by James Fenton (1998)
"James Fenton, one of England's most gifted poets, has in recent years been looking closely at works of art and writing incisively and inventively about them and their creators. Leonardo's Nephew collects fifteen pieces, most originally published in The New York Review of Books, in which he discusses a wide range of painting and sculpture, from the mummy portraits of ancient Egypt and the few surviving works of the fifteenth-century sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio to Seurat's bathers in the Seine, the boxes of Joseph Cornell, and the works of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns."--BOOK JACKET.
Hanns Zischler
"Went to the movies. Wept. Boundless entertainment." So wrote Franz Kafka in one of his diaries, giving but one hint of his little-known passion for the cinema. Kafka aficionados have been left to speculate about which films moved Kafka and how those films might have influenced his writing. Here, the author draws on years of detective work to provide an account of Kafka's moviegoing life.
G.D. Sheffield
This collection of essays, written by members of the British Commission for Military History, examines key aspects of the experience of the US and British armies, ranging from the American Civil War to the most recent example of high intensity manoeuvre war, the Gulf Conflict of 1991. The exercise of command in particular is an under-researched area and the essays make a major contribution to our understanding of this vital topic.
Danielle Steel
"A dazzling contemporary novel that interweaves the lives of a Russian mistress and the young French painter who falls in love with her. Set in the South of France, London, and Paris, a gorgeous, innocent mistress of a Russian oligarch gradually finds independence via her own efforts and through her friendship with the artist son of a world-renowned painter and his devoted muse/now restaurateur mother, reminiscent of Picasso and La Colombe D'or in St-Paul-de-Vence. A glamorous, elegant story that will resonate with Steel's audience, with an element of intrigue that will keep readers turning the pages"--
Geoffrey Batchen
In an 1828 letter to his partner Nicephore Niepce, Louis Daguerre wrote, "I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature." In this book, Geoffrey Batchen analyzes the desire to photograph as it emerged within the philosophical and scientific milieus that preceded the actual invention of photography. Recent accounts of photography's identity tend to divide between the postmodern view that all identity is determined by context and a formalist effort to define the fundamental characteristics of photography as a medium. Batchen critiques both approaches by way of a detailed discussion of photography's conception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this refiguring of the traditional story of photography's origins, Batchen examines the output of the various nominees for "first photographer," then incorporates this information into a mode of historical criticism informed by the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The result is a way of thinking about photography that persuasively accords with the medium's undeniable conceptual, political, and historical complexity.