Anne Bronte: A Biography
£50.00A prized historic edition of Gerin’s full-length biography of Anne Bronte’s life, lauded for its extensive research.
£30.00
A fully illustrated overview of the life and work of the universally loved Quentin Blake, released ahead of the artist’s 90th birthday in December 2022.
Quentin Blake is an artist who has charmed and inspired generations of readers. Tracing Blake’s art and career from his very first drawings – published in Punch when he was 16 – through his collaborations with writers from Roald Dahl and John Yeoman to Russell Hoban and David Walliams, to his large-scale works for hospitals and public spaces and right up to his most recent passions and projects, acclaimed author Jenny Uglow here presents a fully illustrated overview of Quentin Blake’s extraordinary body of work, with accompanying commentary by the artist himself.
With unprecedented access to the artist’s entire archive, The Quentin Blake Book reveals the stories behind some of Blake’s most famous creations, while also providing readers with an intimate insight into the unceasing creativity of this remarkable artist.
A prized historic edition of Gerin’s full-length biography of Anne Bronte’s life, lauded for its extensive research.
As known for her fraught personal life as her chart-topping songs, Amy Winehouse who died at the age of 27 in July 2011 was one of the most compelling vocalists in the world. But despite this fact, it was her self-destructive excesses that made headlines. Drinking binges, self-harm, eating disorders, drug abuse, and a turbulent marriage overshadowed her music even as her record sales soared, and the media watched eagerly as Amy’s world imploded. This richly illustrated biography tells her story in full, from childhood through to the pleasures and pains of superstardom, her blazing talent, the years she lost to her addictions, the final days before her death, and the legacy of her raw and heartfelt music.
Sir Robert Vere (‘Robin’) Darwin, great-grandson of Charles Darwin, was a British artist of note and the highly influential Rector of the Royal College of Art from 1948 until 1971. His story, beginning in 1910, takes in life as an art student and then a teacher, his wartime involvement in camouflage, British postwar reconstruction and the Festival of Britain 1951. His influence in shaping British arts education for the future is uncontested (the list of RCA graduates from 1950-1980 is particularly impressive, including not only fine artists (David Hockney, Peter Blake) but also leaders in industrial design such as James Dyson.
The current status of the Royal College of Art is largely the result of one man, a formidable force with the drive, vision and ability to inspire huge loyalty and first-class creative thinking in others. The list of RCA professors, tutors and visiting lecturers recruited by Darwin reads like a rollcall of the best in post-war British design and art, and their influence continues to inspire students to this day.
Volume Two covers the early years of his editorship of The Criterion (the periodical that Eliot launched with Lady Rothermere’s backing in 1922), publication of The Hollow Menand the course of Eliot’s thinking about poetry and poetics after The Waste Land. The correspondence charts Eliot’s intellectual journey towards conversion to the Anglican faith in 1927, as well as his transformation from banker to publisher, ending with his appointment as a director of the new publishing house of Faber & Gwyer, in late 1925, and the appearance of Poems 1909-1925, Eliot’s first publication with the house with which he would be associated for the rest of his life.
It was partly because of Eliot’s profoundly influential work as cultural commentator and editor that the correspondence is so prolific and so various, and Volume Two of the Letters fully demonstrates the emerging continuities between poet, essayist, editor and letter-writer.
Marlon Brando will never cease to fascinate us: for his triumphs as an actor (On the Waterfront, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris), as well as his disasters; for the power of the screen portrayals he gave, and for his turbulent, tumultuous personal life.
Seamlessly intertwining the man and the work, Kanfer takes us through Brando’s troubled childhood, to his arrival in New York in the 1940s, where he studied with the legendary Stella Adler, and at the age of twenty-three became the toast of Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire. Kanfer expertly examines each of Brando’s films – from The Men in 1950 to The Score in 2001 – making clear the evolution of Brando’s singular genius, while also shedding light on the cultural evolution of Hollywood itself. And he brings into focus Brando’s self-destructiveness, his lifelong dissembling, his deeply ambivalent feelings towards his chosen vocation, and the tragedies that shadowed his final years. This is a never-before-seen portrait of one of the most extraordinary talents of the twentieth century.
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.