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In 1913 Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase exploded through the American art world. This is the story of how he followed the painting to New York two years later, enchanted the Arensberg salon, and—almost incidentally—changed art forever. In 1915, a group of French artists fled war-torn Europe for New York. In the few months between their arrival—and America’s entry into the war in April 1917—they pushed back the boundaries of the possible, in both life and art. The vortex of this transformation was the apartment at 33 West 67th Street, owned by Walter and Louise Arensberg, where artists and poets met nightly to talk, eat, drink, discuss each others’ work, play chess, p...
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From acclaimed novelist and cultural historian Ruth Brandon comes a captivating dual biography of the legendary founders of the cosmetics industry, Helena Rubinstein and Eugène Schueller, creator of L’Oréal. Brandon’s gripping and sometimes disturbing story of gender, power, and politics stretches back from the darkest days of World War II, to the emergence of the modern fashion and makeup industries, with magazines such as Vogue and Cosmopolitan and game-changing product lines such as Avon and Mary Kay. Ugly Beauty resonates as well with its implications for modern culture, as we enter an era when haute couture and cosmetology exert an ever more powerful influence upon society at large.
A reissue of Ruth Brandon's definitive biography of Houdini. When Harry Houdini died in 1926, he was one of the most famous men in the world. Having started out as a vaudeville magician, he soon began to specialise in the escapes for which his name remains a byword. In this classic biography, Ruth Brandon explains in detail the secrets of Houdini's most celebrated escapes, but more importantly she asks, 'What was Houdini really trying to escape from?' - and, searching for the answer, reveals a man far more extraordinary than any of his audience could have imagined. 'A ripping account of shamanism, celebrity and magic' Sunday Times 'Brandon paints a fascinating picture of this complicated and charismatic character, and also of turn-of-the-century America' The Times
First published in 1973, Wrongful Imprisonment aims to combine the human interest of individual cases of wrongful imprisonment with a general analysis of how and why they occur. It deals in detail with the English system, but also provides comparisons with Scotland, France, and the United States. The authors spent three years collecting material from newspaper reports, trial transcripts, books, lawyers, the Home Office and – most important – interviews with the persons concerned. As a result, they have been able to analyse objectively the existing system of justice; they have isolated and identified the areas in which the system is at fault, and the successive hazards which may confront the innocent man suspected of a criminal offence; they have also revealed the many obstacles which have to be overcome by the wrongfully imprisoned man seeking to establish his innocence and regain his liberty. This topical and convincingly argued book should appeal not only to students of law and sociology, or to lawyers, policemen, criminals, and others involved in the system of criminal justice, but also to the man in the Wormwood Scrubs omnibus.
A rich and fascinating account of the lives of Victorian governesses, exploring nineteenth-century attitudes to women, family and class. If a nineteenth century lady had neither a husband to support her nor money of her own, almost her only recourse was to live in someone else's household and educate their children - in particular, their daughters. Marooned within the confines of other people's lives, neither servants nor family members, governesses occupied an uncomfortable social limbo. And being poor and insignificant, their papers were mostly lost. But a few journals and letters have come down to us, giving a vivid record of what it was to be a lone professional woman at a time when such a creature officially did not exist.
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Between the 1780s and the end of the nineteenth century, an army of sad women took up residence in other people's homes, part and yet not part of the family, not servants, yet not equals. To become a governess, observed Jane Austen in Emma, was to "retire from all the pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope, to penance and mortification for ever." However, in an ironic paradox, the governess, so marginal to her society, was central to its fiction-partly because governessing was the fate of some exceptionally talented women who later wrote novels based on their experiences. But personal experience was only one source, and writers like Wilkie Collins, William ...
Brandon follows the lives of the Surrealists--such as Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali and Man Ray--through the movement, which culminated at the end of World War II. 24 pages of photos.