John Gielgud: Matinee Idol to Movie Star

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Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1408131072
Total Pages : 736 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (81 download)

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Book Synopsis John Gielgud: Matinee Idol to Movie Star by : Jonathan Croall

Download or read book John Gielgud: Matinee Idol to Movie Star written by Jonathan Croall and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-05-05 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his lifetime Gielgud was acclaimed as the finest classical actor of the twentieth century and Jonathan Croall's biography from 2000 was instantly recognised by critics as a masterful achievement, one that was 'unlikely to be surpassed' (Sunday Telegraph). Since that time however a considerable amount of new material has come to light and the passing of time has allowed a new candour. John Gielgud: Matinee Idol to Movie Star sees this peerless biographer return to his subject to offer the definitive life of Gielgud. For this new biography Croall's exhaustive research has included over a hundred new interviews with key people from his life and career, several hundred letters from Gielgud that have never been published, scores of letters written to him and archived versions of his film and television work. As Gielgud worked increasingly in this medium during the last third of his life much greater attention is given to this than in the earlier work. Fresh light is thrown on his professional relationships with figures such as Laurence Olivier and Edith Evans, and on turbulent episodes of his private life. The overall result is a a much more rounded, candid and richly textured portrait of this celebrated and complex actor.

Great Shakespeare Actors

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Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191008346
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Great Shakespeare Actors by : Stanley Wells

Download or read book Great Shakespeare Actors written by Stanley Wells and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-04-24 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great Shakespeare Actors offers a series of essays on great Shakespeare actors from his time to ours, starting by asking whether Shakespeare himself was the first—the answer is No—and continuing with essays on the men and women who have given great stage performances in his plays from Elizabethan times to our own. They include both English and American performers such as David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, Charlotte Cushman, Ira Aldridge, Edwin Booth, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Edith Evans, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft, Janet Suzman, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, and Kenneth Branagh. Individual chapters tell the story of their subjects' careers, but together these overlapping tales combine to offer a succinct, actor-centred history of Shakespearian theatrical performance. Stanley Wells examines what it takes to be a great Shakespeare actor and then offers a concise sketch of each actor's career in Shakespeare, an assessment of their specific talents and claims to greatness, and an account, drawing on contemporary reviews, biographies, anecdotes, and, for some of the more recent actors, the author's personal memories of their most notable performances in Shakespeare roles.

Gielgoodies!

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1849435863
Total Pages : 139 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (494 download)

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Book Synopsis Gielgoodies! by : Jonathan Croall

Download or read book Gielgoodies! written by Jonathan Croall and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A glorious compendium of John's scintillating irreverences and fabulous faux pas... He was one of the greatest of all theatrical personalities, and these utterly characteristic throwaway squibs bring him vividly back to life.' Simon Callow This delicious feast of "Gielgoodies", compiled by Gielgud's biographer, reveals a less well-known side to this celebrated man of the theatre: his lightning wit, his love of scandal and gossip, his wicked delight in putting down his fellow-artists, his relish of bawdy humour. Full of startling new material, drawn from many unpublished letters and Jonathan Croall's extensive interviews, the book also celebrates the man who dropped a thousand bricks. Gielgud's excruciating gaffes were legendary, and here are both the famous and the unknown, collected in all their glory. Whether committed backstage, in the wings or in rehearsals, on film sets or in television studios, they bring this merry and much-loved man vividly to life.

Ageing Masculinities in Contemporary European and Anglophone Cinema

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Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000830144
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Ageing Masculinities in Contemporary European and Anglophone Cinema by : Tony Tracy

Download or read book Ageing Masculinities in Contemporary European and Anglophone Cinema written by Tony Tracy and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a unique exploration of how ageing masculinities are constructed and represented in contemporary international cinema. With chapters spanning a range of national cinemas, the primarily European focus of the book is juxtaposed with analysis of the social and cultural constructions of manhood and the "anti-ageing" impulses of male stardom in contemporary Hollywood. These themes are inflected in different ways throughout the volume, from considering how old age is not the monolithic and unified life stage with which it is often framed, to exploring issues of queerness, sexuality, and asexuality, as well as themes such as national cinema and dementia. Offering a diverse and multifaceted portrait of ageing and masculinity in contemporary cinema, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of film and screen studies, gender and masculinity studies, and cultural gerontology.

All is Fortune

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Publisher : Book Guild Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1915853982
Total Pages : 141 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (158 download)

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Book Synopsis All is Fortune by : Jonathan Croall

Download or read book All is Fortune written by Jonathan Croall and published by Book Guild Publishing. This book was released on 2023-06-28 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unusual collection of short stories captures the essence of life in the theatre. Behind the superficial glamour lies a world marked by ambition, jealousy and heartache.

Oscar Wilde's Society Plays

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Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137410930
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (374 download)

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Book Synopsis Oscar Wilde's Society Plays by : Michael Y. Bennett

Download or read book Oscar Wilde's Society Plays written by Michael Y. Bennett and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-08-05 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the first collection of essays about Oscar Wilde's comedies, the contributors re-evaluate Oscar Wilde's society plays as 'comedies of manners" to see whether this is actually an apt way to read Wilde's most emblematic plays. Focusing on both the context and the texts, the collection locates Wilde both in his social and literary contexts.

Performing Hamlet

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350030740
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis Performing Hamlet by : Jonathan Croall

Download or read book Performing Hamlet written by Jonathan Croall and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hamlet is arguably the most famous play on the planet, and the greatest of all Shakespeare's works. Its rich story and complex leading role have provoked intense debate and myriad interpretations. To play such a uniquely multi-faceted character as Hamlet represents the supreme challenge for a young actor. Performing Hamlet contains Jonathan Croall's revealing in-depth interviews with five distinguished actors who have played the Prince this century: Jude Law: 'You get to speak possibly the most beautiful lines about humankind ever given to an actor.' Simon Russell Beale: 'Hamlet is a very hospitable role: it will take anything you throw at it.' David Tennant: 'No other part has been so satisfying. It was tough, but utterly compelling.' Maxine Peake: 'Hamlet was a way of accessing bits of me as an actress I've not been able to access before.' Adrian Lester: 'Working with Peter Brook on Hamlet changed me as an actor, and for the better.' The book benefits from the author's interviews with six leading directors of the play during these years: Greg Doran, Nicholas Hytner, Michael Grandage, John Caird, Sarah Frankcom and Simon Godwin. Many other productions are described, from those starring Michael Redgrave, Alec Guinness and Paul Scofield in the 1950s, to the performances of Benedict Cumberbatch, Andrew Scott and Paapa Essiedu in recent times. The volume also includes an updated text of the author's earlier book Hamlet Observed, and an account of actors' experiences of performing at Elsinore.

Homintern

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300219563
Total Pages : 455 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Homintern by : Gregory Woods

Download or read book Homintern written by Gregory Woods and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a hugely ambitious study which crosses continents, languages, and almost a century, Gregory Woods identifies the ways in which homosexuality has helped shape Western culture. Extending from the trials of Oscar Wilde to the gay liberation era, this book examines a period in which increased visibility made acceptance of homosexuality one of the measures of modernity. Woods shines a revealing light on the diverse, informal networks of gay people in the arts and other creative fields. Uneasily called “the Homintern” (an echo of Lenin’s “Comintern”) by those suspicious of an international homosexual conspiracy, such networks connected gay writers, actors, artists, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, politicians, and spies. While providing some defense against dominant heterosexual exclusion, the grouping brought solidarity, celebrated talent, and, in doing so, invigorated the majority culture. Woods introduces an enormous cast of gifted and extraordinary characters, most of them operating with surprising openness; but also explores such issues as artistic influence, the coping strategies of minorities, the hypocrisies of conservatism, and the effects of positive and negative discrimination. Traveling from Harlem in the 1910s to 1920s Paris, 1930s Berlin, 1950s New York and beyond, this sharply observed, warm-spirited book presents a surpassing portrait of twentieth-century gay culture and the men and women who both redefined themselves and changed history.

Performing King Lear

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1474223885
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis Performing King Lear by : Jonathan Croall

Download or read book Performing King Lear written by Jonathan Croall and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: King Lear is arguably the most complex and demanding play in the whole of Shakespeare. Once thought impossible to stage, today it is performed with increasing frequency, both in Britain and America. It has been staged more often in the last fifty years than in the previous 350 years of its performance history, its bleak message clearly chiming in with the growing harshness, cruelty and violence of the modern world. Performing King Lear offers a very different and practical perspective from most studies of the play, being centred firmly on the reality of creation and performance. The book is based on Jonathan Croall's unique interviews with twenty of the most distinguished actors to have undertaken this daunting role during the last forty years, including Donald Sinden, Tim Pigott-Smith, Timothy West, Julian Glover, Oliver Ford Davies, Derek Jacobi, Christopher Plummer, Michael Pennington, Brian Cox and Simon Russell Beale. He has also talked to two dozen leading directors who have staged the play in London, Stratford and elsewhere. Among them are Nicholas Hytner, David Hare, Kenneth Branagh, Adrian Noble, Deborah Warner, Jonathan Miller and Dominic Dromgoole. Each reveals in precise and absorbing detail how they have dealt with the formidable challenge of interpreting and staging Shakespeare's great tragedy.

Small-Screen Shakespeare

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443869694
Total Pages : 515 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Small-Screen Shakespeare by : Peter Cochran

Download or read book Small-Screen Shakespeare written by Peter Cochran and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Small-Screen Shakespeare is a guide to all the Shakespeare productions available for viewing on computer or TV. From Beerbohm Tree’s silent scene from King John, to Helen Mirren as Prospera and Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff, Peter Cochran gives an expert opinion on the best and the worst, basing his judgements on a lifetime of viewing, teaching, acting and directing. The book covers films, television productions, plays on YouTube, and DVDs of videoed stage productions, as well as cinematic Shakespearean spin-offs such as Throne of Blood and Joe Macbeth. The book is composed of five sections: one on film directors who have specialised in Shakespeare; one on screen versions of individual plays; one on films remaking Shakespeare’s plots in a different idiom; one on films which contain creative references to Shakespeare; and a final review of two famous stage productions.

Gielgud

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Author :
Publisher : Burns & Oates
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 618 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (321 download)

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Book Synopsis Gielgud by : Jonathan Croall

Download or read book Gielgud written by Jonathan Croall and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 2001 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on interviews with over 100 friends and colleagues who worked with Gielgud, this biography covers Gielgud's childhood amongst his famous Terry relations, his early struggles as a young actor, his triumphs in Shakespeare at the Old Vic and his late flowering as an Oscar-winning film star.

Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band

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Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0698195531
Total Pages : 624 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (981 download)

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Book Synopsis Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band by : Simon Callow

Download or read book Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band written by Simon Callow and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • The third volume of Simon Callow’s acclaimed Orson Welles biography, covering the period of his exile from America (1947–1964), when he produced some of his greatest works, including Touch of Evil In One-Man Band, the third volume in his epic and all-inclusive four-volume survey of Orson Welles’s life and work, the celebrated British actor Simon Callow again probes in comprehensive and penetrating detail into one of the most complex, contradictory artists of the twentieth century, whose glorious triumphs (and occasional spectacular failures) in film, radio, theater, and television introduced a radical and original approach that opened up new directions in the arts. This volume begins with Welles’s self-exile from America, and his realization that he could function only to his own satisfaction as an independent film maker, a one-man band, in fact, which committed him to a perpetual cycle of money raising. By 1964, he had filmed Othello, which took three years to complete; Mr. Arkadin, the most puzzling film in his output; and a masterpiece in another genre, Touch of Evil, which marked his one return to Hollywood, and like all too many of his films was wrested from his grasp and reedited. Along the way he made inroads into the fledgling medium of television and a number of stage plays, of which his 1955 London Moby-Dick is considered by theater historians to be one of the seminal productions of the century. His private life was as spectacularly complex and dramatic as his professional life. The book reveals what it was like to be around Welles, and, with an intricacy and precision rarely attempted before, what it was like to be him, answering the riddle that has long fascinated film scholars and lovers alike: Whatever happened to Orson Welles?

Television: A Biography

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Publisher : Thames & Hudson
ISBN 13 : 0500773726
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Television: A Biography by : David Thomson

Download or read book Television: A Biography written by David Thomson and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The invention, or the quaint piece of furniture, wandered into our lives in the 1940s, as a primitive plaything, a clever if awkward addition to the household. It was expensive, unreliable and a bit of an invalid.” —Television, A Biography In just a few years, what used to be an immobile piece of living room furniture, which one had to sit in front of at appointed times in order to watch sponsored programming on a finite number of channels, morphed into a glowing cloud of screens with access to a near-endless supply of content available when and how viewers want it. With this phenomenon now a common cultural theme, a writer of David Thomson’s stature delivering a critical history, or “biography” of the six-decade television era, will be a significant event which could not be more timely. With Television, the critic and film historian who wrote what Sight and Sound's readers called “the most important film book of the last 50 years” has finally turned his unique powers of observation to the medium that has swallowed film whole. Over twenty-two thematically organized chapters, Thomson brings his provocatively insightful and unique voice to the life of what was television. David Thomson surveying a Boschian landscape, illuminated by that singular glow—always “on”—and peopled by everyone from Donna Reed to Dennis Potter, will be the first complete history of the defining medium of our time.

The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage

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Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030238288
Total Pages : 850 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (32 download)

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Book Synopsis The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage by : Jan Sewell

Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage written by Jan Sewell and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-04-29 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together nearly 40 academics and theatre practitioners to chronicle and celebrate the courage, determination and achievements of women on stage across the ages and around the globe. The collection stretches from ancient Greece to present-day Australasia via the United States, Soviet Russia, Europe, India, South Africa and Japan, offering a series of analytical snapshots of women performers, their work and the conditions in which they produced it. Individual chapters provide in-depth consideration of specific moments in time and geography while the volume as a whole and its juxtapositions stimulate consideration of the bigger picture, underlining the challenges women have faced across cultures in establishing themselves as performers and the range of ways in which they gained access to the stage. Organised chronologically, the volume looks not just to the past but the future: it challenges the very notions of ‘history’, ‘stage’ and even the definition of ‘women’ itself.

The Great European Stage Directors Volume 3

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1474259901
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis The Great European Stage Directors Volume 3 by : Jonathan Pitches

Download or read book The Great European Stage Directors Volume 3 written by Jonathan Pitches and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-07 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the work of directors Jacques Copeau, Theodore Komisarjevsky and Tyrone Guthrie. It explores in detail many of the directors' key productions, including Copeau's staging of Molière's The Tricks of Scapin, Komisarjevsky's signature season of Chekhov plays at the Barnes Theatre and Guthrie's pioneering direction of Shakespeare's plays in North America. This study argues that their work exemplifies the complexity and novelty of the role of theatre directing in the first three-quarters of the 20th century, as Komisarjevsky was in the middle of the genesis of directing in Russia, Copeau launched his directorial career just as the role was gaining definition, and Guthrie was at the vanguard of directing in Britain, at last shaking off the traditions of the actor-manager to formulate the new role of artistic director.

Modernists and the Theatre

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350145505
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis Modernists and the Theatre by : James Moran

Download or read book Modernists and the Theatre written by James Moran and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-16 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernists and the Theatre examines how six key modernists, who are best known as poets and novelists, engaged with the realm of theatre and performance. Drawing on a wealth of unfamiliar archival material and fresh readings of neglected documents, James Moran demonstrates how these literary figures interacted with the playhouse, exploring W.B. Yeats's earliest playwriting, Ezra Pound's onstage acting, the links between James Joyce's and D.H. Lawrence's sense of drama, T.S. Eliot's thinking about theatrical popularity, and the feminist politics of Virginia Woolf's small-scale theatrical experimentation. While these modernists often made hostile comments about drama, this volume highlights how the writers were all repeatedly drawn to the form. While Yeats and Pound were fascinated by the controlling aspect of theatre, other authors felt inspired by theatre as a democratic forum in which dissenting voices could be heard. Some of these modernists used theatre to express and explore identities that had previously been sidelined in the public forum, including the working-class mining communities of Lawrence's plays, the sexually unconventional and non-binary gender expressions of Joyce's fiction, and the female experience that Woolf sought to represent and discuss in terms of theatrical performance. These writers may be known primarily for creating non-dramatic texts, but this book demonstrates the importance of the theatre to the activities of these authors, and shows how a sense of the theatrical repeatedly motivated the wider thinking and writing of six major figures in literary history.

Secret City

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Author :
Publisher : Henry Holt and Company
ISBN 13 : 1627792333
Total Pages : 607 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (277 download)

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Book Synopsis Secret City by : James Kirchick

Download or read book Secret City written by James Kirchick and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 607 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 Named one of Vanity Fair's “Best Books of 2022” “Not since Robert Caro’s Years of Lyndon Johnson have I been so riveted by a work of history. Secret City is not gay history. It is American history.” —George Stephanopoulos Washington, D.C., has always been a city of secrets. Few have been more dramatic than the ones revealed in James Kirchick’s Secret City. For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government. In the fevered atmosphere of political Washington, the secret “too loathsome to mention” held enormous, terrifying power. Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified documents, interviews with over one hundred people, and material unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, Secret City is a chronicle of American politics like no other. Beginning with the tragic story of Sumner Welles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s brilliant diplomatic advisor and the man at the center of “the greatest national scandal since the existence of the United States,” James Kirchick illuminates how homosexuality shaped each successive presidential administration through the end of the twentieth century. Cultural and political anxiety over gay people sparked a decades-long witch hunt, impacting everything from the rivalry between the CIA and the FBI to the ascent of Joseph McCarthy, the struggle for Black civil rights, and the rise of the conservative movement. Among other revelations, Kirchick tells of the World War II–era gay spymaster who pioneered seduction as a tool of American espionage, the devoted aide whom Lyndon Johnson treated as a son yet abandoned once his homosexuality was discovered, and how allegations of a “homosexual ring” controlling Ronald Reagan nearly derailed his 1980 election victory. Magisterial in scope and intimate in detail, Secret City will forever transform our understanding of American history.