Edition: 1st Broadway Books Trade Pbk. Ed
Publication date: 2008-05-01
Dewey code: 811.54
Price: £8.91
Review Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir / Broadway Books (A Division of Bantam Doubleday Del:
Edition: 1st Grove Press Ed
Publication date: 2000-08-25
Dewey code: 818.5403
Price: £8.99
Review Indian Journals / Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press:
Publication date: 2001-06-14
RRP: £20.00
Price: £8.09
Review Dangerous Muse: A Life Of Caroline Blackwood: A Life of Caroline Blackwood / Weidenfeld & Nicolson:American academic-writer Nancy Schoenberger's candid yet sympathetic biography of Caroline Blackwood, Dangerous Muse, portrays a volatile, charismatic beauty of Guinness pedigree who embraced more than a touch of the dark stuff of life. After a miserable Anglo-Irish childhood belonging to an Elizabeth Bowen novel, Blackwood met her first husband, the "wolfishly handsome", and somewhat terrifying painter Lucian Freud, when he and Francis Bacon booed Princess Margaret as she sang a medley of Cole Porter numbers at a ball in 1949. Their marriage lasted three alcohol-led Soho years, before she moved on to American composer Israel Citkowitz. Where she inspired Freud, Citkowitz was silenced by their marriage, reduced to menial household activity that led guests to think he was the janitor. Her third, and main, marriage was to seminal American poet Robert Lowell, equipped with a lineage as distinguished as hers, and the manic depression to match. He was to refer to her in the bruisingly honest "The Dolphin" as "a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers ". He also referred to their domestic life in Kent as "like two eggs cracking", and while their creative life was co-inspirational (she was a decent, if unblinking, writer), he was the first to fall apart, dying in the back of a New York cab clutching Girl in Bed, Freud's portrait of Blackwood, and a symbolism of which the painter's grandfather would have been proud. She was herself to die of cancer in 1996, aged 64. These were the three major partnerships of a tempestuous life, but all eventually came second to the bottle, which caused a dramatic transformation from wide-eyed debutante waif to haggardly haunted beauty, less faded than soaked, with heavily painted panda eyes. Drink loosened her wicked, inspired tongue, but also set free the demons that led her to neglect the children she loved, and to live in often abject conditions. [+]Nancy Schoenberger does a competent job with the "black Irish gothic" of her story, and manages to convey something of Blackwood's mercurial presence, though perhaps a better sense of the Lowell years is conveyed in Ian Hamilton's Robert Lowell. It will remain a pity that Blackwood did not live long enough to pen her own memoirs, but Schoenberger has written a shrewd, if occasionally timid, account of a talented, doomed beauty, a sometime muse who proved most dangerous, ultimately, to herself. -David Vincent.
Creator: Catherine E. Ward
Publication date: 1974-06
Dewey code: 861
RRP: £12.25
Price: £6.34
Review The Gaucho Martin Fierro (UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. Latin-American) / State University of New York Press:
Publication date: 2000-04-10
Dewey code: 809
RRP: £12.95
Price: £6.32
Review The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane / W W Norton & Co Ltd:
Authors
- Terry Dolan
- Juliette Dor
- Terry Jones
Publication date: 2006-06-13
Dewey code: 809
Price: £11.14
Review Who Murdered Chaucer"": A Medieval Mystery / St. Martin's Griffin:
Publication date: 1994-05-05
Dewey code: 823.914
RRP: £16.99
Price: £21.18
Review The History of the Ginger Man / Houghton Mifflin (Trade):
Creator: Steven Aggelis
Edition: New title
Publication date: 2004-12-09
Dewey code: 813.54
RRP: £16.99
Price: £6.87
Review Conversations with Ray Bradbury (Literary Conversations (Paperback)) / University Press of Mississippi:
Edition: New e.
Publication date: 2001-04-25
Dewey code: 821.912
RRP: £13.40
Price: £11.97
Review T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life / W. W. Norton & Co.:
Publication date: 1999-04-15
RRP: £15.99
Price: £4.47
Review Girlitude: A Portrait of the 50s and 60s / Jonathan Cape:In Strangers, her first foray into biography, Emma Tennant chronicled the lives of her eccentric, aristocratic forebears and their Scottish Gothic castle, Glen, in a languid, romantic memoir. Her next instalment, the delightfully entitled Girlitude: A Portrait of the 50s and 60s, concentrates on Tennant's own "long adolescence" from 18 to 30, her three marriages, her lovers, her experiences as a magazine journalist and first-time novelist, all set against the back-drop of the post-war boom of the 1950s and the free love and revolution of the 1960s. Tennant writes in glittering, witty prose of her life at this time: one of the last debutantes to be presented at court, she became a young woman lurching from one marriage to the next, with a small child to support, a fledgling writing career and a host of connections on the London literary scene. She remained dependent on her parents until her late 20s and never felt she had grown up until her daughter was born in 1969. "If I have given birth to a woman, I ponder afterwards, can I at last give up being a girl?" Wry and poignant by turns, Girlitude is a sparkling portrait of the writer's golden years, and a vivid account of her changing times. -Catherine Taylor.
Publication date: 2002-03-23
RRP: £25.00
Price: £24.98
Review Paradise Remembered: Ursula Vaughan Williams - An Autobiography / Albion Music Ltd:
Publication date: 2008-10-15
Dewey code: 973.7092
RRP: £20.50
Price: £9.84
Review Abraham Lincoln and Robert Burns: Connected Lives and Legends / Southern Illinois University Press:
Creator: Patrick Olivelle
Publication date: 2008-02-15
Dewey code: 294.3823
RRP: £12.95
Price: £12.27
Review "The Life of the Buddha" (Clay Sanskrit Library) / New York University Press:
Publication date: 2002-10-25
RRP: £20.00
Price: £1.94
Review Slipstream: A Memoir / Macmillan:
Publication date: 1999-11-15
Dewey code: 828.91403
Price: £9.99
Review Acting Up: A Theatre Diary / Faber and Faber:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 1990-03-22
Price: £6.99
Review The Letters / HarperCollins Publishers Ltd:
Creator: Nina Burgis
Edition: Pilgrim ed
Publication date: 1988-06-30
Dewey code: 823.8
RRP: £145.00
Price: £126.69
Review Letters of Charles Dickens: 1850-52 v.6: 1850-52 Vol 6 (British Academy/Pilgrim Edition) / Clarendon Press:
Edition: New title
Publication date: 2006-03-17
Dewey code: 942.080922
RRP: £43.00
Price: £34.39
Review Faith, Duty, and the Power of Mind: The Cloughs and their circle, 18201960: The Cloughs and Their Circle, 1820-1960 / Cambridge University Press:
Publication date: 2004-04-01
RRP: £12.99
Price: £4.95
Review Chaucer (Brief Lives) / Chatto & Windus:
Publication date: 2005-06-05
RRP: £1.50
Price: £0.01
Review Artists and Models (Pocket Penguins 70's) / Penguin Books Ltd:
| Browse Novelists, Poets & Playwrights:
Models & Brands:
Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir, Indian Journals, Dangerous Muse: A Life Of Caroline Blackwood: A Life of Caroline Blackwood, The Gaucho Martin Fierro (UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. Latin-American), The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane, Who Murdered Chaucer"": A Medieval Mystery, The History of the Ginger Man, Conversations with Ray Bradbury (Literary Conversations (Paperback)), T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Girlitude: A Portrait of the 50s and 60s, Paradise Remembered: Ursula Vaughan Williams - An Autobiography, Abraham Lincoln and Robert Burns: Connected Lives and Legends, "The Life of the Buddha" (Clay Sanskrit Library), Slipstream: A Memoir, Acting Up: A Theatre Diary, The Letters, Letters of Charles Dickens: 1850-52 v.6: 1850-52 Vol 6 (British Academy/Pilgrim Edition), Faith, Duty, and the Power of Mind: The Cloughs and their circle, 18201960: The Cloughs and Their Circle, 1820-1960, Chaucer (Brief Lives), Artists and Models (Pocket Penguins 70's) |
