All Publications - Visiting Professors

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• Astronomical Instruments and Their Users: Tycho Brahe to William Lassell (Collected Studies Series)

  Professor Allan Chapman
  Hardcover 332 pages
  Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Limited
  ISBN: 086078584X

  This volume looks at the way in which the development of a viable instrument technology has lain at the heart of astronomical research since the late-16th century. In particular, the concern with precise measurement has largely transcended the concern for purely philosophical considerations in establishing characteristics of the solar system. These articles, therefore, demonstrate how scientists like Tycho, Flamstead, Herschel, Lassell and Aimy recognised the importance of hypothesis, whilst acknowledging that hypothesis needed physical substantiation to produce inductive science.

• Claude Debussy: Pelleas Et Melisande (Cambridge Opera Handbooks)

  Professor Richard Langham-Smith, Roger Nichols
  Print on Demand (Paperback) 224 pages
  Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  ISBN: 0521314461

  The first comprehensive guide to Pelleas et Melisande, Debussy's only completed opera, this book is written by three of the leading authorities on French music of the period. As a background to the opera Richard Langham Smith discusses the play, by the Belgian dramatist Maeterlinck, and considers its literary roots. David Grayson then traces the genesis and composition of the opera, examining also the sketches and rejected versions in order to illuminate Debussy's compositional strategies. A detailed synopsis by Roger Nichols, which considers carefully Debussy's musical response to the text, forms a central chapter. The book then moves on to consider more detailed aspects of the style and language of the opera. The relationship between symbols and musical motives forms the basis of a chapter by Richard Langham Smith, and a subsequent chapter by him considers the themes of darkness and light and the key-schemes used to portray them. Two chapters by Roger Nichols on the various performances since 1902 and on the ideas of interpreters and commentators complete the text. The book concludes with a detailed bibliography and a discography.

• Debussy Studies

  Professor Richard Langham-Smith
  Hardcover 251 pages
  Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  ISBN: 0521460905

  Our knowledge of Debussy?s life and music has increased considerably during the last decade or so, largely through the efforts of those working on the long overdue complete edition of his music. Many of the contributors to the current volume have worked on various pieces in the complete edition and the significance of their research is apparent here. Topics include an examination of Debussy?s working methods, his visual tastes and his response to literature, his reception in England, as well as aspects of performance practice. It also includes a close study of Debussy?s relationship to the poet Stephane Mallarme. An appendix reproduces a discarded scene from Maeterlinck?s ?Pelleas? for the first time, and the book is particularly rich in previously unpublished facsimiles and other little-known illustrative material.

• Gauging the Heavens: Astronomy the Master Science

  Professor Allan Chapman
  Hardcover 240 pages
  Publisher: Athlone Press
  ISBN: 0485114747

  Central to the theory and practice of astronomy have been astronomical and cosmological models devised to make sense of the heavens in coherent terms. More than a history of these models, this account treats astronomy as the "master science", from which the other sciences took their lead.

• Gods in the Sky: Astronomy from the Ancients to the Enlightenment

  Professor Allan Chapman
  Hardcover 352 pages
  Publisher: Channel 4 books
  ISBN: 0752261649

  Most histories of astronomy start with Copernicus, Galileo and Columbus, But this text shows that in the colourful mythology of the ancients lay a surprisingly accurate understanding of celestial movements. A radical prefiguring of modern astronomy can be found throughout history. Two millennia before Columbus set sail for America, Pythagoras conceived the world was round. In 3rd century BC, Erasthones calculated the approximate size of the Earth, and long before Galileo's heretical science upset Christian orthodoxy, our 365.25 day calendar had been more or less finalized by Julius Ceaser as a variation on that of the Egyptians. "Gods in the Sky" is more than a history of astronomy, it explores the inextricable links in ancient civilization between astronomy and astrology, mythology, religion, philosophy, architecture, art, agriculture and navigation, to illuminate the history of the ancients

• In Defence of History

  Professor Richard J Evans
  Paperback
  Publisher: Granta Books (18 Jan 2001)
  ISBN: 1862073953

  In this volume, English historian Richard Evans offers a defence of the importance of his craft. At a time of deep scepticism about our ability to learn anything from the past, even to recapture any serious sense of past cultures and ways of life, Evans shows us why history is both possible and necessary. His demolition of the wilder claims of post-modern historians, who deny the possibility of any realistic grasp of history, seeks to be witty and well-balanced. He takes us into the historians' workshop to show us just how good history gets written, and explains the deadly political dangers of losing a historical perspective on the way we live our lives. This new edition contains an extensive afterword by the author.

• Patrick Moore's Millennium Yearbook: The View from 1001 AD

  Professor Allan Chapman, Sir Patrick Moore
  Paperback 100 pages
  Publisher: Springer-Verlag UK
  ISBN: 1852336196

  In a year that will probably be remembered almost as much for books about the millennium as for the turn of 2000 AD itself, Patrick Moore's yearbook celebrates, well, the wrong millennium! This entertaining book - aimed at the general reader not just astronomers - contains articles on King Alfred's chronological work, reviews of the new "Star Catalogue" by the Arab Al-Sufi and the latest edition of Ptolemy's "Almagast". And foreshadowing the change to metric units by 1000 years, the book uses arabic numbers instead of Roman - but there is a conversion table if you have trouble with the idea of "zero" and prefer the older system.

• Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial

  Professor Richard J Evans
  Paperback 336 pages
  Publisher: Verso Books (30 May 2002)
  ISBN: 1859844170

  In April 2000, a High Court judge branded the writer David Irving a racist, an anti-semite, a Holocaust denier and a falsifier of history. Irving's attempts to silence his critics by means of a libel suit against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt was decisively rejected in a judgement later confirmed by the Court of Appeal. Faced with mountainous costs to pay, Irving was declared bankrupt on 5 March 2002. But none of this has stopped him continuing to try to prevent the publication of books that expose him as a manipulator of historical documents who has denied the Nazi genocide of the Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and elsewhere. The key expert witness in revealing Irving's methods of historical falsification was the Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans, a specialist on modern German history and author of "In Defence of History". Although Evans's report was upheld in all its major points by the High Court, Irving's threats of legal action have succeeded in intimidating a series of publishers into dropping his book on the trial after first agreeing to take it on. Evans describes how he came to be involved in the case, and reflects on the interaction of historical and legal rules of evidence. He recounts his discovery of how Irving falsified the documentary evidence on which he claimed to have based his account of Hitler, the Holocaust, the Allied bombing of Dresden and other aspects of World War II, and demonstrates his connections with far-right Holocaust deniers in the United States.

• The Coming of the Third Reich

  Professor Richard J Evans
  Hardcover: 656 pages
  Publisher: Allen Lane (30 Oct 2003)
  ISBN: 071399648X

  This title unfolds perhaps the single most important story of the 20th century: how a stable and modern country in less than a single lifetime led Europe into moral, physical and cultural ruin and despair. A terrible story not least because there were so many other ways in which Germany's history could have been played out. With authority, skill and compassion, Evans recreates a country torn apart by overwhelming economic, political and social blows: World War I, Versailles, hyperinflation and the Great Depression. One by one these blows ruined or pushed aside almost everything admirable about Germany, leaving the way clear for a truly horrifying ideology to take command.

• The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939

  Professor Richard J Evans
  Paperback: 960 pages
  Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd (25 May 2006)
  ISBN: 0141009764

  The Economist, October 29, 2005 'Evans's magisterial study should be on our shelves for a long time to come' --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

• William Crabtree 1610-1644: Manchester's First Mathematician

  Professor Allan Chapman
  Paperback 19 pages
  Publisher: Manchester Statistical Society
  ISBN: 0853361320