Judith Flanders

Nineteenth-century Britain was then the world's most prosperous nation, yet Victorians would bury meat in earth and wring sheets out in boiling water with their bare hands. Such drudgery was routine for the parents of people still living, but the knowledge of it has passed as if it had never been. Following the daily life of a middle-class Victorian house from room to room; from childb

THE MACDONALD SISTERS--Alice, Georgiana, Agnes, and Louisa--started life in the teeming ranks of the lower-middle classes, denied the advantages of education and the expectation of social advancement. Yet as wives and mothers they would connect a famous painter, a president of the Royal Academy, a prime minister, and the uncrowned poet laureate of the Empire. Georgiana and Alice married, respectiv

A delightful and fascinating social history of Victorians at leisure, told through the letters, diaries, journals and novels of 19th-century men and women from the author of the bestselling 'The Victorian House'.Imagine a world where only one in five people owns a book, where just one in ten has a knife or a fork - a world where five people out of every six do not own a cup to hold a hot drink. Th

In this fascinating exploration of murder in nineteenth century England, Judith Flanders examines some of the most gripping cases that captivated the Victorians and gave rise to the first detective fictionMurder in the nineteenth century was rare. But murder as sensation and entertainment became ubiquitous, with cold-blooded killings transformed into novels, broadsides, ballads, opera,

Dance and arts critic Judith Flanders focuses our attention on the crucial relationship between the performer and the audience. Great artists and great art is made by those performers who recognize that the audience, and not the performer or the critic, is paramount; a relationship that has often been forgotten in favour of the prominence or self-importance of the performer.

The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented change, and nowhere was this more apparent than London. In only a few decades, the capital grew from a compact Regency town into a sprawling metropolis of 6.5 million inhabitants, the largest city the world had ever seen. Technology--railways, street-lighting, and sewers--transformed both the city and the experience of city-living, as London expan

A whip-smart, impeccably crafted debut mystery, A Murder of Magpies takes readers on a whirlwind tour of London and Paris with an unforgettably original new heroineIt's just another day at the office for London book editor Samantha "Sam" Clair. Checking jacket copy for howlers, wondering how to break it to her star novelist that her latest effort is utterly unpublishable,

“家”与人类的历史同样悠久吗？弗兰德斯这本雄心勃勃的著作认为，“家”其实是一个晚近才诞生的观念。作者追溯了近五百年来西方人的房子从“栖居之所”演变为“温馨之家”的过程，这一演变并非偶然，而是内承人文主义和消费主义的思潮，外借资本主义和工业革命的发展。作者从家庭模式的演变、房间分配的变化、家与外部世界的关系、家具的沿革变化、建筑类型的发展、炉灶厨房和水电设施的现代化等方面，层层地揭开历史的画卷，驱散了笼罩在一些假想之上的迷雾，破除了人们以往从文学和艺术作品中获得的关于家的神话。作者巧妙而优雅地将宗教、历史、经济、技术和艺术的线索结合在一起，不仅展示了发生什么，而且展示了何以发生。我们最终来到一个这样的世界里，可以像《绿野仙踪》中的桃乐茜一样宣称：“没有什么比家更好的地方。”

Summer in London-the sun is finally shining, the flowers are in bloom, and life is humming merrily along for book editor Samantha Clair, off to lunch with her old friend, art-dealer Aidan Merriam. Humming merrily until she learns that his partner has just been found dead in their gallery, slumped over his desk with a gun in his hand. Could anything be worse? Oh yes, the police investigation is bei

There was every possibility that I was dead, and my brain hadn't got the memo. Or maybe it was that I wished I were dead. On reflection, that was more likely.Usually sharp-witted editor Sam Clair stumbles through her post-launch-party morning with the hangover to end all hangovers. Before the Nurofen has even kicked in, she finds herself entangled in an elaborate saga of missing neighbours,

A critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author explores the Christmas holiday, from the original festival through present day traditions. Christmas has always been a magical time. Or has it? Thirty years after the first recorded Christmas, one archbishop was already complaining that his flock was spending the day, not in worship, but in dancing and feasting to e

“Whip-smart” (Louise Penny) amateur sleuth Samantha Clair returns in the newest mystery from Judith Flanders, the New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed author of A Murder of Magpies.Sam Clair figures she’ll be a good sport and spend a night out at the theater in support of her upstairs neighbors, who have small parts in a play in the West End. Boyfriend (a Scotland Yard d

In A Place for Everything, historian Judith Flanders draws our attention to both the neglected ubiquity of the alphabet and the long, complex history of its rise to prominence. For, while the order of the alphabet itself became fixed very soon after letters were first invented, their ability to sort and store and organize proved far less obvious. To many of our forebears, the idea of o

In Rites of Passage, acclaimed historian Judith Flanders deconstructs the intricate, fascinating, and occasionally – to modern eyes – bizarre customs that grew up around death and mourning in Victorian Britain.Through stories from the sickbed to the deathbed, from the correct way to grieve and to give comfort to those grieving to funerals and burials and the reaction of those le