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EBookClubs

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Book Ossie Clark Diaries Pbk

Download or read book Ossie Clark Diaries Pbk written by Ossie Clark and published by . This book was released on 2002-01 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The diaries of Ossie Clark, one of the most influential names in post-war British fashion. He created exquisite and outrageous costumes for the famous of London, New York, Paris and Rome, many of whom became his friends: Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, Twiggy, Eric Clapton, George Harrison and Andy Warhol. At the peak of his career he enjoyed superstar status (Hockney painted him in 1971). He was the archetypal flawed genius, living a jet-set life for ten years, but finally falling due to his lack of business acumen and his undisciplined talent. He was bankrupt by the early 1980s and his marraige to Celia Birtwell, Hockney's muse, had foundered because of his affairs with men. In his last few years he became interested in Buddhism and lived in a small council flat in Holland Park where he was murdered by his lover in 1996.

Book A Constant Heart

Download or read book A Constant Heart written by Maud Russell and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The publication of Maud Russell's diaries is of considerable importance. Together with her husband Gilbert, Maud's principal home was Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire which she later gave to the National Trust. To many she was an enigma, but the diaries reveal a woman of strong emotion with an immense appetite for life.

Book A London Year

    Book Details:
  • Author : Travis Elborough
  • Publisher : Frances Lincoln Adult
  • Release : 2013-10-03
  • ISBN : 1781311447
  • Pages : 609 pages

Download or read book A London Year written by Travis Elborough and published by Frances Lincoln Adult. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVA London Year is an anthology of short diary entries, one or more for each day of the year, which, taken together, provides an impressionistic portrait of life in the city from Tudor times to the twenty-first century. This ebook edition, with its own distinct cover, has been optimised for the digital reader. A hyperlinked contents page makes it easy for the reader to dip in and out of the book while each 'page' is dedicated to a separate day. To further improve formatting, the illustrations from the printed edition have been omitted. We promise this does not detract from the reading experience. This ebook serves as the perfect accompaniment to the print edition. There are more than two hundred featured writers, with a short biography for each. The most famous diarist of all - Samuel Pepys - is there, as well as some of today’s finest diarists like Alan Bennett and Chris Mullin. There are coronations and executions, election riots and zeppelin raids, duels, dust-ups and drunken sprees, among everyday moments like Brian Eno cycling in Kilburn or George Eliot walking on Wimbledon Common. Vividly evoking moments in the lives of Londoners in the past, providing snapshots of the city’s inhabitants at work, at play, in pursuit of money, sex, entertainment, pleasure and power, the ebook of A London Year is the perfect read for all who live in or love this eternal, ever-changing city./div

Book The Assassin s Cloak

Download or read book The Assassin s Cloak written by Irene Taylor and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2020-11-05 with total page 960 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A diary is an assassin's cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen', wrote William Soutar in 1934. But a diary is also a place for recording everyday thoughts and special occasions, private fears and hopeful dreams. The Assassin's Cloak gathers together some of the most entertaining and inspiring entries for each day of the year, as writers ranging from Queen Victoria to Andy Warhol, Samuel Pepys to Adrian Mole, pen their musings on the historic and the mundane. Spanning centuries and international in scope, this peerless anthology pays tribute to a genre that is at once the most intimate and public of all literary forms. This new updated edition is published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the book's original publication.

Book A Chequered Past

Download or read book A Chequered Past written by Peter Schlesinger and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A Chequered Past' guides reader with a wry eye through the artists’ studios, fashion shows, country houses and gay discos that made London such a magnet during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Schlesinger provides lengthy, entertaining captions that remind us why London was such a swinging and sometimes outrageous scene.

Book The War Diaries

Download or read book The War Diaries written by Irene Taylor and published by Canongate Us. This book was released on 2006 with total page 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the creators of The Assassin's Cloak comes an anthology of powerful and sometimes surprising daily wartime diary entries from war fronts throughout history. The War Diaries brings together--in their own words--the stories of men and women who have endured life at its most intense and dangerous. By turns horrific and comic, the entries retain the candid intimacy that is the particular preserve of those who keep diaries. From Che Guevara, Virginia Woolf, and Davy Crockett to anonymous soldiers in the trenches, these poignant and intense missives capture the immediacy, horror, and pathos of wars that span the centuries. With a remarkable cross-section of contributors--Josef Goebbels, Anaïs Nin, Florence Nightingale, Samuel Pepys, and Salam Pax to name just a few--Irene and Alan Taylor bring unprecedented insight into what has been described as "the most exciting and dramatic thing in life" and "the universal perversion" war. This book is a unique gift for history enthusiasts everywhere.

Book Encyclopedia of Life Writing

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Life Writing written by Margaretta Jolly and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 3905 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2001. This is the first substantial reference work in English on the various forms that constitute "life writing." As this term suggests, the Encyclopedia explores not only autobiography and biography proper, but also letters, diaries, memoirs, family histories, case histories, and other ways in which individual lives have been recorded and structured. It includes entries on genres and subgenres, national and regional traditions from around the world, and important auto-biographical writers, as well as articles on related areas such as oral history, anthropology, testimonies, and the representation of life stories in non-verbal art forms.

Book Swamplandia

    Book Details:
  • Author : Karen Russell
  • Publisher : Vintage
  • Release : 2011-02-01
  • ISBN : 0307595447
  • Pages : 417 pages

Download or read book Swamplandia written by Karen Russell and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The bravely imagined, wildly acclaimed debut novel from the author of Vampires in the Lemon Grove—about a thirteen year old girl who sets out on a mission through magical swamps to save her family. "Ms. Russell is one in a million.... A suspensfuly, deeply haunted book." —The New York Times Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at Swamplandia!, her family’s island home and gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, the family is plunged into chaos; her father withdraws, her sister falls in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a rival park called The World of Darkness. As Ava embarks on her mission to save them all, we are drawn into a lush debut that takes us to the shimmering edge of reality.

Book Contemporary Fashion

    Book Details:
  • Author : Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf
  • Publisher : Saint James Press
  • Release : 2002
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 776 pages

Download or read book Contemporary Fashion written by Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf and published by Saint James Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 776 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reference book covering individual designers and fashion houses that have been active throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Informative essays mirror the many facets of the fashion world.

Book David Hockney

Download or read book David Hockney written by Christopher Simon Sykes and published by Nan A. Talese. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on exclusive and unprecedented access to David Hockney’s extensive archives, notebooks, and paintings, interviews with family, friends, and on Hockney himself, Christopher Simon Sykes provides a colorful and intimate portrait of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Born in 1937, David Hockney grew up in a northern English town during the days of postwar austerity. By the time he was ten years old he knew he wanted to be an artist, and after leaving school he went on to study at Bradford Art College and later at the Royal College of Art in London. Bursting onto the scene at the Young Contemporaries exhibition, Hockney was quickly heralded as the golden boy of postwar British art and a leading proponent of pop art. It was during the swinging 60s in London that he befriended many of the seminal cultural figures of the generation and throughout these years Hockney's career grew. Always absorbed in his work, he drew, painted and etched for long hours each day, but it was a scholarship that led him to California, where he painted his iconic series of swimming pools. Since then, the most prestigious galleries across the world have devoted countless shows to his extraordinary work. In the seventies he expanded his range of projects, including set and costume design for operas and experiments with photography, lithography, and even photocopying. Most recently he has been at the forefront the art world's digital revolution, producing incredible sketches on his iPhone and iPad, and it is this progressive thinking which has highlighted his genius, vigor and versatility as an artist approaching his 75th birthday. In this, the first volume of Hockney’s biography, detailing his life and work from 1937 - 1975, Sykes explores the fascinating world of the beloved and controversial artist whose career has spanned and epitomized the art movements of the last five decades. "The timing couldn't be better for this enjoyable and well-sourced book, which — like Hockney's own work — is both conversational and perceptive." —Los Angeles Times "To read Christopher Simon Sykes' David Hockney is to marvel at the artistic gifts of the eccentric Yorkshireman who rose from a sometimes pinched childhood to hobnob with poet Stephen Spender and novelist Christopher Isherwood, to party with Mick Jagger and Manolo Blahnik." —The Plain Dealer "Prodigiously entertaining." —Financial Times “A chatty, knowledgeable, insider's biography, full of anecdotes.” —The Guardian

Book Old Gods Almost Dead

Download or read book Old Gods Almost Dead written by Stephen Davis and published by Crown Archetype. This book was released on 2001-12-11 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed, bestselling rock-and-roll biographer delivers the first complete, unexpurgated history of the world’s greatest band. The saga of the Rolling Stones is the central epic in rock mythology. From their debut as the intermission band at London’s Marquee Club in 1962 through their latest record—setting Bridges to Babylon world tour, the Rolling Stones have defined a musical genre and experienced godlike adulation, quarrels, addiction, legal traumas, and descents into madness and death_while steadfastly refusing to fade away. Now Stephen Davis, the New York Times bestselling author of Hammer of the Gods and Walk This Way, who has followed the Stones for three decades, presents their whole story, replete with vivid details of the Stones’ musical successes_and personal excesses. Born into the wartime England of air-raid sirens, bombing raids, and strict rationing, the Rolling Stones came of age in the 1950s, as American blues and pop arrived in Europe. Among London’s most ardent blues fans in the early 1960s was a short blond teenage guitar player named Brian Jones, who hooked up with a lorry driver’s only son, Charlie Watts, a jazz drummer. At the same time, popular and studious Michael Philip Jagger–who, as a boy, bawled out a phonetic version of “La Bamba” with an eye-popping intensity that scared his parents–began sharing blues records with a primary school classmate, Keith “Ricky” Richards, a shy underachiever, whose idol was Chuck Berry. In 1962 the four young men, joined by Bill Perks (later Wyman) on bass, formed a band rhythm and blues band, which Brian Jones named the “the Rollin’ Stones” in honor of the Muddy Waters blues classic. Using the biography of the Rolling Stones as a narrative spine, Old God Almost Dead builds a new, multilayered version of the Stones’ story, locating the band beyond the musical world they dominated and showing how they influenced, and were influenced by, the other artistic movements of their era: the blues revival, Swinging London, the Beats, Bob Dylan’s Stones-inspired shift from protest to pop, Pop Art and Andy Warhol’s New York, the “Underground” politics of the 1960s, Moroccan energy and European orientalism, Jamaican reggae, the Glam and Punk subcultures, and the technologic advances of the video and digital revolution. At the same time, Old Gods Almost Dead documents the intense backstage lives of the Stones: the feuds, the drugs, the marriages, and the affairs that inspired and informed their songs; and the business of making records and putting on shows. The first new biography of the Rolling Stones since the early 1980s, Old Gods Almost Dead is the most comprehensive book to date, and one of the few to cover all the band’s members. Illustrated throughout with photos of pivotal moments, it is a celebration of the Rolling Stones as an often courageous, often foolish gang of artists who not only showed us new worlds, but new ways of living in them. It is a saga as raunchily, vibrantly entertaining as the Stones themselves.

Book The Beautiful Fall

Download or read book The Beautiful Fall written by Alicia Drake and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2009-02-28 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive biography of the late designer, Karl Lagerfeld, and his infamous rivalry with Yves Saint Laurent. In the 1970s, Paris fashion exploded like a champagne bottle left out in the sun. Amid sequins and longing, celebrities and aspirants flocked to the heart of chic, and Paris became a hothouse of revelry, intrigue, and searing ambition. At the center of it all were fashion's most beloved luminaries - Yves Saint Laurent, the reclusive enfant terrible, and Karl Lagerfeld, the flamboyant freelancer with a talent for reinvention - and they divided Paris into two fabulous halves. Their enduring rivalry is chronicled in this dazzling exposè of an era: of social ambitions, shared obsessions, and the mesmerizing quest for beauty. "Deliciously dramatic... The Beautiful Fall crackles with excitement."-New York Times Book Review "Fascinating." -New York Times "Addictive." -Philadelphia Inquirer "It's like US Weekly, 1970s style." -Gotham "A story constructed as exquisitely as a couture dress. . . . It moves stylishly forward, with frequent over-the-shoulder glances at some very dishy background." -Boston Globe

Book A Tomb With a View     The Stories   Glories of Graveyards

Download or read book A Tomb With a View The Stories Glories of Graveyards written by Peter Ross and published by Headline. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A FINANCIAL TIMES, I PAPER AND STYLIST BOOK OF THE YEAR 'In his absorbing book about the lost and the gone, Peter Ross takes us from Flanders Fields to Milltown to Kensal Green, to melancholy islands and surprisingly lively ossuaries . . . a considered and moving book on the timely subject of how the dead are remembered, and how they go on working below the surface of our lives.' - Hilary Mantel 'Ross is a wonderfully evocative writer, deftly capturing a sense of place and history, while bringing a deep humanity to his subject. He has written a delightful book.' - The Guardian 'The pages burst with life and anecdote while also examining our relationship with remembrance.' - Financial Times (best travel books of 2020) 'Among the year's most surprising "sleeper" successes is A Tomb with a View. In a year with so much death, it may have initially seemed a hard sell, but the author's humanity has instead acted as a beacon of light in the darkness.' -The Sunday Times 'Fascinating . . . Ross makes a likeably idiosyncratic guide and one finishes the book feeling strangely optimistic about the inevitable.' - The Observer 'Ross has written [a] lively elegy to Britain's best burial grounds.' - Evening Standard (*Best New Books of Autumn 2020*) 'One of the non-fiction books of the year.' - The i paper (*2020 Best Books for Christmas*) 'Brilliant.' - Stylist (*Best Christmas books for Christmas 2020*) 'Never has a book about death been so full of life. James Joyce and Charles Dickens would've loved it - a book that reveals much gravity in the humour and many stories in the graveyard. It also reveals Peter Ross to be among the best non-fiction writers in the country.' - Andrew O'Hagan For readers of The Salt Path, Mudlarking, Ghostland, Kathleen Jamie and Robert Macfarlane. Enter a grave new world of fascination and delight as award-winning writer Peter Ross uncovers the stories and glories of graveyards. Who are London's outcast dead and why is David Bowie their guardian angel? What is the remarkable truth about Phoebe Hessel, who disguised herself as a man to fight alongside her sweetheart, and went on to live in the reigns of five monarchs? Why is a Bristol cemetery the perfect wedding venue for goths? All of these sorrowful mysteries - and many more - are answered in A Tomb With A View, a book for anyone who has ever wandered through a field of crooked headstones and wondered about the lives and deaths of those who lie beneath.

Book Loulou   Yves

Download or read book Loulou Yves written by Christopher Petkanas and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No one interested in fashion, style, or the high-flying intrigues of café society will want to miss Christopher Petkanas’s exuberantly entertaining oral biography Loulou & Yves: The Untold Story of Loulou de La Falaise and the House of Saint Laurent. Dauntless, “in the bone” style made Loulou de La Falaise one of the great fashion firebrands of the twentieth century. Descending in a direct line from Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, she was celebrated at her death in 2011, aged just sixty-four, as the “highest of haute bohemia,” a feckless adventuress in the art of living—and the one person Yves Saint Laurent could not live without. Yves was the most influential designer of his times; possibly also the most neurasthenic. In an exquisitely intimate, sometimes painful personal and professional relationship, Loulou was his creative right hand, muse, alter ego and the virtuoso behind all the flamboyant accessories that were a crucial component of the YSL “look.” For thirty years, until his retirement in 2002, Yves relied on Loulou to inspire him, make him laugh and talk him off the ledge—the enchanted formula that brought him from one historic collection to the next. Yves’s many tributes shape Loulou’s memory, as if everything there was to know about this fugitive, Giacometti-like figure could be told by her clanking bronze cuffs, towering fur toques, the turquoise boulders on her fingers and her working friendship with the man who put women in pants. But another, darker story lifts the veil on Loulou, a classic “number two” with a contempt for convention, and exposes the underbelly of fashion at its highest level. Behind Yves’s encomiums are a pair of aristocrat parents—Loulou’s shiftless French father and menacingly chic English mother—who abandoned her to a childhood of foster care and sexual abuse; Loulou’s recurring desperation to leave Yves and go out on her own; and the grandiose myths surrounding her family. Loulou felt that her life had been kidnapped by the operatic workings of the House of Saint Laurent, and in her last years faced financial ruin. Loulou & Yves unspools an elusive fashion idol—nymphomaniacal, heedless and up to her bracelets in coke and Boizel champagne—at the core of what used to be called “le beau monde.”

Book A Year in High Heels

Download or read book A Year in High Heels written by Camilla Morton and published by Hodder & Stoughton. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If your resolutions tend to look much the same from one year to another and you are suffering from the suspicion that someone, somewhere is having more fun that you, then you need something to revitalise your lust for life. A YEAR IN HIGH HEELS is here to help. This book will guide you through the months with a perfectly co-ordinated combination of culture and challenges. With a monthly muse to inspire, and a suggested title for that soon-to-be-formed book club, dumbing down is so last season. Erin O'Connor, Diane von Furstenberg, Matthew Williamson and others share their secrets about their favourite places - so the next time you check in you'll know what to check out - while Dita von Teese, Anya Hindmarch and Christian Lacroix show you how to undress, how to go green and how to appreciate opera. Eclectic, practical and fantastical, A YEAR IN HIGH HEELS is crammed with fascinating stories, inspiring ideas and surprisingly sensible advice. Forget who, when, why and what to wear. Get ready to wow!

Book A Year with Swollen Appendices

Download or read book A Year with Swollen Appendices written by Brian Eno and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The diary and essays of Brian Eno republished twenty-five years on with a new introduction by the artist in a beautiful hardback edition.'One of the seminal books about music . . . an invaluable insight into the mind and working practices of one of the industry's undeniable geniuses.'GUARDIANAt the end of 1994, Brian Eno resolved to keep a diary. His plans to go to the cinema, theatre and galleries fell quickly to the wayside. What he did do - and write - however, was astonishing: ruminations on his collaborative work with David Bowie, U2, James and Jah Wobble, interspersed with correspondence and essays dating back to 1978. These 'appendices' covered topics from the generative and ambient music Eno pioneered to what he believed the role of an artist and their art to be, alongside adroit commentary on quotidian tribulations and happenings around the world.This beautiful 25th-anniversary hardcover edition has been redesigned in the same size as the diary that eventually became this book. It features two ribbons, pink paper delineating the appendices (matching the original edition) and a two-tone paper-over-board cover, which pays homage to the original design.An intimate insight into one of the most influential creative artists of our time, A Year with Swollen Appendices is an essential classic.

Book House of Nutter

Download or read book House of Nutter written by Lance Richardson and published by Crown Archetype. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The strange, illuminative true story of Tommy Nutter, the Savile Row tailor who changed the silhouette of men’s fashion—and his rock photographer brother, David, who captured it all on film. From an early age, there was something different about Tommy and David Nutter. Growing up in an austere apartment above a café catering to truck drivers, both boys seemed destined to lead rather humble lives in post-war London—Tommy as a civil servant, David as a darkroom technician. Yet the strength of their imagination (plus a little help from their friends) transformed them instead into unlikely protagonists of a swinging cultural revolution. In 1969, at the age of twenty-six, Tommy opened an unusual new boutique on the “golden mile” of bespoke tailoring, Savile Row. While shocking a haughty establishment resistant to change, “Nutters of Savile Row” became an immediate sensation among the young, rich, and beautiful, beguiling everyone from Bianca Jagger to the Beatles—who immortalized Tommy’s designs on the album cover of Abbey Road. Meanwhile, David’s innate talent with a camera vaulted him across the Atlantic to New York City, where he found himself in a parallel constellation of stars (Yoko Ono, Elton John) who enjoyed his dry wit almost as much as his photography. House of Nutter tells the stunning true story of two gay men who influenced some of the most iconic styles and pop images of the twentieth century. Drawing on interviews with more than seventy people—and taking advantage of unparalleled access to never-before-seen pictures, letters, sketches, and diaries—journalist Lance Richardson presents a dual portrait of brothers improvising their way through five decades of extraordinary events, their personal struggles playing out against vivid backdrops of the Blitz, an obscenity trial, the birth of disco, and the devastation of the AIDS crisis. A propulsive, deftly plotted narrative filled with surprising details and near-operatic twists, House of Nutter takes readers on a wild ride into the minds and times of two brilliant dreamers.