian response to the impending war. Witty, furious and despairing in turn, these forgotten magazine columns reveal new insights into how people find war and its tyrannies creeping up on them. These are supported by Macaulay's two inter-war essays on pacifism and a short story narrating a devastating account of the loss of her flat and all her possessions...
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Potterism

Potterism

Rose Macaulay

Fiction / Memoir / Religion

Back in print for the first time in seventy years is award-winning novelist Rose Macaulay's Potterism, a satire on British journalism through the lens of both the owners and employees of a popular newspaper empire. When Jane and Johnny Potter are at Oxford they learn to despise their father's popular newspapers, though they still end up working for the family business. But Jane is ambitious and wants more than society will let her have. Mrs. Potter is a well-known romantic novelist, whose cheap novelettes appear in the shop-girls' magazines. She has become unable to distinguish fact from fiction, and her success gives her an unhealthy estimation of her own influence. When she visits a medium to try to find the truth about the murder of her son-in-law, she wreaks terrible damage. Arthur Gideon works for Mr. Potter as an editor. He respects his employer's honesty while he despises the populist newspapers he has to produce. His turbulent...
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Orphan Island

Orphan Island

Rose Macaulay

Fiction / Memoir / Religion

In 1855 a philanthropic young person, Miss Charlotte Smith, was escorting forty orphans to San Francisco when the ship was wrecked, and the survivors-Miss Smith, the orphans, a doctor, and some others, landed on a desert island. Those sailors who had escaped deserted them the next day in the boats. There they remained unvisited for some seventy years, with little to disturb the monotony beyond the adventures of the Doctor, who was secured in turn by Miss Smith and a shark. All this is contained in chapter one. The second chapter opens in 1922 at Cambridge, where lived the descendants of one of the sailors who deserted-a professor and his three children. A document and chart coming into the professor's hands, left by his dead grandfather, telling the story of the marooning of Miss Smith and the orphans, the professor and his family voyage out to the island and find there a thriving community, and Orphan Island is chiefly concerned with the community and the relations of it to...
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Fabled Shore

Fabled Shore

Rose Macaulay

Fiction / Memoir / Religion

The long Mediterranean coast-line of Spain from the Pyrenees to the Pillars of Hercules, with the Atlantic shore beyond that sweeps round Cadiz Bay to the southern edge of Portugal, is the changing scene of Rose Macaulay's journey, here described, as she drove her car along the fabled shore. Phoenician and Greek settlements, Carthaginian cities, Roman walls, arches, towers aqueducts and theatres, richly ex­quisite Arab courts and doorways, white Moorish towns, Romanesque churches and monasteries, sumptuous baroque facades, line the coast and its hinterland, a lovely palimpsest of the Mediterranean history of three thousand years. With this book Dame Rose Macaulay made her own witty, erudite, observant and poetic addition to the literature of Spain. The Spanish coastline has changed in many aspects, and not for the better, since Fabled Shore first appeared in 1949, but with her strongly developed sense of the past her learning and her humour, Rose Macaulay remains, through...
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Personal Pleasures

Personal Pleasures

Rose Macaulay

Fiction / Memoir / Religion

Rose Macaulay was one of the most popular satirical novelists of her day. In this lively, anecdotal collection, she turns her admittedly opinionated attention to life's random, and largely unrecorded, pleasures. From astronomy to new cars, church-going to the turtles in Hyde Park, she never fails to delight and amuse with her sure philosophical sense, sharp wit, and unerring eye for life's subtle ironies. "How true it is that every pleasure has also its reverse side, in brief, its pain. Therefore, I have added to most of my pleasures the little flavor of bitterness, the flaw in their perfections . . . which tang their sweetness and remind us of their mortality and our own, and that nothing in this world is perfect."
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