Böcker av Daniel Swift

The remarkable untold story of Shakespeare's first theatre - the playhouse before the Globe In 1576, in a muddy field in Shoreditch, James Burbage erected London's first purpose-built commercial playhouse. A place of high culture and quick profit, run by cunning dreamers, the Theatre for the first time offered London's players the chance to control what they staged. At a time when playgoing was held to be close to a sin, this entertainment factory was a flashpoint for controversy - but would also become Shakespeare's first theatre, where he learned to ply his trade before his company moved to the Globe.   Through the life of this little-known playhouse, Daniel Swift tells the story of how Shakespeare became Shakespeare, and the Elizabethan stage began to flourish. Introducing us to the businessmen who dreamed up the Theatre, the carpenters who built it, the preachers who hated it, and the actors who performed upon its small stage, The Dream Factory recreates the world that produced Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream - and the audiences who first saw them.

In 1945, the American poet Ezra Pound was due to stand trial for treason for his broadcasts in Fascist Italy during the Second World War. He was also an irresistible figure and, in his cell on Chestnut Ward and in the elegant hospital grounds, he was visited by the major poets and writers of his time.

In early June 1943, James Eric Swift, a pilot with 83 Squadron of the Royal Air Force, boarded his Lancaster bomber for a night raid on M nster and disappeared.Aerial bombardment was to the Second World War what the trenches were to the First: a shocking and new form of warfare, wretched and unexpected, and carried out at a terrible scale of loss. Just as the trenches produced the most remarkable poetry of the First World War, so too did the bombing campaigns foster a haunting set of poems during the Second.In researching the life of his grandfather, Daniel Swift became engrossed in the connections between air war and poetry. Ostensibly a narrative of the author's search for his lost grandfather through military and civilian archives and in interviews conducted in the Netherlands, Germany and England, Bomber County is also an examination of the relationship between the bombing campaigns of the Second World War and poetry, an investigation into the experience of bombing and being bombed, and a powerful reckoning with the morals and literature of a vanished moment.