Great art has dreadful manners…
…The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock and proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality.’ In inimitable style, our greatest historian and master storyteller Simon Schama makes an irresistible case for the power of art and its necessary place in our lives, examining art through the prism of the troubling life and works of Italian master painter, and murderer, Caravaggio.
Selected from The Power of Art.
A band of savage thirteen-year-old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'objectivity'. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard this disillusionment as an act of betrayal on his part - and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.
In the Tokyo suburbs four women work the graveyard shift at a factory. Burdened with heavy debts, alienated from husbands and children, they all secretly dream of a way out of their dead-end lives.
A young mother among them finally cracks and strangles her philandering, gambling husband. She confesses her crime to her colleagues and unexpectedly, they agree to help. But then the dismembered body parts are discovered, the police start asking questions and more dangerous enemies begin to close in.
OUT is a psychologically taut and unflinching foray into the darkest recesses of the human soul, an unsettling reminder that the desperate desire for freedom can make the most ordinary person do the unimaginable.
Each morning, the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to one another. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant mathematical equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles – based on her shoe size or her birthday – and the numbers reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her ten-year-old son. With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory.
In the years leading up to the Second World War, four sisters live in dilapidated houses in Osaka and Ashiya, and each navigate their own complex, personal relationship to the fading lustre of the Makioka family name. Rich with breathtaking descriptions of ancient customs and an ever-changing natural world, Junichiro Tanizaki evokes in loving detail a long-lost way of life even as it withers under the harsh glare of modernity.
Beautifully written and full of wonderful descriptions and intriguing tales, In Patagonia is an account of Bruce Chatwin's travels to a remote country in search of a strange beast and his encounters with the people whose fascinating stories delay him on the road.
As dazzling as the decade they dominated, The Beatles almost single-handedly created pop music as we know it. Today, their songs are cited as seminal influences by stars like Oasis and Blur. Eloquently giving voice to their time, The Beatles quite simply changed the world.
Fully updated to include material from The Beatles Live at the BBC and the Anthology series, this acclaimed book goes back to the heart of The Beatles - their records. Drawing on a unique resource of knowledge and experience to 'read' their 241 tracks - chronologically from their first amateur efforts in 1957 to 'Real Love', their final 'reunion' recording in 1995 - Ian MacDonald has created an engrossing classic of popular criticism in which the extraordinary songs of The Beatles remain a central and continually surprising presence.
Rediscover the ultimate comfort read in the classic story of friendship, loyalty and secrets set in the deep south of America in the 1930s.
The day Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison opened the Whistle Stop Cafe, the town took a turn for the better. It was the Depression and that cafe was a home from home for many of us. You could get eggs, grits, bacon, ham, coffee and a smile for 25 cents. Ruth was just the sweetest girl you ever met. And Idgie? She was a character, all right. You never saw anyone so headstrong. But how anybody could have thought she murdered that man is beyond me.
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a mouth-watering tale of love, laughter and mystery. It will lift your spirits and above all it'll remind you of the secret to life: friends.
‘A richly comic, poignant narrative’ Harper Lee
Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and hoping to reconnect with her estranged family. That’s why she is there. Dene is there because he has been collecting stories to honour his uncle’s death, while Edwin is looking for his true father and Opal came to watch her boy Orvil dance.
All of them are connected by bonds they may not yet understand. All of them are here for the celebration that is the Big Oakland Powwow. But Tony Loneman is also there. And Tony has come to the Powow with darker intentions.
‘Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark and everyone sailing under a different sky’
Where do you go if you can’t feel at home in your own family? When the people who made you can’t fathom who you become? In these three tales of quarrelling clans and fraught reunions, Mark Haddon shows family in its frank, unsparing yet frequently absurd light, and, in doing so charts a stormy course into the crucible of the self.
Selected from The Pier Falls, The Red House and A Spot of Bother.
The radical, urgent new novel from the author of The End of Eddy – a personal and powerful story of violence.
I met Reda on Christmas Eve 2012, at around four in the morning. He approached me in the street, and finally I invited him up to my apartment. He told me the story of his childhood and how his father had come to France, having fled Algeria.
We spent the rest of the night together, talking, laughing. At around 6 o'clock, he pulled out a gun and said he was going to kill me. He insulted me, strangled and raped me. The next day, the medical and legal proceedings began.
History of Violence retraces the story of that night, and looks at immigration, class, racism, desire and the effects of trauma in an attempt to understand a history of violence, its origins, its reasons and its causes.
'Superb... Weaves winningly between the present and the Second World War, between Tangier and Paris' Observer
American academic Hannah and runaway Moroccan teenager Tariq have little in common, yet both find themselves haunted by the ghosts of Paris.
Hannah listens to the extraordinary witness of women living under the German Occupation and finds a city bursting with clues, connections and past love affairs, while in the migrant suburbs Tariq is searching for a mother he barely knew. Urgent and deeply moving, Paris Echo asks how much we really need to know in order to live a valuable life.
For sixteen days in the summer of 1936, the world’s attention turned to the German capital as it hosted the Olympic Games.
Seen through the eyes of a cast of characters – Nazi leaders and foreign diplomats, athletes and journalists, nightclub owners and jazz musicians – Berlin 1936 plunges us into the high tension of this unfolding scene.
Alongside the drama in the Olympic Stadium – from the triumph of Jesse Owens to the scandal when an American tourist breaks through the security and manages to kiss Hitler – Oliver Hilmes takes us behind the scenes and into the lives of ordinary Berliners: the woman with a dark secret who steps in front of a train, the transsexual waiting for the Gestapo’s knock on the door, and the Jewish boy hoping that Germany may lose in the sporting arena.
During the sporting events the dictatorship was partially put on hold; here then, is a last glimpse of the vibrant and diverse life in Berlin in the 1920s and 30s that the Nazis aimed to destroy.
LONGLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2018
'Funny, angry, urgent. Ghodsee is going to start a revolution' Daisy Buchanan, author of The Sisterhood
A witty, fiercely intelligent exploration of why capitalism is rigged against women and what we can do about it.
Unregulated capitalism is bad for women. Socialism, if done properly, leads to economic independence, better labour conditions, better work/family balance and, yes, even better sex.
If you like the idea of such outcomes, then come along for an exploration of how we can change women’s lives for the better.
Singer, a thirty-four-year-old recently trained librarian, arrives by train in the small town of Notodden to begin a new and anonymous life. He falls in love with Merete, a ceramicist, and moves in with her and her young daughter. After a few years together, the relationship starts to falter, and as the couple is on the verge of separating a car accident prompts a dramatic change in Singer’s life…
A British agent floats in the waters of the French Riviera, murdered by an unknown hand.
Determined to uncover the truth, James Bond enters a world of fast cars, grand casinos and luxury yachts. But beneath the glamour, he soon encounters a dangerous network of organised crime.
It’s time for Bond to earn his licence to kill. He must find those responsible and unravel their devastating plan – before he becomes their next victim…
The exhilarating prequel to Casino Royale
When Harriet Westaway receives an unexpected letter telling her she’s inherited a substantial bequest from her Cornish grandmother, it seems like the answer to her prayers.
There's just one problem – Hal's real grandparents died more than twenty years ago.
Hal desperately needs the cash and makes a choice that will change her life for ever. She knows that her skills as a seaside fortune teller could help her con her way to getting the money.
But once Hal embarks on her deception, there is no going back. She must keep going or risk losing everything, even her life…
Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life: when she was eleven and her mother disappeared, being proposed to at twenty-one, the accident that would make her a widow at forty-one. At each of these moments, Willa ended up on a path laid out for her by others.
So when she receives a phone call telling her that her son’s ex-girlfriend has been shot and needs her help, she drops everything and flies across the country. The spur-of-the moment decision to look after this woman – and her nine-year-old daughter, and her dog – will lead Willa into uncharted territory. Surrounded by new and surprising neighbours, she is plunged into the rituals that make a community, and takes pleasure in the most unexpected things.
A bittersweet novel of hope and regret, fulfilment and renewal, Clock Dance brings us the everyday life of a woman who decides it’s never too late to change direction, and choose your own path.
It is 1945, and London is still reeling from the Blitz. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, are apparently abandoned by their parents, left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women all who seem determined to protect Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? A dozen years later, Nathaniel journeys through recollection, reality and imagination to uncover all he didn’t know or understand in that time, to piece together a story that feels something like the truth.
What do you and an ancient philosopher have in common? It turns out much more than you might think…
Aristotle was an extraordinary thinker yet he was preoccupied by an ordinary question: how to be happy. In this handbook to his timeless teachings, Professor Edith Hall shows how ancient thinking is precisely what we need today, even if you don’t know your Odyssey from your Iliad. In ten practical lessons you can learn how to make good decisions, how to ace an interview, how to choose a partner and how to face death. This is advice that won’t go out of fashion.
Ten produkt jest zapowiedzią. Realizacja Twojego zamówienia ulegnie przez to wydłużeniu do czasu premiery tej pozycji. Czy chcesz dodać ten produkt do koszyka?
