Nieuwe producten

The Battleships, an accompaniment to the new four-part Channel 4 series, relates the story of the most awesome war-machines ever built and their pivotal role in global history.

« Fourteenth-century French manuscripts have been characterized as being striking examples of varied fluid styles, expressive of narrative and enhanced by light and delicate modelling. Incidental drolleries often show a direct and tender observation of the natural characteristics of birds, beasts, insects and flowers. In a number of the major manuscripts we find an intriguing new feature : the figures are no longer plainted in full color, as is the rest of the miniature, but are portrayed in pale, semi-lucent monochrome or grisaille. The color "abstraction" of such miniatures makes for a distinct decorative harmony between picture and script which could never exist between black lettering and miniatures painted in full color. François Avril of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris has selected and described the individual folios reproduced from these masterworks. »--Quatrième de couverture.

This masterly account of Leonardo da Vinci and his vision of the world is now widely recognized as the classic treatment of Leonardo's art, science, and thought, giving an unparalleled insight into the broadening and deepening of Leonardo's intellect and vision throughout his artistic career. Kemp, one of the world's leading authorities on Leonardo, takes us on a journey through the whole span of the great man's career, giving a fully integrated picture of his artistic, scientific, and technological achievements. Leonardo's early training in Florence provided a crucial foundation in the 'science of art', particularly perspective and anatomy. His period in the service of the Sforzas of Milan enlarged his outlook to embrace a wide range of natural sciences and mathematics, as he searched for scientific rules governing both man and the universe. It was these rules which provided the basis for his imaginative reconstruction of nature in great works such as the Last Supper, the Mona Lisa, and St John, which reveal his increasingly complex vision of man in the context of nature. And towards the end of his life, Leonardo became fascinated with the mathematics underlying the 'design of nature', behind which lay the ultimate force of the 'prime mover', as manifested with supreme power in his Deluge drawings. Covering all areas of Leonardo's achievement, generously illustrated, and now including a new introductory chapter setting Leonardo's work in its historical context, this fully updated new edition provides an unparalleled insight into the marvellous works of this central figure in western art.

The yoga and classical dance traditions of India have been inextricably entwined for millennia. The exacting hand gestures, postures and movements of Indian classical dance can only be achieved through yogic concentration. Conversely, the esthetics, symmetry, and dynamism of dance enhance the practice of yoga. These two traditions, so complementary and essential to one another, are united and explicated for the first time in A Yoga of Indian Classical Dance.
Twenty-five years ago Roxanne Kamayani Gupta embarked on a journey of dance and yoga, yearning to unlock their mysteries and discover their common origins. As a twenty-year-old student from America she was miraculously and mysteriously absorbed into Indian culture, became a Hindu, and began an odyssey so unusual and unique that the reader will be enchanted by its telling. Choosing the path of the dancer, Roxanne Gupta accomplished what no Western woman had done before: being accepted and trained by Indian masters and then performing in the Indian classical traditions--from the palaces of maharajas to the arts festivals of Europe and America--while at the same time achieving a doctorate in the anthropology of religion and being initiated into a number of yogic traditions. Having mastered the classical form of Kuchipudi dance and studied with teachers of the hatha and kriya yoga traditions, she brings together these two great streams of consciousness and practice.

In this tantric approach to yoga and dance, expressed through the body and through a yoga of emotions, we see the traditions embodied in a manner that embraces the totality of the human experience. The result is the dance of the yogini, the sacred feminine initiatress who dances with one foot in nature and the other in the realm of the gods. With extensive photographs of innovative yoga routines, Roxanne Kamayani Gupta distills her experience into techniques for yogic study certain to assist students of all levels to achieve a dynamic, beautiful, and graceful practice.

This book presents a powerful view of the history of dance, contrasting its role in Western civilization with its significance in other cultures. Highwater--a renowned critic, author, and lecturer on art, theater, music, and dance--links the history of dance to cultural forces as diverse as Karl Marx and Elvis Presley. Beginning with the original, ritualistic, and primal forms of dance, he traces its decline into empty ceremonial forms while all along insisting that dance is a fundamental life impulse made visible in motion--a spontaneous transformation of experience into metaphoric meaning. Considering the historical and creative context from which dance emerged, Highwater goes on to point out the specific contributions and cultural influences of such 20th-century dance giants as Isadora Duncan, Twyla Tharp, Robert Wilson, George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Alwin Nikolais, Erick Hawkins, Jose Limon, Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk, and Garth Fagan. Also examined are many newer artists, such as Bebe Miller and the Urban Bush Women.

.The Middle Ages represented a flowering of spirituality and culture which, in Europe, has not been equalled since. This book examines some of the great writers and thinkers of the period and the events in which they took part.

No other woman in world history has been of such compulsive interest as Elizabeth Tudor. While the rest of the 16th-century Europe was subject to the bloodshed of religious war, Tudor peace brought England its great flowering of the arts. Central to that flowering was the enigmatic legend of the Queen herself, a myth deliberately created and sustained over four decades by public spectacle and courtly chivalry, by private sonnet and official oration.

An exhilarating new book from the author of the worldwide bestseller The Tulip.

The Naming of Names traces the search for order in the natural world, a search that for hundreds of years occupied some of the most brilliant minds in Europe.

Redefining man's relationship with nature was a major pursuit during the Renaissance. But in a world full of poisons, there was also an urgent practical need to name and recognize different plants, because most medicines were made from plant extracts.

Anna Pavord takes us on a thrilling adventure into botanical history, traveling from Athens in the third century BC, through Constantinople, Venice, the medical school at Salerno to the universities of Pisa and Padua. The journey, traced here for the first time, involves the culture of Islam, the first expeditions to the Indies and the first settlers in the New World.

In Athens, Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus was the first man ever to write a book about plants. How can we name, sort, and order them? He asked. The debate continues still, two thousand years later. Sumptuously illustrated in full colour, The Naming of Names gives a compelling insight into a world full of intrigue and intensely competitive egos.

The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces, and villas, often covering vast ceilings like those at the Wurzburg Residenz in Germany and the Royal Palace in Madrid with frescoes that are among the glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around him - but though his contemporaries appreciated and admired him, they failed to understand him. Few have even attempted to tackle Tiepolo's series of thirty-three bizarre and haunting etchings, the Capricci and the Scherzi, but Roberto Calasso rises to the challenge, interpreting these etchings as chapters in a dark narrative that contains the secret of Tiepolo's art. Blooming ephebes, female satyrs, Oriental sages, owls, snakes: we will find them all, including Punchinello and Death, within the pages of this book, along with Venus, Time, Moses, numerous angels, Cleopatra and Beatrice of Burgundy - a motley, gypsyish company always on the go. Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo in the history of painting. Rather, he represented a particular way of meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a fluid, seemingly effortless style, Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura, the art of not seeming artful.

All the poems of a great 20th-century poet

From the astonishing debut Hawk in the Rain (1957) to Birthday Letters (1998), Ted Hughes was one of postwar literature's truly prodigious poets. This remarkable volume gathers all of his work, from his earliest poems (published only in journals) through the ground-breaking volumes Crow (1970), Gaudete(1977), and Tales from Ovid (1997). It includes poems Hughes composed for fine-press printers, poems he wrote as England's Poet Laureate, and those children's poems that he meant for adults as well. This omnium-gatherum of Hughes's work is animated throughout by a voice that, as Seamus Heaney remarked, was simply "longer and deeper and rougher" than those of his contemporaries.

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER, January 2022
A TIMES HISTORICAL FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR
SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR
A BBC HISTORY MAG BOOK OF THE YEAR
A DAILY EXPRESS BOOK OF THE YEAR

Soaked in mist and old magic, Storyland is a new illustrated mythology of Britain, set in its wildest landscapes.

It begins between the Creation and Noah's Flood, follows the footsteps of the earliest generation of giants from an age when the children of Cain and the progeny of fallen angels walked the earth, to the founding of Britain, England, Wales and Scotland, the birth of Christ, the wars between Britons, Saxons and Vikings, and closes with the arrival of the Normans.

These are retellings of medieval tales of legend, landscape and the yearning to belong, inhabited with characters now half-remembered: Brutus, Albina, Scota, Arthur and Bladud among them. Told with narrative flair, embellished in stunning artworks and glossed with a rich and erudite commentary. We visit beautiful, sacred places that include prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge and Wayland's Smithy, spanning the length of Britain from the archipelago of Orkney to as far south as Cornwall in a vivid, beautiful tale of our land steeped in myth.

In Storyland, Jeffs reimagines these myths of homeland, exile and migration, kinship, loyalty, betrayal, love and loss in a landscape brimming with wonder.

PRAISE FOR STORYLAND
'Expressive, bold and quite beautiful' The Lady
'[a] delight of a book' Antonia Senior, The Times
'ravishingly lovely' The Times Ireland
'[a] lively retelling of British myths' Apollo Magazine

The extraordinary new novel from the acclaimed author of "Bad Behavior" and "Two Girls, Fat and Thin, " "Veronica" is about flesh and spirit, vanity, mortality, and mortal affection. Set mostly in Paris and Manhattan in the desperately glittering 1980s, it has the timeless depth and moral power of a fairy tale.
As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica--an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years." Improbably, the two women become friends. Their friendship will survive not only Alison's reentry into the seductive nocturnal realm of fashion, but also Veronica's terrible descent into the then-uncharted realm of AIDS. The memory of their friendship will continue to haunt Alison years later, when she, too, is aging and ill and is questioning the meaning of what she experienced and who she became during that time.
Masterfully layering time and space, thought and sensation, Mary Gaitskill dazzles the reader with psychological insight and a mystical sense of the soul's hurtling passage through the world. A novel unlike any other, "Veronica" is a tour de force about the fragility and mystery of human relationships, the failure of love, and love's abiding power. It shines on every page with depth of feeling and formal beauty.

The Taiping rebellion in mid-nineteenth century China, led by Hong Xiuquan, was one of the strangest and most violent events in human history, costing at least twenty million lives. From his capital in Nanjing, Hong ruled over his 'Heavenly Kingdom' for eleven years, establishing absolute power over a vast area of northern China. Historian Spence recalls some of the historical epics of the nineteenth century here, adding insight into the minds of the participants, Hong himself in particular, in a book that is both intimately detailed and epic in scope--From publisher description.

Best known for his provocative take on cultural issues in The Intellectuals and the Masses and What Good Are the Arts?, John Carey describes in this warm and funny memoir the events that formed him - an escape from the London blitz to an idyllic rural village, army service in Egypt, an open scholarship to Oxford and an academic career that saw him elected, age 40, to Oxford's oldest English Literature professorship.

He frankly portrays the snobberies and rituals of 1950s Oxford, but also his inspiring meetings with writers and poets - Auden, Graves, Larkin, Heaney - and his forty-year stint as a lead book-reviewer for the Sunday Times.

This is a book about the joys of reading - in effect, an informal introduction to the great works of English literature. But it is also about war and family, and how an unexpected background can give you the insight and the courage to say the unexpected thing.

"Rape, Ravage and Rant are the German watchwords in this war. Right, Revenge & Retrenchment shall be ours." Alexander Scrimgeour, 17th September 1914.When nineteen year old Alexander Scrimgeour lost his life at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, he had already left a legacy - complete diaries spanning the previous six years, chronicling first his life as the son of a wealthy stock broker, then his time as a young sea cadet and finally as a Sub-Lieutenant in His Majesty's Navy. Like all good midshipmen were required to do, Scrimgeour took great pride in writing his journals and was careful to recount every event with marked sincerity. Appalled by some of the actions of the British Admiralty and the Germans alike, Scrimgeour risked court-martial to record some of the more notorious incidents during World War I, and what really happened...His candid way of writing coupled with an articulate and imaginative turn of phrase has left us with first hand evidence shedding light on some extraordinary moments of the Great War. Among his revelations, Scrimgeour reveals the real reason behind the sinking of the HMS Hawke, the events preceding the capture of the infamous Baron Von Wedel - head of the German Spy Bureau and Privy Councilor to the Kaiser and what he learnt from dining with his Naval Commanders as the ship's interpreter. A great deal of attention is devoted to his personal life, including his numerous love affairs, his relationship with his family and his anguish at the loss of close friends killed during the war.Up until now, the few existing war diaries have generally been written by those who fought in the trenches. To have such a detailed and well preserved account of the Great War, written so eloquently from a naval standpoint is nothing less than a marvel.With thousands of British sailors losing their lives at sea during World War I, it is important to draw on all remaining first hand evidence so that we remember, and never forget the heroic actions of our ancestors during one of our country's darkest episodes...Through the diaries of Alexander Scrimgeour, we can do just that.

The report that Brodeck is writing into the lynching of an artist, an outsider, a flamboyant Other figure who has deeply disturbed the fragile equilibrium of the town he briefly settled in, becomes a report into the catastrophe of his own life. Brodeck, it seems, himself also an outsider, has lately returned from a concentration camp. In the course of his investigation into the death of the artist, he uncovers the truth about his distant origins, about his having been rounded up when the Germans came to the town, and all that happened to his family when he was gone. This immensely powerful chronicle of a community's fear and loathing of what is strange, what is from the outside, has been hailed as one of the outstanding European novels of the last decade.

engengThe 18th-century landscape garden is the only art form to have originated wholly in Britain. This book tells the extraordinary story of the gang of eccentrics who created these gardens, a small group of politicians and poets, farmers and businessmen, and others whose obsession with their gardens changed the course of artistic history.

Raffaello, Bruegel, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, Tiziano, El Greco, Veronese e tutti i grandi artisti che hanno fatto la storia dell'arte e sono vissuti in questo secolo.

Eric Gill was the greatest English artist-craftsman of the twentieth century: a typographer and lettercutter of genius and a master in the art of sculpture and wood-engraving. He was a devoted family man and key figure in three Catholic art and craft communities: yet he also believed in complete sexual freedom. In her controversial, landmark biography, originally published in 1989, biographer Fiona MacCarthy delves into the complex, dark, and contradictory sides of the man and the artist for the first time and the result is his definitive portrait.

This text contains the first three volumes of Christopher Logues recomposition of Homers Iliad - Kings, The Husbands and War Music.

"A fictional account of a walking tour through England's East Anglia, Sebald's home for more than twenty years, The Rings of Saturn explores Britain's pastoral and imperial past. Its ten strange and beautiful chapters, with their curious archive of photographs, consider dreams and reality. As the narrator walks, a company of ghosts keeps him company - Thomas Browne, Swinburne, Chateaubriand, Joseph Conrad, Borges - conductors between the past and present. The narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabiting tumble-down mansions, and hears of the furious coastal battles of two world wars. He tells of far-off China and the introduction of the silk industry to Norwich. He walks to the now forsaken harbor where Conrad first set foot on English soil and visits the site of the once-great city of Dunwich, now sunk in the sea, where schools of herring swim. As the narrator catalogs the transmigration of whole worlds, the reader is mesmerized by change and oblivion, survival and memories. Blending fiction and history, Sebald's art is as strange and beautiful as the rings of Saturn, created from fragments of shattered moons." -- Publisher's description.

This classic study emphasizes the admirals personality and character and draws on a wealth of primary sources, including Nelsons letters.

Such Rare Citings is the first full-length account of the British prose poem, its history, and status as a genre. Prose poetry is not a recognized literary form in England, where it remains largely unknown. This book not only aims to place British prose poetry within the larger literary framework, but also contributes to the discussion of what constitutes the genre, while posing the question: is there a discernible "British style"? The author examines the structure and style of prose poems together with texts that move toward or away from the form in order to locate and explain the genre's defining characteristics. Extending from the Romantic period to the twentieth century, Such Rare Citings offers analyses of prose poems by writers from Coleridge to Samuel Beckett. It uncovers the historical development of the genre in Britain, occasionally thwarted by writers themselves, and calls for inclusion in theoretical discussion and international anthologies.

Born in 1728, French aristocrat Charles d'Eon de Beaumont had served his country as a diplomat, soldier, and spy for fifteen years when rumors that he was a woman began to circulate in the courts of Europe. D'Eon denied nothing and was finally compelled by Louis XVI to give up male attire and live as a woman, something d'Eon did without complaint for the next three decades. Although celebrated as one of the century's most remarkable women, d'Eon was revealed, after his death in 1810, to have been unambiguously male. Gary Kates's acclaimed biography of d'Eon recreates eighteenth-century European society in brilliant detail and offers a compelling portrait of an individual who challenged its conventions about gender and identity.