Romantic Moderns
Romantic Moderns

Author: Alexandra Harris

Publisher:

Published: 2015-02-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780500289723

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While the battles for modern art and society were being fought in France and Spain, it has seemed a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea-shops. In this multi-awardwinning book now available in paperback Alexandra Harris tells a different story. In the 1930s and 1940s, artists and writers explored what it meant to be alive in England. Eclectically, passionately, wittily, they showed that the modern need not be at war with the past. Constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré, László Moholy-Nagy, was beguiled into taking photographs for Betjemans nostalgic Oxford University Chest. This modern English renaissance was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, tourists and composers. John Piper, Virginia Woolf, Florence White, Christopher Tunnard, Evelyn Waugh, E. M. Forster and the Sitwells are part of the story, along with Bill Brandt, Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper
Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper

Author: Alexandra Harris

Publisher: Thames & Hudson

Published: 2010-11-01

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 0500778434

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Winner of the 2010 Guardian First Book Award: a groundbreaking reassessment of English cultural life in the thirties and forties. In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea shops. Alexandra Harris tells a different story: eclectically, passionately, wittily, urgently, English artists were exploring what it meant to be alive at that moment and in England. They showed that “the modern” need not be at war with the past: constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photos for Betjeman’s nostalgic An Oxford University Chest. A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

Weatherland
Weatherland

Author: Alexandra Harris

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0500518114

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A lively look at the English literary and artistic responses to the weather from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Keats and Ian McEwan In a sweeping panorama, Weatherland allows us to witness England’s cultural climates across the centuries. Before the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxons living in a wintry world wrote about the coldness of exile or the shelters they had to defend against enemies outside. The Middle Ages brought the warmth of spring; the new lyrics were sung in praise of blossoms and cuckoos. Descriptions of a rainy night are rare before 1700, but by the end of the eighteenth century the Romantics had adopted the squall as a fit subject for their most probing thoughts. The weather is vast and yet we experience it intimately, and Alexandra Harris builds her remarkable story from small evocative details. There is the drawing of a twelfth-century man in February, warming bare toes by the fire. There is the tiny glass left behind from the Frost Fair of 1684, and the Sunspan house in Angmering that embodies the bright ambitions of the 1930s. Harris catches the distinct voices of compelling individuals. “Bloody cold,” says Jonathan Swift in the “slobbery” January of 1713. Percy Shelley wants to become a cloud and John Ruskin wants to bottle one. Weatherland is a celebration of English air and a life story of those who have lived in it.

A Geometry of Music
A Geometry of Music

Author: Dmitri Tymoczko

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2011-03-21

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 0195336674

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In this groundbreaking book, Tymoczko uses contemporary geometry to provide a new framework for thinking about music, one that emphasizes the commonalities among styles from Medieval polyphony to contemporary jazz.

Tom's Midnight Garden
Tom's Midnight Garden

Author: Philippa Pearce

Publisher:

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780192717771

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"Tom is not prepared for what is about to happen when he hears the grandfather clock strike thirteen. Outside the back door is a garden, which everyone tells him does not exist."--Page 4 de la couverture.

Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf

Author: Alexandra Harris

Publisher: Thames & Hudson

Published: 2011-10-01

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 0500770972

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An ideal introduction to the life and work of Virginia Woolf by an award-winning author: the story of a life lived with intensity from moment to moment and shaped into the lasting patterns of art. In 1907, when she was twenty-five and not yet a published novelist, Virginia Stephen had everything still to prove. She felt herself to be at a crossroads: “I shall be miserable, or happy; a wordy sentimental creature, or a writer of such English as shall one day burn the pages.” Today her prose is still blazing; perhaps it burns brighter than ever. This is the story of how a determined young woman with a notebook became one of the greatest writers of all time. It is a story that sparkles with wit and friendship, language and love, wicked jokes and passionate appreciation of ordinary things. In this illuminating new account, Alexandra Harris uses vivid flashes of detail to evoke Woolf’s changing backgrounds and preoccupations. We move from the close-packed rhythms of a Victorian childhood to the experiments of Bloomsbury and Woolf’s trial-and-error answers to the pressing question of how to live. We see her tackling challenging forms of writing, trying out different voices, following flights of fancy, and returning to earth. Above all, we see her making conscious decisions about what to do next. The book considers each of the novels in context, gives due prominence to a range of Woolf’s dazzlingly inventive essays, traces the contentious course of her “afterlife,” and shows why, seventy years after her death, Virginia Woolf continues to haunt and inspire us.

The Enduring Melody
The Enduring Melody

Author: Michael Mayne

Publisher: Darton Longman and Todd

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13:

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When he was in his fifties, Michael Mayne, formerly the vicar of Great St Mary's in Cambridge and Dean of Westminster Abbey, was cruelly afflicted with ME, but transformed personal adversity through his pen, writing (with Gerald Priestland) an account of his illness (A Year Lost and Found) that continues to be helpful to ME sufferers worldwide. Sadly, in the health lottery, Mayne seems to have drawn the short straw. In 2005, he was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw, and found himself overnight in what he calls 'cancer country', perhaps the most merciless terrain in the world.

Reading the Ruins
Reading the Ruins

Author: Leo Mellor

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-09-15

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1139501534

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From fires to ghosts, and from flowers to surrealist apparitions, the bombsites of London were both unsettling and inspiring terrains. Yet throughout the years prior to the Second World War, British culture was already filled with ruins and fragments. They appeared as content, with visions of tottering towers and scraps of paper; and also as form, in the shapes of broken poetics. But from the outbreak of the Second World War what had been an aesthetic mode began to resemble a proleptic template. During that conflict many modernist writers – such as Graham Greene, Louis MacNeice, David Jones, J. F. Hendry, Elizabeth Bowen, T. S. Eliot and Rose Macaulay – engaged with devastated cityscapes and the altered lives of a nation at war. To understand the potency of the bombsites, both in the Second World War and after, Reading the Ruins brings together poetry, novels and short stories, as well as film and visual art.

Ring of Bright Water
Ring of Bright Water

Author: Gavin Maxwell

Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1567924840

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This volume weaves together the Scottish otter stories from Gavin Maxwell's three non-fiction books, Ring of Bright Water (1960), The Rocks Remain (1963), and Raven Meet Thy Brother (1969). Maxwell was both an extraordinarily evocative writer and a highly unusual man. While touring the Iraqi marshes, he was captivated by an otter and became a devoted advocate of and spokesman for the species. He moved to a remote house in the Scottish highlands, co-habiting there with three otters and living an idyllic and isolated life – at least for a while. Fate, fame, and fire conspired against this paradise, and it, too, came to an end, though the journey was filled with incident and wonder. Maxwell was also talented as an artist, and his sinuous line drawings of these amphibious and engaging creatures, and the homes they occupied, illustrate his story. This book stands as a lasting tribute to a man, his work, and his passion. It was received and has endured as a classic for its portrait not only of otters but also of a man who endured heartaches and disappointments, whose life embodied both greatness and tragedy. He writes with rare eloquence about his birth, his devotion to the beloved Scottish highlands, and the wildlife he loved, while refusing to ignore the darker aspects of his nature and of nature in its larger sense.