Great Art

The story goes that under the influence of blues and rock and roll, Britain suddenly started making spectacularly great music in the 1960s like some clever, quick-learning cultural satellite of America. But Britain’s mid-20th-century pop music explosion didn’t happen from a standing start. The reasons, both dazzling and multifaceted, appear to lie deeper than those legendary deliveries of blues records to Liverpool’s port and the legacy of music halls.

In this volume, Greg Clarke and Monte Beauchamp take us on an unforgettable literary bar crawl. A Sidecar Named Desire is packed with historical factoids, anecdotes, booze trivia, and fascinating detours into the lives of our most storied literary personalities - along with literary-themed cocktail recipes such as Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Philip Larkin’s Gin and Tonic set to verse.

Before The Beatles landed on American shores in February 1964, only two British acts had topped the Billboard singles chart. In the first quarter of 1964, however, the Beatles alone accounted for 60% of all recorded music sold in the United States; in 1964 and 1965 British acts occupied the number one position for 52 of the 104 weeks; and from 1964 through to 1970, the Rolling Stones, Herman's Hermits, the Dave Clark Five, the Animals, and more placed more than 130 songs on the American Top Forty.

Former Prime Minister John Major takes a remarkable journey into his own unconventional family past to tell the richly colourful story of the British music hall. Music hall was one of the glories of Victorian England. Sentimental, vulgar, class-conscious, but always patriotic and on the side of the underdog, it held a mirror to the audiences’ hopes and fears - and sometimes the general absurdity of life. Vast, smoke-filled auditoriums were packed night after night in nearly every town and city in Britain.

An immigrant from Hong Kong, Jimmy O. Yang is now a bona fide American comedian and actor. In his debut stand-up special, Good Deal, Jimmy will tell you all about his take on Asian representation, how he learned to speak English from rap videos, dating tall women, and pursuing his dreams only to disappoint his old school Chinese parents.

Want to create song lyrics that move people? Whether you want to create magnificent lyrics that moves mind, body, and soul, enjoy an easy-to-follow guide for creating incredible songs, or maximize your writing skills by supercharging your lyrics, this audiobook will give you what you want and more! Get excited! You are about to discover the complete creative process for writing great song lyrics!

Una completa biografía, correctamente documentada por el hispanista Ian Gibson, que ahora puedes escuchar. En tono ágil y ameno, incluye análisis de los cuadros más importantes y representativos de la trayectoria del pintor.

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British institution, and its story during the Second World War is also our story. This was a period of remarkable voices: Churchill’s speeches, de Gaulle’s broadcasts from exile, Richard Dimbleby and Vera Lynn. Radio offered an incomparable tool for propaganda while at the same time eyewitness testimonies gave a voice to everyone, securing the BBC’s reputation as a purveyor of truth.

Leadership is often a struggle, and yet strong taboos keep us from talking openly and honestly about our difficulties for fear of looking weak and seeming to lack confidence. But Steven Snyder shows that this discussion is vital - adversity is precisely what unlocks our greatest potential. Using real-life stories drawn from his extensive research studying 151 diverse episodes of leadership struggle, Snyder shows how to navigate intense challenges to achieve personal growth and organizational success.

Henry David Thoreau is a beloved American author, poet and philosopher. He was a lifelong abolitionist, advocate of civil disobedience againts unjust or corrupted goverments, and he defended the idea of abandoning illusory matters in favor of simple living, in order to discover life's authentic essential needs. He is best known for Walden, or Life in the woods, the book he wrote during his two-year experiment in minimalist living: having built himself a cabin in the woods, he stayed there to study, write, and enjoy his newfound communion with nature.

Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with E. E. Cummings's Cambridge upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary Decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, and other "modern" movements in the arts.

The poster-child victim of a dysfunctional family from Beech Grove, Indiana, Steve McQueen experienced an unsettled early life with a rebellious and alcoholic mother. McQueen channeled his difficult childhood into a masterful career on screen portraying tough, self-sufficient characters in such iconic films as The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Sand Pebbles, Bullitt, and Papillon.

Most art history books just go over dates and major style changes, without letting the artists speak for themselves. In For Artists by Artists, you will learn directly from the top 40 of some of the most famous artists in the world. You will see how they thought about art, nature, truth, beauty, work, other artists, and God. You will journey through the last 750 years of art history in chronological order, seeing the evolution of how painters taught and thought over time.

Mike Medavoy is a Hollywood rarity: a studio executive who, though never far from controversy, remained loved and respected through four decades of moviemaking. He helped bring to the screen some of the most acclaimed Oscar-winning films of our time, including Apocalypse Now, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus, The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, and Sleepless in Seattle.

A Son of the Middle Border is an epic story of the quest for new frontiers during the last half of the nineteenth century, and of the gradual, heartbreaking failure of America's pioneer ideal.

The story of the Stuart dynasty is a breathless soap opera played out in just a hundred years in an array of buildings that span Europe from Scotland, via Denmark, Holland and Spain to England. Life in the court of the House of Stuart has been shrouded in mystery: the first half of the century overshadowed by the fall and execution of Charles I, the second half in the complete collapse of the House itself. Lost to time is the extraordinary contribution the Stuarts made to the fabric of sovereignty.

Jane Austen is famous for such books as Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. Now learn about the author’s journey through a life spent making up stories that touched the lives of millions.

Essential listening for understanding the development of religious thought in America...or for just hearing a rousing good sermon! Dynamic performances bring these classic pieces of Americana to life!

The story of F. Scott Fitzgerald's creation of Jay Gatsby - war hero and Oxford man - at the beginning of the Jazz Age, when the City of Dreaming Spires attracted an astounding array of intellectuals, including the Inklings, W. B. Yeats, and T. S. Eliot.

During the upheavals of 2007-9, the chairman of the Federal Reserve had the name of a Victorian icon on the tip of his tongue: Walter Bagehot. Banker, man of letters, inventor of the Treasury bill, and author of Lombard Street, the still-canonical guide to stopping a run on the banks, Bagehot prescribed the doctrines that - decades later - inspired the radical responses to the world's worst financial crises.