In the twentieth century, however, the Enlightenment has often been judged harshly for its apparently simplistic optimism. Here a master historian goes back to the sources to give us both a more sophisticated and a more intriguing view of the philosophes, their world and their ideas.

    This alphabetically arranged, cross-referenced volume contains nearly 2,000 articles on the people, issues, and events of the American Revolutionary era.

    Childhood, early music training, years in London; composition of Messiah, other oratorios and operas; analysis of Handel's musical style and individual works, much more. Includes 35 illustrations, Introduction, Bibliographical Note, Indexes.

    He is known especially for the wider significance and deeper meaning he gave to art history by placing art in the general history of ideas and relating it to its economic, social and political environment -- an undertaking calling for encyclopedic knowledge, meticulous documentation, and historical insight. ... Antal's reputation rested largely on the now classic Florentine Painting and Its Social Background and on a number of highly original, authoritative and stimulating articles that had appeared over the years in various specialized periodicals. Making available the more important and characteristic of these essays, the publication of this volume represents an important new contribution to art history. Not only does it amplify the principles underlying Professor Antal's art-historical method, but also makes available in one place many of his pioneering studies on the origin and evolution of mannerism and the interaction of romanticism and classicism, especially from the time of the French Revolution to the death of Gericault. -- The Author -- Hungarian by birth, the late Frederick Antal was a man of the widest culture. He studied art history at the universities of Budapest, Berlin, Paris and Vienna and thereafter traveled extensively in Italy, where he devoted himself to pioneering research in the history of mannerist painting. --book jacket

    "Love, understanding, compassion...this ability to feel with others, deep beneath the surface, this was the bridge between. Well, not too deep beneath the surface are all of Jenny's feelings as comes the Revolution to Jersey Dutch country in 1776--she wants things to stay as they are and she doesn't want to be involved in the war. But circumstances overrule her conscientious objections and her attempt to keep her home a "place of peace;" the boy it is assumed she will marry is off to fight; her father is arrested and interned; her younger brother (Jenny has been surrogate mother to all her family) comes home with a sizable amount of Hessian gold which Jenny eventually will smuggle through to General Washington and his bedraggled, mutinous men. The infiltration here of certain morality-maturity concepts is also in the attempt to make this more worthwhile than the usual teen-aged historical although one questions whether they won't have shied away from quiltings and hymn sings to begin with. The story is better than the prose which you will have judged for yourself, above." From Kirkus Review

    Pottle has devoted a lifetime to the study of Boswell. He is the acknowledged authority on the subject, and perhaps knows more Boswell better than Boswell knew himself. His unparalleled knowledge and graceful style qualify him uniquely to convert the welter of information -- much of it recently recovered -- into a convincing portrait of James Boswell: Scot, lawyer, hypochondriac, rake, show-off -- above all, author.Eagerly awaited for more than a decade, James Boswell, The Earlier Years is a rapid and compelling narrative. The long line of lairds of Auchinleck are shown pressing on Boswell's consciousness. His childhood and adolescence for the first time take shape. His religious turmoils, which carried him through Methodism and Pythagoreanism to Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism, are absorbingly reconstructed. His flirtations, his guilt-ridden affair with a young married woman of his own circle, his intrigues with actresses, his dealings with his lively kept-mistress, his occasional recourse to street-girls, are frankly presented as essential but subordinate details. We are never allowed to lose sight of Boswell the intrepid traveller, the admired author, the hard-working and brilliant criminal lawyer, the odd and lovable young man who charmed the Margrave of Baden-Durlach, the brilliant bluestocking Belle de Zuylen, the high-born lady Girolama Piccolomini, and such formidable heroes of letters as Johnson, Rousseau, and Voltaire.From this brilliantly imaginative study emerges a man we can know almost perfectly: a paradoxical character, shrewd of head and foolish in behavior, vain and disarmingly honest, sensual and pious, charming and exasperating, self-indulgent and warm-hearted, who somehow in the Age of Enlightenment managed to think and write like a man of the twentieth century.

    Barbary in the 18th century. Frances Morley was a most rebellious young, to the despair of her worried mother, strait-laced sister, and many disconcerted suitors. It was only when Mr. Thomas Strickland arrived in the village of St. Barbary from fashionable London that Frances at last met a man whose shocking ways matched her own. Thomas called himself a writer, as if this might excuse his rude behavior and uncommonly direct assault on Frances's affections. In her fight to save the life of a little climbing-boy, condemned to death for robbery, Frances becomes more involved with the mysterious novelist. But when Frances's priceless bracelet disappeared, and a mysterious highwayman known as the Moonlighter began terrorizing travels, Frances came to suspect there as more to Strickland than met the eye.Who is he really, and why is he interested in her valuable bracelet? He might have been a thief and a cad, but he was a singularly handsome and witty one -- and Miss Frances Morley found his kind of danger far more diverting than dreary conventional romance as she plunged into a breathtaking game of intrique, suspense and startling surprise...Frances's suspicions grow when a Bow Street Runner appears on the scene, looking for the notorious jewel-thief, the Moonlighter.