Great Art

In Simply Eliot, Joseph Maddrey plumbs the emotional and intellectual life of the man whom critic Edmund Wilson called "one of our only authentic poets". He chronicles Eliot's attempts to create a coherent worldview, and explores how his religious conversion in 1927 led to a spiritual rebirth that allowed him to produce his ultimate poetic statement.

"1100 Quotations from the Great French Writers of the 19th Century" is a wonderful collection of wit and wisdom from some of the greatest French writers ever. From Guy de Maupassant and Honoré de Balzac to Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, this carefully crafted collection is guaranteed to inspire and entertain. Ideal for those needing a dose of encouragement. These French literary giants are responsible for some of the worlds most famous works, including "The Three Musketeers", "Les Misérables", "Madame Bovary" and "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame".

From the acclaimed biographer - the fascinating, little-known story of a Victorian-era murder that rocked literary London, leading Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and Queen Victoria herself to wonder: Can a novel kill?

Let’s face it: Life hits hard. Empowering yourself to succeed feels like a never-ending battle. But you don’t have to fight it alone. Now there’s a book that will help you beat the toughest opponent you’ll ever face: yourself. You Versus You examines the triumphs of warriors throughout history, and shows how a martial arts mind-set can help you achieve success in all areas of life.

When Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own in 1929, she established her reputation as a feminist, and an advocate for unheard voices. But like thousands of other upper-class British women, Woolf relied on live-in domestic servants for the most intimate of daily tasks. That room of Woolf’s own was kept clean by a series of cooks and maids throughout her life. In the much-praised Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, Alison Light probes the unspoken inequality of Bloomsbury homes with insight and grace.

In The Violet Hour, Katie Roiphe takes an unexpected and liberating approach to the most unavoidable of subjects. She investigates the last days of six great thinkers, writers, and artists as they come to terms with the reality of approaching death, or what T. S. Eliot called "the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea".

In London during the interwar years, five women's lives intertwined around one address. Mecklenburgh Square, on the radical fringes of Bloomsbury, was home to activists, experimenters and revolutionaries; among them were the modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and author and publisher Virginia Woolf.

The immense cultural contribution made by two maverick Scottish independent music labels, Fast Product and Postcard, cannot be underestimated. Bob Last and Hilary Morrison in Edinburgh, followed by Alan Horne and Edwyn Collins in Glasgow, helped to create a confidence in being Scottish that hitherto had not existed in pop music (or the arts in general in Scotland). Their fierce independent spirit stamped a mark of quality and intelligence on everything they achieved. Hungry Beat is a definitive oral history of these labels and the Scottish post-punk period.

Drawing from science, literature, art, theology, history, music, philosophy, pop culture, and more, Thaddeus J. Williams paints a fresh and inspiring vision of how we become most truly ourselves by mirroring the greatest person in history.

If Hollywood had a superhero throne, Spider-Man would be perched upon it. As the most popular superhero in the world, the web-slinger plays a pivotal role in three of the six highest-grossing film franchises in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe; the Avengers quadrilogy; and the Spider-Man movies themselves. Spidey has come a long way since Marvel guru Stan Lee first concocted him in 1962, but until now his cinematic journey has not been fully documented.

While wisdom is something to be accrued through experience and knowledge, ‘500 Quotes of Great Wisdom’ offers a shortcut. Dipping into the minds of some of the most revered thinkers of all time, this book is packed with insights, reflections, and observations sure to inspire and stimulate thought. A superb gift for anyone with an inquiring mind.

A short life of Dickens which celebrates the impact of the theatre on his life and work. Two hundred years after his death, Dickens’s work is more popular than ever, in a variety of media, most of them undreamed of during his lifetime. Over the last few decades of intensive research, Dickens the man has become much better known to us and the sheer originality of his personality blazes forth as never before.

The architects selected here have designed buildings that are as dramatic as their impact on the world of architecture. From familiar modern era names such as Zaha Hadid and Sir Norman Foster to geniuses from history such as Nicholas Hawksmoor and Andrea Palladio, Ike Ijeh reveals his top 50 list of the architects deserving of the description "greatest".

Ear training is one of the most rewarding skills you can develop, and it’s one that you can work on every day. Which makes total sense: music is an aural experience, after all. Ear training helps you turn the music you hear into music you make on your piano. This works for your own musical ideas, too: when you dream up a great riff or chord progression, you naturally want to sit down and play it right away. Ear training helps you do just that.

For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. The Royal Art of Poison is a hugely entertaining work of popular history that traces the use of poison as a political - and cosmetic - tool in the royal courts of Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the Kremlin today.

The Art of Writing is Yang's highly practical treatise on the four key principles of dazzling, effective writing - economy, transparency, variety, and harmony. Far from your garden-variety style guide, the principles in this audiobook apply to everyone, whether you're writing an inauguration speech or a letter home to Mom.

Born in a small town near Warsaw, Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) was a musical prodigy who began giving public concerts and composed his first piano pieces at the age of seven. Following studies at the Warsaw Conservatory, he left his native Poland in 1830, eventually settling in Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. There he cultivated friendships with prominent musicians and intellectuals of the period and quickly achieved renown as a virtuoso performer and pioneering composer.

It’s no secret that writers often used their books, poems, and plays to impart observations, thoughts, and reflections. This was also the case for the literature of the 17th century which followed France’s pioneering status in politics and culture. "500 Quotations from the Great French Writers of the 17th Century" offers a fascinating snapshot of that changing society, seen through the eyes of some of the best writers of the era. A superb book for dipping in and out of, this makes a great gift for anyone with an interest in French literature.

Hans Holbein the Younger is chiefly celebrated for his beautiful and precisely realised portraiture, which includes representations of Henry VIII, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Anne of Cleves, Jane Seymour and an array of the Tudor lords and ladies he encountered during the course of two sojourns in England. But beyond these familiar images, which have come to define our perception of the world of the Henrician court, Holbein was a protean and multi-faceted genius.

"600 Quotations from the Great 18th Century Writers" is a collection of inspiring thoughts and reflections from six of the greatest literary minds of all time. During this time, society was experiencing a cultural upheaval, with more emphasis being placed on happiness and the pursuit of knowledge. While these quotes might be over 200 years old, they bear as much relevance today as they did when they were first coined. A superb read for dipping in and out of.