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The Kit Cat Club Friends Who Imagined A Nation
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Book Synopsis The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation by : Ophelia Field
Download or read book The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation written by Ophelia Field and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2009-02-05 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fascinating history of the male-only members of the Kit-Cat Club, the unofficial centre of Whig power in 17th century Britain, and home to the greatest political and artistic thinkers of a generation.
Download or read book The Kit-Cat Club written by Ophelia Field and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2008 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the fascinating history of the male-only members of the Kit-Cat Club, the unofficial centre of Whig power in 17th century Britain, and home to the greatest political and artistic thinkers of a generation.
Book Synopsis Behind Closed Doors by : Seth Alexander Thévoz
Download or read book Behind Closed Doors written by Seth Alexander Thévoz and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2022-07-28 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a keen eye for the juicy anecdote, Thévoz tells the fascinating and entertaining story of the rise, decline and resurgence of London's private members' clubs, from the late-eighteenth century to the present day. In doing so he looks at cultural and political developments beyond the clubs, revealing how while the clubs may have been products of their city and country, they also exerted significant influence on London, Britain and places far beyond. This is a chronicle, as informative as it is entertaining, of the ups and downs of London clubland, and how it had an impact on parts of the world far from London. It is packed with amusing anecdotes and illustrative examples of the growth of this quirky, unique institution, which grew to spread around the world. London, though, with its four hundred clubs, was always at its heart. Thévoz reveals how everything we might have thought we knew about these clubs is wrong. They may have started out as white, male, aristocratic watering holes - but that's only part of the story. All sections of society built their own clubs and lived their lives there: highbrow and lowbrow; women and men; working-class, middle-class and upper-class; international and British. The club has been central to a distinctively British form of leisure over more than three centuries. Behind Closed Doors is a distillation of a decade of research and writing on London clubs, based on exclusive behind-the-scenes access to archives and proceedings, as well as a love of gossip and scandal.
Download or read book Thomas Betterton written by David Roberts and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-17 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first biography for more than 100 years of the greatest English actor between Burbage and Garrick, Thomas Betterton.
Download or read book The Favourite written by Ophelia Field and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'An incredible story crackling with royal passion, envy, ambition and betrayal ... Field's account of the psychological power play between Queen Anne and her confidante is surely definitive. A tour de force' Lucy Worsley Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (1660-1774), was as glamorous as she was controversial. Politically influential and independently powerful, she was an intimate, and then a blackmailer, of Queen Anne, accusing her of keeping lesbian favourites - including Sarah's own cousin Abigail Masham. Ophelia Field's masterly biography, published in a new and updated edition, brings Sarah Churchill's own voice, passionate and intelligent, back to life. Here is an unforgettable portrait of a woman who cared intensely about how we would remember her.
Book Synopsis Queens of Georgian Britain by : Catherine Curzon
Download or read book Queens of Georgian Britain written by Catherine Curzon and published by Grub Street Publishers. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of four royal women that’s “as inherently fascinating as it is exceptionally informative . . . an extraordinary read from beginning to end” (Midwest Book Review). Once upon a time there were four kings called George who, thanks to a quirk of fate, ruled Great Britain for over a century. Hailing from Germany, these occasionally mad, bad, and infamous sovereigns presided over a land in turmoil. Yet what of the remarkable women who were crowned alongside them? From the forgotten princess locked in a tower to an illustrious regent, a devoted consort, and a notorious party girl, the queens of Georgian Britain lived lives of scandal, romance, and turbulent drama. Whether dipping into politics or carousing on the shores of Italy, Caroline of Ansbach, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and Caroline of Brunswick refused to fade into the background. Queens of Georgian Britain offers a chance to step back in time and meet the women who ruled alongside the Georgian monarchs, not forgetting Sophia Dorothea of Celle, the passionate princess who never made it as far as the throne. From lonely childhoods to glittering palaces, via family feuds, smallpox, strapping soldiers, and plenty of scheming, these are the queens who shaped an era. “A lively deep dive into the lives of four women regularly overshadowed by their husbands . . . Curzon is a captivating writer and this book is an impressive addition to her existing Georgian books.” —The Lazy Historian “Curzon has a breezy, colloquial style . . . an easy and informative read.” —Historical Novels Review
Book Synopsis Kings of Georgian Britain by : Catherine Curzon
Download or read book Kings of Georgian Britain written by Catherine Curzon and published by Grub Street Publishers. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This royal historian’s “lively study of the four Georges who sat on the English throne for over a century is a joy” (Jane Austen’s Regency World). For over one hundred years of turmoil, upheaval, and scandal, Great Britain was a Georgian land. From the day the German-speaking George I stepped off the boat from Hanover to the night that George IV, bloated and diseased, breathed his last at Windsor, the four kings had presided over a changing nation. Kings of Georgian Britain offers a fresh perspective on the lives of the four Georges and the events that shaped their characters and reigns. From love affairs to family feuds, political wrangling, and beyond, it is a chance to peer behind the pomp and follow these iconic figures from cradle to grave. After all, being a king isn’t always about grand parties and jaw-dropping jewels, and sometimes following in a father’s footsteps can be the hardest job around. Take a step back in time and meet the wives, mistresses, friends, and foes of these remarkable kings who shaped the nation, and find out what really went on behind closed palace doors. Whether dodging assassins, marrying for money, digging up their ancestors, or sparking domestic disputes that echoed down the generations, the kings of Georgian Britain were never short on drama. “[A] chronological series of amusing anecdotes. [Curzon is] often whimsical, has a good sense of pace and you can imagine her stifling a smirk while writing this unusual biography.” —History of Royals
Book Synopsis The Mistresses of George I & II by : Catherine Curzon
Download or read book The Mistresses of George I & II written by Catherine Curzon and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2021-08-04 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When George I arrived in England he found a kingdom in turmoil. Mistrustful of the new monarch from Hanover, his subjects met his coronation with riots. At George’s side was his mistress, Melusine von der Schulenberg, whilst his ex-wife languished in prison. Known as the Maypole thanks to her eye-catching figure, Melusine was the king’s confidante for decades. She was a mother to his children and a queen without a crown. George II never forgave his father for tearing him from his mother's arms and he was determined to marry for love, not duty. Though his wife, Caroline of Ansbach, proved to be a politically gifted queen, George II turned to another for affection. She was Henrietta Howard, the impoverished Countess of Suffolk, and she was desperate to escape her brutish husband. As the years passed, the royal affair became a powerplay between king and queen and the woman who was mistress to one and servant to another. Melusine and Henrietta's privileged position made them the envy of every courtier. It also made them a target of jealousy, plotting and ambition. In the tumultuous Georgian court, the bedroom and the throne room weren't so far apart.
Book Synopsis Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered by : Kate Parker
Download or read book Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered written by Kate Parker and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-24 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered beginswith the brute fact that poetry jostledup alongside novels in the bookstallsof eighteenth-century England. Indeed,by exploringunexpected collisions and collusionsbetween poetry and novels, this volumeof exciting, new essays offers a reconsideration of the literary and cultural history of the period. Thenovel poached from and featured poetry, and the “modern” subjects and objects privileged by “rise of the novel” scholarship are only one part of a world full of animate things and people with indistinct boundaries. Contributors: Margaret Doody, David Fairer, Sophie Gee, Heather Keenleyside, ShelleyKing, Christina Lupton, Kate Parker, Natalie Phillips, Aran Ruth, Wolfram Schmidgen, Joshua Swidzinski, and Courtney Weiss Smith.
Book Synopsis Inventing Afterlives by : Regina M. Janes
Download or read book Inventing Afterlives written by Regina M. Janes and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is belief in an afterlife so persistent across times and cultures? And how can it coexist with disbelief in an afterlife? Most modern thinkers hold that afterlife belief serves such important psychological and social purposes as consoling survivors, enforcing morality, dispensing justice, or giving life meaning. Yet the earliest, and some more recent, afterlives strikingly fail to satisfy those needs. In Inventing Afterlives, Regina M. Janes proposes a new theory of the origins of the hereafter rooted in the question that a dead body raises: where has the life gone? Humans then and now, in communities and as individuals, ponder what they would want or experience were they in that body. From this endlessly recurring situation, afterlife narratives develop in all their complexity, variety, and ingenuity. Exploring afterlives from Egypt to Sumer, among Jews, Greeks, and Romans, to Christianity’s advent and Islam’s rise, Janes reveals how little concern ancient afterlives had with morality. In south and east Asia, karmic rebirth makes morality self-enforcing and raises a new problem: how to stop re-dying. The British enlightenment, Janes argues, invented the now widespread wish-fulfilling afterlife and illustrates how afterlives change. She also considers the surprising afterlife of afterlives among modern artists and writers who no longer believe in worlds beyond this one. Drawing on a variety of religious traditions; contemporary literature and film; primatology; cognitive science; and evolutionary psychology, Janes shows that in asking what happens after we die, we define the worlds we inhabit and the values by which we live.
Book Synopsis The Georgians by : Penelope J. Corfield
Download or read book The Georgians written by Penelope J. Corfield and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive history of the Georgians, comparing past views of these exciting, turbulent, and controversial times with our attitudes today The Georgian era is often seen as a time of innovations. It saw the end of monarchical absolutism, global exploration and settlements overseas, the world’s first industrial revolution, deep transformations in religious and cultural life, and Britain’s role in the international trade in enslaved Africans. But how were these changes perceived by people at the time? And how do their viewpoints compare with attitudes today? In this wide-ranging history, Penelope J. Corfield explores every aspect of Georgian life—politics and empire, culture and society, love and violence, religion and science, industry and towns. People’s responses at the time were often divided. Pessimists saw loss and decline, while optimists saw improvements and light. Out of such tensions came the Georgian culture of both experiment and resistance. Corfield emphasizes those elements of deep continuity that persisted even within major changes, and shows how new developments were challenged if their human consequences proved dire.
Book Synopsis Paradise Lost and the Making of English Literary Criticism by : David A. Harper
Download or read book Paradise Lost and the Making of English Literary Criticism written by David A. Harper and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-20 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paradise Lost and the Making of English Literary Criticism identifies the early reception of Paradise Lost as a site of contest over the place of literature in political and religious controversy. Milton’s earliest readers and critics (Dryden, Addison, Dennis, Hume, and Bentley) confronted a poem and author at odds with prevailing culture and the revanchist conservatism of the restored monarchy. Grappling with the epic required navigating Milton’s reputation as a “fanatick” who had called in print for Charles I’s execution, inveighed openly against monarchy on the eve of Charles II’s return, and held heretical views on the trinity, baptism, and divorce. Harper argues that foundational figures in English literary criticism rose to this challenge by innovating new ways of reading: producing creative (and subversive) rewritings of Paradise Lost, articulating new theories of the sublime, explaining the poem in the first substantial body of annotations for an English vernacular text, and by pioneering early forms of textual criticism and editing.
Book Synopsis Conservation of Easel Paintings by : Joyce Hill Stoner
Download or read book Conservation of Easel Paintings written by Joyce Hill Stoner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 917 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conservation of Easel Paintings is the first comprehensive text on the history, philosophy, and methods of treatment of easel paintings that combines both theory with practice. With contributions from an international group of experts and interviews with important artists, this volume provides an all-encompassing guide to necessary background knowledge in technical art history, artists' materials, scientific methods of examination and documentation, with sections that present varying approaches and methods for treatment, including consolidation, lining, cleaning, retouching, and varnishing. The book concludes with a section featuring issues of preventive conservation, storage, shipping, exhibition, lighting, safety issues, and public outreach. Conservation of Easel Paintings is a crucial resource in the training of conservation students and will provide generations of practicing paintings conservators and interested art historians, curators, directors, collectors, dealers, artists, and students of art and art history with invaluable information and guidance.
Book Synopsis The Princess's Garden by : Vanessa Berridge
Download or read book The Princess's Garden written by Vanessa Berridge and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2015-08-15 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of how our national obsession with gardening came to be.
Book Synopsis "Striking Images, Iconoclasms Past and Present " by : Stacy Boldrick
Download or read book "Striking Images, Iconoclasms Past and Present " written by Stacy Boldrick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All cultures make, and break, images. Striking Images, Iconoclasms Past and Present explores how and why people have made and modified images and other cultural material from pre-history into the 21st century. With its impressive chronological sweep and disciplinary breadth, this is the first book about iconoclasm (the breaking of images) and the transformation of broader sets of signs that includes contributions from archaeologists, curators, and museum conservators as well as historians of art, literature and religious studies. The chapters examine themes critical to the study of iconoclasm: violence, punishment, memory, intentionality, ruins and relics and their survival. The conclusion shows how cross-disciplinary debate amongst the contributors informed Tate Britain?s 'Art under Attack' exhibition (2013) and addresses the challenges iconoclasm presents to the modern museum. By juxtaposing objects and places usually considered in isolation, Striking Images raises provocative questions about our understandings of cross-cultural differences and the value of representational objects from the broken swords of pre-historical bog graves to the Bamiyan Buddhas and contemporary art. Are any such objects ever ?finished?, or are they simply subject to constant transformation? In dialogue with each other, the essays consider this question and expand the field of iconoclasm - and cultural - studies.
Download or read book Queen Anne written by Anne Somerset and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 990 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She ascended the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1702, at age thirty-seven, Britain’s last Stuart monarch, and five years later united two of her realms, England and Scotland, as a sovereign state, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain. She had a history of personal misfortune, overcoming ill health (she suffered from crippling arthritis; by the time she became Queen she was a virtual invalid) and living through seventeen miscarriages, stillbirths, and premature births in seventeen years. By the end of her comparatively short twelve-year reign, Britain had emerged as a great power; the succession of outstanding victories won by her general, John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, had humbled France and laid the foundations for Britain’s future naval and colonial supremacy. While the Queen’s military was performing dazzling exploits on the continent, her own attention—indeed her realm—rested on a more intimate conflict: the female friendship on which her happiness had for decades depended and which became for her a source of utter torment. At the core of Anne Somerset’s riveting new biography, published to great acclaim in England (“Definitive”—London Evening Standard; “Wonderfully pacy and absorbing”—Daily Mail), is a portrait of this deeply emotional, complex bond between two very different women: Queen Anne—reserved, stolid, shrewd; and Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, wife of the Queen’s great general—beautiful, willful, outspoken, whose acerbic wit was equally matched by her fearsome temper. Against a fraught background—the revolution that deposed Anne’s father, James II, and brought her to power . . . religious differences (she was born Protestant—her parents’ conversion to Catholicism had grave implications—and she grew up so suspicious of the Roman church that she considered its doctrines “wicked and dangerous”) . . . violently partisan politics (Whigs versus Tories) . . . a war with France that lasted for almost her entire reign . . . the constant threat of foreign invasion and civil war—the much-admired historian, author of Elizabeth I (“Exhilarating”—The Spectator; “Ample, stylish, eloquent”—The Washington Post Book World), tells the extraordinary story of how Sarah goaded and provoked the Queen beyond endurance, and, after the withdrawal of Anne’s favor, how her replacement, Sarah’s cousin, the feline Abigail Masham, became the ubiquitous royal confidante and, so Sarah whispered to growing scandal, the object of the Queen's sexual infatuation. To write this remarkably rich and passionate biography, Somerset, winner of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, has made use of royal archives, parliamentary records, personal correspondence and previously unpublished material. Queen Anne is history on a large scale—a revelation of a centuries-overlooked monarch.
Book Synopsis The Face of Britain by : Simon Schama
Download or read book The Face of Britain written by Simon Schama and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author of a number of celebrated works, including the bestselling The Story of the Jews and Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Simon Schama's latest book fuses history and art to create a tour de force of narrative sweep and illuminating insight. Using images from works-paintings, photographs, lithographs, etchings, sketches-found in London's National Portrait Gallery, The Face of Britain weaves together an account of their composition, framed by their particular moment of creation, and in the process unveils a collective portrait of nation and its history. "Portraits," Schama writes, "have always been made with an eye to posterity." Commissioned to paint Winston Churchill in 1954 Graham Sutherland struggled with how to capture the "savior" of Great Britain honestly and humanely. Schama calls the portrait, initially damned, the "most powerful image of a Great Briton ever executed." Annie Leibovitz's photograph of a nude John Lennon kissing Yoko Ono, taken five hours before his murder, bears "a weight of poignancy she could not possibly have anticipated." Hans Holbein's preparatory sketch for a portrait of Henry VIII depicts "an unstoppable engine of dynastic generation." Here are expressions from across the centuries of normalcy and heroism, beauty and disfigurement, aristocracy and deprivation, the familiar and the obscure-the faces of courtesans, warriors, workers, activists, playwrights, the high and mighty as well as pub-crawlers. Linking them is Schama's vibrant exploration of how their connective power emerges from the dynamic between subject and artist, work and viewer, time and place. Schama's compelling analysis and impassioned evocation of these works create an unforgettable verbal mosaic that at once reveals and transforms the images he places before us. Lavishly illustrated and written with the storytelling brio that is Schama's trademark, The Face of Britain invites us to look at a nation's visual legacies and find its reflection.
