{"title":"Matt Houlbrook","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the fascinating world of Matt Houlbrook, where history meets insightful analysis. Explore themes of identity, culture, and social change through his compelling works. Start your historical journey here.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"prince-of-tricksters-book-matt-houlbrook-9780226133157","title":"Prince of Tricksters","description":"Meet Netley Lucas, Prince of Tricksters—royal biographer, best-selling crime writer, and gentleman crook. In the years after the Great War, Lucas becomes infamous for climbing the British social ladder by his expert trickery—his changing names and telling of tales. An impudent young playboy and a confessed confidence trickster, he finances his far-flung hedonism through fraud and false pretenses. After repeated spells in prison, Lucas transforms himself into a confessing “ex-crook,” turning his inside knowledge of the underworld into a lucrative career as freelance journalist and crime expert. But then he’s found out again—exposed and disgraced for faking an exclusive about a murder case. So he reinvents himself, taking a new name and embarking on a prolific, if short-lived, career as a royal biographer and publisher. Chased around the world by detectives and journalists after yet another sensational scandal, the gentleman crook dies as spectacularly as he lived—a washed-up alcoholic, asphyxiated in a fire of his own making.   The lives of Netley Lucas are as flamboyant as they are unlikely. In Prince of Tricksters, Matt Houlbrook picks up the threads of Lucas’s colorful lies and lives. Interweaving crime writing and court records, letters and life-writing, Houlbrook tells Lucas’s fascinating story and, in the process, provides a panoramic view of the 1920s and ’30s. In the restless times after the Great War, the gentlemanly trickster was an exemplary figure, whose tall tales and bogus biographies exposed the everyday difficulties of knowing who and what to trust. Tracing how Lucas both evoked and unsettled the world through which he moved, Houlbrook shows how he prompted a pervasive crisis of confidence that encompassed British society, culture, and politics.   Taking readers on a romp through Britain, North America, and eventually into Africa, Houlbrook confronts readers with the limits of our knowledge of the past and challenges us to think anew about what history is and how it might be made differently.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49536677413137,"sku":"GOR013392668","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50465751236881,"sku":"GOR010097456","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50500925653265,"sku":"GOR013975210","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53362035818769,"sku":"CIN022613315XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022613315X.jpg?v=1751389563"},{"product_id":"queer-london-book-matt-houlbrook-9780226354620","title":"Queer London","description":"In August 1934, young Cyril L. wrote to his friend Billy about all the exciting men he had met, the swinging nightclubs he had visited, and the vibrant new life he had forged for himself in the big city. He wrote, \"I have only been queer since I came to London about two years ago, before then I knew nothing about it.\" London, for Cyril, meant boundless opportunities to explore his newfound sexuality. But his freedom was limite: he was soon arrested, simply for being in a club frequented by queer men.  Cyril's story is Matt Houlbrook's point of entry into the queer worlds of early twentieth-century London. Drawing on previously unknown sources, from police reports and newspaper exposés to personal letters, diaries, and the first queer guidebook ever written, Houlbrook here explores the relationship between queer sexualities and modern urban culture that we take for granted today. He revisits the diverse queer lives that took hold in London's parks and streets; its restaurants, pubs, and dancehalls; and its Turkish bathhouses and hotels—as well as attempts by municipal authorities to control and crack down on those worlds. He also describes how London shaped the culture and politics of queer life—and how London was in turn shaped by the lives of queer men. Ultimately, Houlbrook unveils the complex ways in which men made sense of their desires and who they were. In so doing, he mounts a sustained challenge to conventional understandings of the city as a place of sexual liberation and a unified queer culture.   A history remarkable in its complexity yet intimate in its portraiture, Queer London is a landmark work that redefines queer urban life in England and beyond.   “A ground-breaking work. While middle-class lives and writing have tended to compel the attention of most historians of homosexuality, Matt Houlbrook has looked more widely and found a rich seam of new evidence. It has allowed him to construct a complex, compelling account of interwar sexualities and to map a new, intimate geography of London.”—Matt Cook, The Times Higher Education Supplement   Winner of History Today’s Book of the Year Award, 2006","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49729640005905,"sku":"NGR9780226354620","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50338425798929,"sku":"CIN0226354628VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226354628.jpg?v=1751227677"},{"product_id":"men-and-masculinities-in-modern-britain-book-matt-houlbrook-9781526174697","title":"Men and masculinities in modern Britain","description":"Men and masculinities provides a critical overview of ongoing debates in the history of masculinities and the making of mens lives and ideas of masculinity in Britain between the 1890s and present day.It proposes a new agenda, urging histories to reflect on the enduring influence of patriarchy in contemporary Britain. -- .","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49753015812369,"sku":"NGR9781526174697","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52143336325393,"sku":"NLS9781526174697","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53036658295057,"sku":"NIN9781526174697","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1526174693.jpg?v=1776333724"},{"product_id":"songs-of-seven-dials-book-matt-houlbrook-9781526181954","title":"Songs of Seven Dials","description":"Centring on a 1927 libel trial, this book tells the story of the cosmopolitan London neighbourhood of Seven Dials and its battles with racism and gentrification throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a struggle that would shape the city we know today. -- .","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51606467182865,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51606467379473,"sku":"NGR9781526181954","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52584976908561,"sku":"NLS9781526181954","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52657969398033,"sku":"GOR014577766","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52725076164881,"sku":"NIN9781526181954","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1526181959.jpg?v=1772704759"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-matt-houlbrook.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}