Hilary Spurling

Presents a tribute to the life and work of the author known for her books portraying ordinary life in China, covering her fundamentalist upbringing, witness to the Boxer Rebellion, and two marriages.

Journey to The Good Earth

Pearl Buck in China

Presents a portrait of the artist, Henri Matisse, discussing his early youth, his conflict with the art establishment of the time, and his family's involvement in the scandalous "Humbert Affair."

A Life of Henri Matisse, the Early Years, 1869-1908

The Unknown Matisse

Henri Matisse was one of the most important and beloved artists of the twentieth century, rivalled only by his friend - and competitor - Pablo Picasso. This title reveals the origins of Matisse's astonishing talent and provides an insight into his life and work.

The Life

Matisse

A Life

Anthony Powell

Ivy Compton-Burnett

The exacting Miranda's search for a suitable companion brings her family into contact with a very different kind of household, raising a plenitude of questions about the ability to manage alone, the difficulties of living with strangers and some strange discoveries about intimates.

Mother and Son

Pearl Buck was raised in China by her American parents, Presbyterian missionaries from Virginia. Blonde and blue-eyed she looked startlingly foreign, but felt as at home as her Chinese companions. She ran free on the grave-littered grasslands behind her house, often stumbling across the tiny bones of baby girls who had been suffocated at birth. Buck's father was a terrifying figure, with a maniacal zeal for religious conversion - a passion rarely shared by the local communities he targeted. He drained the family's budget for his Chinese translation of the New Testament, while his aggrieved, long-suffering wife did her utmost to create a homely environment for her children, several of whom died tragically young.Pearl Buck would eventually rise to eminence in America as a bestselling author (her most renowned work, The Good Earth, re-entered the bestseller charts in 2004 when it was selected for Oprah's Book Club) but in this startlingly original biography, Spurling recounts with elegance and great insight her unspeakable upbringing in a China that was virtually unknown to the West.

Burying the Bones

“If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone,” wrote Henri Matisse. It is hard to believe today that Matisse, whose exhibitions draw huge crowds worldwide, was once almost universally reviled and ridiculed. His response was neither to protest nor to retreat; he simply pushed on from one innovation to the next, and left the world to draw its own conclusions. Unfortunately, these were generally false and often damaging. Throughout his life and afterward people fantasized about his models and circulated baseless fabrications about his private life. Fifty years after his death, Matisse the Master (the second half of the biography that began with the acclaimed The Unknown Matisse) shows us the painter as he saw himself. With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his voluminous family correspondence, and other new material in private archives, Hilary Spurling documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt exacerbated by Matisse’s attempts to counteract the violence and disruption of the twentieth century in paintings that now seem effortlessly serene, radiant, and stable. Here for the first time is the truth about Matisse’s models, especially two Russians: his pupil Olga Meerson and the extraordinary Lydia Delectorskaya, who became his studio manager, secretary, and companion in the last two decades of his life. But every woman who played an important part in Matisse’s life was remarkable in her own right, not least his beloved daughter Marguerite, whose honesty and courage surmounted all ordeals, including interrogation and torture by the Gestapo in the Second World War. If you have ever wondered how anyone with such a tame public image as Matisse could have painted such rich, powerful, mysteriously moving pictures, let alone produced the radical cut-paper and stained-glass inventions of his last years, here is the answer. They were made by the real Matisse, whose true story has been written down at last from start to finish by his first biographer, Hilary Spurling.

A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954

Matisse the Master

Mervyn Peake

The Drawings of Mervyn Peake

A classic in the history of English cooking, and an extraordinarily intimate glimpse into the fabric of everyday Elizabethan life.

Elizabethan Country House Cooking

Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book

Chronicles the later years of the influential artist, interweaving analyses of his work with a study of Matisse's relationships with family and friends, trips around the world, the women in his life, and the continuing influences on the evolution of his a

A Life of Henri Matisse, the Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954

The author of the award-winning Matisse: A Life gives us the definitive biography of writer Anthony Powell--and takes us deep into the heart of twentieth-century London's literary life. Insightful, lively, and enthralling, this biography is as much a brilliant tapestry of a seminal era in London’s literary life as it is a revelation of an iconic literary figure. Best known for his twelve-volume comic masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time, the prolific writer and critic Anthony Powell (1905–2000) kept company between the two world wars with rowdy, hard-up writers and painters—and painters’ models—in the London where Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis loomed large. He counted Evelyn Waugh and Henry Green among his lifelong friends, and his circle included the Sitwells, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Philip Larkin, and Kingsley Amis. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, Hilary Spurling—herself a longtime friend of Powell’s as well as an award-winning biographer—has produced a fresh and powerful portrait of the man and his times.

Dancing to the Music of Time

Anthony Dymoke Powell

Handbook to Anthony Powell's Music of Time

The author of the award-winning, two-volume Matisse: A Life, now gives us the long-awaited, definitive biography of literary master Anthony Powell--the critic, editor, and novelist known as "the English Proust"-- that, at the same time, takes us deep into twentieth-century London literary life. Anthony Powell (1905-2000), best known for his twelve-volume comic masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time, was also the author of sixteen earlier novels, plays, and biographies, five memoirs, and three volumes of journals. He was a prolific literary critic and book reviewer. Between the two world wars, before making his name, he kept company with rowdy, hard-up writers and painters--and painters' models--in the London where Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis loomed large. He counted Evelyn Waugh and Henry Green among his lifelong friends, and his circle included the Sitwells, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Philip Larkin, and Kingsley Amis, among many others. Now, drawing on his letters, diaries, and interviews, Hilary Spurling--herself a longtime friend of Powell's-- has written a fresh and masterful portrait of the man, his work, and his time. Insightful, poignant, and cinematic in scope, this biography is as much a brilliant tapestry of a seminal moment in London's literary life as it is a revelation of an iconic literary figure.

Otoño de 1940: ha estallado la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Llueven bombas sobre Londres; los teatros han cerrado, y de noche reina la oscuridad por miedo a la aviación enemiga. Una joven rubia y pálida, que parece salida de un lienzo de Renoir, acaba de aceptar la oferta laboral de Horizon, una revista que se erigirá en referente cultural europeo.

la chica del Departamento de Ficción

Sonia Orwell

Le don créatif de Thérèse était spontané et inné. "Elle ment comme l'oiseau respire", dit un témoin qui l'avait connue enfant. Elle combinait la subtilité psychologique d'un acteur confirmé à l'exubérance narrative d'un romancier. Si elle avait choisi les livres, au lieu de la vie réelle, comme moyen d'expression pour ses fictions romantiques à propos de titres égarés, de coffres-forts, d'héritages surprises et de parents longtemps perdus de vue, elle serait devenue un romancier à gros tirage du XIXe siècle. HILARY SPURLING

la plus grande escroquerie du siècle

La grande Thérèse

In this astounding book (winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year 2005) Hilary Spurling�s fascinating exploration of Matisse�s world uncovers the secret life of the artist, whose paintings shocked and infuriated his contemporaries while paving the way for modern art. This beautifully presented second volume tells the story of Matisse's growing artistic maturity and the relationship between his life and art from 1909 to 1954, his glory years.

A Life of Henri Matisse 1909-1954

Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year 2005 Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2005 The second in Hilary Spurling's sweeping, two-volume biography of Henri Matisse, one of the most influential and beloved artists of the twentieth century This fascinating exploration of Matisse's world uncovers the secret life of the artist, whose paintings shocked his contemporaries while paving the way for modern art. Tracing the artist's story through growing maturity and success, Matisse the Master unveils the intimate relationship between his life and his work. Spanning from 1909 to 1954, this triumphant second volume in Spurling's essential biography captures the glory years of Henri Matisse.

A Life of Henri Matisse: 1909-1954

While writing her biography of Matisse, which won the Whitbread Biography and Book of the Year 2005, Hilary Spurling came across the scandal that nearly destroyed the French Third Republic. Reading like a novella, its plot is a confidence trick of dazzling proportions. Therese Humbert was one of the most conspicuous women of fin-de-siecle Paris. Her astronomical wealth, as the illegitimate daughter of an American billionaire, was known to all and she lived a life of sumptuous extravagance. But it was all a hoax. Finally exposed in 1902, Therese was found to own nothing more than an old trouser button and an Italian coin. Thousands of small investors and creditors, including Henri Matisse's parents-in-law, were ruined. Therese was tried and sentenced to five years' hard labour. She died disgraced and penniless.

Hilary Spurling

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