An account of the life of Francisco de Goya from 1792 when he was 47 and contracted a serious illness which left him totally deaf. Through times of war and political turmoil he continued to work with passion and ferocious energy, transforming the scenes around him into his visionary artwork.[...]
Her first work of fiction, this journey around the writer's father and grandfather is set largely in Mauritius and concerns childhood, madness, fears of miscegenation - and a pig. By the author of "The Emperor's Last Island" and "Daisy Bates in the Desert".[...]
Shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Biography Award and the 2012 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize Julia Blackburn and her husband moved to a little house in the mountains of northern Italy in 1999. She arrived as a stranger but a series of events brought her close to the old people of the villa[...]
You come across the shell of a ruined house. It could be anywhere in southern Europe where people once lived and then moved away because there was no work to hold them there. You might find things scattered in the empty rooms: a bread oven, a broken spade, earthenware jars that still hold the pungen[...]
John Craske, a Norfok fisherman, was born in 1881 and in 1917, when he had just turned thirty-six, he fell seriously ill. For the rest of his life he kept moving in and out of what was described as 'a stuporous state'. In 1923 he started making paintings of the sea and boats and the coastline seen f[...]
A haunting portrait of legendary singer Billie Holiday intertwines more than 150 interviews and personal revelations into an illuminating study of Lady Day, as seen through the eyes of friends, lovers, fellow musicians, critics, producers, pimps and junkies, narcotics agents, and others, from her Ba[...]