After meeting the mysterious & beautiful Lady Beauclair at a society ball, George Cautley, a hapless young artist adrift in the gilded world of 1770s London, paints her portrait. She, in turn, tells him the scandalous story of Tristano, a castrato singer in Handel's opera company fifty years before. But Cautley also meets the eminent painter Sir Endymion Starker that same evening & his mistress, Eleanora, who has another tragic tale to tell, one that will have George unwittingly re-enacting the fate of Tristano- ...

Considered by Graham Greene to be Maugham's best work, Don Fernando is a paean to a golden age of enormous creative energy. ...

Enchanted by the landscape & people of Spain, Maugham had long resolved to write a picaresque novel about the country. Instead, he wrote a living commentary assessing a great people in their greatest hour. DON FERNANDO, considered by Graham Greene to be Maugham's best work, is a paean to Spain's golden age of enormous creative energy. Beginning with the vivid tale of Loyola's life & conversion, it discusses the writings of St Teresa & the painting of El Greco, & comment with sagacity & wit on such illustrious figures as Cervantes, Luis de Lyon, Lope de Vega, Velasquez & the creator of Don Juan. DON FERNANDO is full of happy surprises, curious facts & stimulating opinions that reflect Maugham's lifelong love & admiration for Spanish culture & civilisation. ...

Don Mc Cullin is one of the greatest photographers of conflict in our time. This book was conceived on a grand scale that does justice to his extraordinary life & the events he has witnessed. It forms one of the great documents of the latter part of the last century.

The book begins & ends in the Somerset landscape that surrounds Mc Cullin's home, but the whole sequence of more than two hundred photographs encompasses a ravaged northern Engl&, war in Cyprus, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia, Beirut & riots in Derry. The climax of the book is among the cannibals & tribespeople deep in the jungles of Irian Jaya, where Mc Cullin focuses on humanity in an almost Stone Age condition.

The introduction by Harold Evans, the acclaimed newspaper editor & authority on photojournalism, is drawn from his long experience of working with Mc Cullin. The distinguished novelist & essayist, Susan Sontag, has contributed an essay on Mc Cullin & the role of witness to conflict
- a subject of timely pertinence.




...

Don Mc Cullin's reputation stands as one of the greatest war photographers of our times. In recent years he has photographed the landscape surrounding his home in Somerset, but his later travels have taken him to some of the most remote regions in the world. His skill in photographing people in extreme situations has enabled him to mix with tribes on the edges of civilisation.

His work among the people of Irian Jaya, including cannibals, appeared in his last book, Don Mc Cullin. Mc Cullin's new work in Africa reaches one of the last corners of the earth where signs of outside influence are few, though they appear ominously significant. Over the last two years Don Mc Cullin has travelled south from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia to the valley of the Omo River leading down to the border with Sudan. There he has entered the tribal lands of the Surma, the Gheleb, the Bume, the Erbore, the Bene, the Bodi, the Karo, the Hamar & the Mursi. Extraordinary body paints decorate many of their bodies. Metalwork adorns their limbs, &, in the case of the Mursi, huge circular plates extend their lower lips & piercings open up large holes in their ear lobes. Ritualistic stick battles are enacted with ferocity. Rifles & machine guns are often cradled in the hands of warriors. The violence Mc Cullin witnessed was staged but real dangers were close.

African tribespeople can present another face of the exotic to those of us in modern, developed cultures, especially if the photography recognises nothing of their dignity but all of their exoticism. Mc Cullin knows too much to fall into that trap. Mc Cullin's subjects retain their dignity & also become heroic. We, the viewers, can be amazed by their strength & beauty, & all the more so because Mc Cullin's compassionate photography enables us to understand their vulnerability. Mc Cullin's photographs will be prefaced by extracts from his diaries.



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The story of the Spanish knight Don Quizote whose devotion to the tales of chivalry leads him into a series of bizarre adventures in the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, blends fantasy, comedy & gripping narrative in a way that has appealed to children ever since it was first published. All the wisdom & humour of Cervantes' great seventeenth-century classic are to be found in Parry's very readable modern abridgement, enhanced by the delightful illustrations of Walter Crane, one of the greatest of all English children's book illustrators. ...

Don Revie was the football man about whom few were neutral. The Leeds United team he created was possibly the finest in the history of the English league, one of legendary endurance, it characters strong & unyeilding. Yet is remained unloved by the world at large, for many felt its voracious pursuit of honours was hallmarked by cynicism & ruthlessness. This compelling study of Revie, one of football's most complex & controversil figures, examines the factors & influences that moulded him. In interviews with playing colleagues, the footballers he managed & others who worked alongside him, Andrew Mourant reflects on the seemingly paradoxical aspects of Revie's nature. He traces Revie's development from a childhood in which, living on the breadline in Middlesborough, the game was his great escape, through playing days with five clubs to management of Leeds United, England & beyond; & considers the legacy Revie left Leeds: a craving for a return to the days of glory & triumph he engineered. It is a turbulent story of success & failure. The tragic nature of Revie's untimely death in 1989 through motor neurone disease served only to sharpen memories of his achievements. He continues to cast a shadow over Elland Road; Revie remains the yardstick against whom all successors are judged. Amid the triumphs, near misses & traumas, his reign brought Leeds United an era of unparalleled prosperity & stability. The story of Revie's career is one of intense dedication, willpower & pursuit of the near impossible. For some it was an inspiration; while for others its darker elements tainted the success he brought to Elland Road & all he strove to achieve for Engl&. ...