Oldcastle Books imprint: 21 books

A depressive illness or a passing feeling? Mental detachment or a precursor to genius? Melancholy is a critical part of what it is to be human, yet everything from Prozac to self-help psychology books seems intent on removing all signs of sadness from contemporary existence. A Field Guide to Melancholy...

For more than 150 years, the garrets and pubs of Soho, the salons of Chelsea, the opium dens of Limehouse, and the brothels of Covent Garden teemed with poets, painters, derelicts, drunks, sensualists, homosexuals, crooks, and cranks. In Bohemian London, Travis Elborough chronicles de Qunincey and...

Covering territory from Rififi to Run Lola Run to Spiral, a guide to the edgy, gritty best of European noir fiction, films, and television The invasion of foreign crime fiction, films, and TV—and not just the Scandinavian variety—has opened up incredible new options for crime fiction...

Credited with cofounding the movement with his Edwardian/Victorian themed albums, Paul Roland traces the history of the genre, drawing on exclusive quotes from leading writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers in the fieldWhat began in the late 1980s as an underground community of science fiction...

A philosophical history of that strange but prolific hybrid—the writer as walkerFrom the peripatetic philosophers of Ancient Greece to the streets of 20th-century London, Paris, and New York, the figure of writer as walker has continued to evolve through the centuries, the philosopher and the...

In a wickedly funny satire on size zero, celebrity weight-obsessed magazines, the fashion industry, the advertising industry, high society, and Hollywood, no area of media-fueled "body perfection" bullying remains unscathed Sad, lonely Sharon Plunkett is a size 18. She's tried every fad,...

As the war is slipping beyond living memory, this concise history helps ensures that the conflict is never forgotten WWI, lasting just four years from 1914 to 1918, was without parallel, the first true global conflict in which all of the earth's great powers participated. This book tells...

An award-winning television drama producer with 20 years experience in script editing and development offers a practical guide for anyone interested in the television industry Written in an engaging, anecdotal tone, this is a no-nonsense, direct down-the-lens look at the television industry...

For millennia priests and holy men have told countless conflicting tales about humanity's genesis and fate, while also saying anyone devoid of faith is evil, immoral, and responsible for societal ills. For those tired of these contradictions, fed up with hearing about divine mysteries when there aren't...

How has the idea of the South come to exert such a powerful hold over our imagination? From the beaches of Southern Europe to the Great White South of the Antarctic; from South America to the South Pacific, South explores this most diverse and captivating of regions. The South has long since cast...

Leon Marc gives the reader the big picture of Eastern Europe—its political, economic, social and cultural history, the nature of changes there and of the issues at stake in the political and economic transition—while putting the fall of the Berlin Wall and the EU enlargement into a broader perspective...

Sidney Blattner is the most successful—and the most brutal—organized crime figure in London, and now someone has dared to execute his innocent brother in the seaside resort of Margate. When Sidney attends the funeral, his chauffeur disappears and two aides turn up dead. Will Vince, the sharpest member of Sid’s firm, have better luck when he arrives in the seaside town?

Jersey fishing Captain Jean Cotterell is rescued by a French frigate—The Hortense—off the Grand Banks of Nova Scotia in May 1794. His fishing vessel has foundered and he is the sole survivor. The Hortense is part of Republican Admiral Jan Van Stabel’s great fleet of more than 100 ships bringing...

The term "psychogeography" is used to illustrate a bewildering array of ideas, from ley lines and the occult to urban walking and political radicalism—where does it come from and what exactly does it mean? Psychogeography is the point where psychology and geography meet in assessing the...