This is it, the 1st since the official & monumental study by Monypenny & Buckle which appeared deecades ago. Blake deals with Disraeli's political style & above all with the legend that he was moved by a consistent philosophy of Tory radicalism which he conceived in his youth & later put into practice. In place of this, he presents a man moved far less by principle than by sheer zest for "the great game", loving power & skillfully maneuvering to get & hold it. Paradoxically, Blake shows how this may have made him far more effective in steering the Tory party into new paths than any man of principle could have been. Disraeli presents a lively portrait of an extraordinary man & of his age. Without ever deviating far from his subject, Blake illuminates the whole arena of Victorian politics. The character he presents is more subtle & fascinating than the conventional image. Altho his origins were less obscure than he liked people to believe, his youth was extraordinarily disreputable for a future Prime Minister & an aura of raffishness hindered him until late in his career. The book follows Disraeli's slow climb to power from the time when the young novelist & dandy failed repeatedly to get into Parliament at all, thru his period as a neglected backbencher until finally achieving the Leadership of the Tory Party in the House of Commons &, late in life, becoming Victoria's confidant & perhaps most favored Prime Minister. Many characters crowd into the book: the brilliant young men of "Young England"; Disraeli's family, friends, wife & mistresses; his colleagues & opponents in parliament, including Peel, whom he destroyed as an effective political leader, & Gladstone, who hated him; Queen Victoria, whose relationship with him verges on the comic to those reading it some generations later; & the great landed families into whose society Disraeli was finally admitted. A whole vanished world comes to life in this book. In its center stands the brilliant, enigmatic figure of one who was perhaps the most atypical inhabitant, but who has come to symbolize, for Americans at least, the Victorian Age.

    Fuji in foreground or background: the series of 36 original prints plus 10 that Hokusai added to the series later. Introductory remarks and commentary on each print by Ichitaro Kondo in Japanese, with English translations by Charles S. Terry. Includes map of probable location from which Hokusai viewed Mt. Fuji to create each print.

    Classic Literature, Literary Studies, Collected Works

    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

    

    The diary of a wife who, with their five-year old daughter, accompanied her husband on a three-and-a-half year whaling voyage.