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Point To Point Navigation: A Memoir

The brilliant sequel to Gore Vida's acclaimed, bestselling memoir, Palimpsest.

In Point to Point Navigation, the celebrated novelist, essayist, critic, and controversialist Gore Vidal ranges freely over his remarkable life with the signature wit and literary elegance that is uniquely his. The title refers to a form of navigation he resorted to as a first mate in the Navy during World War II. As he says, "As I was writing this account of my life and times since Palimpsest, I felt as if I were again dealing with those capes and rocks in the Bering Sea that we had to navigate so often with a compass made inoperable by weather." It is a beautifully apt analogy for the hazards (mostly) eluded during his eventful life and for the way this memoir proceeds — far from linear but always on course.

From his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Gore Vidal travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theater, politics and international society where he has cut a broad swath, recounting achievements and defeats, friends and enemies made (and on a number of occasions lost). Among the gathering of notables to be found in these pages, sketched with a draftsman's ease and evoked with the panache of one of our great raconteurs, are Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy, Tennessee Williams (the "Glorious Bird"), Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Johnny Carson, Greta Garbo, Federico Fellini, Rudolph Nureyev, Elia Kazan, and Francis Ford Coppola. Some of the book's most moving pages are devoted to the illness and death of his partner of five decades, Howard Austen, and indeed the book is, among other things, a meditation on mortality written in the spirit of Montaigne.

Elegiac yet vital and even ornery, Point to Point Navigation is a summing-up of Gore Vidal's time on the planet that manages to be at once supremely entertaining, endlessly provocative, and thoroughly moving.

After Dark

I think I’ve said it before on these pages, but I have to say it again: Murakami is the literary world’s answer to David Lynch. The ordinary and the extraordinary, the natural and the supernatural, are equally expected and all greeted with typical authorial nonchalance. Expect quirky characters and mysterious otherworlds; pop culture references (especially to music) and tell-tale clues casually dropped along the way. Like Lynch, Murakami makes his reader work for the story, while thoroughly entertaining. And (last comparison, I promise), he’ll never quite give you the whole answer. You’ll spend the next few days puzzling over exactly what the story meant and what particular events or conversations signified. After Dark follows the misadventures of a cast of linked characters in one Tokyo night, from 11pm to 7am. A prickly, street-smart teenage girl stays out all night to distract herself from worrying about her sister, a modern sleeping beauty. A former schoolmate practices with his band, in between a series of Tarantinoesque meandering conversations and feeding a swarm of stray cats. Also involved are the workers of a ‘love hotel’ named after an art film, a nocturnal workaholic with a savage streak and a masked character from another dimension.

Jo Case is Editor of Readings Monthly

Things I Overheard While Talking To Myself

So what we'll do is, we'll take this boy - born into a life of illusion, bred by a mother who had hallucinations, trained in the art of being someone else and who found himself known for someone he only partly resembled - and we'll give him a new identity. After a life of trying many others, this one may work best. The identity we'll give him is himself.' Acclaimed actor and internationally bestselling author Alan Alda has written a shrewd and funny account of some impossible questions he's asked himself over the years: What do I value? What, exactly, is the good life? (And what does that even mean?) Here, Alda listens in on things he's heard himself saying at critical points in his life - from the turbulence of the sixties, to his first Broadway show, to the birth of his children, and to the ache of September 11. He notices that 'doorways are where the truth is told', and wonders what one thing - art, activism, family, money, fame - could lead to a 'life of meaning . In a book that is candid, wise and as questioning as it is incisive, Alda amuses and moves us with his uniquely witty meditations on questions great and small.

Out Stealing Horses

In 1948, when he is fifteen, Trond spends a summer in the country with his father. The events - the accidental death of a child, his best friend's feelings of guilt and eventual disappearance, his father's decision to leave the family for another woman - will change his life forever. An early morning adventure out stealing horses leaves Trond bruised and puzzled by his friend Jon's sudden breakdown. The tragedy which lies behind this scene becomes the catalyst for the two boys' families gradually to fall apart. As a 67-year-old man, and following the death of his wife, Trond has moved to an isolated part of Norway to live in solitude. But a chance encounter with a character from the fateful summer of 1948 brings the painful memories of that year flooding back, and will leave Trond even more convinced of his decision to end his days alone. A moving tale about feelings of isolation and of the painful loss of innocence and of traditional ways of life gone for ever.

The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad

When he died in 1924, Virginia Woolf wrote of Joseph Conrad, 'Suddenly, our guest has left us... There was always an air of mystery around him.' Never quite an Englishman, Conrad is depicted in this authoritative new biography as a man who consistently reinvented himself, transforming fiction into life and, in turn, life into litererature. Having endured a difficult childhood in the politically repressive Austro-Hungarian empire Conrad took to the seas, first working as a sailor in Marseilles, before joining the British merchant navy and travelling to the Far East and the Congo. Then in 1894, Conrad began his great transformation; after some twenty tears at seaprecarious cash-strapped existence as an Edwardian novelist and anxious family man and father, Such phrases as the 'heart of darkness" and 'The horror! The horror!' have entered the language, often cited without an awareness of their original contexts - few writers of such determinedly literary, 'difficult' fiction have enjoyed so wide an impact. THE SEVERAL LIVES OF JOSEPH CONRAD places into context Conrad's life and work as never before possible, drawing on letters and documents previously unseen. John Stape's evocative portait is complete with period detail and packed with fresh insights into the life of a wilfully enigmatic man who became one of the greatest writers of his, and our, time.

On Ugliness

This book is the follow up to the previous volume ON BEAUTY. Apparently beauty and ugliness are concepts that imply each other, and by ugliness we usually mean the opposite of beauty, so all we need do is define the first to understand the nature of the second. But the various manifestations of ugliness over the centuries are richer and more unpredictable than is commonly thought. The anthological quotations and the extraordinary illustrations in this book lead us on a surprising journey among the nightmares, terrors, and loves of almost three thousand years, where acts of rejection go hand in hand with touching gestures of compassion, and the rejection of deformity is accompanied by decadent ecstasies over the most seductive violations of all classical canons. Among demons, madmen, horrible enemies, and disquieting presences, among horrid abysses and deformities that verge on the sublime, among freaks and the living dead, we discover a vast and often unsuspected iconographic vein. So much so that, on gradually encountering in these pages the ugliness of nature, spiritual ugliness, asymmetry, disharmony, disfigurement, and the succession of things sordid, weak, vile, banal, random, arbitrary, coarse, repugnant, clumsy, horrendous, vacuous, nauseating, criminal, spectral, witchlike, satanic, repellent, disgusting, unpleasant, grotesque, abominable, odious, crude, foul, dirty, obscene, frightening, abject, monstrous, hair-raising, ugly, terrible, terrifying, revolting, repulsive, loathsome, fetid, ignoble, awkward, ghastly and indecent, the first foreign publisher to see this book exclaimed: 'How beautiful ugliness is!'

Casa Moro

The Moro restaurant was born out of a desire to cook within the wonderful tradition of Mediterranean food, and to explore exotic flavours little known in the UK. It is one of the most talked about restaurants and in 1998 won both the Time Out and BBC Good Food awards for Best New Restaurant. MORO: THE COOKBOOK was a huge success. Its passionate insight into the culinary traditions of Spain and the Muslim Mediterranean and its strong vision and ethos captured readers' imaginations. Casa del Moro introduces an impressive quality and diversity of recipes that are by no means inaccessible to the average cook; ranging from Asparagus with parsley and almonds; Moroccan courgette salad; Partridge escabeche; Garlic prawns with white wine and chilli; Chicken with pine nuts, saffron and fino sherry and Chestnut, almond and chocolate cake. Taking the range of flavours beyond those covered in their first book, Sam and Sam Clark have created fresh and dynamic dishes that reflect Moro's ever-changing menu. Much more than a simple catalogue of recipes, Casa del Moro evokes Sam and Sam's extensive travels, their first discovery of Spain and Morocco and their house in the heart of Moorish Andalucia, taking the reader on a journey that resonates with delicious dishes, history and tradition. With an entire chapter dedicated to the ancient ways and cooking of Andalucia and, more specifically, the village in which Sam and Sam live, this personal, evocative account exudes romance and is written and designed with palpable excitement and elegance.

Voyage And Landfall: The Art Of Jan Senbergs

Traces Senbergs' journey, his development as an artist and his distinctive interpretation of the Australian landscape.

Michael Tolliver Lives

Fans of Maupin’s San Franciscan sextet Tales of the City rejoice! Almost twenty years since Sure of You he has returned with an instalment (of sorts) in this evergreen series. Although be warned, this isn’t strictly a continuation. As told by the title character, Michael Tolliver Lives focuses on Michael and less on other characters from the ‘Tales’ books. There’s enough here though to satisfy ardent devotees as Michael is in touch with most of the old gang. Importantly, Anna Madrigal, his 85-year-old ex-landlady is ever present to lend a wise quip. In the present day, Michael, now 55, is healthy despite his HIV status, in love with a much younger man, Ben, and runs a successful landscaping business with transgender employee Jake. When his fundamentalist mother falls drastically ill in Florida, he returns with Ben in tow. What ensues is classic Maupin: familial awkwardness, secrets exposed in soap-operatic fervour, steamy sex, racist queens, Christian puppeteers and a butch gay hairdresser named Patreese. Pleasant and bittersweet surprises abound. Mostly, this is about growing older and celebrating families, both the ones we are born into and the ones found along the way.

Jason Austin is from Readings Carlton

To Boulez And Beyond

Beginning with Stravinsky and his seminal work early in the twentieth century, this book traces the course of classical music to the present day and beyond, as it moves into the twenty-first century.

The World At War

THE WORLD AT WAR is the definitive television work on the Second World War. It set out to tell the story of the war through the testimony of key participants - from civilians to ordinary soldiers, from statesmen to generals. First broadcast in 1973, the result was a unique and irreplaceable record since many of the eyewitnesses captured on film did not have long to live. The programme's producers committed hundreds of interview-hours to tape in its creation, but only a fraction of that recorded material made it to the final cut. For more than 30 years the interviews have never been allowed to be published - until now. The well-known names interviewed for the series include Albert Speer, Karl Wolff (Himmler's adjutant), Traudl Junge (Hitler's secretary), James Stewart (USAAF bomber pilot and Hollywood star), Anthony Eden, John Colville (Parliamentary Private Secretary to Winston Churchill), Averell Harriman (US Ambassador to Russia) and Arthur 'Bomber' Harris (Head of RAF Bomber Command). Highly respected historian and bestselling author Richard Holmes has skilfully woven this valuable original material into a compelling narrative, creating a truly phenomenal oral history of the Second World War.

Kitchen Diaries

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Tuscany Flying High

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Muhammad

This immacualtely researched biography will enable readers to understand the true origins and spirituality of a faith that is often misrepresented as cruel, intolerant and inherently violent.

Spike Milligan: The Biography

In this first major biography of the comic genius from Woy Woy, Carpenter draws on Milligan’s writings and those closest to him to chart the life of this most complex man.

Whole Equation A History Of Hollywood

Taking his title from a line in "The Last Tycoon, Thomson sets out to explore the American movie business in all its complexity, all its component parts, from the invention of film until the present day. What is "the whole equation"? In the author's words" "It embraces the majesty, the business statistics and millions of us being moved, the art and the awfulness. It accommodates the artistic careers, the lives of the pirates, the ebb and flow of business, the sociological impact-in short, the wonder in the dark, the calculation in the offices, and the staggering impact on America of moving pictures. Which is to say, also, the thunderous artillery of America unleashed on all the world." And to be sure, it's essential to follow the money, which Thomson always does, making clear that the urge to tell the stories that are movies is inseparable from the urge to make money, and that the movies redefined greed--there was just so much money to be made. We start when D.W. Griffith yields final say on his films to a movie executive, making the essential point that it's always the studio that owns the work. We see Chaplin, who understands the whole equation, rising and then losing his way when he, the artist, not the mogul, has the final say--another essential point. We learn how Louis B. Mayer mastered the whole equation, and dominated the golden age of film, understanding both how to make a star and the dreamlike state of moviegoers, trying to escape reality.

Heat

Heat is the story of an amateur cook surviving - or, perhaps more accurately, trying to survive - in a professional kitchen. Until recently, Bill Buford was an enthusiastic, if rather chaotic, home cook. His meals were characterized by two incompatible qualities: their ambition and his inexperience at preparing them. Nevertheless, his lifelong regret was that he'd never worked in a professional kitchen. Then, three years ago, an opportunity presented itself. Buford was asked by the New Yorker to write a profile of Mario Batali, a Falstaffian figure of voracious appetites who ran one of New York's most successful three-star restaurants. Batali had learned his craft by years of training - first, working in London with the young Marco Pierre White; then in California during the Food Revolution; and finally in Italy, being taught how to make pasta by hand in a hillside trattoria. Buford accepted the commission, if Batali would let him work in his kitchen, as his slave. He worked his way up to being a 'line cook' and then left New York to apprentice himself under the very teachers who had taught his teacher: preparing game with Marco Pierre White, making pasta in a hillside trattoria, and finally, in a town in Northern Italy, becoming an Italian butcher. HEAT is a marvellous hybrid: a memoir of Buford's kitchen adventure, the story of Batali's amazing rise to culinary fame, a dazzling behind-the-scenes look at a famous restaurant, and an illuminating exploration of why food matters. It is a book to delight in, and to savour.

Meaning Of Tingo

Drawing from the collective wisdom of more than 280 languages, a collection of the most astomishing words the human species has found the need to concoct.

The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics 1965 to 1995

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Francis Crick Discoverer Of The Genetic Code Eminent Lives

Francis Crick, who died at the age of 84 in 2004, wukk be bracketted with Galileo, Darwin and Einstein as one of the greatest scientists of all time.

Ganges

The Ganges River (Gang Ma or Great Mother) is the holiest river in the world. Rising from the pure glacial meltwaters of the Himalayas, it flows down onto India's Northern Plain, then heads eastwards into the swamplands of Bangladesh, finally discharging a 500-km (310-mile) tongue of red silt into the Bay of Bengal. As well as filling wells and irrigating crops to sustain the cities and villages along its banks, it is the spiritual life-blood for India's primary religion, Hinduism. Bathing in the Ganges remains the lifelong ambition of many of India's believing masses, who consider the river to be a living goddess. People gather daily at her banks to murmur prayers, baptise children, wash vibrant coloured saris, drink her waters or simply die believing such acts help absolve sins and lead the way to Nirvana. Ganges reveals the source of the river high in the Himalayas the youngest mountain range in the world and follows its route as it sharply incises the mountains on its journey south-east. Along the way we discover the Hindu story of the river's creation, and how it supports the myriad forms of life that thrive on its banks. With stunning, evocative images by photographer Jon Nicholson, Ganges is a true visual feast as teeming with life and colour as the mighty river itself.

In Search Of The Blues

Everyone knows the story of the Delta blues, with its fierce, raw voices and tormented drifters and deals with the devil at the crossroads at midnight. In this compelling book, Marybeth Hamilton radically rewrites that story. Archaic and primeval though the music may sound, the idea of something called 'Delta blues' emerged in the late twentieth century, the culmination of a longstanding white fascination with 'uncorrupted' black singers, untainted by the city, by commerce, by the sights and sounds of modernity. The prehistory of the Delta blues begins around 1900, when a group of obsessive white men and women set out to track down those 'uncontaminated' voices. For the would-be 'race scientist' Howard Odum, this meant combing remote Mississippi backroads with a cylinder phonograph to capture the obscene melodies of vagrants and field hands. For the plantation-bred folklorist Dorothy Scarborough, it meant finding elderly white Civil War veterans to recreate the croonings of mammies and nursemaids. For the Texas banker turned song hunter John Lomax and his teenage son Alan, it meant prowling Southern penitentiaries (where isolation from the radio ensured 'primitive purity') and unearthing a double murderer, Leadbelly, whose rough, ragged, melancholy vocals evoked the anguish of the chain gang. Yet in time, that search for unsullied voices turned from living singers to disused recordings. The Delta blues, it turns out, had its birth in the 1950s in a single room in a Brooklyn YMCA, where a reclusive gay alcoholic named James McKune heard something pure and primal in the voices of Charley Patton and Robert Johnson, the prized items in the collection of scratched, battered 78s that he stored in a cardboard box under his bed. The book is remarkable not only for the stories it tells but also for its deep understanding of the place of the blues within the wider American culture, its obvious exclusion of women and its romance with outsider manhood. Written with exquisite grace and sensitivity, at once historically acute and hauntingly poetic, the book is an extraordinary excavation of the blues mystique.

Mere Anarchy

I am greatly relieved that the universe is finally explainable. I was beginning to think it was me.' Thus begins 'Strung Out', Woody Allen's hilarious application of the laws of the universe to daily life. MERE ANARCHY, Woody Allen's first new collection in 25 years, features eighteen witty, wild and intelligent comic pieces - nine of which have never been in print before. Surreal, absurd, rich in verbal play, bitingly satirical and just plain daft, this collection includes tales of a body double - mistaken for the film's star - kidnapped by outlaws; a pretentious writer forced to work on the novelisation of a Three Stooges film; a nanny secretly writing an expose of her Manhattan employers; crooks selling bespoke prayers on ebay; and how to react when you re asked to finance a Broadway play about the invention and manufacture of the adjustable showerhead. Laced with his unique brand of humour and reminiscent of some of his finest films, MERE ANARCHY is an essential collection of tales by the inimitable Woody Allen.

Everyman

Philip Roth's twenty-seventh book takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century English allegorical play whose drama centres on the summoning of the living to death and whose hero, EVERYMAN, is intended to be the personification of mankind. The fate of Roth's Everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers and during his hospitalisation as a nine-year-old surgical patient through the crises of health that come close to killing him as a vigorous adult, and into his old age, when he is undone by the death and deterioration of his contemporaries and relentlessly stalked by his own menacing physical woes. A successful commercial advertising artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons who despise him and a daughter who adores him, the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. EVERYMAN is a painful human story of the regret and loss and stoicism of a man who becomes what he does not want to be. The terrain of this savagely sad short novel is the human body, and its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.

Vintage Yachts Of The World

This title offers numerous historical and technical facts as well as exquisite photographs of historic and classic yachts. Included are portrayals of ships that have been entered in the annals of the sport of yachting, as well as detailed interior and exterior views of famous boats. The yachts and their crews are bound by an intense love of the sea and of a freedom that only the world of sailing can offer. A magnificent volume of high typographic value in an elegant format in which the poetry and the fascination of sailing, as well as the charm of historic yachts, find their greatest expression.

That's How The Light Gets In

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Brooklyn Follies

Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, retired, estranged from his daughter, the former life insurance salesman wants only solitude and anonymity. Then Glass encounters his long-lost nephew Tom Wood, working in a local bookstore—a far cry from the brilliant academic career he had been headed for. Tom's boss is the charismatic Harry Brightman, a born prankster and the former owner of a Chicago art gallery, also seeking a new life in what he calls "the ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, New York," and through them and maybe a stray relative or two, Nathan comes to a reckoning with his past.

Arthur & George

A masterful novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race, this tale is a profound and witty meditation on the fateful differences between what is believed, what is known, and what can be proven. Two men's lives become interwoven and each becomes the other's salvation.

Diana Mosley

Diana Mosley was a society beauty who fell from grace when she left her husband, brewery heir Bryan Guinness, for Sir Oswald Mosley, an admirer of Mussolini and a notorious womanizer. This horrified her family and scandalized society.

In 1933, Diana met the new German leader, Adolf Hitler. They became close friends and he attended her wedding as the guest of honor. During the war, the Mosleys' association with Hitler led them to be arrested and interned for three and a half years. Diana's relationships with Hitler and Mosley defined her life in the public eye and marked her as a woman who possessed a singular lack of empathy for those less blessed at birth.

Anne de Courcy's revealing biography chronicles one of the most intriguing, controversial women of the twentieth century. It is a riveting tell-all memoir of a leading society hostess, a woman with intimate access to the highest literary, political, and social circles of her time. Written with Mosley's exclusive cooperation and based upon hundreds of hours of taped interviews and unprecedented access to her private papers, letters, and diaries, Lady Mosley's only stipulation was that the book not be published until after her death.

Oxford History Of Christian Worship

This text is a comprehensive and authoritative history of the origins and development of Christian worship to the present day. Backed by an international roster of experts as contributors, it examines the liturgical traditions of Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal.

God's Grace

"God's Grace "(1982), Bernard Malamud's last novel, is a modern-day dystopian fantasy, set in a time after a thermonuclear war prompts a second flood-a radical departure from Malamud's previous fiction. The novel's protagonist is paleolosist Calvin Cohn, who had been attending to his work at the bottom of the ocean when the Devastation struck, and who alone survived. This rabbi's son?a "marginal error"?finds himself shipwrecked with an experimental chimpanzee capable of speech, to whom he gives the name Buz. Soon other creatures appear on their island-baboons, chimps, five apes, and a lone gorilla. Cohn works hard to make it possible for God to love His creation again, and his hopes increase as he encounters the unknown and the unforeseen in this strange new world. With "God's Grace," Malamud took a great risk, and it paid off. The novel's fresh and pervasive humor, narrative ingenuity, and tragic sense of the human condition make it one of Malamud's most extraordinary books.

That Sweet Enemy

A definitive study of the unique and endlessly fascinating relationship between France and Britain -- and its effects on the world. The relationship between Britain and France is one of the catalysts of world history. Their geographical proximity, combined with their intellectual and economic dynamism, placed them both at the forefront of continental developments and overseas expansion from the eighteenth century onwards. Their insatiable rivalry set the pattern of European imperialism, and hence did much to shape the future of the planet. The interaction between them -- both peaceful and violent, combining admiration and emulation as well as rejection and conflict -- did much to create the identity and culture of both. The result, paradoxically, has been the persistence of a deep sense of difference between two countries that have much in common but regard themselves as exceptional. That Sweet Enemy is a study of the dynamic processes of mutual contact and influence: and how these have been expressed in caricatures, histories, literature, painting and film -- it is definitely not a standard textbook account of diplomatic relations. Appealing not only to scholars, it will also fascinate anyone who takes a general interest in history, politics and culture, as well as those who just love to visit France and England.

Pablo Neruda

A journalist and prize-winning translator of Spanish and Latin American poetry, delves into a wealth of published and unpublished accounts of Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean writer.

History Of The American People

A history of American society and the American nation, written by the celebrated English journalist. Keenly sensitive to the contradictions that Americans embody within themselves--materialism vs. prudism, naivete vs. cynicism--Johnson attempts to show the ways in which the America character shaped, and was shaped by, American history.

Social History Of The Third Reich

A balanced, thorough study of Germany during the Nazi years, by the celebrated author of The Nazi Question.

The Inner Voice: The Making Of A Singer

Blessed with one of the most beautiful voices of her generation, soprano Renie Fleming is one of the most celebrated talents on today s music scene. In The Inner Voice, this great singer shares what she has learned from her experience as an inspiration for those contemplating a career in the arts. From struggling to get a career under way to dealing with her own personal doubts, Fleming is wonderfully candid and articulate about her art - especially the little discussed heart-throat-mind connection - and childhood influences, formal education, mentors, preparation, and mental and physical discipline.

I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too

With it’s glorious hooks, distinctive melodic style and intimate lyrics, the new album is pure Martha. But there’s a lushness and glowing sensuality to the recording that hasn’t been evident before. ‘I Know You’re Married...’ contains a near embarrassment of riches - sonically, melodically, and emotionally - that will thrill long term fans as well as reach a whole new audience.

Decorative Arts

A comprehensive guide to the history and development of style and design from 1700 to the present day, from No.1 antiques and collectables expert Judith Miller.

From priceless Oriental porcelain and Huguenot silver to exquisite Art Deco glass and minimalist contemporary chairs, explore the entire spectrum of decorative pieces including furniture, ceramics, silverware, glass, textiles, sculpture, clocks, and posters through the centuries.

Discover how to identify the key features and motifs, materials and techniques that influenced design and their significance. Uncover the stories behind the key designers and craftsmen, and the movements they represent. Over 3,000 beautiful items reveal the style and beauty of furnishings and objects used to decorate interiors through the centuries.

Victorians

We live in the world which the Victorians created. The 'global village' is a Victorian village. Their two great inventions go hand in hand: industrial capitalism, and imperialism. Historians in the past have tended to describe these two great facts in ideological, rather than in personal terms. A. N. Wilson illuminates them through the people who built them. In a panoramic survey of the Victorian Age he describes the men and women who brought the modern age into being. The capitalist world came into being because of actual businessmen, actual journalists, actual politicians. We meet them in the pages of this book. It was challenged by the ideas of such men as Karl Marx, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw - here they are. Here are the lofty and famous - Prince Albert, Lord Palmerston, Charles Dickens, Gladstone and Disraeli - and here too are the poor and the obscure - doctors ministering to cholera victims in the big cities, young women working as models for the famous painters, the man who got the British hooked on cigarettes, the butchers and victims of conflict in Ireland, India and Africa. A. N. Wilson's book is a mosaic, in which hundreds of different lives have been pieced together to tell a story - one which is still unfinished in our own day.

Marie Antoinette

We live in a world the Victorians created. Their two great inventions go hand-in-hand: industrial capitalism and imperialism. A.N. Wilson illuminates these two great facts, not in ideological terms but in personal terms, through the people who built them. In a panoramic survey of the Victorian Age, he describes the men and women who brought the modern age into being.

The capitalist world came about because of actual businessmen, actual journalists, and actual politicians. It was challenged by the ideas of such men as Karl Marx, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw — here they are. Here are the lofty and famous — Lord Palmerston, Charles Dickens, Gladstone and Disraeli. And here too are the poor and the obscure — doctors ministering to cholera victims in the big cities, young women working as models for the famous painters, the man who got the British hooked on cigarettes, the butchers and victims of conflict in Ireland, India and Africa.

A Writer At War: Vasily Grossman With The Red Army

Vasily Grossman's masterpiece LIFE AND FATE is rated by many as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. Among its admirers is Antony Beevor, the bestselling author of STALINGRAD and BERLIN. A WRITER AT WAR is based on the notebooks in which Grossman gathered his raw material. It depicts as never before the crushing conditions on the Eastern Front and the lives and deaths of infantrymen, tank drivers, pilots, snipers and civilians alike. Deemed unfit for service when the Germans invaded in 1941, Grossman became a special correspondent for Red Star, the Red Army newspaper. A portly novelist in his mid-thirties with no military experience, he was given a uniform and hastily taught to use a pistol. Remarkably, he spent three of the following four years at the front observing with a writer's eye the most pitiless fighting ever known. Grossman witnessed almost all the major events on the Eastern Front: the appalling defeats and desperate retreats of 1941, the defence of Moscow and fighting in the Ukraine. In August 1942 he was posted to Stalingrad where he remained during four months of brutal street-fighting. He was present at the battle of Kursk, the largest tank engagement in history, and, as the Red Army advanced, he reached Berdichev where his worst fears for his mother and other relations were confirmed. A Jew himself, he undertook the faithful recording of Holocaust atrocities as their extent dawned. His supremely powerful report 'The Hell of Treblinka' was used in evidence at the Nuremberg tribunal.

Clearings Six Colonial Gardeners And Their Landscapes

When Europeans settled the Australian colonies they saw beyond the wilderness of the bush to the possibilities of an ideal landscape. But first the land had to be cleared. And to make a clearing in the colonies was to erase what existed in nature and replace it with something new.

In Clearings, Paul Fox tells the stories of six colonial gardeners and their making of the Australian landscape. These are tales of strong characters and determination. Sir William Macarthur, the colonial gentleman, took pride in besting a great London nursery. The passionate and energetic nurseryman, Thomas Lang, imported over a million plants into the country. Daniel Bunce, a man of 'uncertain reputation' lived on the edge of society and came to understand something of how Aboriginal people saw their country. William Guilfoyle combined his pioneering experience with the aesthetics of gardening design and a grand vision to create the magic of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. Josiah Mitchell championed new farming practices through his journalism and lecturing. A gardener, William Ferguson, became a forester but could only conceive of a forest in European terms.

The individual stories reveal the nuances in the history of nineteenth-century botany, horticulture and plant collecting. Through the nursery, the botanic garden, the farm and the forest the colonial landscape was transformed. Using the gardeners' writings and a range of beautiful illustrations, including garden plans, botanic illustrations and photographs from the period, Paul Fox evocatively charts the progress of these gardeners as they made the clearings we still inhabit.

One Continuous Picnic

2007 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first publication of One Continuous Picnic, a frequently acclaimed Australian classic on the history of eating in Australia. Until recently, historians have tended to overlook eating, and yet, through meat pies and lamingtons, Symons tells the history of Australia gastronomically.

He challenges myths such as that Australia is "too young" for a national cuisine, and that immigration caused the restaurant boom. Australians have enjoyed plenty to eat, but food had to be portable: witness the weekly rations of mutton, flour, tea and sugar that made early settlers a mobile army clearing a whole continent. By the time of screw-top riesling, takeaway chicken and frozen puff pastry, Australians were hypnotised consumers, on one continuous picnic.

But good food has never come from factory farms, process lines, supermarkets and fast-food chains. Only when we enjoy a diet of fresh, local produce treated with proper respect, when we learn from peasants, might we at last have found a national cuisine and cultivated a continent.

Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir

Aline Kominsky-Crumb, one of the earliest female cartoonists, presents a collection of her own highly inventive and daring artwork from over four decades, along with unusual photographs and memorabilia. The road to becoming an underground- comics legend begins with Komisky-Crumb as a nice jewish girl from Long Island, carries her to Greenwich Village in the 1960's, and to California, land of hippy cartoonists, and on to a more or less sedate life with hubby(equally legendary R. Crumb) and daughter, Sophie. Her funny/sad tales show a woman bewildered by her place in society and determined to find her own way. These stories touch on every phase of her existence from childhood, to sexual obsessions, food, motherhood and, of course, her art. The book includes sharp vignettes of the Movers and Shakers - and the jerks - of the art and music worlds since the sixties.

Book Addicts Treasury

The ideal gift for any book obsessive, A Book Addict's Treasury is an extensively researched anthology of more than 350 quotations and excerpts from a wide selection of writers and thinkers--all on the subject of books.

Traditional Spanish Cooking

Presented in paperback, this work includes 270 recipes for traditional Spanish dishes from Andalusian red garlic fish soup to Catalan chicken, Asturias stuffed sardines and Galician fish stew to Castilian roast baby lamb and shepherds' stew from La Mancha. Its introductions set the food in the context of a land on the crossroads of civilizations

Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France And America 1934-1971

In 1934, Igor Stravinsky was fifty-two, a Russian expatriate living in Paris and already regarded by many as the most important composer of his generation. STRAVINSKY: THE SECOND EXILE follows Stravinsky through the remainder of his long life, which he would spend largely in the United States. These are the years during which he would compose such masterworks as The Rake's Progress and Symphony in C, and achieve a new level of fame as a conductor and concert pianist in his own right. In this second and final volume of Stephen Walsh's acclaimed biography, the author traces and illuminates Stravinsky's increasingly complex and often agonised family life and his crucially important relationship with his associate Robert Craft. As a musicologist and critic, Walsh is able to speak with authority and wit not only about Stravinsky's life, but also about his work, expertly following the composer's musical journey from the neoclassicism of his late French and early American periods, through his early essays in serial technique, and on finally to the astonishing complexities of this protean genius's final works. Based on exhaustive research, Stephen Walsh uncovers new and controversial material, making this the second volume of the most definitive biography of the most significant and influential composer of the twentieth century.

Villa Gardens Of The Mediterranean From The Archives Of Country Life

Covering gardens in the Mediterranean region, this book features over 35 locations, which are illustrated with archive photographs. It includes private residences in Greece, Spain and Italy, the iconic gardens of the French Riviera, Arabic gardens of Algeria, and more.

Christine Falls

A compelling new crime series from the pen of Booker Prize winner John Banville.

In the Pathology Department it was always night. This was one of the things Quirke liked about his job... it was restful, cosy, one might almost say, down in these depths nearly two floors beneath the city's busy pavements. There was too a sense here of being part of the continuance of ancient practices, secret skills, of work too dark to be carried on up in the light.

But one night, late after a party, Quirke stumbles across a body that shouldn't have been there... and his brother-in-law, eminent paediatrician Malachy Griffin – a rare sight in Quirke's gloomy domain – altering a file to cover up the corpse's cause of death.

It is the first time Quirke encounters Christine Falls, but the investigation he decides to lead into the way she lived – and the reason she died – disturbs a dark secret that has been festering at the core of Dublin's high Catholic society, a secret ready to destabilise the very heart and soul of Quirke's own family...

Putin's Russia

Former KGB spy Vladimir Putin, named Prime Minister of Russia in 1999 and, one year later, President, has been something of a media darling in the West, having successfully marketed himself as an enlightened leader with both feet planted firmly on the Eastern borders of Europe. Anti-establishment journalist and human-rights activist Anna Politkovskaya disagrees strenuously with this point of view. In her new book, she trains her steely gaze on, as she puts at, Putin 'without the rapture'. From her privileged vantage-point at the heart of Russian current affairs, Politkovskaya reports from behind the scenes, dismantling both Putin the man and Putin the brand name, arguing that he is a power-hungry product of his own history in the security forces and so unable to prevent himself from stifling dissent and other civil liberties at every turn. After centuries of living under tyrants, Politkovskaya argues, this is not what contemporary Russians want. The book is, however, not simply a biography or an analysis of Putin's presidency. Politkovskaya's writing is known for its humanity and its passion, and her focus is on individual human beings and their stories. As she puts it, 'my book is jottings made on the margins of life in Russia. For the time being, I cannot analyse that existence. I'm just living and noting what I see.' So her readers are treated to expos-s of mafia dealings and scandals in the provinces, of corruption in the military and the judiciary, of the decline of the dissident intelligentsia and concomitant rise of street traders, and of the truth behind the Moscow theatre siege. Other shocking stories fill out an intimate portrait of nascent civil institutions being subverted under the unquestioning eyes of the West.

Sixty Lights

Photography has without doubt made her a seer; she is a woman of the future, someone leaning into time, beyond others, precarious, unafraid to fall...' This is the story of Lucy Strange, a photographer, while the art is in its infancy, in the 1870s, who exists in an extraordinarily heightened state of seeing and imagining. Her tale is told in sixty illuminated parts - using candlelight, flames, lightning, gas-lamps, mirrors, magic lanterns and, most mysteriously, lit faces and bodies. In a contracted, almost modernist form, SIXTY LIGHTS tracks Lucy s life from her childhood in Australia, to her stormy adolescence in England and India and finally to her death in London at the age of twenty-three. It is a life abbreviated, but not a life diminished: she is a remarkable character, forthright, gifted, passionate and canny. SIXTY LIGHTS plays powerfully with Victorian tropes and texts - orphans, inheritances, Great Expectations - setting them against the technological revolution in seeing that is inspired by photography. Written with astute imagistic precision, the story is deeply layered, fluctuating between past, present and future. This is an impressive UK debut from a prize-winning Australian author.

On Green Dolphin Street

“The sensuous, affective surfaces, the details, the fully imagined physicality of life and death are so powerful as to be almost unbearable . . . a tribute to the author’s remarkable skill and tact, and, at moments, dazzling virtuosity.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

Hiroshige Birds And Flowers

Endlessly experimenting with design, composition, and color, Hiroshige captured in these paintings, as no where else in his work, his poetic and idyllic sense of nature.

Postwar: A History Of Europe Since 1945

As [Tony] Judt movingly draws it, the picture of Europe at the end of World War II is pitiful almost beyond bearing. Some 36.5 million Europeans are reckoned to have died between 1939 and 1945 because of the war. Tens of millions more were uprooted by Hitler and Stalin. In the immediate aftermath of Germany's defeat, the continent was scarred with violent retribution, purges and outbreaks of what in some places—like Greece and Yugoslavia—amounted to civil war. As Judt notes, the war in Europe did not really end in 1945 at all. Neither did the persecution of Jews end with the closing of the death camps: well over a thousand Jews were killed in Polish pogroms after the liberation of Poland."—NYTimes

Open To Desire: The Truth About What The Buddha Taught

It is common in both Buddhism and Freudian psychoanalysis to treat desire as if it is the root of all suffering and problems, but psychiatrist Mark Epstein believes this to be a grave misunderstanding. In his controversial defense of desire, he makes clear that it is the key to deepening intimacy with ourselves, each other, and our world.

Darkness In Paris

In May 1940 Germany invaded France and within six weeks had triumphantly seized control of Paris. The Allies' complacency was replaced with a sense of helplessness as they were defeated by a new kind of dynamic warfare; it seemed that the Nazis were unbeatable.

While the British gathered around their radios to hear Churchill make defiant speeches, the French suffered invasion, defeat, occupation, a hundred thousand people killed, and the imposition of a Fascist regime. For many in the West, the fall of France seemed to be the greatest catastrophe suffered by civilisation since the fall of ancient Rome to the barbarians.

Darkness in Paris' tells the inside story of 1940 from Paris and London, brought brilliantly to life in this narrative masterpiece about a time when Western civilisation seemed to hang in the balance.

Tete A Tete The Lives And Loves Of Simone De Beauvoir And Jean Paul Sartre

They are one of the world's legendary couples. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Startre - those passionate, free-thinking Existentialist philosopher-writers - had a committed but notoriously open union that generated no end of controversy. Through original interviews and access to new primary sources, Hazel Rowley portrays them up close: we witness Beauvoir and Sartre with their circle, holding court in Paris caf s. We learn the details of their infamous romantic entanglements with the young Olga Kosakiewicz and others; of their efforts to protest the wars in Algeria and Vietnam; and of Beauvoir's tempestuous love affair with Nelson Algren. We hear the anguished discussions that would lead to Sartre's refusal of the Nobel Prize and listen in on the couple as they comment on each other's great works. The impact of their writings on modern thought can hardly be overestimated, but Beauvoir and Sartre are remembered just as much for the lives they led. Theirs is a great story - and a great story is precisely what Beauvoir and Sartre most wanted their lives to be.

Youth

From the acclaimed South African writer, this autobiographical account explores Coetzee's youth as a boy who longs only to escape his homeland. When he finally does get away, however, and is living in London as a lonely computer programmer--rather than the poet he hoped to be--he confronts his disillusion by giving up writing. Coetzee's account of his life in the 1960s expands to include not only his own experiences but the events of the world around him, including the Vietnam War and the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre.

Europe East And West

Collected here for the first time are some of the numerous essays and lectures by Norman Davies, author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed EUROPE, THE ISLES and RISING '44. Spanning over a decade and a half of his remarkably prodigious career, this highly accessible collection addresses many of the issues that continue to dominate the political and cultural climate of Europe today. In EUROPE EAST AND WEST Davies argues for a comprehensive view that challenges Western stereotypes and no longer ignores the history and experience of Eastern Europe. He shows that the conventional exclusion of Central and Eastern Europe has led to serious shortcomings in our understanding of the most crucial episodes of European history, namely the Second World War. The essays collected in this volume confront prevalent distortions and prejudices; taken together, they also form a meditation on the art of history writing itself. From the classical origins of the idea of Europe to the division between East and West during the Cold War; from the Jewish and Islamic strands in European history to the expansion of Europe to other continents; from the misunderstood Allied victory in 1945 to Britain's place in Europe; from reflections on the use and abuse of history to personal recollections on learning languages - this companion volume to the bestselling Europe looks at European history from a variety of unusual and entertaining angles in an equally erudite and accessible way.

Desert War

North Africa was one of the greatest theaters of the Second World War. Alan Moorehead's bestselling account of the Allied/Axis desert conflict is an epic story of electrifying details and keen historical insights. The Desert War interweaves vivid snapshots of war with eyewitness portraits of the famous adversaries—Generals Rommel, Montgomery, Eisenhower, and Patton--all set against the backdrop of the ancient desert and Mediterranean shores. The result is a masterpiece of war reportage. This edition includes a new Introduction by renowned military historian John Keegan.

Malcontents The Best Bitter Cynical Satirical Writing In Theworld

Popular satirist Joe Queenan proves that cynicism in literature flourished long before Generation X in this acerbic compendium of the best classic satirical writing from the last several centuries, as well as from Ancient Greece.

The collection encompasses essays, short stories, plays, and novels, with Queenan's insightful biographies of each featured writer. Selections include engaging, readable works by early wits ranging from Oscar Wilde to Mark Twain, and excerpts from The Prince by Machiavelli; "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift; "Justine" by the Marquis de Sade; as well as works by Rabelais, Moliere, Ben Johnson, Aristophanes, George Bernard Shaw, Jane Austen, and other wits.

Max Perutz And The Secret Of Life

This is the story of the father of molecular biology whose famous research team uncovered the structure of DNA. Georgina Ferry’s story brims with life, has the zest of an adventure novel and is full of fascinating characters.

Social History Of Tea

In this book Jane Pettigrew will redress the balance, using the research that she has carried out over the years, and drawing on the incomparable resource of the National Trust's collections and archives. She will delve into many subject areas — tea gowns, tea dances and social etiquette, for instance — to satisfy an enthusiastic international audience, waiting, thirsty, for more knowledge.

Unknown American Revolution

In 1775, war broke out between the British and the American colonists. By 1776, the colonists had declared themselves independent and in 1783, following a long and bloody war, Britain was forced to recognize the independence of the United States. Writing with the benefit of hindsight in 1818, John Adams, one of the central figures in the Revolution, recalled that Americans were committed to independence in their hearts long before the outbreak of hostilities. This remarkable new book not only tells the story of the Revolutionary war - the longest and most disruptive upheaval in American history - but also explores the truth of Adams's claim. The Founding Fathers - those men who signed the Declaration of Independence against Britain - may have led the charge, but the energy to raise a revolt emerged from all classes and races of American society. The Unknown American Revolution plunges us into the swirl of ideology, grievance, outrage and hope that animated the Revolutionary decades. It tells of the efforts of a wide variety of men and women who stepped forward amidst a discouraging, debilitating, but ultimately successful war to inscribe on the clean slate their ideas for the kind of America they hoped would emerge from the blood-soaked eight-year conflict. Millennialist preachers and enslaved Africans, frontier mystics and dockside tars, disgruntled women and aggrieved Indians - all had their own fierce vision of what an independent America could and should be. According to Nash, the American Revolution was truly a people's revolution, a civil war at home as well as an armed insurrection against British colonial control. The goal was to set a new course for the new country, one free of entrenched class hostilities, religious bigotry and racism. The people so vividly portrayed in this book did not all agree or succeed, but during the exhilarating and messy years of the country's birth, they laid down ideas that have become a crucial and fundamental part of America's inheritance.