Very Special Relationship: Field Marshall Sir John Dill and the Anglo-American Alliance, 1941-44

DANCHEV, Alex

University Of Nebraska Press

Lord Franks was an exceedingly deliberate man who, paradoxically, embarked upon his various careers--as don, mandarin, diplomat, banker, provost, pillar of state--almost by accident. A moral philosopher by training and inclination, Franks had a hand in the making of both war and peace in the middle decades of the twentieth century. He secured Marshal Aid for Europe's post-war recovery program. He had a major role in negotiating the North Atlantic Treaty. Later, he was responsible for several unusually influential offical reports, including that on Oxford University in the 1960s, and most recently and controversially, on the British Government's handling of the Falklands crisis. An extensively researched and thoroughly readable study, this book looks at the life of a man who succeeded in combining great intellect and public service to a rare degree. Oliver Franks, though personally self-effacing was an immensely influential figure at the center of public life for many years.

Oliver Franks: Founding Father

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Oxford University Press

After Picasso and Matisse, Braque is the third man of modern art. Together with Picasso, he pioneered the greatest revolution in Western ways of seeing since the Renaissance, and if an 'ism' can be said to be invented by a person, Cubism was invented by Braque. In life, a combination of heroic soldier and Zen master, he seemed to survive everything - even the shattering of his skull on the Western Front in 1915 - but, in death, his story remains untold. To reveal Braque, as Alex Danchev does here, is to revise Picasso - and to illuminate one of the most influential figures in modern art.

Georges Braque

Hamish Hamilton UK

Liddell Hart, no warrior, dwelt all his life on war. He obtained its waste, deplored its unreasonableness, but amended the classical dictum as one of his own-if you wish for peace understand war. Although his name is synonuymous w military thought and military controversy, throughout his life he appeared i succession of different guises. He was variously revered and reviled. He adv Lloyd George-among others-and antaginised Winston Churchill.

Alchemist of War: The Life of Basil Liddell Hart

Weidenfeld&Nicolson

With 32-pages of full-color inserts, and black-and-white illustrations throughout. Alex Danchev gives us the first comprehensive assessment of the revolutionary work and restless life of Paul Cézanne to be published in decades. One of the most influential painters of his time and beyond, Cézanne was the exemplary artist-creator of the modern age who changed the way we see the world. With brisk intellect, rich documentation, and eighty-eight color and fifty-two black-and-white illustrations, Danchev tells the story of an artist who was originally considered a madman, a barbarian, and a sociopath. Beginning with the unsettled teenager in Aix, Danchev takes us through the trials of a painter who believed that art must be an expression of temperament but was tormented by self-doubt, who was rejected by the Salon for forty years, who sold nothing outside his immediate circle until his thirties, who had a family that he kept secret from his father until his forties, who had his first exhibition at the age of fifty-six—but who fiercely maintained his revolutionary beliefs. Danchev shows us how the beliefs Cézanne held and the life he led became the obsession and inspiration of artists, writers, poets, and philosophers from Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso to Samuel Beckett and Allen Ginsberg. A special feature of the book is a remarkable series of Cézanne’s self-portraits, reproduced in full color. Cézanne is not only the fascinating life of a visionary artist and extraordinary human being but also a searching assessment of his ongoing influence in the artistic imagination of our time. A stunning portrait of a monumentally important artist, this is a biography not to be missed.

Cezanne: A Life

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Pantheon

Product Description 
The first major biography of the pathbreaking, perpetually influential surrealist artist and iconoclast whose inspiration can be seen in everyone from Jasper Johns to Beyoncé—by the celebrated biographer of Cézanne and Braque\nIn this thought-provoking life of René Magritte (1898‒1967), Alex Danchev makes a compelling case for Magritte as the single most significant purveyor of images to the modern world. Magritte’s surreal sensibility, deadpan melodrama, and fine-tuned outrageousness have become an inescapable part of our visual landscape, through such legendary works as 
The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), and his celebrated iterations of 
Man in a Bowler Hat.\nDanchev explores the path of this highly unconventional artist, from his middle-class Belgian beginnings to the years in which he led a small, brilliant band of surrealists (and famously clashed with André Breton) to his first major retrospective, which traveled to the United States in 1965 and gave rise to his international reputation.\nUsing thirty-two pages of color images and more than 160 black-and-white illustrations throughout the text, Danchev delves deeply into Magritte’s artistic development and the profound questions he raised in his work about the very nature of authenticity. 
 Review 
“Far from underestimating Magritte, Danchev’s picture of him is pointillist and enormous in scope. It is full of shock.” — 
Jo Livingstone, The New Republic\n“Thoroughly and gruesomely entertaining . . . Danchev is right to call Magritte ‘the dream merchant of our time.’ Magritte’s studiously underplayed paintings are a modern image bank, and we draw on it unknowingly every time we see the Apple logo . . . A fascinating biography.” 
—Dominic Green, The Wall Street Journal\n“Clouds, pipes, bowler hats, umbrellas and green apples: the thought-provoking works of Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte continue to fascinate. The late Alex Danchev offers enthralling insight into the man behind the easel.” — 
The Herald\n“Sinuous . . . [Danchev] has uncovered a life that was by turns quirky, controversial, and tinged by tragedy . . . This book leaves no doubt that the image Magritte maintained of himself as a regular citizen living a quiet life in a nondescript Brussels neighborhood was indeed performance art of the highest order.” 
—Tobias Grey, Airmail\n“Diligent and insightful . . . Danchev proved an indefatigable researcher, and Sarah Whitfield does full justice to his labors in completing [the] final chapter of Magritte’s life.” 
—Tim Adams, The Guardian\n“Monumental . . . A fascinating study of a man whose ‘stunning imagination ha[s] revolutionized what we see and how we understand’ . . . Sure to be the definitive account of the extraordinary artist’s life.” — 
Publishers Weekly 
 About the Author 
ALEX DANCHEV is the author of the biographies 
Georges Braque: A Life and 
Cézanne: A Life, a new translation of 
The Letters of Paul Cézanne, and the essay collections 
On Art and War and Terror, On Good and Evil and the Grey Zone, and 
100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists. For three years before his death in 2016 (as he was finishing this biography), Danchev was a professor of international relations at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland.\nSARAH WHITFIELD is an art historian. She is the coeditor of 
René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, and she serves on the René Magritte authentication committee 
.

Magritte: A Life

Humor & Entertainment

Attempts to delineate a theory that defines and explains the political relationship of the U.S. and Great Britain. Among other subjects, the volume discusses military cooperation, the creation and conduct of the Combined Chiefs of Staff during World War II, the friction over plans for the Middle East, and the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

On Specialness: Essays in Anglo-American Relations (St. Antony's Series)

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

Misunderstood by his peers but hailed by later generations as the father of modern art, Cézanne has long fascinated artists and art lovers, writers, poets and philosophers. This new annotated translation of his letters provides fresh insight into his views on art, politics, literature and friendship. Illustrated with more than 70 images, this book enriches our knowledge of the artist and the man, who emerges as wittier, wiser, more irascible, more philosophical, and above all, more fully human.

The Letters of Paul Cezanne (Hardback) /anglais

Individual Artists

Thames&Hudson

A singular thinker and an uncompromising seeker after artistic truth, Cézanne channelled a large part of his wide-ranging intellect and ferocious wit into his letters. This translation by Alex Danchev is based on a thorough re-examination of Cézanne’s correspondence with family, friends and major figures from the literary and art worlds. Danchev’s great achievement is to allow readers in English to hear Cézanne’s voice for the first time in his own idiomatic, idiosyncratic style. And he sounds rather different from the Cézanne we thought we knew – richer, wittier, wiser, more philosophical, more irascible, above all more fully human. The letters offer fresh perspectives on his artistic vision, politics, friendships, psychology, philosophy, literary tastes and classical frame of reference. They provide an intimate insight into the preoccupations and personality of a legend.

The Letters of Paul Cezanne (Paperback) /anglais

On Art and War and Terror

This collection of Alex Danchev's essays shows us how works of art can help us to explore the most difficult ethical and political issues of our time: war, terror, extermination, torture and abuse. It takes seriously the idea of the artist as moral witness to this realm, considering war photography, for example, as a form of humanitarian intervention. War poetry, war films and war diaries are also considered in a broad view of art, and of war. Kafka is drawn upon to address torture and abuse in the war on terror; Homer is utilised to analyse current talk of 'barbarisation'. The paintings of Gerhard Richter are used to investigate the terrorists of the Baader-Meinhof group, while the photographs of Don McCullin and the writings of Vassily Grossman and Primo Levi allow the author to propose an ethics of small acts of altruism. This book examines the nature of war over the last century, from the Great War to a particular focus on the current 'Global War on Terror'. It investigates what it means to be human in war, the cost it exacts and the ways of coping. Several of the essays therefore have a biographical focus.

History

Military

Edinburgh University Press

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