Gordon Williams

This is the book that Gordon Williams wrote after Straw Dogs (the film was based on his novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm). Working in Soho at the time he turned his forensic gaze on the landscape and characters around him. Slated by one reviewer for his dark and violent vision of a corrupt Soho subculture Williams simply replied 'Most of the events in this book happened'. Original reviews: 'Mr Williams' passionate and tragic comedy' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH. 'A fine book and a funny one' THE TIMES. 'Unrelieved sleaziness' GLASGOW HERALD. 'Gordon Williams is an uninhibited writer in top gear in this novel' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH. The remake of STRAW DOGS for release in 2010.

On a dead December day in 1996, Alice Rossetti Greerson finds something that powerfully links her to Captain Phillip Rossetti, her beloved ancestor. It replaces the perfect love she thought she'd found, and continues a journey that took her from a lost boy in France to a husband who failed her, and leads finally to the tragic limerence that changes her life for ever. In a story that ranges from the English port of Bristol at the end of its slave-trading years to the tranquility of the Wye Valley, Alice weaves a tangled web she could never have imagined at the outset. Those who care for her the most are unable to help her, and she craves forgiveness for the secret crimes she fears she will never be free of. This is a literary novel with wide appeal beyond mainstream women's writing, with deep character development and evocative descriptions of Bristol and the Welsh border country, along with a powerful historical element giving depth to the main storyline. This story is about love and obsession, about Alice's struggle to overcome her disappointments and to fulfil her long-held belief in perfect love. It deals with longing, with forgiveness, and with promises kept and broken. The vivid historical strand running through the story - so vital to Alice - brings to life the ancestors she's proud of and those she would rather forget; the English port of Bristol holds them all and the unblemished life of her hero Captain Phillip Rossetti guides her through the fantasies of her youth to the calamity she is helpless to avoid.

Change and Decline: Roman Literature in the Early Empire offers a nuanced exploration of the transformation and challenges faced by Roman literary culture during the so-called "Silver Age" of Roman literature. Delivered as part of the Sather Classical Lectures, the work critically examines the causes and manifestations of literary decline in the early Roman Empire, while grappling with questions of cultural growth, decay, and the interplay between societal and artistic values. The author engages with six thematic approaches to illuminate how Roman writers navigated the pressures of their political and cultural milieu, offering insights into their stylistic shifts, intellectual tendencies, and the broader social functions of literature in this transformative period. The book delves into the complex relationship between Roman and Greek cultural dominance, the pervasive influence of imperial politics on artistic expression, and the emotional and sensational tendencies that began to overshadow the rationality of the Augustan age. Through analyses of figures like Tacitus and Ovid, the work demonstrates how fear, escapism, and societal expectations reshaped literary priorities and led to adaptations both innovative and detrimental. Ultimately, Change and Decline argues that the adjustments imposed by external pressures often eroded the integrity of a once-vibrant tradition, marking a period of both literary transformation and decline. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

Change and Decline: Roman Literature in the Early Empire offers a nuanced exploration of the transformation and challenges faced by Roman literary culture during the so-called "Silver Age" of Roman literature. Delivered as part of the Sather Classical Lectures, the work critically examines the causes and manifestations of literary decline in the early Roman Empire, while grappling with questions of cultural growth, decay, and the interplay between societal and artistic values. The author engages with six thematic approaches to illuminate how Roman writers navigated the pressures of their political and cultural milieu, offering insights into their stylistic shifts, intellectual tendencies, and the broader social functions of literature in this transformative period. The book delves into the complex relationship between Roman and Greek cultural dominance, the pervasive influence of imperial politics on artistic expression, and the emotional and sensational tendencies that began to overshadow the rationality of the Augustan age. Through analyses of figures like Tacitus and Ovid, the work demonstrates how fear, escapism, and societal expectations reshaped literary priorities and led to adaptations both innovative and detrimental. Ultimately, Change and Decline argues that the adjustments imposed by external pressures often eroded the integrity of a once-vibrant tradition, marking a period of both literary transformation and decline. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

These delightful poems - by turns whimsical, beautiful, and vulgar - seem to have primarily survived because they were attributed to Virgil. But in David R. Slavitt's imaginative and appealing translations, they stand firmly on their own merits. Slavitt brings to this little-known body of verse a fresh voice, vividly capturing the tone and style of the originals while conveying a lively sense of fun.

Author Gordon Williams is best know for Straw Dogs (originally titled 'The Siege of Trencher's Farm') and the Booker shortlisted From Scenes Like These. When he wrote THE CAMP Williams had the benefit of his newsman's eye for detail and the immediacey of his own, ex-conscript's, experiences at the sharp end of the Cold War. He was stationed at RAF Gutersloh - the closest air base to the East German border. But for the young conscripts in THE CAMP, their real enemy lay elsewhere. THE CAMP relates their coming of age in the mid 1950s in a small town in Germany. It was the first book Williams wrote, and does not pander to the usual cosy image of national service. The reviews were excellent. 'A story of power, oppression and self preservation... Impressive' The Times Literary Supplement. 'A talent at once so harsh and controlled' The Spectator. 'THE CAMP earns high honours' The Sunday Times. This new edition of THE CAMP was published by reinkarnation on the 50th anniversary of the ending of conscription in the UK.

Under the Roman Empire Greek literature experienced a renaissance. This flowering of interest in the Classics was in part a revival of the traditional culture associated with the glorious past and in part a development of new forms such as the novel, the classical lecture and the erotic letter. This literature has traditionally been considerably underrated and the essays in this 1982 volume of Yale Classical Studies were collected in an attempt to draw attention to the literary excellence of some undeservedly neglected authors and to inspire more readers to take them seriously. As the editors say in their introduction: 'nowadays we look to papyrology for ocasional revelations of exciting new pieces of ancient literature, but there are masterpieces already on the shelves waiting to be noticed'. This book will be of interest to students of Greek literature and ancient hsitory, especially to those concerned with post-Hellenistic Greek culture.

Shakespeare's use of sexual language, imagery and erotic themes is extensive, varied, and although this is necessarily hard to establish, probably innovative at times. This glossary provides a first-hand guide to Shakespeare's sexual language, some of which is notoriously difficult to unravel and whose roots go back into earlier literature. Compiled by Gordon Williams, author of the authoritative three volume Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, this is a comprehensive but concise reference guide to sexual language and imagery in Shakespeare. Entries are cross-referenced and include references to textual examples where possible.

In the same year that Man first flew to the moon and the last American soldier left Vietnam there were still corners of England where lived men and women who had never travelled more than fifteen miles from their own homes. There was a dark side to this corner of England ... American academic George Magruder and his English wife Louise have left the city streets of Philadelphia in search of a little tranquility. At Louise's wishes, they have rented an isolated stone house in England and are spending an icy winter in the remote Cornish village of Dando. But their arrival is greeted with suspicion - and hostility. Their first shock comes when their little daughter Karen stumbles across an odd object in the snow. Discovering first a piece of tabby fur, and then a leg, she finds their pet cat: strangled. Something is seriously amiss. And when Henry Niles, a convicted child murderer, escapes across the moor and a local girl goes missing, the Magruders become the unwitting targets of a primitive and brutal violence. STRAW DOGS is a disturbing evocation of how an insular, xenophobic society can react to an outsider. It is also a shocking expolration of the violence at the heart of even the most mild-mannered of men, asking the question: how far will a man go to protect his family and his home?

British Theatre in the Great War deals with a theatrical phase customarily dismissed by those charting twentieth-century developments. What becomes clear is that assessment by unsuitable literary criteria has masked the importance of the war years in British theatrical history. In avoiding a texts bias, the book reveals a period of unsurpassed prosperity in which the stage's substantial contribution to the war effort is only one notable feature. That it also saw the commercial theater's absorption of Continental avant-gardeism by way of revue, the last great epoch of music hall, the rise of the Old Vic with a project in opera and Shakespeare, and the unprecedented popularity of opera everywhere--this was surely the most fruitful period of Thomas Beecham's theatrical career--is compelling argument for revaluation. In his reassessment of this period, Dr. Williams extensively examines scripts and press coverage, providing a comprehensive overview from popular pantomime to the specialist work of the private stage as well as discussion of such issues as working conditions and censorship.

In "Spirit-led Days: Day by Day with the Holy Spirit", Reverend Gordon Williams has teamed together with Diane Roblin Lee to produce one of the most inspirational, detailed and theologically sound studies on the Holy Spirit in years. Using a daily devotional format, they take the reader step-by-step, day-by-day, into a study of what the entire scriptures say about the person of the Holy Spirit. This book has also been written to help the reader grow in intimate knowledge and daily fellowship with God.

This book investigates how the sexual element in Shakespeare's works in complicated and compromised by the impact of print. Whether the issue is one of censorship and evasion or sexual redefinition, the fact that Shakespeare wrote in the first century of popular print is crucial. Out of the newly-accesible classical canon he creates a reconstituted idea pf the sexual temptress; and out of Counter-Reformation propaganda he fashions his own complex thinking about the prostitute. Shakespeare's theatrical scripts, meeting-ground for the spoken and written word, contribute powerfully to those socio-sexual debates which had been re-energised by print. Dr Williams teaches at the University of Wales, Lampeter. His previous book was A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (Athlone, 1994) and forthcoming is a Glossary of Shakespeare's Sexual Usage (Athlone, 1997).

It has long been assumed that the language of Roman poetry was constructed under the dictates of elaborately defined rules of rhetoric, and its content determined according to the system of comparable classifications called invention. This belief has persisted in spite of the difficulty of fitting the works of Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Propertius, and Tibullus into such a rigid scheme. In this book Gordon Williams demonstrates that, although Ovid and his successors did indeed assimilate their poetry to the rhetorical rules devised for prose, the earlier poets employed a quite different method. Williams sees this method as falling into either a metaphorical or metonymic mode, both of which permitted the poet “to say one thing and mean another.” Delicate and often startling transitions of thought could be grasped—though not necessarily on first reading—by readers “assumed by the poet to have a special access to the poet’s process of thought.” This access presupposed similarities of “education, social position, and sympathetic understanding.” Through close analyses of many poems, Williams shows how poets in the fifty years before Horace’s death exploited metaphor, metonymy, and a third device that he calls thematic anticipation to evoke subtle associations of thought. In doing so he elucidates problems of Latin poems that have been generally misunderstood almost since they day they were written.