Andere talen

The ruins of the Forum in Rome are one of the best known wonders of antiquity and a highpoint of the tourist route round the Eternal City; but the Forum remains for many visitors a baffling and unwelcoming place. In this book, David Watkins discusses this topic.

I was living in a fairy story - the kind with sinister overtones and not always a happy ending - in which a young man loves a beautiful maiden who returns his love but is always disappearing into some unknown and mysterious world, about which she will reveal nothing," So writes John Bayley about his wife, Iris Murdoch, considered by many to be one of the greatest living writers in the English-speaking world. In dreamlike passages, he recalls both his youthful love for an entrancing philosopher who stole his heart at Oxford's St. Antony's Dance in 1954, as well as their marriage, a union of two great minds, which resulted two years later.

'Away' is the story of young Lillian Leyb. Her family murdered in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way. In 1920s New York she is taken under the wing of Mr Reuben Burstein, the famous Impresario and his matinee-idol son. But then she finds out that her daughter, Sophie, may still be alive.

Everymans Library no. 25

A witty and entertaining guide to the use of Latin expressions for one's own advantage in the modern world.

See America with 50 of Our Finest, Funniest, and Foremost Writers Anthony Bourdain chases the fumigation truck in Bergen County, New Jersey. Dave Eggers tells it straight: Illinois is Number 1. Louise Erdrich loses her bikini top in North Dakota. Jonathan Franzen gets waylaid by New York's publicist...and personal attorney...and historian...and geologist. John Hodgman explains why there is no such thing as a "Massachusettsean". Edward P. Jones makes the case: D.C. should be a state! Jhumpa Lahiri declares her reckless love for the Rhode Island coast. Rick Moody explores the dark heart of Connecticut's Merritt Parkway, exit by exit. Ann Patchett makes a pilgrimage to the Civil War site at Shiloh, Tennessee. William T. Vollmann visits a San Francisco S&M club and Many More!

One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly--thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.

Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them.

When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another.

Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It is a brilliant and tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and responsibility that bind us together.

A new narrative history of the Viking Age, interwoven with exploration of the physical remains and landscapes that the Vikings fashioned and walked: their rune-stones and ship burials, settlements and battlefields.

"This revised Norton Critical Edition, like its predecessor, is the only edition available that includes both the 1890 Lippincott's and the 1891 book version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Under the editorial guidance of Wilde scholar Michael Patrick Gillespie, students have the opportunity to read comparatively both published versions of this controversial novel." ""Backgrounds" and "Reviews and Reactions" allow readers to gauge The Picture of Dorian Gray's sensational reception when the 1890 version appeared and to consider the heated public debate over art and morality that followed its publication. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde offer a sense of the diverse opinions on these topics. Eight contemporary reviews and comments on the novel are reprinted, among them four opinions from the St. James's Gazette immediately after publication in 1890, each followed by Oscar Wilde's vehement reply." ""Criticism" includes seven new essays on the novel that reflect key changes in interpretive theory in recent years and reveal the broad range of perspectives associated with Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Simon Joyce, Donald L. Lawler, Sheldon W. Liebman, Maureen O'Connor, Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, John Paul Riquelme, and Michael Patrick Gillespie provide their varied assessments. A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are also included."--BOOK JACKET.

Detailed essays, extensive photos, and informative sidebars describe life in ancient Aztec civilization, showing the results of significant archaeological digs; also includes a time line and a bibliography.

The story of Celie, a poor black woman from the south, whose friendship with two women helps her overcome the brutality of her father and husbandSteven Spielberg, proving he's one of the few modern filmmakers who has the visual fluency to be capable of making a great silent film, took a melodramatic, D.W. Griffith-inspired approach to filming Alice Walker's novel. His tactics made the film controversial, but also a popular hit. You can argue with the appropriateness of Spielberg's decision, but his astonishing facility with images is undeniable--from the exhilarating and eye-popping opening shots of children playing in paradisiacal purple fields to the way he conveys the brutality of a rape by showing hanging leather belts banging against the head of the shaking bed. In a way it's a shame that Whoopi Goldberg, a stage monologist who made her screen debut in this movie, went on to become so famous, because it was, in part, her unfamiliarity that made her understated performance as Celie so effective. (This may be the first and last time that the adjective understated can be applied to Goldberg.) Nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including best picture and actress (supporting players Oprah Winfrey and Margaret Avery were also nominated), it was quite a scandal--and a crushing blow to Spielberg--when it won none.

In the picturesque Tuscan hill town of Scandicci, the body of a girl is discovered. Scantily dressed, she is lying by the edge of the woods. The local police investigate the case - but after a week, they still haven't even identified her, let alone got to the bottom of how she died.

Frustrated by the lack of progress, Chief Superintendent Michele Ferrara, head of Florence's elite Squadra Mobile, decides to step in. Because toxins were discovered in the girl's body, many assumed that she died of a self-inflicted drugs overdose. But Ferrara quickly realises that the truth is darker than that: he believes that the girl was murdered.

And when he delves deeper, there are many aspects to the case that convince Ferrara that the girl's death is part of a sinister conspiracy - a conspiracy that has its roots in the very foundations of Tuscan society...

Originally published in Italian as La Loggia Degli Innocenti.

Cafe-owner Ellie Parrish Duveen finds herself falling for ex-New York cop Dan Cassidy. But unknown to them, Ellie is being stalked by her psychopathic half-brother, who wants to kill her and claim what he considers to be his rightful inheritance. Can Dan save her before it is too late?

Lara Lewis's marriage is fizzling. Her surgeon husband is far too busy for her - too busy even to go on their long-planned second honeymoon to France and Lara suspects that he's backed out of it because he's found another woman to replace her. Then she meets Dan Holland, earthy, unsophisticated, California-handsome and a good guy, and takes him on the second honeymoon that was meant to have saved her marriage. Except that Dan doesn't know this.

What follows is a madcap, romantic adventure that begins with missed connections and lost luggage, then fights and making up, losing each other - and finding love. Trouble comes when the lover finds out he is the stand-in for her husband on the second honeymoon - and then her husband shows up in Paris and wants her back.

Torn between struggling to live up to the expectations of being a Modern Woman and ridding herself of the effect of a repressed upbringing, Izzy Jordan would be the first to admit that it's time to take stock of her life. She's thirty-one, with a teaching career on the skids - not surprising, really, given that she harbours a strong desire to lock her pupils in the art room cupboard and throw away the key. She also has a manipulative mother and an ex-boyfriend whose parting shot was to tell her she was boring in bed!

So when she's invited to spend the summer on Corfu and is offered the chance of a no-strings holiday romance with the irresistible Theo, what should she do? Go for it, or listen to the voice of Modern Woman and tell him to sling his hook? Just as she thinks she's made up her mind, along comes Mark, whose turbulent past sets in motion a series of dramatic events...

Ellen has been living on her own in a picturesque if damp cottage in Cheshire since her husband abandoned her to go and live with another woman in Provence. Having married once for love, she is now determined that the second time around it will be for money. Close at hand is Duncan, her not unattractive, and enticingly single, divorce lawyer...

But then two new people enter her life: Jo-Jo, a homeless girl several months pregnant, and Matthew, an artist who paints murals in country houses and who, on first meeting Ellen, openly criticises her for being mercenary and devious. But, as hostility gives way to friendship, Ellen realises that she has wavered off course from her original plan and has to remind herself very strongly indeed that Duncan is the man for her...

On the forty-fifth floor of the Nakamoto Tower in downtown L. A. a grand opening celebration is in full swing at the new American headquarters of the immense Japanese conglomerate. On the forty-sixth floor, in an empty conference room, the dead body of a beautiful woman is discovered. The investigation immediately becomes a thrilling chase through a twisting maze of industrial intrigue, a no-holds barred conflict in which control of a vital American technology is the fiercely coveted prize - and the Japanese saying 'business is war' takes on a terrifying reality.

Rising Sun is a powerful, compulsive thriller from a master of the genre.

A brutal power struggle in the cut-throat computer industry; a shattering psychological game of cat and mouse; an accusation of sexual harassment that threatens to derail a brilliant career . . . this is the electrifying core of Crichton's new novel, his first since Rising Sun. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

WINNER OF THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2019
WINNER OF THE STANFORD DOLMAN TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2020
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2020

'You'd be crazy not to read this book' The Sunday Times

A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century

The highly anticipated new book from the internationally bestselling, prize-winning author of Landmarks, The Lost Words and The Old Ways

Discover the hidden worlds beneath our feet...

In Underland, Robert Macfarlane takes us on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland's glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves, this is a deep-time voyage into the planet's past and future.

Global in its geography, gripping in its voice and haunting in its implications, Underland is a work of huge range and power, and a remarkable new chapter in Macfarlane's long-term exploration of landscape and the human heart.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2020

'Underland is a magnificent feat of writing, travelling and thinking that feels genuinely frontier pushing, unsettling and exploratory' Evening Standard

'Marvellous... Neverending curiosity, generosity of spirit, erudition, bravery and clarity... This is a book well worth reading' The Times

'Extraordinary... at once learned and readable, thrilling and beautifully written' Observer

One blustery night in 1928, a whale washes up on the shores of the English Channel. By law, it belongs to the King, but twelve-year-old orphan Cristabel Seagrave has other plans. She and the rest of the household, her sister, Flossie, her brother, Digby, long-awaited heir to Chilcombe manor, Maudie Kitcat, kitchen maid. Taras, visiting artist, build a theatre from the beast’s skeletal rib cage. Within the Whalebone Theatre, Cristabel can escape her feckless stepparents and brisk governesses, and her imagination comes to life. As Cristabel grows into a headstrong young woman, World War II rears its head. She and Digby become British secret agents on separate missions in Nazi-occupied France, a more dangerous kind of playacting, it turns out, and one that threatens to tear the family apart.

The narrator of Optic Nerve is an Argentinian woman whose obsession is art. The story of her life is the story of the paintings, and painters, who matter to her. Her intimate, digressive voice guides us through a gallery of moments that have touched her. In these pages, El Greco visits the Sistine Chapel and is appalled by Michelangelo’s bodies. The mystery of Rothko’s refusal to finish murals for the Seagram Building in New York is blended with the story of a hospital in which a prostitute walks the halls while the narrator’s husband receives chemotherapy. Alfred de Dreux visits Géricault’s workshop; Gustave Courbet’s devilish seascapes incite viewers “to have sex, or to eat an apple”. Picasso organizes a cruel banquet in Rousseau’s honor... All of these fascinating episodes in art history interact with the narrator’s life in Buenos Aires―her family and work, her loves and losses, her infatuations and disappointments. The effect is of a character refracted by environment, composed by the canvases she studies.

The Great Railway Bazaar is Paul Theroux's account of his epic journey by rail through Asia. Filled with evocative names of legendary train routes - the Direct-Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Delhi Mail from Jaipur, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Hikari Super Express to Kyoto and the Trans-Siberian Express - it describes the many places, cultures, sights and sounds he experienced and the fascinating people he met. Here he overhears snippets of chat and occasional monologues, and is drawn into conversation with fellow passengers, from Molesworth, a British theatrical agent, and Sadik, a shabby Turkish tycoon, while avoiding the forceful approaches of pimps and drug dealers. This wonderfully entertaining travelogue pays loving tribute to the romantic joys of railways and train travel.

Simon Snow just wants to relax and savour his last year at the Watford School of Magicks, but no one will let him. His girlfriend broke up with him, his best friend is a pest and his mentor keeps trying to hide him away in the mountains where maybe he'll be safe. Simon can't even enjoy the fact that his room-mate and longtime nemesis is missing, because he can't stop worrying about the evil git. Plus there are ghosts. And vampires. And actual evil things trying to shut Simon down. When you're the most powerful magician the world has ever known, you never get to relax and savour anything. Carry On is a ghost story, a love story, a mystery and a melodrama. It has just as much kissing and talking as you'd expect from a Rainbow Rowell story - but far, far more monsters.

Captain Alatriste is a swordsman for hire in Spain in the 1620s - a time when Court intrigue was high and the decadent young king had dragged the country into a series of disastrous wars. As a hired 'blade', Alatriste becomes involved in many political plots and must live by his wits. He comes face to face with hired assassins, court players, political moles, smugglers, pirates and of course, the infamous Spanish Inquisition... All the stories are told by Inigo Balboa, Alatriste's young page. The cast of characters also includes Quevedo, an irrepressible subversive poet who likes to start fights in the local tavern, the kind-hearted innkeeper and ex-prostitute who shares Alatriste's bed, the elegant Count of Guadalmedina, the beautiful but deadly Angelica de Alquezar, and a whole host of underworld figures.

The two best known of Carlyle's long essays in one volume.