Phil Benson
Beckside Lights
John Ackworth was the pen name of the Rev. Frederick R. Smith, a Methodist minister who was born in Snaith, Yorkshire, but spent much of his…
Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair
A prose romance set in the forested kingdom of Oakenrealm, where a squirrel can go about from end to end without touching the ground, in whi…
BLAST No. 1
BLAST, edited by Wyndham Lewis and subtitled 'Review of the Great British Vortex', was the magazine of the short-lived Vorticist movement in…
Sydney Past and Present
An account of the early history of Sydney, Australia's first colonial city. Best known for his collection of light-hearted yarns, Steve Brow…
Cycling in the Alps
A guide to cycling in the European Alps in the days before surfaced roads and automobile tourism. As the author explains, the spectacular vi…
The Story of Peterloo
On 16th August 1819 around 60,000 people gathered at St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to rally for parliamentary reform. Shortly after the me…
Kamakura
'Kamakura is nothing if she has no history, writes Japanese novelist, poet, and essayist Yone Noguchi. At the turn of the 20th century, Kama…
Hartmann the Anarchist, or the Doom of a Great City
A gem of nineteenth-century science fiction from mountaineer, philosopher and occasional novelist, Edward Douglas Fawcett. Stanley, a wealth…
Froth
Clementina is losing her youth in the fashionable world of late-nineteenth century Madrid and takes a younger lover. Meanwhile her father, t…
Forty Seasons of First-Class Cricket
R. G. "Dick" Barlow was one of the most accomplished all-round cricketers of the late 19th Century. For many years he opened the b…
Wild and romantic: Early guides to the English lake district
A collection of some of the most significant literary work on the English Lake District prior to Thomas West’s A guide to the Lakes (1778). …
The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed
Cenydd Morus's (Kenneth Morris) imaginative retelling of tales from the Mabinogion, the great work of Welsh literature first recorded in the…
Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods
A limbless reptilian monster that propels itself through the swamps with a propellor-tipped tail? A creature so ashamed of its monstrous app…
Two Cumberland Ballads
Two narrative ballads, based on local lore, by the Cumberland poet John Stagg. In 'The Hermit of Rockcliffe', a young fugitive takes refuge …
Every Man His Own Art Critic
This collection includes two texts written to accompany two blockbuster art exhibitions: Every man his own art critic at the Manchester Exhi…
Sonnets on Anglo-Saxon History
The history of Britain up to the Norman Conquest in the form of 100 prose commentaries, each followed by a sonnet. The commentaries set the …
Manchester Poetry
Manchester's first published anthology of locally-written poetry was compiled by editor James Wheeler to show that Manchester, 'the most mec…
'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf: Contemporary Reviews (1927)
Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse was published in May 1927 in both Britain and the United States. The publication of Mrs. Dalloway a year …
War Impressions: Being a Record in Colour
A personal account of the second Boer War by Australian expatriate artist Mortimer Menpes. Menpes travelled to South Africa as a corresponde…
Poems for my Children
Published in 1847, five years after her epic poem, 'Dionysus the Areopagite', 'Poems For My Children' was Ann Hawkshaw's second collection o…