The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism

The fascinating new book by the author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling: a saga of artistic rivalry and cultural upheaval in the decade leading to the birth of Impressionism. If there were two men who were absolutely central to artistic life in France in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were Edouard Manet and Ernest Meissonier. While the former has been labelled the “Father of Impressionism” and is today a household name, the latter has sunk into obscurity. It is difficult now to believe that in 1864, when this story begins, it was Meissonier who was considered the greatest French artist alive and who received astronomical sums for his work, while Manet was derided for his messy paintings of ordinary people and had great difficulty getting any of his work accepted at the all-important annual Paris Salon. Manet and Meissonier were the Mozart and Salieri of their day, one a dangerous challenge to the establishment, the other beloved by rulers and the public alike for his painstakingly meticulous oil paintings of historical subjects. Out of the fascinating story of their parallel careers, Ross King creates a lens through which to view the political tensions that dogged Louis-Napoleon during the Second Empire, his ignominious downfall, and the bloody Paris Commune of 1871. At the same time, King paints a wonderfully detailed and vivid portrait of life in an era of radical social change: on the streets of Paris, at the new seaside resorts of Boulogne and Trouville, and at the race courses and picnic spots where the new bourgeoisie relaxed. When Manet painted Dejeuner sur l’herbe or Olympia, he shocked not only with his casual brushstrokes (described by some as applied by a ‘floor mop’) but with his subject matter: top-hatted white-collar workers (and their mistresses) were not considered suitable subjects for ‘Art’. Ross King shows how, benign as they might seem today, these paintings changed the course of history. The struggle between Meissonier and Manet to see their paintings achieve pride of place at the Salon was not just about artistic competitiveness, it was about how to see the world. Full of fantastic tidbits of information (such as the use of carrier pigeons and hot-air balloons during the siege of Paris), and a colourful cast of characters that includes Baudelaire, Courbet, and Zola, with walk-on parts for Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Cezanne, The Judgment of Paris casts new light on the birth of Impressionism and takes us to the heart of a time in which the modern French identity was being forged.

Arts & Photography

King, Ross

History & Criticism

Bond Street Books

'Hunger is the loudest voice in my head. I'm hungry most of the time.' On a January morning in 2003, William Leith woke up to the fattest day of his life. That same day he left London for New York to interview controversial diet guru Dr Robert Atkins. But what started out as a routine journalistic assignment set Leith on an intensely personal and illuminating journey into the mysteries of hunger and addiction. In his twenties, Leith's weight had risen steadily. In his early thirties, he was slim again, but then, predictably, his weight began to creep up - and up, and up. At his worst he was driven to the kitchen, manically consuming slice after slice of buttered toast, lusting after fries, bacon sandwiches and peanut butter, wracked by a need that was emotional as well as physical. Fat has been called a feminist issue. But in this unflinching investigation into the bodily consequences and psychological pain of being overweight, Leith reveals how it affects us all. Our fat society, he tells us, is a lot like him: always hiding from the truth about itself. "The Hungry Years" charts fascinating new territory for everyone who has ever had a craving or counted a calorie. It is a story of food, fat, and addiction that is both funny and heart-wrenching.

The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict

Biographies & Memoirs

Leith, William

Professionals & Academics

From a stunning new voice, a debut novel that, like Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Monica Ali's Brick Lane, confronts the multi-racial realities of modern Britain with humour, grace, and lyrical intensity. Identical twins Georgia and Bessi live in the loft of 26 Waifer Avenue in Neasden, London. It is their place, one of strawberry-scented beanbag chair, a view of the apple trees, and very important decisions, and all visitors must knock on the door marked 26a before entering. Downstairs is a less harmonious world: Ida, the twins’ Nigerian mother, puts cayenne pepper on Yorkshire pudding and can only assuage her bouts of desperate homesickness with five-hour baths and long conversations in Edo with her own absent mother; Aubrey, their Derbyshire-born father, shouts “Haddock!” in frustration with his house full of women, and angrily roams the streets of Neasden to escape his demons. Older sister Bel discovers sex, high heels, and organic hairdressing, and baby sister Kemy is obsessed with Michael Jackson. The twins plan their own flapjack empire as the ticket to a shining future for two. But as Georgia and Bessi grow up, discovering the temptations and dangers of London in the 1980s and 90s, the realities of separateness and of solitude crowd in. Each must decide on her own path to adulthood and pursue it — and discover if she can face the future as only one. Wickedly funny and devastatingly moving, 26a is part fairytale, part nightmare. It moves from the mundane to the magical, the particular to the universal with exceptional flair and imagination. It is for everyone who remembers their childhood, and anyone who knows what it is to lose it. On the outside of their front door Georgia and Bessi had written in chalk ‘26a,’ and on the inside ‘G&amp;B,’ at eye level, just above the handle. This was the extra dimension. The one after sight, sound, smell, touch and taste where the world multiplied and exploded because it was the sum of two people. Bright was twice as bright. All the colours were extra. Girls with umbrellas skipped across the wallpaper and Georgia and Bessi could hear them laughing. —Excerpt from 26a

EVANS, DIANA

Literature & Fiction

“This is the story of my search for my sister Catherine, after her death. This is the story of schizophrenia, and the terrible things that it does to people.” –Mary Loudon A multi-faceted and extraordinarily honest look at the devastating toll that schizophrenia takes on its victims and on those who care about them, Mary Loudon’s Relative Stranger is riveting, illuminating, and heart-wrenching. It is the author’s fascinating quest to find her sister Catherine, who was lost to her family long before she died, in Catherine’s home, in her last hospital room, her paintings, her letters, her clothes. But perhaps even more compelling is Mary Loudon’s internal journey. In facing the truths about Catherine’s life and death, she asks hard questions about sanity, about family responsibility, about love, and about what it means to say that a life is – or is not – worth living. With intelligence, compassion, and a sharp eye for the funny as well as the sad, Mary Loudon ensures that we question everything we thought we knew about what it means to love, to lose, to live and die, and, most of all, to belong. My sister, Catherine, was a paranoid schizophrenic. Her illness was in place at birth and apparent during her childhood. During her teenage years, it asserted itself suddenly and aggressively. By the time she was in her mid-twenties, it had destroyed her chances of living anything approaching a normal life. . . . Following a severe breakdown, she first went missing, abroad, when she was nineteen and I was five. She was first sectioned when I was six, first sent to prison when I was seven. . . . She last wrote to me a year before her death from cancer, when she was forty-six and I was thirty-two. After Catherine died, I went to the Bristol Royal Infirmary, to see her body, and the hospital room where she had died. It was only there and then that I discovered one of many extraordinary things about my sister. For the last eight years of her life she had lived as a man.

Relative Stranger: A Life After Death

Loudon, Mary

Acclaimed historian Lynne Olson’s collective biography explores one of the most important turning points in 20th-century history – the months leading up to Winston Churchill’s accession to Prime Minister and the decisive turning of the tide in Britain against the appeasement of Hitler. They attended the same schools, went to the same country houses, married each other’s sisters. They were part of the small, clubby network that dominated English society. And now they were doing the unthinkable: trying to topple the man who led their own political party, prime minister Neville Chamberlain, from power. It was early 1940, several months after Britain had declared war on Germany–and then had made clear it had little interest in fighting. Poland had been crushed, and Chamberlain, despite the treaties and the promises to Poland, had done nothing to save it. In Germany, military buildup continued unabated, as Hitler fine-tuned his plans for an assault on Western Europe. In Britain there was doubt, suspicion, and despair. When war was declared, the country had braced itself: millions had been evacuated to the countryside; a blackout had been imposed–and for what? What was the justification? A small group of dissidents within the Conservative Party drew together to fight Chamberlain and his policy of appeasing Hitler. They included the bookish Harold Macmillan, an unlikely rebel; Roland Cartland, most outspoken of the dissidents; and Anthony Eden, the Golden Boy of interwar politics and Chamberlain’s foreign secretary. The climax of months of conspiracy would come in May 1940, when the House of Commons gathered to debate Britain’s defeat by Germany in Norway. As the rebels worked feverishly to line up last-minute support, the dissidents feared that their odds of success were slim. Yet within days of their challenging Chamberlain over the conduct of the war in Norway, he was gone and Churchill was prime minister. Troublesome Young Men is the story of how that came to be–and of the men who made it happen.

Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England

History

Olson, Lynne

Europe

A huge bestseller in Germany for over a year, My Father’s Country offers extraordinarily moving and riveting insight into the experience of being German in the last century. On August 26, 1944, Hans Georg Klamroth, officer in the German army and member of the SS, was executed for high treason for his participation in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. My Father’s Country is the extraordinary work of Klamroth’s daughter, Wibke, born only six years before her father’s death. Decades later, Bruhns was watching a TV documentary about the events of July 1944 when images of her father in the court room suddenly appeared on screen. “I stare at this man with the empty face. I don’t know him. But I can see myself in him — his eyes are my eyes; I know I resemble him. I know I wouldn’t be here without him. And what do I know about him? Nothing at all.” Based on an extensive collection of family letters, private diaries, photographs and even menus, My Father’s Country traces Wibke Bruhns’ father’s, and more widely, her well-to-do merchant family’s, life in the Germany of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With it, Bruhns not only brings to life the nuances of this world — its culture and its assumptions, politics and beliefs — but also comes to know, finally, the mysterious father she barely remembers.

My Father's Country: The Story of a German Family

Bruhns, Wibke

Published to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad is a brilliant and highly readable biography of a literary figure of world-wide reputation. Conrad’s impact has been so profound and far-reaching that, eighty years after his death, he remains an essential cultural reference point. Such phrases as “heart of darkness” and “The horror! The horror!” have entered the language, often cited without an awareness of their original contexts. His popular legacy extends to Latin American fiction, to the spy novel, to the terrorist and anarchist character, and to film. The writers he has influenced range from T. S. Eliot to William Faulkner to V. S. Naipaul and John Le Carré. For a writer of “difficult” fiction he has enjoyed a remarkably wide impact, yet as Marlow proclaims in Lord Jim of the figure whose story he tells,“he was one of us,” and so Conrad remains in fascinating ways. Stape’s biography – an intimate portrait, including previously unpublished photographs – offers a Conrad for our times, a man with a deep sense of otherness, of multiple cultural identities and, writing in his third language, a working writer, whose novels and stories are a cornerstone of literary modernism and, indeed, of modernity itself.

The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad

STAPE,JOHN

Arts & Literature

Incendiary

At once a novel and an open letter to Osama bin Laden, Incendiary is a shocking, hilarious, and heartbreaking debut that crashes head on into huge questions of right and wrong, good and evil, madness and sanity. Incendiary is the story of a working class woman who likes her simple life: watching Arsenal matches on the telly with her husband and little boy, fishsticks for dinner in their small flat, the occasional trip to the pub. One spring afternoon the woman, whom we know only by the nickname “Petal”, watches her husband and their son head happily off to Ashburton Grove, Arsenal’s brand new stadium, to see their favourite team play. A few hours later the horror of a terrorist bombing plays out on her television — the bombing of Ashburton Grove. “Petal” tells her own story in an extraordinary voice, one both desperate and sharply funny, speaking directly to the man responsible for the bombing. She shows the reader an incredible world, a London that is not quite real, in a time that is not quite our own. And as deeply enmeshed as the reader becomes in her reality, a tiny, persistent doubt begins to creep in about just what is reality and what is a manifestation of her griefstricken and distraught imagination. Dear Osama they want you dead or alive so the terror will stop. Well I wouldn’t know about that I mean rock ’n’ roll didn’t stop when Elvis died on the khazi it just got worse. Next thing you know there was Sonny &amp; Cher and Dexy’s Midnight Runners. I’ll come to them later. My point is it’s easier to start these things than to finish them. I suppose you thought of that did you? There’s a reward of 25 million dollars on your head but don’t lose sleep on my account Osama. I have no information leading to your arrest or capture. I have no information full effing stop. I’m what you’d call an infidel and my husband called working class. There is a difference you know. But just supposing I did clap eyes on you. Supposing I saw you driving a Nissan Primera down towards Shoreditch and grassed you to the old bill. Well. I wouldn’t know how to spend 25 million dollars. It’s not as if I’ve got anyone to spend it on since you blew up my husband and my boy. —excerpt from Indendiary

CLEAVE, Chris

Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Prize Poppy Shakespeare is wholly unique — both an insider’s look at the madness of the mental health system and an outsider’s discovery of the power of an unlikely friendship, it signals the arrival of an extraordinary new voice on the international literary scene. Who is mad? Who is sane? Who decides? Welcome to the Dorothy Fish, a day hospital in North London. N has been a patient here for thirteen years. Day after day she sits smoking in the common room, swapping medication and comparing MAD money rates. Like all the patients at the Dorothy Fish, N’s chief ambition is never to get discharged. Each year, when her annual assessment comes round, she is relieved to learn that she hasn’t got any better. Then in walks Poppy Shakespeare in her six-inch skirt and twelve-inch heels. She is certain she isn’t mentally ill and desperate to return to her life outside. Though baffled by Poppy’s attitude, N agrees to help. Together they plot to gain Poppy’s freedom. But in a world where everything’s upside-down, are they crazy enough to upset the system? Funny, brilliant, and moving, Poppy Shakespeare looks at madness from the inside, questioning our mental health system and the borders we place between sanity and insanity. Written in high-voltage prose, original and troubling, it is a stunning debut. Excerpt from Poppy Shakespeare: ‘It’s not that I’ve got a problem with mental illness,’ Poppy said. ‘It’s just there’s nothing the matter with me. Do you know what I’m saying?’ ‘I wouldn’t worry bout that,’ I said. ‘They must think you’s mad or you wouldn’t be here. Candid Headphones don’t reckon she’s mad. Never stopped her,’ I said. . . . ‘Poppy?’ I said, cause I got to say it. Be like watching a blind man walk under a bus. ‘You know what you said bout not thinking you’s mad?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, like what of it? ‘Well I wouldn’t say nothing to them about that,’ I told her. ‘Not at the moment. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I ain’t saying nothing. It’s just the doctors, you never know. They might decide to pick up on it. I mean, it’s up to you, do you know what I’m saying, but maybe if you stick to your other symptoms.’

Poppy Shakespeare

Allan, Clare

A new novel from the acclaimed winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize for achievement in fiction.The Successor is a powerful political novel based on the sudden, mysterious death of the man who had been handpicked to succeed the hated Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. The man who died was Mehmet Shehu, the presumed heir to the ailing dictator. The world was so certain that he was next in line that he was known as The Successor. And then, shortly before he was to assume power, he was found dead. Did he commit suicide or was he murdered?The Successor is simultaneously a page-turning mystery, a historical novel – based on actual events and buttressed by the author’s private conversations with the son of the real-life Mehmet Shehu – and a psychological challenge to the reader to decide, How does one live when nothing is sure? The Successor seamlessly blends dream and reality, legendary past, and contemporary history, and proves again that Kadare stands alongside Márquez, Canetti, and Auster.

The Successor

Kadaré, Ismaïl

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