Queen Bee Of Tuscany

Download or read book Queen Bee of Tuscany written by Ben Downing and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Quite simply one of the best books of the year." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Ben Downing's Queen Bee of Tuscany brings an extraordinary Victorian back to life. Born into a distinguished intellectual family and raised among luminaries such as Dickens and Thackeray, Janet Ross married at eighteen and went to live in Egypt. There, for the next six years, she wrote for the London Times, hobnobbed with the developer of the Suez Canal, and humiliated pashas in horse races. In 1867 she moved to Florence, Italy where she spent the remaining sixty years of her life writing a series of books and hosting a colorful miscellany of friends and neighbors, from Mark Twain to Bernard Berenson, at Poggio Gherardo, her house in the hills above the city. Eventually she became the acknowledged doyenne of the Anglo-Florentine colony, as it was known. Yet she was also immersed in the rural life of Tuscany: An avid agriculturalist, she closely supervised the farms on her estate and the sharecroppers who worked them, often pitching in on grape and olive harvests. Spirited, erudite, and supremely well-connected, Ross was one of the most dynamic women of her day. Her life offers a fascinating window on fascinating times, from the Risorgimento to the rise of fascism. Encompassing all this rich history, Queen Bee of Tuscany is a panoramic portrait of an age, a family, and our evolving love affair with Tuscany. A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2013

Download or read book Queen Bee of Tuscany written by Ben Downing and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A portrait of the Victorian-era writer and Anglo-Florentine colony doyenne includes coverage of her work for the London Times, achievements as an avid agriculturalist and relationships with such contemporaries as Mark Twain and Bernard Berenson.

Download or read book The Queen of Paris written by Pamela Binnings Ewen and published by Blackstone Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legendary fashion designer Coco Chanel is revered for her sophisticated style—the iconic little black dress—and famed for her intoxicating perfume Chanel No. 5. Yet behind the public persona is a complicated woman of intrigue, shadowed by mysterious rumors. The Queen of Paris, the new novel from award-winning author Pamela Binnings Ewen, is fiction based on facts, some uncovered only within the past few years, and vividly imagines the hidden life of Chanel during the four years of Nazi occupation in Paris in the midst of WWII. Coco Chanel could be cheerful, lighthearted, and generous; she also could be ruthless, manipulative, even cruel. Against the winds of war, with the Wehrmacht marching down the Champs-Élysées, Chanel finds herself residing alongside the Reich’s High Command in the Hotel Ritz. Surrounded by the enemy, Chanel wages a private war of her own to wrestle full control of her perfume company from the hands of her Jewish business partner, Pierre Wertheimer. With anti-Semitism on the rise, he has escaped to the United States with the confidential formula for Chanel No. 5. Distrustful of his intentions to set up production on the outskirts of New York City, Chanel fights to seize ownership. The House of Chanel shall not fall. While Chanel struggles to keep her livelihood intact, Paris sinks under the iron fist of German rule. Chanel—a woman made of sparkling granite—will do anything to survive. She will even agree to collaborate with the Nazis in order to protect her darkest secrets. When she is covertly recruited by Germany to spy for the Reich, she becomes Agent F-7124, code name: Westminster. But why? And to what lengths will she go to keep her stormy past from haunting her future?

Download or read book The Book of Nature written by and published by . This book was released on 1820 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A father tells his child about the wonder of the natural world from a Christian point of view.

Download or read book The Book of the Courtier written by conte Baldassarre Castiglione and published by . This book was released on 1903 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Hidden Histories written by D. Medina Lasansky and published by didapress. This book was released on 2018-01-10 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tuscany is a landscape whose cultural construction is complicated and multi-layered. It is this very complexity that this book seeks to untangle. By revealing hidden histories, we learn how food, landscape and architecture are intertwined, as well as the extent to which Italian design and contemporary consumption patterns form a legacy that draws upon the Romantic longings of a century before. In the process, this book reveals the extent to which Tuscany has been constructed by Anglos — and what has been distorted, idealized and even overlooked in the process.

Download or read book A Time of Gifts written by Patrick Leigh Fermor and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-09-14 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This beloved account about an intrepid young Englishman on the first leg of his walk from London to Constantinople is simply one of the best works of travel literature ever written. At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey—to walk to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water continues the story to the Iron Gates that divide the Carpathian and Balkan mountains. Acclaimed for its sweep and intelligence, Leigh Fermor’s book explores a remarkable moment in time. Hitler has just come to power but war is still ahead, as he walks through a Europe soon to be forever changed—through the Lowlands to Mitteleuropa, to Teutonic and Slav heartlands, through the baroque remains of the Holy Roman Empire; up the Rhine, and down to the Danube. At once a memoir of coming-of-age, an account of a journey, and a dazzling exposition of the English language, A Time of Gifts is also a portrait of a continent already showing ominous signs of the holocaust to come.