European Art

Stefan Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday, recalls the golden age of prewar Europe - its seeming permanence, its promise and its devastating fall with the onset of two world wars. Zweig's passionate, evocative prose paints a stunning portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the brink of extinction. It is an unusually humane account of Europe from the closing years of the 19th century through to World War II, seen through the eyes of one of the most famous writers of his era.

In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, Colm Tóibín turns his incisive gaze to three of Ireland's greatest writers, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, and their earliest influences: their fathers.

In his essay about the life of Irish writer John McGahern, Tóibín reveals the tones of melancholy and amusement within both art and the artist. In his extraordinary essay on his cancer diagnosis, Tóibín unpicks the word 'battle', and illuminates the distress, horror and blankness of his experiences. From the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists, to the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances and tied up with dictators and politics, we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as in Marilynne Robinson's fiction.

Lord Rufford has kissed Arabella twice but she realises that much more needs to be done to win him and his estate. It is now time to tell John Morton she no longer wants to marry him? Starring Robert Glenister, Anna Maxwell Martin, Barbara Flynn, Blake Ritson, Stuart Milligan, Joanna David, Daniel Rabin, Penelope Rawlins, Carl Prekopp, Henry Devas, Elaine Claxton, Joanathan Forbes, Jane Whittenshaw, and Sean Baker. Directed by Tracey Neal. Dramatised by Martyn Wade.

The Importance of Being Earnest is undoubtably Oscar Wilde's best known play probably due to its sharp wit that cannot help but enchant and entertain any reader, theatregoer or listener with this performance.

The Book-Makers is a celebration of 550 years of the printed book, told through the lives of eighteen extraordinary men and women who took the book in radical new directions: printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders. This is a story of skill, craft, mess, cunning, triumph, improvisation, and error.

This audiobook includes unabridged recordings of all George Orwell's greatest non-fiction: three full-length books, a collection of his most well-renowned essays and the complete collection of his poetry.

"This story is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs. It ended, as was inevitable, in disruption. Of the two human beings here described, one was born to fly backward, the other could not help being carried forward. The affection of these two persons was assailed by forces in comparison with which the changes that health or fortune or place introduce are as nothing.

More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the center of political life - yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker.

John Keats died 200 years ago, in February 1821. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined a decade that began 100 years ago, the Jazz Age. In this biography, prizewinning author Jonathan Bate recreates these two shining, tragic lives in parallel. Not only was Fitzgerald profoundly influenced by Keats, titling Tender Is the Night and other works from the poet’s lines, but the two lived with echoing fates: both died young, loved to drink, were plagued by tuberculosis, were haunted by their first love and wrote into a new decade of release, experimentation and decadence.

Between the years of 1762 and 1763, James Boswell kept a journal of his time in London. During his time, he met the renowned writer, moralist, and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, with whom Boswell would form a close relationship. This account, told with much detail and candor, was one of the various journals written by Boswell, but it is the journal that has undergone the least amount of censorship, leading it, and the racy material within, to be deemed a best seller upon publication.

Kim Wall was a thirty-year-old Swedish freelance journalist with a rising career. Then, in the summer of 2017, she followed a story that led to an eccentric inventor in Copenhagen. Instead of writing the next days headline, she'd become one. As the bizarre events of Kim's murder unfolded, the world watched in shocked disbelief. For Kim's distraught parents, Ingrid and Joachim, it was a devastating personal struggle. In the ensuing months, day by grueling day, they had to come to terms with their loss, process the global media attention, and endure the investigation and trial.

Orthodoxy, first published 1908, is Chesterton's spiritual autobiography. Subtitled, 'The romance of faith', Chesterton declares that people need a life of 'practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure.'

This audiobook considers the magnetic poles of post-war modernism and the towering figures of Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock. The essay considers the history of French avant-garde art led by Picasso to the post-war years and the increasing dominance of American artists foregrounded by the advent of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s.

G. K. Chesterton was a journalist, playwright, poet, biographer, novelist, essayist, literary commentator, editor, orator, artist, and theologian. Orthodoxy is his great apologia for the Christian faith, which was prompted by a serious attack in 1903 against Christianity by well-known newspaper editor Robert Blatchford.

Author and singer John Potter tells the European story of song. The form has captivated audiences and excited performers for centuries, from the music of the troubadours and the Christian liturgy through classical composers such as Bach and Schumann up to Britten, Berio, and the rise of popular music. Choosing twelve key works, Potter offers a personal tour through this vital tradition, from John Dowland's "Flow My Tears" to George Gershwin's "Summertime." Throughout, he reveals who wrote and sang these joyful masterpieces—and what they mean to singers and audiences today.

An outbreak of plague in London forces a gentleman, Lovewit, to flee temporarily to the country, leaving his house under the sole charge of his butler, Jeremy. Jeremy uses the opportunity given to him to use the house as the headquarters for fraudulent acts. He transforms himself into "Captain Face", and enlists the aid of Subtle, a fellow conman and Dol Common, a prostitute. In The Alchemist, Jonson unashamedly satirizes the follies, vanities and vices of mankind, most notably greed-induced credulity. People of all social classes are subject to Jonson's ruthless, satirical wit.

" La curiosité est la plus grande des qualités. " Hg Wells. Connaissez-vous la théorie du centième singe ? Le kintsugi ou «art de réparer» ? La prophétie des Hopis ? La machine à parler avec les morts ? La règle du micropénis ? Le nom de l’homme qui a fait le plus de bien a l’humanité ? La vraie histoire des Lilliputiens ? La sexualité des baudroies des abysses ? Le moyen d’inventer des faux souvenirs ? La véritable recette du cassoulet toulousain ? L’histoire des harems turcs ? La manière dont réfléchissent les chats ? La civilisation des géants qui aurait préexisté a notre monde ?

Professional ballerina Ailsa MacIntyre is at the peak of her career when her world is shattered by a shocking diagnosis. Life-saving surgery leaves her with a fractured memory, little recollection of her husband, Evan, and none of her career as a principal dancer. While recuperating at home, Ailsa hears beautiful music coming from the apartment upstairs, and the sound of the grand piano at the hands of a talented new neighbor sparks her muscle memory. As her recovery progresses, the broken pieces of her past gradually re-emerge, a picture not quite what Evan would have her remember.

La Correspondance de Marcel Proust avec sa mère constitue à la fois une véritable biographie de l'écrivain, mais aussi et surtout une porte ouverte sur tous les éléments d'une vie sublimée par l'œuvre à la "Recherche du temps perdu", où on retrouve le narrateur sous un aspect parfois drôle, et souvent provocateur. La sélection de lettres que proposent les Éditions Thélème dresse le portrait vif d'un auteur pour qui "la littérature, c'est la vie".