Diese Serie befasst sich mit den Leben und Werken bedeutender historischer Persönlichkeiten und deckt ihre Menschlichkeit und oft unerwartete persönliche Details auf. Durch eine durchdringende und gelegentlich provokante Linse begegnen die Leser komplexen Persönlichkeiten, die die Geschichte geprägt haben. Jeder Teil bietet eine neue Interpretation bekannter Gesichter, demontiert Mythen und präsentiert sie in einem neuen Licht. Es ist fesselnde Lektüre für jeden, der sich für Geschichte und Literatur interessiert.
Geoffrey Chaucer has some claim to being the greatest poet in the English language. Yet he has also been considered to be an invisible poet, self- depreciating and ironic, leaving only the breath of his comedy behind. In truth a great deal is known of him. He was a royal servant, who was indicted for rape.
James Mallord William Turner (1775- 1851) was both the most admired and the most derided painter of his time. His vision soon outran the taste of his contemporaries, as he began to experiment in pure forms of light and colour, producing masterpieces of impassioned tonality that were still unsold at the time of his death.
The third brilliant short biography in Peter Ackroyd’s Brief Lives series. Newton is a companion volume to Chaucer and Turner.Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the English genius, made his greatest contributions to original thought before the age of twenty-five while at home in Lincolnshire escaping the great plague of 1665, a period of which he “I was in the prime of age for invention.”Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, an MP, Master of the Mind and President of the Royal Society, Newton, the author of Principia, one of the most important books in the history of science, was fascinated by calculus, the planets and the laws of motion, and, in keeping with his age, blurred the borders between natural philosophy and speculation. He was as passionate about astrology as astronomy, and dabbled in alchemy, while his religious faith was never undermined by his scientific efforts.
Heralded as a genius, the forerunner of modern fantasy and credited with the invention of the psychological drama, science fiction and the detective story , Edgar Allan Poe had a life as dramatic and tragic as his art.
Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely short- sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colourful clothes, Wilkie Collins looked distinctly strange. But he was none the less a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women - and avidly read by generations of readers.
He was the very first icon of the silver screen, and is one of the most recognisable faces in Hollywood, even a hundred years on from his first film. This masterful brief life offers fresh revelations about one of the most familiar faces of the last century and brings the Little Tramp into vivid... číst celé