Graven With Diamonds

Graven With Diamonds PDF Author: Nicola Shulman
Publisher: Steerforth
ISBN: 1586422081
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
In this thrillingly entertaining book, Nicola Shulman interweaves the bloody events of Henry VIII's reign with the story of English love poetry and the life of its first master, Henry VIII's most glamorous and enigmatic subject: Sir Thomas Wyatt. Poet, statesman, spy, lover of Anne Boleyn and favorite both of Henry VIII and his sinister minister Thomas Cromwell, the brilliant Wyatt was admired and envied in equal measure. His love poetry began as risqué entertainment for ambitious men and women at the slippery top of the court. But when the axe began to fall and Henry VIII's laws made his subjects fall silent in terror, Wyatt's poetic skills became a way to survive. He saw that a love poem was a place where secrets could hide.

Graven With Diamonds

Graven With Diamonds PDF Author: Nicola Shulman
Publisher: Steerforth
ISBN: 1586422081
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
In this thrillingly entertaining book, Nicola Shulman interweaves the bloody events of Henry VIII's reign with the story of English love poetry and the life of its first master, Henry VIII's most glamorous and enigmatic subject: Sir Thomas Wyatt. Poet, statesman, spy, lover of Anne Boleyn and favorite both of Henry VIII and his sinister minister Thomas Cromwell, the brilliant Wyatt was admired and envied in equal measure. His love poetry began as risqué entertainment for ambitious men and women at the slippery top of the court. But when the axe began to fall and Henry VIII's laws made his subjects fall silent in terror, Wyatt's poetic skills became a way to survive. He saw that a love poem was a place where secrets could hide.

Thomas Wyatt

Thomas Wyatt PDF Author: Susan Brigden
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571282083
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 665

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Book Description
Thomas Wyatt (1503?-1542) was the first modern voice in English poetry. 'Chieftain' of a 'new company of courtly makers', he brought the Italian poetic Renaissance to England, but he was also revered as prophet-poet of the Reformation. His poetry holds a mirror to the secret, capricious world of Henry VIII's court, and alludes darkly to events which it might be death to describe. In the Tower, twice, Wyatt was betrayed and betrayer. This remarkably original biography is more - and less - than a Life, for Wyatt is so often elusive, in flight, like his Petrarchan lover, into the 'heart's forest'. Rather, it is an evocation of Wyatt among his friends, and his enemies, at princely courts in England, Italy, France and Spain, or alone in contemplative retreat. Following the sources - often new discoveries, from many archives - as far as they lead, Susan Brigden seeks Wyatt in his 'diverseness', and explores his seeming confessions of love and faith and politics. Supposed, at the time and since, to be the lover of Anne Boleyn, he was also the devoted 'slave' of Katherine of Aragon. Aspiring to honesty, he was driven to secrets and lies, and forced to live with the moral and mortal consequences of his shifting allegiances. As ambassador to Emperor Charles V, he enjoyed favour, but his embassy turned to nightmare when the Pope called for a crusade against the English King and sent the Inquisition against Wyatt. At Henry VIII's court, where only silence brought safety, Wyatt played the idealized lover, but also tried to speak truth to power. Wyatt's life, lived so restlessly and intensely, provides a way to examine a deep questioning at the beginning of the Renaissance and Reformation in England. Above all, this new biography is attuned to Wyatt's dissonant voice and broken lyre, the paradox within him of inwardness and the will to 'make plain' his heart, all of which make him exceptionally difficult to know - and fascinating to explore.

Sir Thomas Wyatt

Sir Thomas Wyatt PDF Author: Thomas Wyatt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781898283188
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Book Description


A Rage for Rock Gardening

A Rage for Rock Gardening PDF Author: Nicola Shulman
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
ISBN: 9781567922493
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
A hundred years ago there was a pronounced change in the direction of British gardening. The garden was transformed from a plaything for the rich to a democratic exercise, a hobby for the millions. Few figures were more central to and prominent in this transition than Reginald Farrer, whose passion for alpines would put a rockery in the backyards of countless enthusiasts and whose adventures in Tibet and China collecting elusive and exotic specimens, including the wild tree peony, a new buddleaia, and even an entire new genus called Farreria, were the stuff of legends. But Farrer was a strange man, a tortured soul. Tormented by physical disabilities (he had a hare lip, a "pygmy body," and a cleft palate) he developed a personality that was defensive, restless, yet productive and endlessly energetic. Within his realm of horticultural exploration and exploitation, he was a giant, becoming one of the great plant hunters of his age, repeatedly traveling to Japan and Tibet to collect new species and, through the influence of his extraordinary series of books, changing forever the art and practice of Western gardening.

Graven with Diamonds

Graven with Diamonds PDF Author: Nicola Shulman
Publisher: Short Books
ISBN: 9781780720883
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
'Masterly. the best work of history this year' AN Wilson, Book of the Year - Evening Standard

Gloria

Gloria PDF Author: Keith Maillard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 684

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Book Description
Light in the Company of Women glittered with turn-of-the-century romance. Hazard Zones resonated with a contemporary exploration of a man's past. Now Gloria - the newest novel in Keith Maillard's acclaimed Raysburg series - transports us deep into the 1950s and straight into the heart of a young woman struggling to find her true self. Her rich father calls his beautiful, brainy daughter "Princess". Her glamorous - and often jealous - mother calls her "Princess Priss". Her Big Man On Campus boyfriend calls her his fiance, until, inexplicably, she calls off the engagement. Only Gloria seems unsure of her true identity. She sees only a dark, rat-faced, neurotic intellectual hiding behind the facade of a clothes-horse debutante. In this stylish literary novel, richly infused with the mood, mores and fashions of the 1950s, Gloria finds her carefully constructed world beginning to unravel the summer after she graduates from college. In her country club society, women wear girdles, three-inch heels and their boyfriends' fraternity pins, talk endlessly about boys and clothes, but seldom about books or ideas - Gloria's passions in life. Gloria has become a reluctant expert at preening and pretending her way through this claustrophobic, closeted community, but she must confront darker realities: the smoke-spewing mills that are the source of her father's wealth, the avuncular navy buddy of her father's who stalks her, and her own nightmares. Keith Maillard has created another grandly detailed evocation of a past era, a novel that is both a remarkable literary achievement and a hugely entertaining read. Gloria is a delight for his many loyal fans and a wonderful story for those unfamiliar with his work.

How Precious Was That While

How Precious Was That While PDF Author: Piers Anthony
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780812575439
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
The author of the bestselling Xanth fantasy series tells his own remarkable life story in this candid autobiography. Focusing on the past 15 years of his career, Anthony also presents a heartwrenching selection of letters and poems from his most ardent young fans who have found in his writings a kindred spirit who understands their anguish and their dreams. (June)

The Book of the Damned

The Book of the Damned PDF Author: Charles Fort
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
ISBN: 1613106424
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
"Time travel, UFOs, mysterious planets, stigmata, rock-throwing poltergeists, huge footprints, bizarre rains of fish and frogs-nearly a century after Charles Fort's Book of the Damned was originally published, the strange phenomenon presented in this book remains largely unexplained by modern science. Through painstaking research and a witty, sarcastic style, Fort captures the imagination while exposing the flaws of popular scientific explanations. Virtually all of his material was compiled and documented from reports published in reputable journals, newspapers and periodicals because he was an avid collector. Charles Fort was somewhat of a recluse who spent most of his spare time researching these strange events and collected these reports from publications sent to him from around the globe. This was the first of a series of books he created on unusual and unexplained events and to this day it remains the most popular. If you agree that truth is often stranger than fiction, then this book is for you"--Taken from Good Reads website.

Sophie's World

Sophie's World PDF Author: Jostein Gaarder
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466804270
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 599

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Book Description
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (A New Verse Translation)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (A New Verse Translation) PDF Author:
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393334155
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
One of the earliest great stories of English literature after ?Beowulf?, ?Sir Gawain? is the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts King Arthur's Round Table festivities one Yuletide, challenging the knights to a wager. Simon Armitrage, one of Britain's leading poets, has produced an inventive and groundbreaking translation that " helps] liberate ?Gawain ?from academia" (?Sunday Telegraph?).