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Author: Darren Coffield
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
ISBN: 1783528176
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
'Entertaining, shocking, uproarious, hilarious . . . like eavesdropping on a wake, as the mourners get gradually more drunk and tell ever more outrageous stories' Sunday Times This is the definitive history of London's most notorious drinking den, the Colony Room Club in Soho. It’s a hair-raising romp through the underbelly of the post-war scene: during its sixty-year history, more romances, more deaths, more horrors and more sex scandals took place in the Colony than anywhere else. Tales from the Colony Room is an oral biography, consisting of previously unpublished and long-lost interviews with the characters who were central to the scene, giving the reader a flavour of what it was like to frequent the Club. With a glass in hand you’ll move through the decades listening to personal reminiscences, opinions and vitriol, from the authentic voices of those who were actually there. On your voyage through Soho’s lost bohemia, you’ll be served a drink by James Bond, sip champagne with Francis Bacon, queue for the loo with Christine Keeler, go racing with Jeffrey Bernard, get laid with Lucian Freud, kill time with Doctor Who, pick a fight with Frank Norman and pass out with Peter Langan. All with a stellar supporting cast including Peter O’Toole, George Melly, Suggs, Lisa Stansfield, Dylan Thomas, Jay Landesman, Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst and many, many more.
Author: Darren Coffield
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
ISBN: 1783528176
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 405
Get Book Here
Book Description
'Entertaining, shocking, uproarious, hilarious . . . like eavesdropping on a wake, as the mourners get gradually more drunk and tell ever more outrageous stories' Sunday Times This is the definitive history of London's most notorious drinking den, the Colony Room Club in Soho. It’s a hair-raising romp through the underbelly of the post-war scene: during its sixty-year history, more romances, more deaths, more horrors and more sex scandals took place in the Colony than anywhere else. Tales from the Colony Room is an oral biography, consisting of previously unpublished and long-lost interviews with the characters who were central to the scene, giving the reader a flavour of what it was like to frequent the Club. With a glass in hand you’ll move through the decades listening to personal reminiscences, opinions and vitriol, from the authentic voices of those who were actually there. On your voyage through Soho’s lost bohemia, you’ll be served a drink by James Bond, sip champagne with Francis Bacon, queue for the loo with Christine Keeler, go racing with Jeffrey Bernard, get laid with Lucian Freud, kill time with Doctor Who, pick a fight with Frank Norman and pass out with Peter Langan. All with a stellar supporting cast including Peter O’Toole, George Melly, Suggs, Lisa Stansfield, Dylan Thomas, Jay Landesman, Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst and many, many more.
Author: Darren Coffield
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1780885261
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Joshua's gallery 'Factual Nonsense' was quite unlike any other. Called a 'crazy powerhouse of ideas' it was a kind of cultural think-tank located in the then run-down East End area known as Shoreditch, which would later become a cohesive and creative hub (since rebranded as 'Silicon Roundabout'). Joshua was the driving force that turned the area's fortune and reputation around. Under the auspices of his Factual Nonsense banner, he held some of the most important and influential public art events of the late 20th Century. The first of these was an anarchic swipe at the notion of a traditional village fete called 'A Fete Worse than Death', with some of the biggest but the still yet unknown stars of the art world, including Damien Hirst and Angus Fairhurst, famously dressed as clowns and produced the first spin paintings at the Fete (for sale for the princely sum of £1). Whilst Hirst's spin machine has, from lowly beginnings at the Fete, gone on to appear recently at the World Economic Forum, a billionaire's playground, creating spin paintings for rich oligarch's wives as entertainment, Joshua was to die alone, poverty stricken back in 1996 on the cusp of international fame. Never reaping the rewards that were to come from the economic upturn and Charles Saatchi's Sensation exhibition, his death was a marker for the beginning of an era of international fame and success for his contemporaries and the end of the 'classic' avant-garde. The list of the seventy or so names of people I have interviewed for the book over the past year reads like a who's who of the contemporary art world, with contributions from the likes of Jay Jopling, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Sam Taylor-Wood, Gary Hume, Gavin Turk, Maureen Paley and Sir Peter Blake. Although Joshua never achieved the recognition that he deserved in his lifetime, he was a pivotal figure in the London art scene during the early 1990's. Josh moved into Hoxton and opened a gallery there and started a veritable art movement, while the place was a neglected London backwater. His lasting legacy was to bring together a group of artists and gallerists and create what is now known as the YBA scene. The text is illustrated with previously unseen photographs, letters and extracts from Joshua's diaries, which give insight into his thought process as well as the deterioration of his mental state towards the end of his brief but eventful life.
Author: Tiphanie Yanique
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555970532
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207
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Book Description
An enthralling debut collection from a singular Caribbean voice For a leper, many things are impossible, and many other things are easily done. Babalao Chuck said he could fly to the other side of the island and peek at the nuns bathing. And when a man with no hands claims that he can fly, you listen. The inhabitants of an island walk into the sea. A man passes a jail cell's window, shouldering a wooden cross. And in the international shop of coffins, a story repeats itself, pointing toward an inevitable tragedy. If the facts of these stories are sometimes fantastical, the situations they describe are complex and all too real. Lyrical, lush, and haunting, the prose shimmers in this nuanced debut, set mostly in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Part oral history, part postcolonial narrative, How to Escape from a Leper Colony is ultimately a loving portrait of a wholly unique place. Like Gabriel García Márquez, Edwidge Danticat, and Maryse Condé before her, Tiphanie Yanique has crafted a book that is heartbreaking, hilarious, magical, and mesmerizing. An unforgettable collection.
Author: Christopher Howse
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472914813
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
A fascinating glimpse into 1980s Soho by leading journalist and writer Christopher Howse. In the 1980s Daniel Farson published Soho in the Fifties. This memoir is a sequel from the Eighties, a decade that saw the brilliant flowering of a daily tragi-comedy enacted in pubs like the Coach and Horses or the French and in drinking clubs like the Colony Room. These were places of constant conversation and regular rows fuelled by alcohol. The cast was more improbable than any soap opera. Some were widely known – Jeffrey Bernard, Francis Bacon, Tom Baker or John Hurt. Just as important were the character actors: the Village Postmistress, the Red Baron, Granny Smith. The bite came from the underlying tragedy: lost spouses, lost jobs, pennilessness, homelessness and death. Christopher Howse recaptures the lost Soho he once knew as home, its cellar cafés and butchers' shops, its villains and its generosity. While it lasted, time in those smoky rooms always seemed to be half past ten, not long to closing time. As the author relates, he never laughed so much as he did in Soho in the Eighties.
Author: Gary Paulsen
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0689841809
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
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Author: Sophie Parkin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780957435407
Category : Arts, British
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
The Colony Room Club was home to Soho's eclectic art community for generations, famously including Francis Bacon. The Colony Room Club was known to the local's as 'Muriel's', after the proprietor Muriel Belcher, of whom Francis Bacon was a great admirer, the artist painted her portrait three times. Muriel would pay Francis ten pounds a week to 'bring in the people you like'. Before long the Colony Room was was welcoming the likes of Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice, Charles Laughton, E.M. Forster, Tallulah Bankhead, as well as artists Frank Auerbach Colquohoun and Macbryde, who, like Bacon are represented in the Leeds Art Gallery collection. Opinions of the famous artistic drinking den have ranged and changed. Brian Patten described it as 'a small urinal full of fractious old geezers bitching about each other'. Painter, novelist, and journalist - Molly Parkin (Author Sophie's mother) saw the club as 'a character-building glorious hell-hole. Everyone left their careers at the roadside before clambering the stairs and plunging into questionable behaviour'. A club member since the gift of membership as an 18th birthday present, Sophie Parkin herself intimately describes the club as 'fish tank whose water needed changing'.
Author: Michael Patrick MacDonald
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807020532
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
“All Souls is the written equivalent of an Irish wake, where revelers dance and sing the dead person’s praises. In that same style, the book leavens tragedy with dashes of humor but preserves the heartbreaking details.”—The New York Times Book Review A 25th anniversary edition of the National Bestselling memoir, with a new afterword from Michael Patrick MacDonald, takes us deep into the South Boston housing projects during one of the city's most tumultuous times in history and tells the story of his family struggling the overcome the poverty, crime, addiction, and incarceration that overtook the neighborhood. A breakaway bestseller since its first printing, All Souls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald’s Southie, the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America. Rocked by Whitey Bulger’s crime schemes and busing riots, MacDonald’s Southie is populated by sharply hewn characters. We meet Ma, Michael’s mini-skirted, accordian-playing, single mother who endures the deaths of four of her eleven children. And there are Michael’s older siblings Davey, sweet artist-dreamer; Kevin, child genius of scam; and Frankie, Golden Gloves boxer and neighborhood hero whose lives are high-wire acts played out in a world of poverty and pride. Nearly suffocated by his grief and his community’s code of silence, MacDonald tells his family story here with gritty but moving honesty. All Souls is heartbreaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be “the best place in the world.”
Author: Ruskin Bond
Publisher: Penguin Books India
ISBN: 0143332309
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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Book Description
Author: Mark Stevens
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 052565674X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 901
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Book Description
THE TIMES BEST ART BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE PLUTARCH AWARD AND THE APOLLO AWARD • “There are not many biographical masterpieces, but…Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan have produced one,” wrote the novelist John Banville of Francis Bacon: Revelations. By the Pulitzer prize-winning authors of de Kooning: An American Master, this acclaimed biography contains a wealth of never before known details about one of the iconic artists of the 20th century—a singularly private, darkly funny, eruptive man and his extraordinary art, whose iconoclastic charm “keeps the pages turning” (The Washington Post). Francis Bacon created an indelible image of mankind in modern times, and played an outsized role in both twentieth century art and life—from his public emergence with his legendary Triptych 1944 (its images "so unrelievedly awful" that people fled the gallery), to his death in Madrid in 1992. Bacon was a witty free spirit and unabashed homosexual at a time when many others remained closeted, and his exploits were as unforgettable as his images. He moved among the worlds of London's Soho and East End, the literary salons of London and Paris, and the homosexual life of Tangier. Through hundreds of interviews, and extensive new research, the authors probe Bacon's childhood in Ireland (he earned his father's lasting disdain because his asthma prevented him from hunting); his increasingly open homosexuality; his early design career—never before explored in detail; the formation of his vision; his early failure as an artist; his uneasy relationship with American abstract art; and his improbable late emergence onto the international stage as one of the great visionaries of the twentieth century. In all, Francis Bacon: Revelations gives us a more complete and nuanced--and more international--portrait than ever before of this singularly private, darkly funny, eruptive man and his equally eruptive, extraordinary art. Bacon was not just an influential artist, he helped remake the twentieth-century figure.
Author: Juliet E. McKenna
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061020362
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 518
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Book Description
The Secrets of the Shadow-Men Magic? It's for the rich, the powerful...the Archmage and his elite wizards and cloud-masters. Livak is not among them. She haunts the back taverns of the realm, careful to appear neither rich nor poor, neither tall nor short . . . neither man nor woman. Obscurity is her protection, thievery her livelihood, and gambling her weakness. Alas, some bets are hard to resist. Particularly when they offer a chance to board a ship for Hadrumal, the fabled city of the Archmage. So Livak follows a minor wizard, Shiv, in an attempt to turn a rune or two, never dreaming that the stolen tankard she wants to sell contains the secrets of an ancient magic far more powerful, and infinitely darker, than any mortal mage's spells.
