UNITED KINGDOM AUTHOR · PHILOSOPHY · FICTION
Michael Jackson
Also known as: Michael JACKSON
Michael James Jackson (27 March 1942 – 30 August 2007) was an English writer and journalist. He was the author of many influential books about beer and whisky
Many times since the Earth was young, the place had lain under the sea.
— from London
Most acclaimed
The work of art
What art is--its very nature--is the subject of this book by one of the most distinguished continental theorists writing today. Informed by the aesthetics of Nelson Goodman and referring to a wide range of cultures, contexts, and media, The Work of Art seeks to discover, explain, and define how art exists and how it works. To this end, Gérard Genette explores the distinction between a work of art's immanence--its physical presence--and transcendence--the experience it induces. That experience may go far beyond the object itself. Genette situates art within the broad realm of human practices, extending from the fine arts of music, painting, sculpture, and literature to humbler but no less fertile fields such as haute couture and the culinary arts. His discussion touches on a rich array of examples and is bolstered by an extensive knowledge of the technology involved in producing and disseminating a work of art, regardless of whether that dissemination is by performance, reproduction, printing, or recording. Moving beyond examples, Genette proposes schemata for thinking about the different manifestations of a work of art. He also addresses the question of the artwork's duration and mutability.--Google Books description of Volume 1.
Dead reckoning
Is death written in a fortune-tellers cards? Three friends, Althea Lewis, Phoebe Denton and Cressida Cruse have been friends since schooldays. Cressida had been to art college and emerged a promising young artist who soon started to make a name for herself. Fiercely independent, she never married. Althea married, had a son, divorced, and was now married to the successful, but arrogant, businessman Geoffrey Lewis. And now that the initial ardour had cooled, and she took stock of her life coming up to forty, she wasn't sure she was still in love with him. Phoebe became an actress, and had been seriously involved with her married lover. Her calling meant she only kept in touch sporadically with her once-inseparable friends. But this time when they met up and Phoebe heard that the time for Geoffrey's annual charity Garden Party was imminent, she volunteered a fortune-telling acquaintance of hers. And Madame Tokoly was sufficiently accurate to unnerve Geoffrey totally. And then she draws the Death Card... From that moment, things go from bad to worse, and Geoffrey's behaviour is under scrutiny. If the past comes to life, then death, more than one, is a rude awakening....
London
This dazzling and yet intimate book is the first modern one-volume history of London from Roman times to the present. An extraordinary city, London grew from a backwater in the Classical age into an important medieval city, a significant Renaissance urban center, and a modern collossus. Roy Porter writes a whole life of this world-renowned place - from the grid streets and fortresses of Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror to the medieval, walled "most noble city" of churches, friars, and crown and town relationships. Within the crenellated battlements, manufactures and markets developed and street-life buzzed, enlivened with the cries of hawkers and peddlers. People worked, talked, haggled, and relaxed in London's medieval streets, while craftsmen lived where they worked, nestled trade-by-trade in neighborhoods. London's profile in 1500 was much as it was at the peak of Roman power. The city owed its courtly splendor and national pride of the Tudor Age to the phenomenal expansion of its capital. It was the envy of foreigners, the spur of civic patriotism, and a hub of culture, architecture, and great literature and new religion. Tudor Londoners had an insatiable appetite for new workshops, yards and stores, and comfortable homes; and makeshift quarters for laborers from rural areas began to dot the rising city.