Alexander Walker

#2

1978

Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference. In this Very Short Introduction the renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores the concept of beauty, asking what makes an object—either in art, in nature, or the human form—beautiful, and examining how we can compare differing judgments of beauty when it is evident all around us that our tastes vary so widely. Is there a right judgment to be made about beauty? Is it right to say there is more beauty in a classical temple than a concrete office block, more in a Rembrandt than in last year's Turner Prize winner? Forthright and thought-provoking, and as accessible as it is intellectually rigorous, this introduction to the philosophy of beauty draws conclusions that some may find controversial, but, as Scruton shows, help us to find greater sense of meaning in the beautiful objects that fill our lives.

#3

1980

No other twentieth-century artist in or out of film so captivated the world or spent so much energy trying to hide from it. To bring her out of hiding, Barry Paris draws on a wealth of hitherto unavailable material - ranging from Garbo's drama school notebooks and her unpublished letters to an astonishing set of a hundred taped conversations, recorded during her later years in New York, as well as interviews with her surviving friends and family in Sweden and America. Paris's biography supplants the legend of Garbo the "enigma" with a revelation of the real woman, whose grip on our imagination remains as powerful today as it was almost seventy years ago when she dazzled the world in Flesh and the Devil.