Д. Р. Торп0.0 Packed with new revelations about Macmillan's private life as well as key events including the Tolstoy controversy, the Suez Crisis, You've Never Had It So Good, the Winds of Change, and the Profumo Scandal
The culmination of 35 years of research by a respected historian, this magisterial biography provides an unforgettable portrait of a turbulent age. Great-grandson of a crofter and son-in-law of a Duke, Harold Macmillan (18941986) was complex as a person and influential as a politician. Marked by terrible experiences in the trenches in World War I and by his work as an MP during the Depression, he was a Tory rebelan outspoken backbencher, opposing the economic policies of the 1930s and the appeasement policies of his own government. Churchill gave him responsibility during World War II with executive command as "Viceroy of the Mediterrranean." After the war, in opposition, Macmillan overhauled the Conservatives on progressive and radical lines; after 1951, in government, he served as Minister of Housing, Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He became Prime Minister after the Suez Crisis, and between 1957 and 1963 presided over Great Britain's transition from the age of austerity to that of affluence. He also proved himself one of the great publishers of his generation.
Розмари Хилл0.0 Pugin was one of Britain’s greatest architects and his short career one of the most dramatic in architectural history. Born in 1812, the son of the soi-disant Comte de Pugin, at 15 Pugin was working for King George IV at Windsor Castle. By the time he was 21 he had been shipwrecked, bankrupted and widowed. Nineteen years later he died, insane and disillusioned, having changed the face and the mind of British architecture. Pugin’s bohemian early career as an antique dealer and scenery designer at Covent Garden came to a sudden end with a series of devastating bereavements, including the loss of his first wife in childbirth. In the aftermath he formed a vision of Gothic architecture that was both romantic and deeply religious. He became a Catholic and in 1836 published Contrasts, the first architectural manifesto. It called on the 19th century to reform its cities if it wanted to save its soul. Once launched, Pugin’s career was torrential. Before he was 30 he had designed 22 churches, three cathedrals, half a dozen extraordinary houses and a Cistercian monastery. For eight years he worked with Charles Barry on the Palace of Westminster creating its sumptuous interiors, the House of Lords and the clock ‘Big Ben’ that became one of Britain’s most famous landmarks. He was the first architect-designer to cater for the middle-classes, producing everything from plant pots to wallpaper and early flat-pack furniture. God’s Architect is the first full modern biography of this extraordinary figure. It draws on thousands of unpublished letters and drawings to recreate his life and work as architect, propagandist and romantic artist as well as the turbulent story of his three marriages, the bitterness of his last years and his sudden death at 40. It is the debut of a remarkable historian and biographer.
Мэгги Фергюссон0.0 George Mackay Brown was one of Scotland’s most prolific and acclaimed writers, but he was also a handful of paradoxes. He holds a wide international reputation despite rarely leaving his native Orkney. He never married, but some of his most poignant letters and poems were written to Stella Cartwright, “the Muse of Rose Street.” Maggie Fergusson is the only biographer to whom the reluctant Brown gave his blessing, and her brilliant account reveals that this artist’s life was not only fascinating but vivid, courageous, and surprising
Джон Гай4.2 Жизнь Марии Стюарт была исполнена беспрецедентного драматизма и противоречий. Став королевой Шотландии в возрасте девяти месяцев, а королевой Франции — в шестнадцать лет, она взошла на престол, который принадлежал ей по праву рождения, в восемнадцать. Как глава одной из самых неспокойных стран Европы, раздираемой религиозным конфликтом и борьбой за власть, Мария вела за собой армии к победе и к поражению; она пережила убийство второго мужа и вышла замуж за того, кого называли его убийцей. В двадцать пять лет она оказалась в плену у другой королевы — Елизаветы Тюдор, подписавшей Марии после девятнадцатилетнего заточения смертный приговор. Прославленный историк и биограф Джон Гай изучает лабиринты заговоров, которые плели шотландские лорды, стремясь захватить власть, и усилия, которые прикладывали министры Елизаветы, чтобы исключить Марию из числа законных наследников английского престола. Он предлагает абсолютно новые интерпретации известной истории, на протяжении многих веков вдохновлявшей писателей, поэтов, композиторов, художников и режиссеров. Книга легла в основу снятого в 2018 году в Великобритании фильма с Сиршей Ронан в роли Марии и Марго Робби в роли Елизаветы.
«Я решил написать новую биографию Марии. Мне хотелось добраться до самой сути: увидеть женщину, выбор которой был понятным, а решения логичными, а не собрание стереотипов или удобных и плохо согласующихся друг с другом мифов. Я хотел рассказать историю Марии Стюарт, по возможности предоставив слово ей самой, и одновременно показать, почему свидетельства других людей о тех же событиях разительно отличаются от ее точки зрения». (Джон Гай)
Бренда Мэддокс5.0 Wilkins, Francis Crick, and James Watson received the Nobel Prize, but it was Rosalind Franklin's data and photographs of DNA that led to their discovery.
Brenda Maddox tells a powerful story of a remarkably single-minded, forthright, and tempestuous young woman who, at the age of fifteen, decided she was going to be a scientist, but who was airbrushed out of the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century.
Энтони Сэмпсон0.0 The author has known Mandela since the 1950s, and has been given complete access to all his personal papers, to Mandela himself, and to his friends and political associates, to write the full story of Mandela's life. In addition to covering his years before, during and after his incarceration, the author assesses Mandela's impact as President on South Africa and the world. He also reveals many features of the apartheid system that have hitherto been hidden, and describes the changing attitudes of big business to the ANC and to Mandela himself. The result is an authoritative biography of one of the greatest men of the 20th century.
Ричард Холмс0.0 Richard Holmes's Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, the long-awaited second volume, chronicles the last thirty years of his career (1804-1834), a period of domestic and professional turmoil. His marriage foundered, his opium addiction increased, he quarreled bitterly with Wordsworth, and his son, Hartley (a gifted poet himself), became an alcoholic. But after a desperate time of transition, Coleridge reemerged as a new kind of philosophical and meditative author, a great and daring poet, and a lecturer of genius.
Holmes traces the development of Coleridge into a legend among the younger generation of Romantic writers--the "hooded eagle amongst blinking owls"--and the influence he had on Hazlitt, De Quincey, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Walter Scott, Carlyle, and J. S. Mill, among others. And he rediscovers Coleridge's power as a conversationalist and a ceaseless generator of ideas. As Charles Lamb noted, "his face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged."
Although Coleridge's later life was not a happy one, it is continually fascinating. As Holmes brings it vividly to life in these pages, we feel his hopeless heartaches, his moments of elation, his electrifying creativity and boundless energy, his unfailing ability to rescue himself from the darkest abyss. The result is a brilliantly animated, superbly detailed, wondrously provocative portrait of an extraordinary artist and an even more extraordinary human being.
Jim Ring0.0 This biography of Erskine Childers shows that he led a life as enigmatic and adventurous as his classic novel, The Riddle of the Sands. It tells how his original patriotism changed due to his views of how Irish independence was handled pre-World War I and culminated in his joining the IRA.
Селина Ширли Гастингс0.0 One of the foremost writers of our time, Evelyn Waugh was also one of its most extraordinary eccentrics, with a life full of comedy and conflict. Selina Hastings, who was granted unrestricted access to his personal papers by Waugh's family, has uncovered a wealth of new material in her eight years of research for this volume. Letters, diaries, and family photographs shed new light on Waugh's childhood, his affairs at Oxford, his ill-fated first marriage and subsequent romantic adventures, his World War II military service, and his enduring but thorny friendships with such notable figures as Diana Cooper, Ann Fleming, and Nancy Mitford. Perceptive, fascinating, by turns hilarious and tragic, Hastings's portrait gives us Waugh's glittering social life at Oxford, where he was a friend of Harold Acton, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell, and Alastair Graham, the inspiration for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. Waugh then followed a diverse career as schoolmaster, world traveler, war co
Patrick Marnham0.0 Winner of the Marsh Prize for biography and an Edgar Award finalist. "I doubt if there will be a better, or a better written, portrait of Simenon for a long time."--Julian Barnes
Хью Сесил0.0 A biography of two figures at the centre of 20th century English literary life for nearly 50 years. Desmond MacCarthy was famous as drama and literary critic of "New Statesman" and "The Sunday Times" and his friends included Henry James and Bertrand Russell. Hugh Cecil is MacCarthy's grandson.
Дэвид Гилмор0.0 David Gilmour's biography of Giuseppe di Lampedusa unearths the life story of the creator of 'The Leopard', one of the great novels of the 20th century.
Роланд Хантфорд0.0 The acclaimed biographer of Robert Falcon Scott masterfully chronicles the life of one of the last great Edwardian heroes, Ernest Shackleton, from his Anglo-Irish childhood through the race for the South Pole to his last expedition to the North Pole. photos. Maps.
