PIMLICO – The Bell Bookshop

Nelson A Dream Of Glory

Emma — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Nelson: A Dream of Glory is the most comprehensive and thoroughly researched account ever written of Horatio Nelson’s rise to international fame. Giving us the private as well as the public man, it combines ground-breaking scholarship with a brilliantly vivid and compelling style.

Passion Of Western Mind

Emma — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The Passion of the Western Mind is a complete guide to Western civilisation and the philosophical ideas that have shaped our world view. From Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud, Richard Tarnas described profound philosophical concepts simply, but without simplifying them.

Ten years in the making, The Passion of the Western Mind was hailed as an instant classic on publication. In it, Tarnas provides a compelling account of the evolution of the Western mind and its changing conception of reality. Advances on several fronts – in philosophy, psychology, religous studies and the history of science – have shed new light on this remarkable evolution and Tarnas draws together these advances to set forth a new perspective for understanding out culture’s intellectual and spiritual history. The result is a complete liberal education in a single volume.

Judgement of Paris

Emma — Thu, 03 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In 1863, the French painter Ernest Meissonier was one of the most famous artists in the world and the darling of the ‘Salon’ – that all important public art exhibition held biannually in Paris. Manet, on the other hand, was struggling in obscurity. Beginning with the year that Manet exhibited his ground-breaking Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe and ending in 1974 with the first ‘Impressionist’ exhibition, Ross King plunges into Parisian life during a ten-year period full of social and political ferment with his usual narrative brillliance.

These were the years in which Napoleon III’s autocratic and pleasure-seeking Second Empire fell from its heights into the ignominy of the Franco-Prussian war and the ensuing Paris Commune of 1871. But it was also a period in which a group of artists, with Manet in the vanguard began to challenge the establishment by turning to the landscapes and ordinary people they saw around them. The struggle between Meissonier and Manet to get their paintings exhibited in pride of place at the Salon was not just about art, it was about how to see the world.

Families Who Made Rome

Emma — Thu, 04 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

How often does a visitor to Rome drift towards some landmark and wonder who created it? Why? What was their story? This fascinating book provides the answers. At once a history and a guide, it divides Rome into the districts dominated by the fabulously rich families of the Popes: the Colonna, della Rovere, Farnese, Borghese, Barberini and others. In each case we learn their story – powerful, bloody and vivid – with all the scandals and intrigues as well as their relationships with artists like Bernini and Michelangelo.

As we stroll through Rome’s history – either literally or in the imagination – we discover it afresh. Famous sites like the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps and St Peter’s take on new significance as we watch the city rise from cramped medieval streets to become a glorious panorama of piazzas and palaces, fountains, towers and domes.

Michelangelo & The Popes Ceiling

Emma — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

In 1508, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The thirty-three-year-old Michelangelo had very little experience of the physically and technically taxing art of fresco; and, at twelve thousand square feet, the ceiling represented one of the largest such projects ever attempted.

Nevertheless, for the next four years he and a hand-picked team of assistants laboured over the vast ceiling, making thousands of drawings and spending back-breaking hours on a scaffold fifty feet above the floor. The result was one of the greatest masterpieces of all time. This fascinating book tells the story of those four extraordinary years and paints a magnificent picture of day-to-day life on the Sistine scaffolding – and outside, in the upheaval of early sixteenth-century Rome.

Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the Liberation at Paris

Emma — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 00:00:00 +0000

The Allied assault on Normandy beaches was an almost flawless success, but it was to take three months of bitter fighting before the German defence of Normandy finally collapsed and Paris was liberated.

In this masterly and highly individual account of that struggle, the reader is subjected to the gruelling ordeals confronted by the combatants – each encounter related from the point of view of a different nationality. While transcending conventional military history, it provides an intensely vivid picture of one of the Second World War’s most crucial campaigns.

Sorcerers Apprentice

Emma — Thu, 07 Sep 2000 00:00:00 +0000

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by John Richardson, author of A Life of Picasso, is a richly entertaining memoir of life with the brilliant but controversial art expert, Douglas Cooper – a fiendish, colourful, Evelyn Waugh-like figure who single-handedly assembled the world’s most important private collection of Cubist paintings.John Richardson tells the story of their ill-fated but comical association, which began in London in 1949 and moved on to the Chateau de Castille, a colonnaded folly in Provence filled with masterpieces by Picasso, Braque, Leger and Juna Gris. Richardson unfurls an adventure lasting twelve years, encompassing artists and writers, collectors and the famous – Francis Bacon, Jean Cocteau, Dora Maar, Peggy Guggenheim and Anthony Blunt to name but a few. Central to the book is Richardson’s close friendship with Picasso, which coincided with the emergence of the artist’s new mistress, Jacqueline Roque, and which gave Richardson an inside view of the repercussions she would have on Picasso’s life and work.

With an extraordinary eye for detail and ear for scandal, Richardson has written a unique saga from behind the scenes of one of the richest periods in European art.

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Other Men’s Flowers

Emma — Thu, 16 Feb 1995 00:00:00 +0000

First published in 1944, during the darkest days of the war, Lord Wavell’s great anthology of English poetry – enhanced by his own introduction and annotations – encouraged and delighted many thousands of readers.

It has remained in print every since, proving beyond doubt that, whatever the fashion of the day, poetry can fulfil its ancient function, finding its way to the hearts of the many, not only to the minds of the few.