Death is the one inevitable fact of life. Throughout the centuries, humanity has sought to understand this sobering thought through art & ritual. The theme of memento mori informs medieval Danse Macabre, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Renaissance paintings of dissected corpses & ”anatomical Eves, ” Gothic literature, funeral effigies, Halloween, & paintings of the Last Judgment. Deceased ancestors are celebrated in the Mexican Day of the Dead, while the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead to secure their afterlife.A volume of unprecedented breadth & sinister beauty, Death: A Graveside Companion examines a staggering range of cultural attitudes toward death. The book is organized into themed chapters: The Art of Dying, Examining the Dead, Memorializing the Dead, The Personification of Death, Symbolizing Death, Death as Amusement, & The Dead After Life. Each chapter begins with thought-provoking articles by curators, academics, & journalists followed by gallery spreads presenting a breathtaking variety of death-related imagery & artifacts. From skulls to the dance of death, statuettes to ex libris, memento mori to memorabilia, all the images are of artifacts in the astonishing collection of Richard Harris & range from 2000 BCE to the present day, running the gamut of both high & popular culture. ...

When it comes to death, is there ever a best case scenario? In this disarmingly witty book, Julian Barnes confronts our unending obsession with the end. He reflects on what it means to miss God, whether death can be good for our careers & why we eventually turn into our parents. Barnes is the perfect guide to the weirdness of the only thing that binds us all. Selected from the book Nothing to be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. Also in the Vintage Minis series: Calm by Tim Parks Drinking by John Cheever Babies by Anne Enright Psychedelics by Aldous Huxley. ...

From Dylan Thomas`s eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath`s desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen; from Chatterton`s Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats` death warrant in a smudge of arterial blood, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work. The post-Romantic lore of the dissolute drunken poet has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture. Novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept & in control, but poets should be melancholic, doomed & self-destructive. Is this just an illusion, or is there some essential truth behind it? What is the price of poetry? In this book, two contemporary poets embark on a series of journeys to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth. ...

A heart-rending account of a Spanish village torn apart by the coming of the Civil War
- A rare humanist & female voice on a war
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Topographic survey of France at 1:25, 000 in IGN`s excellent TOP25 / Série Bleue series. All the maps are GPS compatible, with a 1km UTM grid plus latitude & longitude lines at 5’ intervals. Contours are at 5m intervals except for mountainous areas where the maps have contours at 10m intervals, vividly enhanced by hill shading & graphics for rocky terrain. Colouring with graphics indicates different types of vegetation or land use (deciduous or coniferous forests, moors, orchards, vineyards, etc). PLEASE NOTE: coverage of France at this scale is currently being revised – the format & the presentation of each title are indicated by the letters at the end of its Sheet Reference number (e.g. 0416ET, 3531ETR, 1923SB, etc.)MAPS WITH FULL TOURIST OVERPRINT & AN ENGLISH MAP LEGEND: all TOP25 maps & the SB editions of Série Bleue have an overprint highlighting waymarked walking trails including long-distance GR routes &, where appropriate, ski routes. Symbols indicate campsites, gîtes d’etape, refuges, equestrian centres & other recreational facilities or sites, tourist information centres, cultural heritage, etc. Towns & locations of particular interest are highlighted.- ET or OT = single-sided TOP25 map covering approx. 29x 21 km / 18x 13 miles.- ETR or OTR = waterproof & tear resistant TOP25 map covering the same area as the corresponding ET or OT number, but double-sided, printed on a smaller size sheet with a good overlap between the sides.- SB = Série Bleue map with full tourist overprint; these maps, first introduced in summer 2014, each cover approx. 29x 24km / 18x 15 miles.SÉRIE BLEUE maps with numbers ending in E (Est) or O (Ouest): most editions now indicate the GR routes, but do not show any other tourist information. Map legend is in French only. Each map covers approx. 14x 20km / 9x 12 miles. ...

Debrecen in a series of street plans of Hungary’s main towns from Cartographia in Budapest. The plans cover the whole town with its outer suburbs &, where appropriate, have an enlargement for the central area. All the plans have a street index. Map legend varies; in plans of larger towns or popular tourist destinations it usually

Includes:: English. Many plans also include additional

Features: insets with plans of larger satellite developments or villages, lists of sights and/or various municipal offices & facilities, etc. Some titles include on the reverse a road map of the town’s environs or the administrative province.* In this title: English map legend*; an enlargement for the central area at 1;10, 000; a list of 274 places of interest, various services & facilities, etc ; several insets with plans of satellite villages: road map of the Hajdú-Bihar province at 1:200, 000 with a map legend in Hungarian only; notes in English on the city’s history.



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Pre-war debutantes were members of the most protected, not to say isolated, stratum of 20th-century society: the young (17-20) unmarried daughters of the British upper classes. For most of them, the war changed all that for ever. It meant independence & the shock of the new, & daily exposure to customs & attitudes that must have seemed completely alien to them. For many, the almost military regime of an upper class childhood meant they were well suited for the no-nonsense approach needed in wartime. This book records the extraordinary diversity of challenges, shocks & responsibilities they faced
- as chauffeurs, couriers, ambulance-drivers, nurses, pilots, spies, decoders, factory workers, farmers, land girls, as well as in the Women`s Services. How much did class barriers really come down? Did they stick with their own sort? & what about fun & love in wartime
- did love cross the class barriers?

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Until the middle of the last century, London`s social calendar was dominated by `the Season`, a round of social events & parties during which the daughters of the upper classes made their `debuts`. Debutantes & their families descended on the capital from all over Britain to take part in this elaborate process that in its blend of glamour, great privilege & archaic & sometimes comic ritual is emblematic of a world now lost. From the preparations & formalities of court presentation to the exhausting round of parties that followed, Debutantes & the London Season is a detailed look at a phenomenon that was central to the lives of generations of privileged young ladies. ...

A successor to Phaidon`s award-winning ” Century: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Suffering, Regression & Hope” (1999), ” Decade” provides a comprehensive visual overview of the last 10 years in world history. Adhering to the same standards of historical accuracy & scholarship as its predecessor, this book offers a sensitive anthology of 10 years in photography that will appeal to readers of all ages & interests. ” Decade” presents 500 engaging photographic images, both iconic & idiosyncratic, selected by acclaimed photo editor Eamonn Mc Cabe & arranged in chronological order to tell the story of the first decade in our new millennium. The shorter historical span of this book, compared to ” Century”, allows this sequence to explore more deeply developments in art, architecture, sport & technology, alongside key moments in international political affairs, so that the reader encounters surprising moments from our history alongside those familiar from coverage in the mass media. Global in scope, these photographs tackle subjects ranging from the World Trade Center attacks of `9/11` to the AIDS epidemic in Africa, from the first tests of the Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, to the death of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson. Award-winning documentary photography sits alongside the new `citizen journalism`, which has seen ordinary bystanders capture historic events equipped with nothing more sophisticated than a mobile phone camera. Each image is accompanied by both a short descriptive & an extended, historical caption, to provide a wider context within which to understand these often beautiful, always surprising, photographs. 15 historical & thematic essays are also included, exploring the events, trends & social phenomena that have characterized the decade. Engaging with debates in photography, while providing a visual record of world events both regional & international, this book provides an extraordinary insight into our recent history
- dramatic, nostalgic, intimate & educational by turns.
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The author recreates the artistic & social milieu of the turbulent period around the end of the 19th century. He provides concise biographical material on its central characters such as Wilde, Symons, Beardsley, Whistler, Dowson, Frank Harris & other less well-known people such as Count Stenbock & John Gray. Clayton surveys the arts produced, the favourite dining places, the public reaction & also the decadent life of London outside this artistic arena at a time, before the cataclysm of the Great War, when Victorian values were crumbling. ...