Hughes-Hallett Lucy Скачать все книги 4 Количество книг

Not since Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber have old stories been made to feel so electrically new. Not since Wim Winders’ Wings of Desire have the numinous and the everyday been so magically combined. It's in the nature of myth to be infinitely adaptable. Each of these startlingly original stories is set in modern Britain. Their characters include a people-trafficking gang-master and a prostitute, a migrant worker and a cocksure estate agent, an elderly musician doubly befuddled by dementia and the death of his wife, a pest-controller suspected of paedophilia and a librarian so well-behaved that her parents wonder anxiously whether she’ll ever find love. They’re ordinary people, preoccupied, as we all are now, by the deficiencies of the health service, by criminal gangs and homelessness, by the pitfalls of dating in the age of #metoo. All of their stories, though, are inspired by ones drawn from Graeco-Roman myth, from the Bible or from folk-lore. The ancients invented myths to express what they didn’t understand. These witty fables, elegantly written and full of sharp-eyed observation of modern life, are also visionary explorations of potent mysteries and strange passions, charged with the hallucinatory beauty and horror of their originals.

From the author of ‘The Pike’ – winner of the 2013 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction – a compelling story of heroism told through eight famous lives that span from Achilles to Sir Francis Drake.Beginning beneath the walls of Troy, ending in 1930s Europe, ‘Heroes’ is a compelling evocation of heroism through eight famous lives – Achilles, Odysseus, Alcibiades, Cato, El Cid, Francis Drake, Wallenstein and Garibaldi.Not necessarily all good – sometimes quite the reverse – but all great, they possessed a charisma, a strength of will powerful enough to persuade those around them that they alone could do the incredible and unprecedented.It is a story of morality and dictatorship; money and sorcery; seduction and mass hysteria.

‘One of the best novels of the year so far’ The TimesA SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR‘Unlike anything I’ve read. Haunting and huge, and funny and sensuous. It’s wonderful’ Tessa Hadley‘I just enjoyed it so very much’ Philip PullmanIt is the 17th century and a wall is being built around a great house. Wychwood is an enclosed world, its ornamental lakes and majestic avenues planned by Mr Norris, landscape-maker. A world where everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war, where dissidents shelter in the forest, lovers linger in secret gardens, and migrants, fleeing the plague, are turned away from the gate.Three centuries later, another wall goes up overnight, dividing Berlin, while at Wychwood, over one hot, languorous weekend, erotic entanglements are shadowed by news of historic change. A little girl, Nell, observes all.Nell grows up and Wychwood is invaded. There is a pop festival by the lake, a TV crew in the dining room and a Great Storm brewing. As the Berlin wall comes down, a fatwa signals a different ideological faultline and a refugee seeks safety in Wychwood.From the multi-award-winning author of The Pike comes a breathtakingly ambitious, beautiful and timely novel about game keepers and witches, agitators and aristocrats, about young love and the pathos of aging, and about how those who wall others out risk finding themselves walled in.

WINNER OF THE 2013 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION, THE 2013 DUFF COOPER PRIZE, THE POLITICAL BOOK AWARDS POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR 2014 AND THE 2013 COSTA BOOK AWARDS BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEARThe story of Gabriele D’Annunzio, poet, daredevil – and Fascist.In September 1919 Gabriele D’Annunzio, successful poet, dramatist and occasional politician with an innate flair for the melodramatic, declared himself the Commandante of the city of Fiume in modern day Croatia. He intended to establish the utopian modern state upon his muddled fascist and artistic ideals and create a social paradigm for the rest of the world. It was a fittingly dramatic pinnacle to a career that had been essentially theatrical.In her new book Lucy Hughes-Hallett charts the enthralling but controversial life of D’Annunzio – acclaimed poet and author, legendary seducer and charmer – who lived an extravagant and debt-ridden life, and became a military and national hero. He evolved from an idealistic poet, who allied himself with the Romantic aesthetic, to an instigator of radical right-wing revolt against democratic authority. D’Annunzio’s colourful story is also a political parable: through his apparently contradictory nature and the eventual failure of the Fiume endeavour, a picture is created of the politically turbulent Europe of the early 20th century and of the poison of emergent fascism.As in the successful Heroes, Hughes-Hallett takes the story of a memorable character’s life to explore the society and politics of the times in which he lived. She raises questions concerning the figure of the ‘superman’, the cult of nationalism and the origins of political extremism and war. At the centre however stands the flamboyant and charismatic D’Annunzio: a figure as deplorable as he is fascinating.