Empfehlungen basierend auf "An Officer and a Spy"

In recent years, several of America’s leading art museums have voluntarily given up their finest pieces of classical art to the governments of Italy and Greece. The monetary value is estimated at over half a billion dollars. Why would they be moved to such unheard-of generosity?The answer lies at the Getty, one of the world’s richest and most troubled museums, and scandalous revelations that it had been buying looted antiquities for decades. Drawing on a trove of confidential museum records and frank interviews, Felch and Frammolino give us a fly-on-the-wall account of the inner workings of a world-class museum and tell the story of the Getty’s dealings in the illegal antiquities trade. The outlandish characters and bad behavior could come straight from the pages of a thriller—the wealthy recluse founder, the cagey Italian art investigator, the playboy curator, the narcissist CEO—but their chilling effects on the rest of the art world have been all too real, as the authors show in novelistic detail.Fast-paced and compelling, Chasing Aphrodite exposes the layer of dirt beneath the polished façade of the museum business.

By chance, John and Jean -- one English, the other French -- meet in a provincial railway station. Their resemblance to each other is uncanny, and they spend the next few hours talking and drinking - until at last John falls into a drunken stupor. It's to be his last carefree moment, for when he wakes, Jean has stolen his identity and disappeared. So the Englishman steps into the Frenchman's shoes, and faces a variety of perplexing roles - as owner of a chateau, director of a failing business, head of a fractious family, and master of nothing. Gripping and complex, The Scapegoat is a masterful exploration of doubling and identity, and of the dark side of the self. "A dazzlingly clever and immensely entertaining novel."-New York Times

In 1963, it was learned that Defence Minister, John Profumo, had had an affair with 19-year old Christine Keeler who was also seeing a Soviet diplomat and suspected spy, Eugene Ivanov. The resulting scandal saw the death, an apparent suicide, of society osteopath Stephen Ward (who brought them together) and is widely regarded as contributing to the resignation of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan through ill health and the defeat of the Tory government at the next election - though the public was assured that national security had not been damaged. This book produces evidence that only a fraction of the story was made known at the time or revealed by the trial of Ward for prostitution. The involvement of MI5, the use of sex to procure defections, suspicions that Ward was murdered, and many other aspects of the case are produced here as links in a chain that leads right back to President Kennedy. The book is re-issued to coincide with the release of the film "Scandal". Anthony Summers has written other investigative books, including "The File on the Tsar", "Conspiracy" about the Kennedy's assassination, and "Goddess", a biography of Marilyn Monroe. Stephen Dorrill also worked on "Goddess" and is co-editor of "Lobster", a political and intelligence quarterly.

PULITZER PRIZE FINALISTA Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019National Book Award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her fifteen remarkable years in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, painting intimate new portraits of two literary giants and revealing secrets of the biographical art.In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist and a recently minted Ph.D. who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could be his biographer despite her never having written a biography before. The next seven years of probing conversations, intercontinental research, singular encounters with Beckett's friends, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games resulted in Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Bair to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir.Where Beckett had been retiring and elusive, Beauvoir was domineering and all encompassing. Plus, there was a catch: Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other--and lived in the same neighborhood. Bair, who resorted to dodging one subject or the other by hiding out in the great cafés of Paris, learned that what works in terms of process for one biography rarely applies to the next. Her seven-year relationship with the forceful and difficult Beauvoir required a radical change in approach and yielded another groundbreaking literary profile while also awakening Bair to an era of burgeoning feminist consciousness.Drawing on Bair's extensive notes from the period, including never-before-told anecdotes and details considered impossible to publish at the time, Parisian Lives gives us an entirely new perspective on the all-too-human side of these legendary thinkers. It is also a warmly personal reflection on the writing life--its compromises, its joys, and its rewards.

The landmark novel that inspired Verdi’s opera La Traviata, in a sparkling new translation"One of the greatest love stories of all time," according to Henry James, and the inspiration for Verdi’s opera La Traviata, the Oscar-winning musical Moulin Rouge!, and numerous ballets, stage plays (starring Lillian Gish, Eleonora Duse, Tallulah Bankhead, and Sarah Bernhardt, and films (starring Greta Garbo, Robert Taylor, Rudolph Valentino, Isabelle Huppert, and Colin Firth), The Lady of the Camellias itself was inspired by the real-life nineteeth-century courtesan Marie Duplessis, the lover of the novel’s author, Alexander Dumas fils.Known to all as “the Lady of the Camellias” because she is never seen without her favorite flowers, Marguerite Gautier, the most beautiful, brazen, and expensive courtesan in all of Paris. But despite having many lovers, she has never really loved—until she meets Armand Duval, young, handsome, and hopelessly in love with her.“Marguerite and Armand are the kind of bright, self-destructive young things we still read about in magazines, watch on-screen, or brush up against today.”—Liesl Schillinger, from the Note on the TranslationFor more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

From the New York Times bestselling biographer Anne Edwards comes the irresistible true story of the lives and loves of the great opera diva, Maria Callas.Maria Callas continues to mesmerize us decades after her death, not only because she was indisputably the greatest opera diva of the 20th century, but also because both her life and death were shrouded in a Machiavellian web of scandal, mystery and deception. Now Anne Edwards, well known for her revealing and insightful biographies of some of the world's most noted women, tells the intimate story of Maria Callas—her loves, her life, and her music, revealing the true woman behind the headlines, gossip and speculation.The second daughter of Greek immigrant parents, Maria found herself in the grasp of an overwhelmingly ambitious mother who took her away from her native New York and the father she loved, to a Greece on the eve of the Second World War. From there, we learn of the hardships, loves and triumphs Maria experienced in her professional and personal life. We are introduced to the men who marked Callas forever—Luchino Visconti, the brilliant homosexual director who she loved hopelessly, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, the husband thirty years her senior who used her for his own ambitions, as had her mother, and Aristotle Onassis, who put an end to their historic love affair by discarding her for the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy. Throughout her life, Callas waged a constant battle with her weight, a battle she eventually won, transforming herself from an ugly duckling into the slim and glamorous diva who transformed opera forever, whose recordings are legend, and whose life is the stuff of which tabloids are made. Anne Edwards goes deeper than previous biographies of Maria Callas have dared. She draws upon intensive research to refute the story of Callas's "mystery child" by Onassis, and she reveals the true circumstances of the years preceding Callas's death, including the deception perpetrated by her close and trusted friend. As in her portraits of other brilliant, star-crossed women, Edwards brings Maria Callas—the intimate Callas—alive.

A secret history of scent, memory and desire from the Sunday Times bestselling author of ELEGANCE and THE DEBUTANTE. One letter will turn newly-married Grace Munroe's life upside down: 'Our firm is handling the estate of the deceased Mrs Eva D'Orsey and it is our duty to inform you that you are named as the chief beneficiary in her will. We request your presence at our offices at your earliest convenience, so that we may go through the details of your inheritance.' There is only one problem. Grace has never heard of Eva D'Orsey. So begins a journey which leads Grace through the streets of Paris and into the seductive world of perfumers and their muses. An abandoned perfume shop on the Left Bank will lead her to unravel the heartbreaking story of her mysterious benefactor, an extraordinary woman who bewitched high society in 1920s New York and Paris.

For readers of The Paris Wife and Z comes this vivid novel full of drama, passion, tragedy, and beauty that stunningly imagines the life of iconic fashion designer Coco Chanel—the ambitious, gifted laundrywoman’s daughter who revolutionized fashion, built an international empire, and become one of the most influential and controversial figures of the twentieth century.Born into rural poverty, Gabrielle Chanel and her siblings are sent to orphanage after their mother’s death. The sisters nurture Gabrielle’s exceptional sewing skills, a talent that will propel the willful young woman into a life far removed from the drudgery of her childhood.Transforming herself into Coco—a seamstress and sometime torch singer—the petite brunette burns with ambition, an incandescence that draws a wealthy gentleman who will become the love of her life. She immerses herself in his world of money and luxury, discovering a freedom that sparks her creativity. But it is only when her lover takes her to Paris that Coco discovers her destiny.Rejecting the frilly, corseted silhouette of the past, her sleek, minimalist styles reflect the youthful ease and confidence of the 1920s modern woman. As Coco’s reputation spreads, her couturier business explodes, taking her into rarefied society circles and bohemian salons. But her fame and fortune cannot save her from heartbreak as the years pass. And when Paris falls to the Nazis, Coco is forced to make choices that will haunt her.An enthralling novel of an extraordinary woman who created the life she desired, Mademoiselle Chanel explores the inner world of a woman of staggering ambition whose strength, passion and artistic vision would become her trademark.

The beautifully illustrated fourth volume of Picasso’s life—set in France and Spain during the Spanish Civil War and World War II—covers friendships with the surrealist painters; artistic inspiration around Guernica and the Minotaur; and his muses Marie-Thérèse, Dora Maar, and Françoise Gilot; and much more.Including 271 stunning illustrations and drawing on original and exhaustive research from interviews and never-before-seen material in the Picasso family archives, this book opens with a visit by the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï to Picasso’s chateau in Normandy, Boisgeloup, where he would take his iconic photographs of the celebrated plaster busts of Marie-Thérèse, Picasso’s mistress and muse. Picasso was contributing to André Breton’s Minotaur magazine and he was also spending more time with the likes of Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Lee Miller, and the poet Paul Éluard, in Paris as well as in the south of France. It was during this time that Picasso began writing surrealist poetry and became obsessed with the image of himself as the mythic Minotaur—head of a bull, body of a man—and created his most famous etching, Minotauromachie. Richardson shows us the artist is as prolific as ever, painting Marie-Thérèse, but also painting the surrealist photographer Dora Maar who has become a muse, a collaborator and more. In April 1937, the bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War inspires Picasso’s vast masterwork of the same name, which he paints in just a few weeks for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair. When the Nazis occupy Paris in 1940, Picasso chooses to remain in the city despite the threat that his art would be confiscated. In 1943, Picasso meets Françoise Gilot who would replace Dora, and as Richardson writes, “rejuvenate his psyche, reawaken his imagery and inspire a brilliant sequence of paintings.” As always, Richardson tells Picasso’s story through his work during this period, analyzing how it shows what the artist was feeling and thinking. His fascinating and accessible narrative immerses us in one of the most exciting moments in twentieth century cultural history, and brings to a close the definitive and critically acclaimed account of one of the world’s most celebrated artists.

In 1812, Napoleon enters Russia at the head of 500,000 men. An ocean of fire destroys Moscow. A chaos of ice and snow engulfs the Grand Army. For the first time, the Eagle bows its head. From now on, conquered Europe awakes and takes its revenge. The powerful betray him, his old Guard weep at Fontainebleau. Does the return from the isle of Elba herald a new 'song of departure'? The final act is nigh. The sun of Austerlitz will not rise over the muddy plain of Waterloo. Chained by the English to his rock of St. Helena, the Emperor can still conquer time and oblivion and forge his immortal memory.