Carol drinkwater biography michelangelo
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Rome
Revised for the paperback edition - a dazzling biography of the Eternal City - 'A tour of the great city with a great guide: who could do this better.' - Evening Standard.
For almost a thousand years, Rome held sway as the spiritual and artistic centre of the world. Hughes vividly recreates the ancient Rome of Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Nero, Caligula, Cicero, Martial and Virgil. With the artistic blossoming of the Renaissance, he casts his unwavering critical eye over the great works of Raphael, Michelangelo and Brunelleschi, shedding new light on the Old Masters.
In the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Rome's cultural predominance was assured, artists and tourists from all over Europe converged on the city. Hughes brilliantly analyses the defining works of Caravaggio, Velasquez, Rubens and Bernini.
Hughes' Rome is a vibrant, contradictory, spectacular and secretive place; a monument both to human glory and human error. In equa
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Easy History Lesson
For an overview of history, a guide book can be a good introduction. As someone mentioned above, and encyclopedia or the wikipedia would also be a good olace to start. But the vast reaches of time and space you're working with make one book recommendations difficult.
I think you might do well to focus on some of the more colorful personalities and dramatic events. Pick a few of these: Hannibal, the destruction of Pompeii. civil war and assassination of Caesar, chariot races, gladiator fights, Moorish invasions, El Cid, Roland, Charles Martell, castles, jousting (knighthood in general), Joan of Arc, Crecy and Agincourt, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, the French Revolution and Napoleon, and the World Wars. These are all good bets, and you can find age-appropriate history, biographies and/or novels on most of them.
Learning a few key stories is a lot easier and more interesting than trying to master the grand sw
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Small Things Like These bygd the Irish novelist Claire Keegan fryst vatten my Book of the Year. There have been several books especially bygd women authors that have 'spoken' to me but this one hit a deep chord. I am late to the party in the sense that this novel, published in 2021, has already been short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award back in May. There have also been several other gongs for this haunting work including the Orwell prize. It fryst vatten less than 100 pages in length, so little longer than a novella but it throws such a powerful punch, and its graceful writing has stayed with me, resonating, taking me back to my own Irish childhood, looking at many of my memories anew.
The story is set late in the twentieth century in a small Irish town during a bitter månad. Its principal character fryst vatten Bill Furlong, a caring family man with fem daughters who owns his own modest coal and timber business. A merchant of coal, anthracite,