Genre: History
Author: Julian Barnes
Release: 2020-02-18
File Book: 256
ISBN-10: 9780735279957
Language Options: en
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The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending takes us on a rich, witty, revelatory tour of Belle Époque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi. IN THE SUMMER OF 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' shopping: a prince, a count and a commoner with an Italian name. In time, each of these men would achieve a certain level of renown, but who were they then and what was the significance of their sojourn to England? Answering these questions, Julian Barnes unfurls the stories of their lives, playing out against the backdrop of the Belle Époque in Paris. Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, the society doctor, free-thinker and man of science with a famously complicated private life, and the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits. In this vivid tapestry of people (Henry James, Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, Proust, James Whistler, among many others), place, and time, we see not merely an epoch of glamour and pleasure, but, surprisingly, one of violence, prejudice and nativism--with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. The Man in the Red Coat is, at once, a fresh portrait of the Belle Époque; an illuminating look at the longstanding exchange of ideas between Britain and France; and a life of a man who lived passionately in the moment but whose ideas and achievements were far ahead of his time.

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Genre: History
Author: Julian Barnes
Release: 2020-02-18
File Book: 288
ISBN-10: 9780525658788
Language Options: en
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From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending—a rich, witty, revelatory tour of Belle Époque Paris, via the remarkable life story of the pioneering surgeon, Samuel Pozzi. In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' intellectual shopping: a prince, a count, and a commoner with an Italian name. In time, each of these men would achieve a certain level of renown, but who were they then and what was the significance of their sojourn to England? Answering these questions, Julian Barnes unfurls the stories of their lives which play out against the backdrop of the Belle Époque in Paris. Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, the society doctor, free-thinker and man of science with a famously complicated private life who was the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits. In this vivid tapestry of people (Henry James, Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, Proust, James Whistler, among many others), place, and time, we see not merely an epoch of glamour and pleasure, but, surprisingly, one of violence, prejudice, and nativism—with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. The Man in the Red Coat is, at once, a fresh portrait of the Belle Époque; an illuminating look at the longstanding exchange of ideas between Britain and France; and a life of a man who lived passionately in the moment but whose ideas and achievements were far ahead of his time.

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Genre: Biography & Autobiography
Author: Julian Barnes
Release: 2019-11-07
File Book: 280
ISBN-10: 9781473574038
Language Options: en
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The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending takes us on a rich, witty tour of Belle Epoque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days’ shopping. One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner with an Italian name, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent’s greatest portraits. The commoner was Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, pioneer gynaecologist and free-thinker – a rational and scientific man with a famously complicated private life. Pozzi's life played out against the backdrop of the Parisian Belle Epoque. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side: hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, a time of rampant prejudice and blood-and-soil nativism, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. The Man in the Red Coat is at once a fresh and original portrait of the Belle Epoque – its heroes and villains, its writers, artists and thinkers – and a life of a man ahead of his time. Witty, surprising and deeply researched, the new book from Julian Barnes illuminates the fruitful and longstanding exchange of ideas between Britain and France, and makes a compelling case for keeping that exchange alive.

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Genre: Fiction
Author: Kate Hamer
Release: 2015-02-24
File Book: 304
ISBN-10: 9780571313259
Language Options: en
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She is the missing girl. But she doesn't know she's lost. Carmel Wakeford becomes separated from her mother at a local children's festival, and is found by a man who claims to be her estranged grandfather. He tells her that her mother has had an accident and that she is to live with him for now. As days become weeks with her new family, 8-year-old Carmel realises that this man believes she has a special gift... While her mother desperately tries to find her, Carmel embarks on an extraordinary journey, one that will make her question who she is - and who she might become.

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Genre: Biography & Autobiography
Author: Julian Barnes
Release: 2010-05-28
File Book: 256
ISBN-10: 9780307368447
Language Options: en
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"I don’t believe in God, but I miss him." So begins Julian Barnes’s brilliant new book that is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the writer Jules Renard. Barnes also draws poignant portraits of the last days of his parents, recalled with great detail, affection and exasperation. Other examples he takes up include writers, "most of them dead and quite a few of them French," as well as some composers, for good measure. The grace with which Barnes weaves together all of these threads makes the experience of reading the book nothing less than exhilarating. Although he cautions us that "this is not my autobiography," the book nonetheless reveals much about Barnes the man and the novelist: how he thinks and how he writes and how he lives. At once deadly serious and dazzlingly playful, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a wise, funny and constantly surprising tour of the human condition. From the Hardcover edition.

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Genre: Fiction
Author: Dolley Carlson
Release: 2018-10-23
File Book: 483
ISBN-10: 9781510743328
Language Options: en
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Think Downton Abbey, set in the heart of Boston Irish domestic worker Norah King's decision to ask her wealthy employer, Caroline Parker, for an elegant red coat that the Beacon Hill matriarch has marked for donation ignites a series of events that neither woman could have fathomed. The unlikely exchange will impact their respective daughters and families for generations to come, from the coat's original owner, marriage-minded collegian Cordelia Parker, to the determined and spirited King sisters of South Boston, Rosemary, Kay, and Rita. As all of these young women experience the realities of life – love and loss, conflict and joy, class prejudices and unexpected prospects – the red coat reveals the distinction between cultures, generations, and landscapes in Boston during the 1940s and 50s, a time of change, challenge, and opportunity. Meet the proud, working-class Irish and staid, upper-class Brahmins through the contrasting lives of these two families and their friends and neighbors. See how the Parkers and the Kings each overcome sudden tragedy with resolve and triumph. And witness the profound impact of a mother’s heart on her children’s souls. Carlson brings us front and center with her knowing weave of Celtic passion – both tragic and joyful – words of wisdom, romance, humor, and historical events. Dive into Boston feet first! The Red Coat is a rich novel that chronicles the legacy of Boston from both sides of the city, Southie and the Hill.

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Genre: Biography & Autobiography
Author: Roma Ligocka
Release: 2016-01-12
File Book: 304
ISBN-10: 9781250111227
Language Options: en
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When she first saw Schindler's List--to whose premiere in Germany she was invited--Roma Ligocka suddenly realized she was witnessing a part of her own life. She felt instinctively that the little girl in the red coat--the only spot of color in the film--was her. When she had lived in the Krakow ghetto during the Second World War she had worn a strawberry-red coat given to her by her grandmother. Unlike the girl in Spielbeg's film, however, Roma survived the war. Startled by this eerie conjunction of art and reality, Ligocka determined to write the story of her own life, to find out what had become of the little girl, and to measure who she now was. From a harrowing childhood under the Nazis, described with a simplicity and innocence that lends it even greater power, through the trials of living in Communist Poland, to a career in the theater and film (an artistic struggle paralleling that of her cousin, Roman Polanski), Ligocka traces her struggle for self-defiition and happiness. The Girl in the Red Coat is a courageous and moving story of survival and triumph.

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Genre: Literary Criticism
Author: Leo Damrosch
Release: 2019-03-26
File Book: 512
ISBN-10: 9780300244960
Language Options: en
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Prize-winning biographer Leo Damrosch tells the story of “the Club,” a group of extraordinary writers, artists, and thinkers who gathered weekly at a London tavern In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk’s Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as “the Club.” In this captivating book, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters. With the friendship of the “odd couple” Samuel Johnson and James Boswell at the heart of his narrative, Damrosch conjures up the precarious, exciting, and often brutal world of late eighteenth-century Britain. This is the story of an extraordinary group of people whose ideas helped to shape their age, and our own.

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Genre: History
Author: Richard Holmes
Release: 2011-10-06
File Book: 400
ISBN-10: 9780007374052
Language Options: en
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Redcoat is the brilliant story of the common British soldier from 1700 to 1900, based on the letters and diaries of the men who served and the women who followed them.

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Genre: Art
Author: Julian Barnes
Release: 2015-10-06
File Book: 288
ISBN-10: 9780345815194
Language Options: en
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An extraordinary collection--hawk-eyed and understanding--from the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending and Levels of Life. As Julian Barnes explains: "Flaubert believed that...great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting... But it is a rare picture which stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged." This is the exact dynamic that informs his new book. Barnes, in his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, had a chapter on Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, and since then he has written about many great masters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, including Delacroix, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Cezanne, Degas, Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenburg, Howard Hodgkin and Lucian Freud. The seventeen essays gathered here are adroit, insightful and, above all, a true pleasure to read.

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