Brian Dillon duikt in de ingewikkelde relatie tussen de menselijke psyche en de fysieke wereld. Zijn werk verkent de diepten van herinnering, geschiedenis en belichaming, en ontdekt verborgen verbanden tussen interne toestanden en externe omstandigheden. Lezers kunnen inzichtelijke essays verwachten die de ongrijpbare aspecten van de menselijke ervaring onderzoeken met een unieke gevoeligheid en intellectuele scherpte. Dillon's stijl is zowel poëtisch als analytisch, en trekt lezers naar een doordachte verkenning van de wereld om ons heen.
A practical guide for those involved in all aspects of emergency preparedness, resilience, and response; primarily focused on the requirements of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 and featuring top tips and flowcharts to ensure best practice from plan creation to the final debrief.
Objects in This Mirror is a collection of essays on contemporary art, literature, landscape, aesthetics, and cultural history. Beginning with a polemical and personal defense of generalism and curiosity, Brian Dillon explores the variety of themes it is possible today to corral within the rubric of the critical essay. These pieces engage with the work of such artists as Tacita Dean, Gerard Byrne, Andy Warhol, and Sophie Calle; with the ruinous territories that haunt the work of Robert Smithson and Derek Jarman; with the ambiguous figures of the charlatan, the vandal, the hypochondriac, and the dandy. Taking seriously the playful remit of the essay as form, Dillon treats of compelling gesture manuals of the nineteenth century, the history of antidepressant marketing, the search for a cure to the common cold. Whether his topic is the nature of slapstick, his love of the writings of Roland Barthes, or the genre of the essay itself, he is as much concerned with the form of criticism today as with its varied and digressive subjects.
Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name means a trial, effort or attempt. An ancient form with an eye on the future, a genre poised between tradition and experiment. The essay wants above all to wander, but also to arrive at symmetry and wholeness; it nurses competing urges to integrity and disarray, perfection and fragmentation, confession and invention. How to write about essays and essayists while staying true to these contradictions? Essayism is a personal, critical and polemical book about the genre, its history and contemporary possibilities. It's an example of what it describes: an essay that is curious and digressive, exacting yet evasive, a form that would instruct, seduce and mystify in equal measure. Among the essayists to whom he pays tribute -- from Virginia Woolf to Georges Perec, Joan Didion to Sir Thomas Browne -- Brian Dillon discovers a path back into his own life as a reader, and out of melancholia to a new sense of writing as adventure. -- Back cover
Exploring the intersection of illness and creativity, the book delves into the lives of notable figures like Charlotte Brontë, who used her ailments as a refuge for writing, and Daniel Paul Schreber, who perceived his body as under siege by divine and medical forces. It also examines Andy Warhol's fears surrounding disease and Glenn Gould's psychological struggles linked to touch. The narrative resonates with the universal experience of seeking answers for unexplained symptoms, highlighting the complex relationship between health and artistic expression.
A lucid and delicate exploration of memory and grief from the author of Essayism.
SUPPOSE A SENTENCE is a critical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature.
Written as a series of linked essays, interwoven with a reflection on affinity itself, Affinities completes a trilogy, with Essayism and Suppose a Sentence, about the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking.
Looks at nine prominent hypochondriacs - James Boswell, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol - and what their lives tell us about the way the mind works with, and against, the body.
"In April 1916, shortly before the commencement of the Battle of the Somme, a fire started in a vast munitions works located in the Kent marshes. The resulting series of explosions killed 108 people and injured many more. In a remarkable piece of storytelling, Brian Dillon recreates the events of that terrible day - and, in so doing, sheds a fresh and unexpected light on the British home front in the Great War. He offers a chilling natural history of explosives and their effects on the earth, on buildings, and on human and animal bodies. And he evokes with vivid clarity the interaction of human imperatives and the natural world in one of Britain's strangest and most distinctive landscapes - where he has been a habitual explorer for many years. The Great Explosion is a profound work of narrative, exploration and inquiry form one of our most brilliant writers." --Jacket flap.