Joséphine and the Arts of the Empire


Book Description

This richly illustrated book reveals how Joséphine, Napoléon Bonaparte’s empress, shaped the arts of early nineteenth-century France and beyond. Her incomparable sense of style, her passion for collecting, her love of gardens, and her commissions of works by major artists such as Antonio Canova, Jacques-Louis David, Pierre-Paul Prod’hon, and Pierre-Joseph Redouté set the standard for a new aesthetic. On these pages the opulence of Salon culture is set against the tumultuous era of Revolution and Empire, romance and tragedy—a world in which Joséphine rose to her own momentous role in history with singular grace and elegance.




Benjamin Constant


Book Description

`For forty years I have defended the same principle: freedom in everything, in religion, in philosophy, in literature, in industry, in politics - and by freedom I mean the triumph of the individual.' Constant thus summarized his beliefs at the end of his life. A political theorist and a passionate defender of individual liberty, he was also the author of one of the greatest French novels of psychological insight, Adolphe. In a major new biography Dennis Wood traces the development of Constant as a writer centrally preoccupied with the problematics of freedom, not only in the fields of politics and religious belief but also in his own troubled relationship with several women.




Constant Lambert


Book Description

"To the economist and ballet enthusiast John Maynard Keynes he was potentially the most brilliant man he'd ever met; to Dame Ninette de Valois he was the greatest ballet conductor and advisor this country has ever had; to the composer Denis ApIvor he was the greatest, mostr lovable, and most entertaining personality of the musical world; whilst to the dance critic Clement Crisp he was quite simply a musician of genius. Yet sixty years after his ... death Constant Lambert is little known today. As a composer he is remembered for his jazz-inspired The Rio Grande but little more, and for a man who ... devoted the graeter part of his life to the establishment of English ballet his work is largely unrecognized today. [This book] looks not only at his music but at his journalism, his talks for the BBC, his championing of jazz (in particular, Duke Ellington), and, more privately - his longstanding affair with Margot Fonteyn. ..."--Book jacket.




Memoir


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The Publisher


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India Weather Review


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The Constant Diplomat


Book Description

The leaders and politics of the Soviet Union seen through the eyes of an experienced ambassador.