The catalog of the Aldo Manutiu exhibition, 500 years after his death, is a tribute to the most famous printer in the history of publishing. It tells how the book changed the world & how & why this change happened in Venice, cosmopolitan city & gateway between East & West. But it is mainly a journey through the world of culture & the arts in Venice between the end of the fifteenth century & the start of the sixteenth, in a crucial period featuring major figures like the painters Bellini, Carpaccio, & the young Giorgione (with the debut of his pupil Titian), illustrious visiting foreign artists like Albrecht Durer, & intellectuals of European fame such as Erasmus of Rotterdam. ...

The son of biologist T. H. Huxley, Aldous Huxley had a privileged background & was educated at Eton & Oxford despite an eye infection that left him nearly blind. Having learned braille his eyesight then enhanced enough for him to start writing, & by the 1920s he had become a fashionable figure, producing witty & daring novels like CROME YELLOW (1921), ANTIC HAY (1923) & POINT COUNTER POINT (1928). But it is as the author of his celebrated portrayal of a nightmare future society, BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932), that Huxley is remembered today. A truly visionary book, it was a watershed in Huxley's world-view as his later work became more & more optimistic
- coinciding with his move to California & experimentation with mysticism & psychedelic drugs later in life. Nicholas Murray's brilliant new book has the greatest virtue of literary biographies: it makes you want to go out & read its subject's work all over again. A fascinating reassessment of one of the most interesting writers of the twentieth century.
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Alec Cobbe (b.1945) established his reputation as a conservator of Old Master paintings before specializing in the redecoration & rearrangement of historic interiors as homes for masterpieces. His list of clients

Includes:: H.R.H. The Prince of Wales & the Ritz Hotel.

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This is a biography about the British motor industry's most influential & controversial engineer, Sir Alec Issignois. Wood exposes a behind-the-scenes impression of the personal & corporate struggles within the declining British car industry, a complex process in which Issigonis played a famous role. THE COLLAPSE in 2005 of MG Rover marked the end of Britain's indigenous motor industry as a volume car manufacturer. Yet back in the 1960s its Longbridge-based British Motor Corporation predecessor dominated the market with the iconic Mini & stylish 1100. Both were the work, together with the legendary Morris Minor, of Sir Alec Issigonis, CBE, FRS, the British motor industry's most influential & controversial engineer. In this full-length biography, published to commemorate the centenary of its subject's birth, which falls in 2006, award-winning motoring historian Jonathan Wood chronicles the rise & fall of Issigonis, born in Turkey of Greek/ Bavarian parentage, who arrived in Britain as a near-penniless refugee & became the most powerful automobile engineer in the l&. His ingenious & effective designs had a deep, lasting influence on the evolution of the motor car & on the wider history of industrial design, & he deserves to be ranked with the other giants of the field like Ferdinand Porsche in Germany & Dante Giacosa in Italy. Wood's candid & meticulously researched account, which exposes Sir Alec's public & private faces, & is the product of some 30 years of research, is complemented by interviews conducted with many of Issigonis' former colleagues & friends, including: Ronald Barker, John Cooper, Jack Daniels, Christopher Dowson, Paddy Hopkirk, Spen King, Dr Alex Moulton, Dr Bernd Pischetsrieder, Lord Snowdon & Stuart Turner. The finished volume is a balanced view of a remarkable, immensely talented man, with a behind-the-scenes impression of the personal & corporate struggles within the declining British car industry, a complex process in which Issigonis played a famous role. ...

* For the first time ever, the pioneering autobiographical comics of master cartoonist Eddie Campbell (From Hell) are collected in a single volume! * Brilliantly observed & profoundly expressed, the ALEC stories present a version of Campbell's own life, filtered through the alter ego of Alec Mac Garry. Over many years, we witness Alec's (and Eddie's) progression from beer to wine
- wild nights at the pub, existential despair, the hunt for love, the quest for art, becoming a responsible breadwinner, feeling lost at his own movie premiere, & much more! Eddie's outlandish fantasies & metafictional tricks convert life into art, while staying fully grounded in his own absurdity. * This Life-Size Omnibus edition of ALEC

Includes:: all the stories from The King Canute Crowd, Three-Piece Suit, How to be an Artist, & After the Snooter, as well as the very early, out-of-print ALEC stories & a staggering amount of bonus material.


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Aled Jones was a choirboy with a remarkable voice, whose prodigious talent propelled him to international stardom. Before he was sixteen, he had already sold more than six million records & had become a fixture on television & radio. He has worked alongside such greats as Leonard Bernstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sir Neville Marriner, Howard Blake, & Mike Oldfield. Some of the high points of his early career include performances at the Hollywood Bowl & the wedding of Bob Geldof & Paula Yates, as well as singing privately for the Prince & Princess of Wales. Best known as a boy soprano for his hit " Walking in the Air, Aled tells the full story of this phenomenal record & the effect it had on his life. Always refreshingly honest & self-effacing, Aled reveals how he faced up to life after his voice had broken & how he carved out a new career for himself on stage, record, television, & radio. His story begins with his idyllic childhood on the Welsh island of Anglesey & his years as a chorister at Bangor Cathedral, during which his family provided wonderful support & encouragement as he rose to fame. He tells of his studies at the Royal Academy of Music & the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School & delves behind the scene of some of Britain's best-know institutions, such as Songs of Praise, BBC Wales & Classic FM. Aled reveals the truth about the man behind the music in this frank, heartwarming & funny account of his life. ...

The perfect gift for Christmas, this book

Includes:: all your favourite carols brought vividly to life

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The perfect gift for Christmas, this book

Includes:: all your favourite carols brought vividly to life with

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This book provides a history of the alehouse between the years 1550 & 1700, the period during which it first assumed its long celebrated role as the key site for public recreation in the villages & market towns of Engl&. In the face of considerable animosity from Church & State, the patrons of alehouses, who were drawn from a wide cross section of village society, fought for & won a central place in their communities for an institution that they cherished as a vital facilitator of what they termed good fellowship. For them, sharing a drink in the alehouse was fundamental to the formation of social bonds, to the expression of their identity, & to the definition of communities, allegiances & friendships. Bringing together social & cultural history approaches, this book draws on a wide range of source material
- from legal records & diary evidence to printed drinking songs
- to investigate battles over alehouse licensing & the regulation of drinking; the political views & allegiances that ordinary men & women expressed from the alebench; the meanings & values that drinking rituals & practices held for contemporaries; & the social networks & collective identities expressed through the choice of drinking companions. Focusing on an institution & a social practice at the heart of everyday life in early modern Engl&, this book allows us to see some of the ways in which ordinary men & women responded to historical processes such as religious change & state formation, & just as importantly reveals how they shaped their own communities & collective identities. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the social, cultural & political worlds of the ordinary men & women of seventeenth-century Engl&.BR> MARK HAILWOOD is Associate Research Fellow in History at the University of Exeter.

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This definitive biography of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the most notorious & controversial spiritual figure of the 20th century, brings together a life of world-shaking 'magick', sexual & psychological experimentation at the outer limits, world-record-beating mountaineering & startling prophetic power
- as well as poetry, adventure, espionage, wisdom, excess, & intellectual brilliance. The book reveals the man behind the appalling reputation, demolishing a century of scandalmongering that persuaded the world that Crowley was a black magician, a traitor & a sexual wastrel, addicted to drugs & antisocial posing, rather than the mind-blowing truth that Crowley was a genius as significant as Jung, Freud or Einstein. Churton has enjoyed the full co-operation of the world's Crowley scholars to ensure the accuracy & plausibility of his riveting narrative. The author has also been in contact with Crowley's grandson, who has vouchsafed rare, previously untold accounts of family relationships. The result is an intimate portrait that has never before been shown, & one that has great emotional impact. The book contains the first ever complete investigation of Crowley's astonishing family background
- including facts he concealed in his lifetime for fear of social prejudice. Tobias Churton also gives us a detailed account of Crowley's work as a British spy during World War I in Berlin during the early 1930s & during World War II. This information has not been available to any previous biographer.

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