Aubrey Beardsley : A Biography

Arts & Photography

STURGIS, Matthew

Graphic Design

Harpercollins

The painter Walter Sickert was a man of contradictions: a radical reactionary, a reclusive socialite, a traditionalist and an innovator, a philanderer who believed in the sanctity of marriage, an internationalist grounded in the heart of the English school. In this superb biography, Matthew Sturgis provides the first fully documented account of Sickert’s long and colorful life, drawing on new sources to capture the spirit of a man whose influence remains visible in the work of artists today.

Walter Sickert: A Biography

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

HarperCollins, UK

Flamingo

The first major life of the outstanding British painter – and Jack the Ripper suspect – Walter Sickert (1860-1942), by the highly acclaimed biographer of Aubrey Beardsley.
Walter Richard Sickert is perhaps the outstanding figure of British art during the last hundred years. Many contemporary painters, from Hodgkin and Bacon to Auerbach and Kossof, acknowledge a debt to his influence. His career spanned six decades of unceasing experiment and achievement. As a young artist, he was welcomed and encouraged by Degas. He was the disciple of Whistler and mentor of Beardsley. He founded the London Impressionists and the Camden Town Group. He was taken up by both the Woolfs and the Sitwells. He gave painting lessons to Winston Churchill.
His energy was prodigious and his personality fascinating: he was also an illustrator, cartoonist, writer, polemicist, teacher and wit. He relished controversy: his early paintings of London music halls and his late works, based on 18th-century etchings and contemporary news photographs, provoked outraged criticism from conventional commentators.
Sturgis also devotes an appendix to charting in detail Sickert's posthumous life as a player in the 'Jack the Ripper' circus, assessing (and demolishing) the arguments of Patricia Cornwell and others in the light of his own discoveries.

Walter Sickert: A Life

Humor & Entertainment

Harper-perennial

Off the Leash: Memoirs of a Royal Corgi

An account of the British Royal Family at work, at play, at home, at each other's throats - told with the honesty for which corgis are justly famous. It tells of Princess Di's eating habits, the Duke of Edinburgh's sporting prowess and Fergie's innate sense of modesty.

Humor

Hodder&Stoughton

Product Description 
The fullest, most textural, most accurate—most human—account of Oscar Wilde's unique and dazzling life—based on extensive new research and newly discovered materials, from Wilde's personal letters and transcripts of his first trial to newly uncovered papers of his early romantic (and dangerous) escapades and the two-year prison term that shattered his soul and his life."Simply the best modern biography of Wilde." —Evening Standard\nDrawing on material that has come to light in the past thirty years, including newly discovered letters, documents, first draft notebooks, and the full transcript of the libel trial, Matthew Sturgis meticulously portrays the key events and influences that shaped Oscar Wilde's life, returning the man "to his times, and to the facts," giving us Wilde's own experience as he experienced it.\nHere, fully and richly portrayed, is Wilde's Irish childhood; a dreamy, aloof boy; a stellar classicist at boarding school; a born entertainer with a talent for comedy and a need for an audience; his years at Oxford, a brilliant undergraduate punctuated by his reckless disregard for authority . . . his arrival in London, in 1878, "already noticeable everywhere" . . . his ten-year marriage to Constance Lloyd, the father of two boys; Constance unwittingly welcoming young men into the household who became Oscar's lovers, and dying in exile at the age of thirty-nine . . . Wilde's development as a playwright. . . becoming the high priest of the aesthetic movement; his successes . . . his celebrity. . . and in later years, his irresistible pull toward another—double—life, in flagrant defiance and disregard of England's strict sodomy laws ("the blackmailer's charter"); the tragic story of his fall that sent him to prison for two years at hard labor, destroying his life and shattering his soul. 
 Review 
“Exhaustively researched, enlightening and lively . . . The story of the man in full, with flaws and fine qualities almost equally balanced . . . Sturgis does not pretend to be a critic—one of his gripes against Ellmann is that he approached his biography as a literary critic rather than a historian—and he does not essay any overarching judgments. Instead he delivers the judgments of Wilde’s own day: ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ turns out to have been by far the most popular of Wilde’s works during his own lifetime, a fact I found surprising. The opinions of Wilde’s more perceptive contemporaries can make us think.”—Brooke Allen, 
Wall Street Journal\n“Give yourself a present: Pick up a copy of 
Oscar Wilde: A Life . . . Sturgis’s biography is now the fullest one-volume account of the iconic fin-de-siècle writer, aesthete, wit and gay martyr. It draws on the most up-to-date manuscript discoveries and scholarship, but deliberately sticks closely to Wilde’s life.”—Michael Dirda, 
The Washington Post\n“[Sturgis’s] clear-eyed understanding of Wilde is acute, his narrative assured. Drawing on new material, including the full transcript of the libel trial that set Wilde on the path to prison, he assembles an indelible portrait of a confounding and complex man.”—Mary Ann Gwinn, 
Minneapolis Star Tribune 
 About the Author 
MATTHEW STURGIS is the author of acclaimed biographies of Aubrey Beardsley and Walter Sickert, and has written for 
The Times Literary Supplement, The Daily Telegraph, and 
 The Independent on Sunday. 
 Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 
[ 2 ]\nA FAIR SCHOLAR\nKnowledge came to me through pleasure. 
—Oscar Wilde\nAt the end of January 1864 Oscar and his brother were sent away to school, leaving the six-year-old Isola at home. It was an escape from the nursery and the rule of governesses. The Portora Royal School at Enniskillen in County Fermanagh, a hundred miles north of Dublin, was an ancient foundation, established in 1608 by James I for the education of the town’s recently transplanted Scotch Presbyterian population. During the course

Oscar Wilde: A Life

KNOPF

This highly illustrated book features famous people and their cats at home - in bachelor pads, grand houses, farmhouses, Oxford Colleges, cathedral cloisters and Downing Street. The owners include Kingsley Amis, Desmond Morris, the Bishop of Leicester, Michael Berkeley, Carmen Callil, Alice Thomas Ellis and John Bratby. The book is a companion volume to Chatto's "English Dog at Home". The photographs are by Toby Glanville, a freelance photographer whose work often appears in magazines. Matthew Sturgis is a freelance writer working part-time for "Harpers and Queen". For both this is a first book.

The English cat at home

Travel

Chatto&Windus

ENGLISH CAT AT HOME

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Pets & Animal Care

RANDOM HOUSE UK

During his five years in captivity in Beirut, John McCarthy had very little reading material. But the one book he did have was the Bible, which he read from cover to cover--twice. He was particularly intrigued by the stories of the Old Testament. But how much of this 'history' is actually true? Returning to the Holy Land, John McCarthy visited sites associated with the great biblical stories and spoke to the archaeologists and the historians who are uncovering the truth of the biblical past. This book encapsulates the evidence, examines the arguments and, offers fresh, sometimes shocking but challenging perspectives on the Bible.

It Ain't Necessarily So: Investigating the Truth of the Biblical Past

History

World

Charnwood Pub

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Books by STURGIS, Matthew