The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street


Book Description

A zesty memoir of the celebrated writer's travels to England where she meets the cherished friends from 84, Charing Cross Road.




The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street


Book Description

“A charmer. Will beguile an hour of your time and put you in touch with mankind.” —New York Times Newly reissued with an introduction by Plum Sykes, this cult favorite is a delightful diary—think Nancy Mitford–meets–Nora Ephron—chronicling author Helene Hanff’s “bucket list” trip to London (at the age of fifty-five!) after the unexpected success of her memoir 84 Charing Cross Road. When she’s invited to London for the English publication of her wildly successful book, 84 Charing Cross Road—in which she shares two decades of correspondence with Frank Doel, a British bookseller who became a dear friend—New York writer Helene Hanff is thrilled to realize a lifelong dream. The trip will be bittersweet, because she can’t help wishing Frank was still alive, but she’s determined to capture every moment of the journey. Helene’s time in London exceeds her wildest expectations. She visits landmarks like Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle; explores Shakespeare’s favorite pub, Dickens’s house, and the Oxford University courtyard where John Donne used to walk; and makes a host of new friends from all walks of life, who take her to the theater, introduce her to institutions like Harrod’s, and share with her their favorite corners of countryside. A love letter to England and its literary heritage, written by a Manhattanite who isn’t afraid to speak her mind (or tell a British barman how to make a real American martini), The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street is an endearing account of two wildly different worlds colliding; it’s an outsider’s witty, vibrant portrait of idiosyncratic British culture at its best, as well as a profound commentary about the written word’s power to sustain us, transport us, and unite us.




84 Charing Cross Road


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Q's Legacy


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This memoir tells the remarkable story of how Helene Hanff came to write 84, Charing Cross Road, and how its success changed her. Hanff recalls her serendipitous discovery of a volume of lectures by a Cambridge don, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. She devoured Q’s book, and, wanting to read all the books he recommended, began to order them from a small store in London at 84, Charing Cross Road. Thus began a correspondence that became an enormously popular book, play, television production, and movie, and that finally led to the trip to England -- and a visit to Q’s study -- that she recounts in this exuberant memoir. Hanff pays her debt to her mentor and shares her joyous adventures with her many fans. "Reading Helene Hanff’s book is like making a new friend -- a charming, wise, and funny one." -- Betty Rollin "A potpourri . . . easy and assured . . . A delightful companion for the odd hour." -- San Francisco Chronicle "Hanff’s charm is such that when she exults . . . we exult right along with her." -- Kirkus Reviews




Underfoot In Show Business


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In her spirited, witty and vastly entertaining memoir, Helene Hanff recalls her ingenuous attempts to crash Broadway in the early forties as one of “the other 999.” Naive, nearsighted, frequently penniless but hopelessly stagestruck, she found her life governed by Flanagan’s Law: “No matter what happens to you, it’s unexpected.” Therefore, as a prize-winning Theatre Guild protégée with a brilliant future, Helene naturally found that all the producers who were going to produce her plays didn’t, and all the agents who were going to sell her plays couldn’t. Together with her best friend Maxine, an aspiring actress consigned to playing the comedy-ingénue in plays that regularly folded after five performances, she cultivated the “delicate, illegal art of getting everything for nothing”—from free seats to every Broadway show and neighborhood movie and borrowed outfits from Saks to voice lessons for Maxine and Greek lessons for Helene. To keep body and soul together until Broadway fame arrived, they devised an economic survival system that embraced such unlikely jobs as taking street-corner. Reviews — “Miss Hanff, having a good memory and a lively sense of humor, has composed a theater sketch that is realistic as well as hilarious....One of the most amusing recent theater books about the Broadway theater.”—Brooks Atkinson “A delightful book by an irrepressible author....What really lifts the book to a high level of entertainment is the sparkling humor. To describe the incidents wouldn’t do justice to the book’s charm which comes from the style of writing and Miss Hanff’s boundless optimism.”—Library Journal “A gay and entertaining book which also has substance.”—Boston Herald “Hilarious and highly successful. If you need cheering up, this is it. Here’s hoping Miss Hanff finds more failures to write books about.”—Columbus Dispatch




Letter from New York


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Apple of My Eye


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Inside the Royal Wardrobe


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Queen Alexandra used clothes to fashion images of herself as a wife, a mother and a royal: a woman who both led Britain alongside her husband Edward VII and lived her life through fashion. Inside the Royal Wardrobe overturns the popular portrait of a vapid and neglected queen, examining the surviving garments of Alexandra, Princess of Wales – who later became Queen Consort – to unlock a rich tapestry of royal dress and society in the second half of the 19th century. More than 130 extraordinary garments from Alexandra's wardrobe survive, from sumptuous court dress and politicised fancy dress to mourning attire and elegant coronation gowns, and can be found in various collections around the world, from London, Oslo and Denmark to New York, Toronto and Tokyo. Curator and fashion scholar Kate Strasdin places these garments at the heart of this in-depth study, examining their relationships to issues such as body politics, power, celebrity, social identity and performance, and interpreting Alexandra's world from the objects out. Adopting an object-based methodology, the book features a range of original sources from letters, travel journals and newspaper editorials, to wardrobe accounts, memoirs, tailors' ledgers and business records. Revealing a shrewd and socially aware woman attuned to the popular power of royal dress, the work will appeal to students and scholars of costume, fashion and dress history, as well as of material culture and 19th century history.




The Duchess of Malfi


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More widely studied and more frequently performed than ever before, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi is here presented in an accessible and thoroughly up-to-date edition. Based on the Revels Plays text, the notes have been augmented to cast further light both on Webster's amazing dialogue and on the stage action. An entirely new introduction sets the tragedy in the context of pre-Civil War England and gives a revealing view of its imagery and dramatic action. From its well-documented early performances to the two productions seen in the West End of London in the 1995-96 season, a stage history gives an account of the play in performance. Students, actors, directors and theatre-goers will all find here a reappraisal of Webster's artistry in the greatest age of English theatre, which highlights why it has lived on stage with renewed force in the last decades of the twentieth century.




Building a Life Worth Living


Book Description

Marsha Linehan tells the story of her journey from suicidal teenager to world-renowned developer of the life-saving behavioral therapy DBT, using her own struggle to develop life skills for others. “This book is a victory on both sides of the page.”—Gloria Steinem “Are you one of us?” a patient once asked Marsha Linehan, the world-renowned psychologist who developed Dialectical Behavior Therapy. “Because if you were, it would give all of us so much hope.” Over the years, DBT had saved the lives of countless people fighting depression and suicidal thoughts, but Linehan had never revealed that her pioneering work was inspired by her own desperate struggles as a young woman. Only when she received this question did she finally decide to tell her story. In this remarkable and inspiring memoir, Linehan describes how, when she was eighteen years old, she began an abrupt downward spiral from popular teenager to suicidal young woman. After several miserable years in a psychiatric institute, Linehan made a vow that if she could get out of emotional hell, she would try to find a way to help others get out of hell too, and to build a life worth living. She went on to put herself through night school and college, living at a YWCA and often scraping together spare change to buy food. She went on to get her PhD in psychology, specializing in behavior therapy. In the 1980s, she achieved a breakthrough when she developed Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, a therapeutic approach that combines acceptance of the self and ways to change. Linehan included mindfulness as a key component in therapy treatment, along with original and specific life-skill techniques. She says, "You can't think yourself into new ways of acting; you can only act yourself into new ways of thinking." Throughout her extraordinary scientific career, Marsha Linehan remained a woman of deep spirituality. Her powerful and moving story is one of faith and perseverance. Linehan shows, in Building a Life Worth Living, how the principles of DBT really work—and how, using her life skills and techniques, people can build lives worth living.