Byrne Paula Скачать все книги 8 Количество книг

Sex, fame and scandal in the theatrical, literary and social circles of late 18th-century England.One of the most flamboyant women of the late-eighteenth century, Mary Robinson’s life was marked by reversals of fortune. After being raised by a middle-class father, Mary was married, at age fourteen, to Thomas Robinson. His dissipated lifestyle landed the couple and their baby in debtors' prison, where Mary wrote her first book of poetry and met lifelong friend Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire.On her release, Mary quickly became one of the most popular actresses of the day, famously playing Perdita in ‘The Winter’s Tale’ for a rapt audience that included the Prince of Wales, who fell madly in love with her. She later used his copious love letters for blackmail.This authoritative and engaging book presents a fascinating portrait of a woman who was variously darling of the London stage, a poet whose work was admired by Coleridge and a mistress to the most powerful men in England, and yet whose fortunes were nevertheless precarious, always on the brink of being squandered through recklessness, excess and passion.

A terrifically engaging and original biography about one of England’s greatest novelists, and the glamorous, eccentric, debauched and ultimately tragic family that provided him with the most significant friendships of his life and inspired his masterpiece, ‘Brideshead Revisited’.Evelyn Waugh was already famous when ‘Brideshead Revisited’ was published in 1945. Written at the height of the war, the novel was, he admitted, of no ‘immediate propaganda value’. Instead, it was the story of a household, a family and a journey of religious faith – an elegy, in many ways, for a vanishing world and a testimony to a family he had fallen in love with a decade earlier.The Lygons of Madresfield were every bit as glamorous, eccentric and compelling as their counterparts in ‘Brideshead Revisited’. In this engrossing biography, Paula Byrne takes an innovative approach to her subject, setting out to capture Waugh through those friendships that mattered most to him. Far from the snobbish misanthropist of popular caricature, she uncovers a man as loving and complex as the family that inspired him – a family deeply traumatised when their father was revealed as a homosexual and forced to flee the country.This brilliantly original biography unlocks for the first time the extent to which Waugh’s great novel encoded and transformed his own experiences. In so doing, it illuminates the loves and obsessions that shaped his life, and brings us inevitably to a secret that dared not speak its name.

Who was the real Jane Austen? A spinster who sat in a vicarage confining her novels to the small canvas of village life? Or a woman who knew the turbulent world around her and who took the bold decision to remain unmarried and fashion herself as a professional writer?In this new biography, best-selling author Paula Byrne (Perdita, Mad World) explores the forces that shaped the interior life of Britain’s most beloved novelist: her father’s religious faith, her mother’s aristocratic pedigree, her eldest brother’s adoption, her other brothers’ naval and military experiences, her relatives in the East and West Indies, her cousin who lived through the trauma of the French Revolution, the family’s amateur theatricals, the female novelists she admired, her residence in Bath, her love of the seaside, her travels around England and her long struggle to become a published author.Byrne uses a highly innovative technique whereby each chapter begins from an object that conjures up a key moment or theme in Austen’s life and work—a silhouette, a vellum notebook, a topaz cross, a laptop writing box, a royalty cheque, a bathing machine, and many more.The woman who emerges is far tougher, more socially and politically aware, and altogether more modern than the conventional picture of ‘dear Aunt Jane’ would allow. Published to coincide with the bicentenary of Pride and Prejudice, this lively and scholarly biography brings Austen dazzlingly into the twenty-first century.

A radical look at Jane Austen as you’ve never seen her – as a lover of farce, comic theatre and juvenilia. The Genius of Jane Austen celebrates Britain’s favourite novelist 200 years after her death and explores why her books make such awesome movies, time after time.Jane Austen loved the theatre. She learned much of her art from a long tradition of English comic drama and took joyous participation in amateur theatricals and her visits to the theatre in London and Bath. Her juvenilia, then ‘Sense and Sensibility’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Mansfield Park’ and ‘Emma’ were shaped by the arts of theatrical comedy.Her admiration for drama’s dialogue, characterisation, plotting, exits and entrances is why she has been dramatised so successfully on screen in the last twenty years – and these versions are at the centre of her continuing fame, culminating in her celebration on £10 note.From the stage adaptations of Austen’s novels (including one called ‘Miss Elizabeth Bennet’ by A. A. Milne) to modern classics, including the BBC ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Persuasion’, Emma Thompson’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’, and the phenomenally brilliant and successful ‘Clueless’, ‘The Genius of Jane Austen’ presents an Austen not of prim manners and genteel calm, but filled with wild comedy and outrageous behaviour.

A debut novel by a bestselling non-fiction author, this is a witty, wholly entrancing story of the pleasures, pains and obsessions of contemporary life. Lisa Blaize – teacher, and would-be fashion writer, mother and second wife – feels out of place when her high-flying husband becomes the headmaster of a school in a country town. Isolated and far from her metropolitan upbringing, she turns to the one place where she learns she can be uninhibited.But ‘Twitter may be my undoing’, Lisa discovers as her one-time private life becomes all too public. Soon she is dealing with an online stalker and her husband’s reputation is put at risk, but will she be able to give up her addiction?From the gossip of the classroom to our obsession with instant communication, Look To Your Wife is witty and brilliantly observed, revealing the pleasures and pains of contemporary life.

The extraordinary true story behind the film Belle. The life of Dido Elizabeth Belle – the first mixed race aristocrat who was brought up as the adopted daughter of Lord Mansfield – the Lord Chief Justice of England. Now a Major Motion Picture.Beautiful, wealthy and sophisticated, Dido Belle appears, in her famous portrait alongside her ‘sister’ and companion Lady Elizabeth Murray, a vision of eighteenth-century aristocratic virtue. But Dido Belle was no normal eighteenth century Lady, and this was no common painting. Adopted and raised by Lord Mansfield – one of the most powerful men of the day – Dido Belle’s mixed race and illegitimacy became the controversy of English high society. Born to a captured slave mother and a captain in the Royal Navy, Dido’s evident grace and adoption by the Mansfield family to be raised as a daughter in Kenwood House challenged English notions of race at their highest rank.Meanwhile, as Lord Chief Justice of England, Mansfield presided over the case that would come to be known as the Zong affair – a crucial legal ruling that would galvanise a nascent abolitionist movement and radically alter attitudes towards the barbarism of the Atlantic Slave trade. From the elegant surroundings of Kenwood (reopening after extensive renovation in November), Dido Belle and Elizabeth, to the economics of the Caribbean and the horrific journeys of African slaves to the New World, Paula Byrne vividly depicts for the first time the diverse contexts of this controversial painting. The portrait shocked its contemporary viewers but also resonated with the public of the time – the name of Lord Mansfield was synonymous with the great civil rights question of the age. Today the picture is presented as an icon of black female history.Telling the story behind the major new film starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Tom Wilkinson and Miranda Richardson, this book is the real life of Dido Belle.

The remarkable life of the vivacious, clever – and forgotten – Kennedy sister, who charmed the English aristocracy and was almost erased from her family history.The favourite child of Joe Kennedy and favourite sister of Jack, Kick Kennedy was spirited, vivacious and legendary for her charm. When the Kenndys sailed to Britain in 1938 she was presented as a debutante amid the pre-war social whirl of the British aristocracy. Here she met a shy, tall, handsome man called Billy, and, rebelling against family, faith, and country, soon married him. He was William Cavendish, heir to Chatsworth and the Duke of Devonshire, the most eligible bachelor in England. But their days of married bliss proved short, as war would bring tragedy and loss.Uncovering her spectacular life in full for the first time, Paula Byrne depicts a remarkable woman who bewitched the Churchills, Astors and Mitfords, and yet was almost erased from Kennedy family history.