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Биографии и Мемуары
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Аннотация
Sir John (Jack) Harold Plumb (1911 – 2001) was a great British historian. He led an extraordinary life of startling contrasts, much of it cloaked in secrecy. This memoir attempts to lift that cloak. / This is a very personal account written by Neil McKendrick, a fellow historian, a fellow Master of a Cambridge college and one his oldest and closest friends, who knew Plumb from his early days to his dying hours some fifty years after they first met. / This new memoir depicts a startlingly revelatory portrait of a complex and controversial man who moved from poverty to great affluence; from beginning his life in a two-up two-down terrace house in Leicester to end it in what was called “Jack's Palace” surrounded by a world-class collection of Vincennes and Sèvres. / Plumb’s personality was sufficiently beguiling to attract the attention of four significant novelists who left six vivid if unflattering fictional versions of him – depicting him as a ruthless charmer, a serial bisexual philanderer and, most bizarrely of all, as a murderer planning a further murder. In truth the real man needed no fictional elaboration to make him unusually interesting. In fact, his life is often astonishing. The historian, who achieved such international eminence that, on the direct order of the US President and after a unanimous vote in Congress, the Union flag was flown over the American Congress on his 80th birthday to do honour to the historian who had taught the American people so much, was no run of the mill academic. / In addition to his academic work, during the Second World War Plumb worked in the code-breaking department of the Foreign Office at Bletchley Park, Hut 8 & Hut 4; later Block B. He headed a section working on a German Naval hand cipher, Reservehandverfahren. He became Professor of Modern English History at Cambridge in 1966, serving as Master of Christ's College from 1978-82, when he was knighted in 1982. His pupils included Simon Schama, Roy Porter, Niall Ferguson and Quentin Skinner. / Plumb had moved from drinking beer in down-market pubs in his youth to drinking champagne in aristocratic drawing rooms and owning the finest collection of claret in Cambridge; from a passionate socialist for most of his life (with, at one time, strong Communist sympathies) to a passionate Thatcherite in his 70s; from his provincial working class family in Leicester to become a close friend of the Rothschilds and a companion of the Queen’s sister who gave a memorable 80th birthday party for him in her home at Kensington Palace Gardens. / He moved from a Cambridge college reject in his youth to the Mastership of Christ’s; from a rejected author (of both a novel and his early research) to an acclaimed and prolific writer, editor and journalist; from a conventional heterosexual youth in Leicester to an opportunistic bisexual life thereafter; from his life-enhancing and inspiring best to his embittered worst in extreme old age; from his infancy when he was wet-nursed by a friend of his mother’s to his funeral when he was buried without mourners or music or elegies or even a coffin. For all his achievements, his life also encompassed failure and disappointments and its end was almost unbearably sad. / This memoir is an attempt to do for Plumb what a relative of Lord Macaulay once did for that great historian, when he wrote: “There must be tens of thousands whose interest in history and literature he has awakened and informed by his pen, and who would gladly know what manner of man it was that has done them so great a service”. The “manner of man” that emerges from this book is as fascinating as it is surprising. / Contents: Introduction. Biography. Preface. Sir John Plumb. Family upbringing and schooling: Leicester and Alderman Newton’s. Plumb at Cambridge. Plumb’s Early Research. Plumb’s publications. Plumb, Elton and Chadwick and The Regius Chair. Plumb and his adopted family. Plumb’s Reputation as a Patron, a Promoter and a Fixer. Fictional Portraits of Plumb. Painted Portraits of Plumb. Plumb at Bletchley. Influences on Plumb. The Sources of Plumb’s wealth. Plumb as Editor. Plumb’s Apolarist Life style. Expensive cars and Their Destruction. Plumb the Big Spender: Houses, Holidays and Other Indulgences. Plumb and His New friends: A Case of Social Nobility. Plumb’s reputation as a Scholar. Plumbs’ Health and His Declining Productivity. Plumb’s Professional Reputation. Plumbs’ Dedications. Plumbs’ Other Writing. Plumb’s Pupils. Plumb’s Changing Political Beliefs. Plumb’s Generosity: to his Staff and His Friends and Himself. Plumb’s Wine. Plumb’s Donations. Plumb’s Private Life. Plumb and Friendship. The Posthumous Sale of 2002. Plumb’s Adopted Family. A Postscript on the Black Years. The Plumb Master ship in Context. Other Public Recognition. Desert Island Discs. Plumb’s Changing Attitudes’ to His Pupils. The End of Life, Death and a Memorial Dinner: Memories and Legacy and Final Judgements. Postscript: Sir J.H.Plumb Historian and Teacher of Historians. Acknowledgements. Select Bibliography.
Аннотация
Colin Dayan has one of the most original minds in America and also one of the fiercest. Here for the first time she turns her rigorous intellect toward her own life, onto her vexed relationship with her mother and subsequent suffering – and she does so with her usual uncompromising clarity. It’s rare for such a tormented work to be so masterful. In the Belly of her Ghost is not exactly an easy read, but it’s also very hard to put down. -Madison Smartt Bell <br> Colin Dayan’s searing personal narrative is as much a Southern Gothic story as a haunting family portrait. A tale of love and resentment, In the Belly of Her Ghost is a memoir and meditation on the author’s dead mother – a Haitian woman attempting to assimilate into white Southern belle high society during the Civil Rights era. Dayan’s mother grows austere with her newfound glamour and dismissive of her daughter, whose darker skin foments a loving connection with Lucille, her African American nanny. Capturing the bitter struggle of mother and daughter – from her childhood unto death and beyond into the disconcerting present—In the Belly of Her Ghost is a lyrical journey through memory and loss. Dayan reflects on her complicated origins as she grows into a woman, uncertain if she’s “black” or “white”; we see a gritty, nuanced view of the Jim Crow South. A literary ghost story, In the Belly of Her Ghost grapples with our complicated notions of race, identity, and femininity. <br> In times such as ours, and the times from which they spawned, ages of violence against all forms of “other” – genders, bodies, skins, ideas – how can we lay to rest the ghosts that haunt us, and invite to the table those that help us live? Writing from the headlands far into the interior, threading the personal with the public, an elegy with a covert manifesto of hope, Colin Dayan understands what it is to be haunted: by history, by race, by family, by what presses on the definitions of one’s life. In pages at once strikingly evocative, allusive, and embodied, rigorously sensory in their hard-won wisdoms, Dayan argues for the co-existence of species, variants of identity and belonging, a commonwealth of the living and the dead. In the Belly of Her Ghost imbues profound remembering with a democracy of looking and listening, where all that matters – objects, animals, people and place – is properly attended. It is a volume appearing undeniably in its necessary moment, and it is precisely necessary because the truths it speaks are as old as our troubles, as required as our joys.
–Andrea Luka Zimmerman <br> This subtle, ambivalent, deeply thoughtful book makes nothing easy – difficult moments are imbued with grace and familiar parades of ghosts. “It is not easy to tell a ghost story that is not meant to frighten,” Colin Dayan writes, and we hear a series of conversations with the past, with selves old and new, with memories of Haiti and the American South, with a black woman who effectively mothered the writer, with an actual mother both dead and alive. How many of us could so lucidly say of a disappointed and disappointing parent, “I did not want to love her as much as I did”? At the center of this haunting narrative is an unforgettable ghost story, which, ultimately, is not quite a ghost story at all. –Michael Wood <br> With «In the Belly of Her Ghost,» Colin Dayan delivers a haunted and haunting memoir of her mother, from a childhood in Haiti to a clipped life as a Southern belle. This is no ordinary family story: it is a lyrical telling of how racial terror and patriarchy reverberate in our most intimate relationships; it is about love aborted and love forged in violence and repression. As rejection, loss, and self-loathing simmer on the surface, this beautiful and desolate work recounts social harms and personal grievances. But it also bears witness to the persistent longing for connection that we carry with us and reminds us of what remains: an abiding faith that love can make you whole, even in death. –Deborah Chasman
–Andrea Luka Zimmerman <br> This subtle, ambivalent, deeply thoughtful book makes nothing easy – difficult moments are imbued with grace and familiar parades of ghosts. “It is not easy to tell a ghost story that is not meant to frighten,” Colin Dayan writes, and we hear a series of conversations with the past, with selves old and new, with memories of Haiti and the American South, with a black woman who effectively mothered the writer, with an actual mother both dead and alive. How many of us could so lucidly say of a disappointed and disappointing parent, “I did not want to love her as much as I did”? At the center of this haunting narrative is an unforgettable ghost story, which, ultimately, is not quite a ghost story at all. –Michael Wood <br> With «In the Belly of Her Ghost,» Colin Dayan delivers a haunted and haunting memoir of her mother, from a childhood in Haiti to a clipped life as a Southern belle. This is no ordinary family story: it is a lyrical telling of how racial terror and patriarchy reverberate in our most intimate relationships; it is about love aborted and love forged in violence and repression. As rejection, loss, and self-loathing simmer on the surface, this beautiful and desolate work recounts social harms and personal grievances. But it also bears witness to the persistent longing for connection that we carry with us and reminds us of what remains: an abiding faith that love can make you whole, even in death. –Deborah Chasman
Аннотация
What happens when one harrowing incident changes your life, splitting it between before and after? On the fourth day of what Lara Naughton thought would be two weeks of bliss in Belize, she was kidnapped and assaulted by a man pretending to be a cabdriver. Held in the depths of the tropical forest—alone with the jaguar Man—she found that compassion was her only defense. Lara’s survival and journey of healing is poignant, compelling, and exceptional. Bending the limits of reality, she uses myth to process her experience. As Lara seeks a new understanding of herself, her lyrical, haunting prose reveals a belief that there is room for compassion—for self and and others—even in the midst of violence.Lara Naughton is an author and documentary playwright. Her work includes Never Fight a Shark in the Water: The Wrongful Conviction of Gregory Bright. She is a certified Compassion Cultivation Trainer through The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University School of Medicine. She lives and teaches in New Orleans.
Аннотация
For anyone who's ever sensed that there must be something more . . . let the adventure begin.Using her own personal, professional, and exotic travel experiences, Laurie Gardner shows how we can derive life-changing insights and essential personal growth from any situation. Most importantly, we discover how to connect with our deepest desires and our highest selves, learning to honor our own intuition and truth. Laurie Gardner has Harvard degrees in comparative world religions, psychology, and education. She dedicated her career to spearheading an international public school reform movement and is a master practitioner in body/mind/spirit wellness.
Аннотация
В воюющей Европе специалисты по шифрам бьют тревогу: что означают записи в блокноте секретного агента Людвига Витгенштейна , отправившегося в погоню за животным, которого, возможно, нет в природе?
Аннотация
Екатерина Рождественская – писатель, фотохудожник, дочь известного поэта Роберта Рождественского.
Эта книга об одном московском адресе – ул. Воровского, 52. Туда, в подвал рядом с ЦДЛ, Центральным домом литераторов, где располагалась сырая и темная коммунальная квартира при Клубе писателей, приехала моя прабабушка с детьми в 20-х годах прошлого века, там родилась мама, там родилась я.
В этом круглом дворе за коваными воротами бывшей усадьбы Соллогубов шла особая жизнь по своим правилам и обитали странные и удивительные люди. Там были свидания и похороны, пьянки и войны, рождения и безумства. Там молодые пока еще пятидесятники – поэтами-шестидесятниками они станут позже – устраивали чтения стихов под угрюмым взглядом бронзового Толстого.
Это двор моего детства, мой первый адрес.
Аннотация
Эта книга – документальное повествование об эвакуации Рыбинского моторостроительного завода в Уфу в годы Великой Отечественной войны, основанное на воспоминаниях десятков ее очевидцев и участников. В книге впервые публикуются многочисленные подлинные документы военного времени, а также письма и фотоматериалы из личных архивов рыбинцев и уфимцев, судьбы которых связаны с отечественным авиамоторостроением.
Аннотация
Эта книга об одиннадцати самых известных людях самого известного, можно даже сказать скандально известного советского Театра на Таганке. Среди отечественных творческих коллективов Таганка, пожалуй, единственный в стране, у которого три взаимоисключающие биографии.
С момента образования в 1946 году он был Московским театром драмы и комедии. Потом стал Московским театром драмы и комедии на Таганке. А затем и вовсе разделился на две труппы.
Но эта книга – о главном Театре на Таганке. О том театре, где больше полутора десятка лет на подмостки выходил легендарный Владимир Высоцкий. Здесь читатель найдет, прямо скажем, уникальные, эксклюзивные факты из жизни звезд. Потому что судьба автора книги причудливо переплелась с выдающимися творцами Таганки, о которых идет речь. Это: Владимир Высоцкий, Анатолий Васильев, Николай Губенко, Николай Дупак, Валерий Золотухин, Юрий Любимов, Зинаида Славина, Вениамин Смехов, Леонид Филатов, Борис Хмельницкий, Леонид Ярмольник.
Аннотация
Еще несколько лет назад я не представляла, что решусь преодолеть 65-километровый горный маршрут по Гималаям. Почему-то думала, что не справлюсь, и даже считала тех, кто в такие путешествия отправляется, сумасшедшими. Но вот я уже побывала там – и теперь делюсь с вами тем, что увидела и осмыслила.
В жизни всегда есть место более широким взглядам и устремлениям. Надо лишь не бояться нового и двигаться к нему, не обращая внимания на предостережения близких и на собственные стереотипы. Не стоит концентрироваться на своих страхах – примите их, тогда в определенный момент что-то произойдет, и все ваши опасения трансформируются в радость от достигнутого. Мой маршрут – это тоже преодоление укоренившихся внутри страхов.