CHARLES DRAZIN

Offering portraits of such key figures as the Lumière brothers, Georges Méliès, Charles Pathé and Léon Gaumont, he looks at the early pioneers who transformed a fairground novelty into a global indus

Blue Velvet is perhaps David Lynch s best film to date and certainly his most well known Beneath its tranquil small town ambience lies violence and depravity on a hideous scale with Dennis Hopper as Frank at its core This work covers what one could possibly want to know about the film

Patsy, what are you going to be when you grow up? Well? A Royal Engineer, Daddy. A Royal Engineer!Charles Drazin knew little about his mothers father only that he had been a military surveyor who mapped great swathes of the British Empire. But when his mother was told that she was dying, it prompted recollections of her early life that she had never confided before: of the village in the west of Ireland where she had grown up, and of her father, whose death changed the life of an eight-year-old girl for ever.Soon afterwards her own death left her son to go through alone the relics of her life. They included a box of old photographs, a battered suitcase stamped with the initials of the grandfather he had never known, and the service records of Patricks brothers, who, like him, had all enlisted in the Royal Engineers as the nineteenth century became the twentieth. So began an extraordinary journey of discovery that took him from the age of Queen Victoria to the battlefields of the Western Front.Mapping the Past is the story of five brothers who, mapping the world, lived up to the Royal Engineers motto of Everywhere. It is the story of Ireland, and of the Empire from which it broke away. It is the story of conflict, war and its aftermath. And, most of all, it is the story of memory, endlessly carrying the past, for better or worse, into our present and future. It is an imaginative, intimate and powerful work of history, by a writer of rare power.

Sometime late in 1664, the musketeer DArtagnan rode beside a heavily-armoured carriage as it rumbled slowly southwards from Paris, carrying his great friend Nicolas Fouquet to internal exile and life imprisonment in the fortress of Pignerol. There he would be incarcerated in a cell next door to the Man with the Iron Mask...From a glittering zenith as the Kings first minister, builder of the breathtaking chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte, collector of books, patron of the arts and lover of beautiful women, Fouquet had fallen like Icarus. Charged with embezzlement, he was convicted and sentenced to banishment until the King intervened to change his sentence to life imprisonment.Charles Drazins riveting account brings to life the rich and hazardous world in which Foucquet lived. As a child he learned from his devout mother how to mix herbal remedies for the patients at the Hotel-Dieu and from his father, a creature of Cardinal Richelieu, the demands of political life. Drazin tells of the young mans first adventures as a tax-collector, caught up in rebellion in the Dauphine , of the loyalty and service that he gave to Cardinal Mazarin and of the financial wizardry that somehow kept Frances finances together. The cunning, charisma and charm of Fouquet enchant and beguile while they reveal the seeds of his destruction. But it is in his downfall and incarceration, which he bore with great fortitude, courage and humour, that Fouquets strength of character and grace emerge, as he somehow survives both solitary confinement and absence of books, pen and ink. The richness and contrasts of his remarkable story are done full justice in this compelling book.