Richard Nash

Projected Passion tells the story of the cinema in Salisbury, Wiltshire, UK, to the end of the twentieth century. From the showing of moving pictures at the annual charter fair, via the old city theatres, the story of cinema pioneer Albany Ward and his civilian and garrison theatres, to the golden years when Salisbury could support three state-of-the-art cinemas (with a fourth at nearby Amesbury). The decline of the film sector is covered as one-by-one these old 'picture palaces' fell away until the last of them, The Odeon, was saved from closure and redevelopment by a local campaign worthy of its own feel-good movie. Projected Passion complements the authors' previous books about the history of popular music in Salisbury, and their prose style deals with both the entertainment and potentially stodgy planning processes in a serious but readable manner.

The magnificent medieval city of Salisbury is steeped in history… and hauntings. From unnerving accounts of apparitions to eerie encounters with spirits, this book reveals the dark story of Salisbury and its haunted hinterland. A whole host of ghostly characters are said to haunt the area. Among those examined in Haunted Salisbury are the ‘Demented Whist Player’ who still walks the floors of the famous Haunch of Venison, and the tragic lovesick ghost of Zeals House. Featuring some of the city’s iconic buildings, and drawing on a variety of historical and contemporary sources, this book will entertain everyone interested in the city’s paranormal history. Read on… if you dare.

Wild Enlightenment charts the travels of the figure of the wild man, in each of his guises, through the invented domain of the bourgeois public sphere. We follow him through the discursive networks of novels, broadsheets, pamphlets, and advertisements and through their material locations at fair booths, the Royal Society, Court, and Parliament. He leads us on in various disguises: as Tyson’s Orang-Outang, Swift’s Yahoos, and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Yet Richard Nash is not primarily telling a story of the English gentleman abroad in the realm of the wild man; instead Nash explores the wild man abroad in the realm of the English gentleman. His is the tale of the wild man as complex alter ego to the idealized abstraction of ""the citizen of the Enlightenment.""Nash eloquently argues that following the movements of the wild man through the public sphere helps illuminate the process by which an abstract figure comes to constitute human nature. He contends that expressions such as wild man and noble savage operated as much more than metaphors: if anything, the trajectory was not one of a metaphor being taken literally but rather of the extant terminology’s actually shaping preconceptions by which real beings were observed and recognized by Europeans. Throughout his account, Nash insists on attending to the traffic between literary accounts and real material beings. Shifting perspective from the thematic approach of intellectual history to a more eclectic cultural criticism, Nash introduces a refreshing means to understanding both the figures of the wild man and the citizen of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.

This work charts the travels of the figure of the wild man through the invented domain of the bourgeois public sphere. He is followed through the discursive networks of novels, broadsheets, pamphlets and advertisements and through fair booths, the Royal Society and Parliament.

First published in Latin in 1699, John Craige's Theology represents a rare early attempt to introduce mathematical reasoning into moral and theological dispute. Craige's effort to determine the earliest possible date of the Apocalypse earned him ridicule as an eccentric and a crank. Yet, Richard Nash argues, the intensity of the response to Craige's work testifies to how widely felt the conflict was between the old and newly emergent notions of probability.