The Grand Affair

The Grand Affair
Author: Paul Fisher
Publsiher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2022-11-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780374605315

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A Wall Street Journal and Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year | Long-listed for the Plutarch Award A bold new biography of the legendary painter John Singer Sargent, stressing the unruly emotions and furtive desires that drove his innovative work and defined the transatlantic, fin de siècle culture he inhabited. A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is also an abiding enigma. While dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona, he scandalized viewers on both sides of the Atlantic with the frankness and sensuality of his work. He charmed the nouveaux riches as well as the old money, but he reserved his greatest sympathies for Bedouins, Spanish dancers, and the gondoliers of Venice. At the height of his renown in Britain and America, he quit his lucrative portrait-painting career to concentrate on allegorical murals with religious themes—and on nude drawings of male models that he kept to himself. In The Grand Affair, the historian Paul Fisher offers a vivid life of the buttoned-up artist and his unbuttoned work. Sargent’s nervy, edgy portraits exposed illicit or dark feelings in himself and his sitters—feelings that high society on both sides of the Atlantic found fascinating and off-putting. Fisher traces Singer’s life from his wandering trans-European childhood to the salons of Paris, and the scandals and enthusiasms he caused, and on to London. There he mixed with eccentrics and aristocrats, and the likes of Henry James and Oscar Wilde, while at the same time forming a close relationship with a lightweight boxer who became his model, valet, and traveling partner. In later years, Sargent met up with his friend and patron Isabella Stewart Gardner around the world and devoted himself to a new model, the African American elevator operator and part-time contortionist Thomas McKeller, who would become the subject of some of Sargent’s most daring and powerful work. Illuminating Sargent’s restless itinerary, Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de siècle sexuality and art, fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life.

Grand Affair

Grand Affair
Author: Charlotte Bingham
Publsiher: Random House
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2011-03-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781446464144

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Fans of Louise Douglas, Dinah Jeffries and Kristin Hannah will love this compelling and enthralling read from bestselling author Charlotte Bingham. The 1950s are brought vividly to life - as is the real battle between desire and duty that Ottilie faces. A real page-turner! 'The author perfectly evokes the atmosphere of a bygone era... ' -- Woman's Own 'This is great summer escapism from an award-winning romantic novelist' -- CHOICE 'I couldn't put it down' -- ***** Reader review 'Absolutely riveting' -- ***** Reader review 'A wonderful read' -- ***** Reader review ******************************************************************************* SOME THINGS NEED SAVING...BUT AT WHAT COST? Ottilie Cartaret is born in London into a family of boys dominated by their genial mother, Ma O'Flaherty. For the first four years of her life, all Ottilie knows is love until, that is, the erring father of the boys, sends enough money from America for the O'Flahertys to move to what Ma imagines will be rural bliss in Cornwall. True, St Elcomb is by the sea and in 1950s Britain is certainly rural but, for the O'Flahertys, it is not bliss. Never mind their poverty - the enmity of the local people is what proves insuperable. Ottilie is ultimately adopted by Mr and Mrs Cartaret, a wealthy couple who run the Grand Hotel in St Elcomb. Here she becomes pampered and spoilt, not just by her adopted parents but by all the visitors to the hotel. Times however are changing and not just for Ottilie but for the hotel too, and as the regulars to the now decaying hotel die off, the Cartarets find they are unable to adapt to modern ways. There is no doubt that Ottilie is their greatest asset and they live to rejoice in the day they adopted but is Ottilie perhaps expected to sacrifice too much herself to save the Grand?

A Grand Affair

A Grand Affair
Author: David Beer
Publsiher: Unknown
Total Pages: 135
Release: 2017-11-15
Genre: Electronic Book
ISBN: 0692969268

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David Beer¿s A Grand Affair transforms the way we see hotels. From the first step through the front door into the lobby, on to the bars, guest rooms, spas, swimming pools, and even the private apartments above, he provides an insider¿s view of what makes for a successful hotel, whether modest or grand luxe.A Grand Affair is an elaboration of the lectures that Beer, an architect and designer, gave at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for many years, enlivened by delightful, quirky anecdotes about the adventures and misadventures he experienced while traveling the world to work on projects.He sits next to Princess Diana¿s sacrosanct corner table at The Ritz Restaurant in London, admires the extravagant hats worn by ladies around the Cipriani pool in Venice (illustrating the fact that not all swimming pools are meant for a swim), and proves that you do not have to be an emperor to have a swinging time in the imperial suite at Le Grand Hotel in Rome, even when you¿re on a budget.He takes the reader to a balcony far above the Aegean Sea on Mount Athos where he drinks wine with the monks of Simonopetra, and to a third-class car on the Orient Express where he travels standing-room-only from Paris to Rome. After one too many martinis at the old Ritz Bar in Paris he misses the wedding of the ambassador¿s daughter at the Madeleine. He enjoys the Duchess of Windsor¿s favorite drink, Dubonnet and gin, in her apartment at the Waldorf Towers; sits alongside Ingrid Bergman on a terrace in Taormina; and in a Palm Desert club is bemused when Mamie Eisenhower shows him her vast collection of pastel-colored slacks, neatly arrayed in an immense walk-in closet.A rich and provocative book, A Grand Affair will not only beguile those who love staying in hotels but also chronicle the exciting life David Beer led during the golden age of travel, when it was still possible to visit the world¿s great sites with nary a tourist in sight.

The Heir Affair

The Heir Affair
Author: Heather Cocks,Jessica Morgan
Publsiher: Grand Central Publishing
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2020-07-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781538715925

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Making it up the aisle was the easy part: Rebecca "Bex" Porter must survive her own scandals and adjust to royal British life in this "positively delicious" follow-up to The Royal We that's "just as fun, charming, and delightful as the first" (Taylor Jenkins Reid). After a scandalous secret turns their fairy-tale wedding into a nightmare, Rebecca "Bex" Porter and her husband Prince Nicholas are in self-imposed exile. The public is angry. The Queen is even angrier. And the press is salivating. Cutting themselves off from friends and family, and escaping the world's judgmental eyes, feels like the best way to protect their fragile, all-consuming romance. But when a crisis forces the new Duke and Duchess back to London, the Band-Aid they'd placed over their problems starts to peel at the edges. Now, as old family secrets and new ones threaten to derail her new royal life, Bex has to face the emotional wreckage she and Nick left behind: with the Queen, with the world, and with Nick's brother Freddie, whose sins may not be so easily forgotten—nor forgiven.

The Man in the Red Coat

The Man in the Red Coat
Author: Julian Barnes
Publsiher: Random House Canada
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2020-02-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780735279957

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The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending takes us on a rich, witty, revelatory tour of Belle Époque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi. IN THE SUMMER OF 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' shopping: a prince, a count and a commoner with an Italian name. In time, each of these men would achieve a certain level of renown, but who were they then and what was the significance of their sojourn to England? Answering these questions, Julian Barnes unfurls the stories of their lives, playing out against the backdrop of the Belle Époque in Paris. Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, the society doctor, free-thinker and man of science with a famously complicated private life, and the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits. In this vivid tapestry of people (Henry James, Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, Proust, James Whistler, among many others), place, and time, we see not merely an epoch of glamour and pleasure, but, surprisingly, one of violence, prejudice and nativism--with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. The Man in the Red Coat is, at once, a fresh portrait of the Belle Époque; an illuminating look at the longstanding exchange of ideas between Britain and France; and a life of a man who lived passionately in the moment but whose ideas and achievements were far ahead of his time.

The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair
Author: Graham Greene
Publsiher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2018-03-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781504052474

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Graham Greene’s masterful novel of love and betrayal in World War II London is “undeniably a major work of art” (The New Yorker). Maurice Bendrix, a writer in Clapham during the Blitz, develops an acquaintance with Sarah Miles, the bored, beautiful wife of a dull civil servant named Henry. Maurice claims it’s to divine a character for his novel-in-progress. That’s the first deception. What he really wants is Sarah, and what Sarah needs is a man with passion. So begins a series of reckless trysts doomed by Maurice’s increasing romantic demands and Sarah’s tortured sense of guilt. Then, after Maurice miraculously survives a bombing, Sarah ends the affair—quickly, absolutely, and without explanation. It’s only when Maurice crosses paths with Sarah’s husband that he discovers the fallout of their duplicity—and it’s more unexpected than Maurice, Henry, or Sarah herself could have imagined. Adapted for film in both 1956 and 1999, Greene’s novel of all that inspires love—and all that poisons it—is “singularly moving and beautiful” (Evelyn Waugh).

Battles Betrayals and Brotherhood

Battles  Betrayals  and Brotherhood
Author: Anonim
Publsiher: Hackett Publishing
Total Pages: 503
Release: 2012-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781603849104

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No cycle of historical legends has enjoyed greater or more enduring popularity in China than that of the Three Kingdoms, which recounts the dramatic story of the civil wars (c. AD 180–220) that divided the old Han empire into the Shu-Han, Wei, and Wu states, and the eventual reunification of the realm under the Western Jin in AD 280.

His Imperial Highness The Grand Duke Alexis in the United States of America During the Winter of 1871 72

His Imperial Highness The Grand Duke Alexis in the United States of America During the Winter of 1871 72
Author: Anonymous
Publsiher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2023-03-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9783368158941

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Reprint of the original, first published in 1872.