A COMMONPLACE BOOK.

Biographies & Memoirs

Guinness, Alec

Arts & Literature

Hamish Hamilton

<p>The figure of Dr. Johnson, which for two centuries has bulked so largely in literary history and been the cause of so much comment and quotation, has received perhaps more of our esteem than of our understanding, and has seldom been seen in the round from the viewpoints taken by the general reader. Margaret Lane, distinguished both as novelist and biographer, has here given us aspects of Johnson that, described in clear and touching words, bring to life for everyone that odd, lovable, impossible, and in his own day gigantically influential character. This book without descending into details appropriate to an exhaustive study, not only provides a full account of Johnson's main traits and actions and accomplishments, but places him in the world in which he struggled to survive and which eventually he came triumphantly to dominate. Here we sense the sights and smells of Fleet Street, the noise of the coffee houses where the great verbal battles were waged, the atmospheres pervading the luxurious mansions of the great and the intolerable squalor of the slums. Surrounding the central figure we are shown such other vivid personalities as Garrick, Burke, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Lord Chesterfield, the Thrales, and that inspired note-taker, the alternately irresistible and insufferable Boswell. Lane's account of that world includes much that has hardly been touched upon by earlier biographers. This entrancing literary sketch is illustrated by a wealth of pictures - 16 in color and over 100 monochromes - including some that have never before appeared in a biography.</p>

Samuel Johnson and his World

LANE, MARGARET

Soldier of the Queen

Literature & Fiction

HENNESSY, Max

Genre Fiction

The watch stories (O) (Penguin Originals)

Bass, Rick

Contemporary

In this book, Paul Strathern, the award-winning novelist and expositor of complex ideas, unravels the dramatic history of chemistry through the quest for the elements. Framing this history is the life-story of the 19th century Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev, who fell asleep at this desk and awoke after dreaming of the Periodic Table - the template upon which modern chemistry is founded, and the formulation of which marked chemistry's coming of age as a science. From ancient philosophy, through medieval alchemy to the splitting of the atom, this is the true story of the birth of chemistry and the role of one man's dream.

Mendeleyev's Dream : The Quest for the Elements

PAUL STRATHERN

Science & Math

<p>Jonathan Safran Foer has long had a passion for the work of the twentieth-century American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. Inspired by Cornell's avian-themed boxes, and suspecting that they would be similarly inspiring to others, Foer began to write letters. The responses he received from luminaries of American writing were nothing short of astounding. Twenty writers generously contributed pieces of prose and poetry that are as eclectic as they are imaginative, and the result is a unique collaborative project and one of the most significant engagements of literature with art for many years.</p>

Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell

Jonathan Safran Foer

United States

If It Is Your Life

james-kelman

Interventions

CHOMSKY, Noam.

Essays & Correspondence

For many of us the moon, and the chill light it casts, are things we either ignore or take for granted. It wouldn't enter our heads therefore to set off around the world in search of moonlight. But, as James Attlee's eccentric quest proves, we couldn't be more wrong.  From Normandy to Naples, Wales to Arizona, Las Vegas to Japan, Attlee explores moonlight's many moods and meanings. Taking in the ancient and modern, art and literature, science and music, Nocturne travels far and deep to provide a portrait of an enigmatic light increasingly endangered in our over-illuminated world.

Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight and Its Meanings - In Art, Literature, Music and Our Lives

Attlee, James

Travel

Cockroach

RAWI HAGE

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Books by Hamish Hamilton