Hilary Spurling

Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year 2005Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2005The second in Hilary Spurlings sweeping, two-volume biography of Henri Matisse, one of the most influential and beloved artists of the twentieth centuryThis fascinating exploration of Matisses world uncovers the secret life of the artist, whose paintings shocked his contemporaries while paving the way for modern art. Tracing the artists 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 Spurlings essential biography captures the glory years of Henri Matisse.

En la mitología feminista hoy parece no haber sitio para Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973). Sin embargo fue la primera escritora norteamericana en ganar un Nobel de Literatura y durante dos años consecutivos encabezo la lista de libros mas vendidos en Estados Unidos con su primera novela "La buena tierra". En esta biografia la autora se centra en los años que moldearon a la escritora.

"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 withsuch 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.

Emparentada con un político progresista de renombre, dueña de una fabulosa fortuna, anfitriona de las personalidades más destacadas del momento, Thérèse Humbert se encontraba en el vértice de un noto

One of the twentieth centurys most extraordinary Americans, Pearl Buck was the first person to make China accessible to the West.She recreated the lives of ordinary Chinese people in The Good Earth, an overnight worldwide bestseller in 1932, later a blockbuster movie. Buck went on to become the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long before anyone else, she foresaw Chinas future as a superpower, and she recognized the crucial importance for both countries of Chinas building a relationship with the United States. As a teenager she had witnessed the first stirrings of Chinese revolution, and as a young woman she narrowly escaped being killed in the deadly struggle between Chinese Nationalists and the newly formed Communist Party. Pearl grew up in an imperial China unchanged for thousands of years. She was the child of American missionaries, but she spoke Chinese before she learned English, and her friends were the children of Chinese farmers. She took it for granted that she was Chinese herself until she was eight years old, when the terrorist uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion forced her family to flee for their lives. It was the first of many desperate flights. Flood, famine, drought, bandits, and war formed the background of Pearls life in China. "Asia was the real, the actual world," she said, "and my own country became the dreamworld."Pearl wrote about the realities of the only world she knew in The Good Earth. It was one of the last things she did before being finally forced out of China to settle for the first time in the United States. She was unknown and penniless with a failed marriage behind her, a disabled child to support, no prospects, and no way of telling that The Good Earth would sell tens of millions of copies. It transfixed a whole generation of readers just as Jung Changs Wild Swans would do more than half a century later. No Westerner had ever written anything like this before, and no Chinese had either. Buck was the forerunner of a wave of Chinese Americans from Maxine Hong Kingston to Amy Tan. Until their books began coming out in the last few decades, her novels were unique in that they spoke for ordinary Asian people "translating my parents to me," said Hong Kingston, "and giving me our ancestry and our habitation." As a phenomenally successful writer and civil-rights campaigner, Buck did more than anyone else in her lifetime to change Western perceptions of China. In a world with its eyes trained on China today, she has much to tell us about what lies behind its astonishing reawakening.

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 erigira en referente cultural europeo. Entre otros destacados escritores, alli conocera a su primer marido, George Orwell. Vivaz, atractiva, amiga de los intelectuales, pensadores y artistas mas relevantes de su tiempo, Sonia Orwell (1918-1980) vivio en un mundo donde a la mujer solo se le concedia un papel accesorio. Escindida entre su vulnerabilidad intima y su coraje externo, el indomable teson con que administro el legado literario de Orwell le valio pasar a la historia envuelta en rasgos negativos. En Sonia Orwell, Hilary Spurling ahonda en el claroscuro vital de una mujer radiante y perfeccionista, energica y decidida, que una vez escribio: "Para mi, la inteligencia es una forma como otra cualquiera de obsesion."

Absorbing and provocative, a biography of George Orwells controversial second wife from the Whitbread Prize-winning author of Matisse the Master and Anthony PowellJust three months before his death, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four took a new wife. Sonia Brownell was model for Julia in Orwells most famous novel, she was fifteen years younger than her husband, and after his death she was hounded and pilloried as a manipulative gold-digger who would stop at nothing to keep control of the literary legacy. But the truth about Sonia was altogether different.Beautiful, intelligent and fiercely idealistic, she lived at the heart of Londons literary and artistic scene before her marriage to Orwell changed her life for ever. Those who knew her - Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus - witnessed her great personal generosity. And yet, burdened with the almost impossible task of protecting Orwells intellectual estate, Sonias loyalty to her late husband brought her nothing but poverty and despair.

A unique reference book for all fans of Anthony Powells 12-volume novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, which has become a literary landmark of twentieth-century writing. More than a simple glossary, Invitation to the Dance contains extensive Character, Book, Painting and Place indices, creating a magnificent database of Powells imagination and Englands cultural landscape. This is a masterpiece of extreme ingenuity detailing over four hundred characters and one million words of Powells lively fifty-year dance of fiction and fact. Hilary Spurlings exhaustive analysis of the novels characters supplies a master-key for the reader of Anthony Powell.

A landmark biography The Times, Books of the YearThe long-awaited portrait of a literary master from one of our generations greatest biographersAnthony Powell: the literary genius who gave us A Dance to the Music of Time, an undisputed classic of English literature. Spanning twelve spectacular volumes and written over twenty-five years, his comic masterpiece teems with idiosyncratic characters, capturing twentieth century Britain through war and peace.Drawing on Powells letters and journals, and the memories of those who knew him, Hilary Spurling explores his life. Investigating the friends, relations, lovers, acquaintances, fools and geniuses who surrounded him, she reveals the comical and tragic events that inspired one of the greatest fictions of the age.*Discover Anthony Powells A Dance to the Music of Time series, available in paperback and e-book from Arrow.

Astonishing and essential, the biography that reclaimed Henri Matisse from historys slanders and restored his place in the canon of the 20th centurys greatest artistsBefore acclaimed biographer Hilary Spurling turned her attention to Henri Mattise, precious few facts were known about his life - and those few were distorted by inaccuracy, misunderstanding and glaring gaps. The Unknown Matisse investigates the secret life of The Wild Beast (as he was known), whose early paintings shocked and enraged his contemporaries. It tells the story of an innovative genius, born in war-torn, poverty-stricken Flanders who finally overcame hardship and disaster to fulfil Van Goghs prophecy: The painter of the future will be such a colourist as has never yet been.

Este magno y exhaustivo análisis de Hilary Spurling, premiada por esta obra con el codiciado Premio Whitbread, recorre con minucia la vida y la trayectoria de Matisse, y ésta demuestra ser la mejor manera para comprender tanto las obras individuales del pintor como su impresionante trayectoria y la evolucion de sus ideas respecto a las artes plasticas. No solo nos encontramos ante la mas completa y definitiva biografia de uno de los pintores mas celebres, sino de un esplendido retrado de los ambientes artisticos en que se desarrollo su obra. A esto se une una investigacion muy rigurosa con informacion inedita del artista procedente de entrevistas y el talento narrativo de Spurling al entreverar la evolucion biografica y personal con la artistica.