Drawing on a wealth of unpublished letters and documents and first-ever interviews with Celine's widow, Frederic Vitoux brilliantly weaves together all the available information on Celine into an extraordinary portrait of Celine's temptuous life and times. Photographs.

The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.' Sir Edward Grey, British foreign secretary, 3 August 1914. Drawing on a wealth of material from the Guardian archives 'When the lamps went out' presents a surprising, immediate, sometimes bleakly humorous, sometimes horrifying insight into life during the Great War. We see Boy Scouts patrolling the British coasts, David Lloyd George addressing women war workers, Charlie Chaplin impersonators on the Euston Road and Vesta Tilley at the Ardwick Empire. We see suffragist nurses on the Western Front and Bolsheviks in Glasgow, Pathan soldiers in Flanders and Anglo-Japanese armies in China. Small countries are saved - and aliens persecuted. New technologies - from picture houses to the first reports of gas weapons - are reported upon, as well as movie stars and John Buchan's bestsellers. The bloody battles, defeats, and victories are all here but this book focuses on the women, men and children who lived, loved, defied, perished and survived in the war to end all wars.

From marvellously illustrated pages leaps a rogues’ gallery of characters past and present who have, over the last 400 years, made this bohemian corner of London what it is.

Overzicht van leven en werk van de Franse chemicus en bacterioloog (1822-1895).

The first book to describe both Old Sheffield Plate and Electroplate along with their short lived predecessors mercury plating, cold gilding and close plating. It includes close up photographs of marks, purchasing advice, cleaning and caring.

The diary of the 17th Earl of Derby, once thought to have been lost, provides a detailed and important account of the last months of the First World War as seen through the eyes of the British Ambassador in Paris. Derby was in many ways an unlikely choice as ambassador. He was not a diplomat and could not, on his arrival, speak French. His appointment owed much to Lloyd George’s determination to remove him from his previous post as Secretary of State for War. But, after a somewhat uncertain start, he proved to be a very successful ambassador upon whom successive Foreign Secretaries, Arthur Balfour and Lord Curzon, relied heavily for their appreciation of the situation on the other side of the Channel. Derby took up his appointment at a crucial period of the war when military victory still seemed some way off. He became an assiduous collector of information which he dictated into his diary on a daily basis. Derby’s embassy became renowned for its lavish hospitality. But this was far from being self-indulgence, for he firmly believed that entertaining was the best way to win the confidence of his French associates and therefore to obtain information that would be of use in London. Derby’s diary provides important insights into the state of the war, the often strained relationship between Britain and France and the intrigues of French domestic politics.

Since its inception in World War II, the clinical trial has evolved into a standard procedure in determining therapeutic efficacy in many Western industrial democracies. Its features include a "control" group of patients that do not receive the experimental treatment, the random allocation of patients to either the experimental or control group, and the use of blind assessment so that the researchers do not know which patients are in either group. Even though it has been only within the past generation that the clinical trial has moved to the forefront of medical research, comparative statistics in a therapeutic context has a much longer history. From that history J. Rosser Matthews chooses to discuss three crucial debates: that among clinicians before the Parisian Academy of Medicine in 1837, the debate in the German physiological literature during the 1850s, and, in the early twentieth century, the debate over the bacteriologist's diagnostic technique involving the "opsonic index." Matthews demonstrates that despite the very real differences separating clinician, physiologist, and bacteriologist, they all shared an antipathy toward the methods of the statistician. Since they viewed medical judgment as a form of "tacit knowledge," they downplayed the concerns of the medical statistician who was attempting to make medical inference into something explicit and quantitative. Only when "medical decision-making" moved from the cloistered confines of professional medical expertise into the arena of open political debate could the medical statistician (and the clinical trial) gain the upper hand.

Virginia Woolf's biography of Elizabeth Barrett Brownings spaniel was what she called 'a little escapade', begun to 'ease my brain' in the wake of The Waves (1931).

An epic yet intimate portrait of two theatrical dynasties, which takes us from the Victorian stage to the modern age. Ellen Terry was a natural actress who filled the theatre with a magical radiance. The Times called her the “uncrowned queen of England,” but behind her public success lay a darker story. The child bride of G.F. Watts, she eloped with a friend of Oscar Wilde’s at the age of twenty-one and gave birth to two illegitimate children. But her greatest partnership was on stage with Henry Irving. At the Lyceum Theatre in London, the two of them created a grand Cathedral of the Arts. Their intimately involved lives exceeded in plot the Shakespearean dramas they performed on stage — and indeed were curiously affected by them. They also influenced the life and work of their remarkable children, Ellen’s children in particular. Edy Craig founded a feminist theatre group, The Pioneer Players. Her brother, Edward Gordon Craig, the revolutionary stage designer who collaborated with Stanislavski is revealed by this book to be the forgotten man of modernism. He had thirteen children by eight women. He is, perhaps, the most extraordinary man Michael Holroyd has ever written about.

De la révolution d'octobre 1917 aux derniers événements de 1922, la guerre civile russe a fait des ravages : des millions de morts, épidémies de typhus et de choléra, famine et misère, terreur et déportation des populations. On connaît surtout la lutte des rouges contre les Russes blancs. Mais une troisième force issue du monde rural émergeait. Bandes de pillards ou années de partisans, paysans insurgés, les "verts" se sont battus contre les blancs et les rouges : ils ont refusé la circonscription, la réquisition de récoltes ou se déclaraient pour la liberté du commerce et contre la dictature de la ville, rejetant les "communes", anarchistes, socialistes révolutionnaires ou ultra-nationalistes. Leur histoire est ici revisitée à la lumière de documents russes, souvent inédits en français, traduits par Jean-Jacques Marie. Ces témoignages sont rares. Ils ont disparu ou ont été qualifiés de "bandits" ; Staline les a gommés de l'histoire pour réduire la révolution à un conflit manichéen. L'historiographie, quant à elle, leur réserve une place presque inexistante. Le récit des événements - ponctué de ces textes et de témoignages forts - fait apparaître des acteurs mythiques : Makhno et son armée, le général Wrangel, les révoltés de Cronstadt, le baron fou Ungern ou le chef partisan Kotovski...

John Lehmann (1907-1987) was, for 50 years, at the centre of literary life in England. In this biography, his professional and private lives are brought together and re-evaluated.

The life of Rosamond Lehmann (1901-1990) was as romantic and harrowing as that of any of her fictional heroines. She enjoyed an idyllic childhood in the Thames valley, and she was much pursued while at Cambridge, but an early marriage to Leslie Runciman was wretchedly unhappy. The phenomenal success of her shocking, first novel, Dusty Answer gave her the means to run off with and eventually marry the glamorous maverick, Wogan Philipps. They lived an apparently charmed existence in Oxfordshire, the golden couple at the very heart of Bloomsbury society. But as Rosamond's novels (Invitation to the Waltz, the notorious The Weather in the Streets) became ever more successful, Wogan started on a series of affairs, finally disappearing to the Spanish Civil War, while Rosamond embarked on a tempestuous relationship with Goronwy Rees. When Rees left her she began the most important love affair of her life with the poet, Cecil Day Lewis. Nine years later, he abandoned her for the young actress, Jill Balcon - a betrayal from which Rosamond never recovered. A few years later her daughter, Sally, died at the age of 24, an unendurable loss which led Rosamond into spiritualism in an attempt to find her. The Biography of Rosamond Lehmann conjures up with warmth and wit the intimate world of a woman whose dramatic life, work and relationships criss-crossed the cultural, literary and political landscape of England in the middle of the twentieth century.