Great Art

When the leaders of the French Revolution executed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793, they sent a chilling message to the hereditary ruling orders in Europe. Believing that monarchy anywhere presented a threat to democratic rule in France, the leaders of the revolution declared war on European aristocracies, including those of Great Britain. For more than 20 years thereafter, France and England waged a protracted war that ended in British victory.

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?

"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".

At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the Western world, his armies were seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. He had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: "degenerate" works he despised. A special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Monuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture.

Emily Dickinson may be the most widely read and beloved of all American poets, but the story behind her work's initial, posthumous publication in 1890 and the mother-and-daughter team most responsible for her enduring legacy are barely known. After Emily recounts the extraordinary lives of Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, and the powerful literary legacy they shared.

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 guitar. 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.

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.

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.

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British institution, and its story during the Second World War is also our story. This was a period of remarkable voices: Churchill’s speeches, de Gaulle’s broadcasts from exile, Richard Dimbleby and Vera Lynn. Radio offered an incomparable tool for propaganda while at the same time eyewitness testimonies gave a voice to everyone, securing the BBC’s reputation as a purveyor of truth.

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".

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.

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.

Un delicioso recorrido por la obra y los lugares más emblemáticos de ocho escritores fundamentales. El regreso de Savater a su faceta más divulgativa. En Aquí viven leones, Fernando Savater vuelve a una de sus facetas favoritas, la de divulgador de la literatura y el pensamiento. A través de ocho viajes inolvidables, ilustrados magníficamente por Anapurna, nos presenta la obra y la vida de Shakespeare, Valle Inclán, Poe, Leopardi, Agatha Christie, Reyes, Flaubert y Zweig.

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.

In 1953, Winston Churchill received the Nobel Prize - for Literature. In fact, Churchill was a professional writer before he was a politician, and published a stream of books and articles over the course of two intertwined careers. Now historian Peter Clarke traces the writing of the magisterial work that occupied Churchill for a quarter century, his four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples. As an author, Churchill faced woes familiar to many others - chronically short of funds, late on deadlines, scrambling to sell new projects....

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.

Hi, fellow music lover! Congratulations on starting your music-making journey. I won't waste your time with a long introduction, but let me say a few words just to get us off on the right foot. 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 guitar. This works for your own musical ideas, too.

"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.