Book picks similar to
'Allo 'Allo by Jeremy Lloyd
plays
film_television
_france-and-belgium
type_women-at-war
The Normal Heart
Larry Kramer - 1985
It tells the story of very private lives caught up in the heartrendering ordeal of suffering and doom - an ordeal that was largely ignored for reasons of politics and majority morality.Filled with power, anger, and intelligence, Larry Kramer's riveting play dramatizes what actualy happened from the time of the disease's discovery to the present, and points a moral j'accuse in many directions. His passionate indictment of government, the media, and the public for refusing to deal with a national plague is electrifying theater - a play that finally breaks through the conspiracy of silence with a shout of stunning impact. As Douglas Watt summed it up in his review for the New York Daily News,THE NORMAL HEART is "an angry, unremitting and gripping piece of political theater. You are bound to come away moved."
Rescuing Da Vinci
Robert M. Edsel - 2006
This book includes their heroics and exploits in rescuing and safeguarding the world's great artworks.
The Real Mad Men: The Remarkable True Story of Madison Avenue's Golden Age
Andrew Cracknell - 2011
Like AMC's award-winning drama "Mad Men," this book looks at the industry that shaped a culture. The" Real Mad Men" is a visual history of key major ad campaigns during the 1950s and 1960s and the people responsible for them. Beginning with the iconic VW campaign that kicked off the "Creative Revolution" it covers campaigns such as Avis, Alka Seltzer, Benson & Hedges 100s, Volvo, Chivas Regal, and Braniff Airways."Real Mad Men" reveals the true players of Madison Avenue in the era of the "Mad Men" and provides a behind-the-scenes look at key agencies, including 150 full-color illustrations of the main ad campaigns as well as numerous inset campaigns
In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play
Sarah Ruhl - 2010
Set in the 1880s at the dawn of the age of electricity and based on the bizarre historical fact that doctors used vibrators to treat 'hysterical' women (and some men), the play centers on a doctor and his wife and how his new therapy affects their entire household. In a seemingly perfect, well-to-do Victorian home, proper gentleman and scientist Dr. Givings has innocently invented an extraordinary new device for treating "hysteria" in women (and occasionally men): the vibrator. Adjacent to the doctor's laboratory, his young and energetic wife tries to tend to their newborn daughter-and wonders exactly what is going on in the next room. When a new "hysterical" patient and her husband bring a wet nurse and their own complicated relationship into the doctor's home, Dr. and Mrs. Givings must examine the nature of their own marriage, and what it truly means to love someone.This laugh out loud, provocative and touching play premiered at Berkely Rep and subsequently marked Sarah Ruhl's Broadway debut opening at the Lyceum Theatre on November 19th, 2009.
Marie Antoinette
Sofia Coppola - 2006
Shot entirely in France, much on location at the Palace of Versailles, the film is visually stunning, bringing together a cast that includes Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Rip Torn, and Marianne Faithful, and the extraordinary costume designs of Oscar-winner Milena Canonero (Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange). A moving story of naivety and responsibility, reputation and misunderstanding, Marie Antoinette is a film that Sofia Coppola has wanted to make for years. In a book that is at once the personal chronicle of a major work and a beautiful tribute to the potential of film, featuring elements of the director's own screenplay as well as captivating stills, the director's personal photos, and original designs for costumes and sets, Marie Antoinette is an essential companion for any lover of modern cinema.
My Prairie Cookbook: Memories and Frontier Food from My Little House to Yours
Melissa Gilbert - 2014
From prairie breakfasts and picnic lunches to treats inspired by Nellie’s restaurant, the 80 simple and delicious dishes—crispy fried chicken, pot roasts, corn bread, apple pie, and more—present Bonnet Heads (die-hard Little House fans) with the chance to eat like the Ingalls family. Gilbert’s personal recollections and memorabilia, including behind-the-scenes stories, anecdotes, and more than 75 treasured scrapbook images, accompany the recipes. With answers to the most-asked questions from fans—on topics including the biggest bloopers, on-set romances, and what Michael Landon was really like—My Prairie Cookbook is a cherished memento for Little House fans and fans of simple prairie cooking alike.
Splendor in the Grass
William Inge - 1961
But both Bud and Deanie are disturbed by the powerful feelings that have grown between them, and which are turned into torture by the restraints of proper conduct. Mindful of the bad example of his own debauched sister, Bud wants to marry Deanie immediately and go to agricultural school a hope that is destroyed by his father's ambitions to put Bud through Yale and into the family oil business. Bud and Deanie promise to wait, and Bud decides that it is better for them to see less of each other in the meantime, a turn of events that plunges the unstable Deanie into an emotional crack-up and then commitment to an institution. By the time she is released their world has turned over. The stock market crash has destroyed the Stamper empire and led to suicide for Bud's father; Bud has left Yale and married a young waitress from New Haven; and Deanie has become engaged to a young man she met in the hospital. The time has come for both to start life anew, but to do this means to come to terms with the past, and this Bud and Deanie do in a final, touching scene where old ties are gently broken and each gains the sureness and strength to move on from disturbing memories to better hopes for what lies ahead.
The Peacock's Cry
Paul Doherty - 2016
Includes an exclusive extract from the eighteenth Corbett novel DARK SERPENT, the follow up to THE MYSTERIUM. If you love historical mysteries from Robin Hobb, Susanna Gregory or Bernard Knight you will love this.It is 1311 and England seethes with unrest. Sir Hugh Corbett, former keeper of the Secret Seal, has been absent from royal service for over six years. Content to live a life more relaxed with his wife and children in the country Corbett has enjoyed his time away from the machinations of court and the secrets men will kill to keep. But a visit from his new King, Edward II, brings about change. His former protégé, Ranulf Atte-Newgate, now Senior Clerk in the Chancery, has been implicated in the death of a young novice, and Edward has made it clear that Corbett must resume his post and solve the case if Ranulf is not to hang for the murder...Corbett knows that resuming his post will bring him to the fore of Edward's political machinations but with Ranulf's life at stake, does Corbett have any choice but to accept the Seal once more?
Ladies of the Grand Tour: British Women in Pursuit of Enlightenment and Adventure in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Brian Dolan - 2001
As far as Mary Berry was concerned, writing from her home in Mayfair on 2 August 1798, Napoleon was still running riot in Europe; the prospect of a French invasion of Britain was on everyone's lips, and the Continent was closed off to travellers. Twelve months earlier, Mary thought she would by now be on the Continent -- her much looked forward to third trip there -- conversing personally with Bertie Greatheed. But, alas, she was stranded, left to lament through correspondence her inability to escape. 'Most thoroughly, ' she wrote, 'do I begin to feel the want of that "shake out of English ways, English whims, and English prejudices, which nothing but leaving England gives one.'This was hardly an appropriate time to condemn 'English ways' and a desire for the continental lifestyle. Mary Berry could have been accused of being a French sympathiser -- a Jacobin (a radical activist in support of the principles of the French Revolution), or, with equivalent indignity, a Catholic. Mary was politically aware, but her restlessness with forced domestic residence overrode her sense of discretion. And anyway, she could have claimed with some justification, when "was there a good time for a woman to talk about shaking loose 'English prejudices' and broadening her intellectual horizons? By 'English prejudices' she was in part referring to a deep-rooted antagonism towardswomen's enlightenment. Mary felt confined, both physically and intellectually. The world seemed to be shrinking around her and without a change of air, and marooned in England she feared intellectual suffocation: After a residence of four or five years we all begin to forget the existence of the Continent of Europe, till we touch it again with our feet. The whole world to me, that is to say the whole circle of my ideas, begins to be confined between N. Audley-Street and Twickenham. I know no great men but Pitt and Fox, no king and queen but George and Charlotte, no towns but London. All the other cities, and courts, and great men of the world "may be very good sort of places and of people, for aught we know or care; except they are coming to invade us, we think no more of them than of the inhabitants of another planet.Just a few years earlier, before relations with France disintegrated completely, another English woman abandoned London and headed for Paris. Mary Wollstonecraft had longed to visit the Continent for some time. She had dreamt about it for over a decade, while pursuing a catalogue of occupations open to middle-class women, before taking pen in hand and daringly writing herself into a new career as an author. By 1792, with her authorial voice and confidence gathering strength, she published the work for which she is most well known: "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written while intoxicated on the champagne fizz of the French Revolution. In this work she expressed a desire to see the revolutionary principles of "liberte, e galite and "fraternite apply to women as well as to men. Things were happening abroad; the Continent was a model of change andliberation. 'In France or Italy, have women confined themselves to domestic life?, ' she asked her readers. 'No!' England was behind the times. 'I long for "independence!, ' she cried. 'I will certainly visit France, it has long been a desire floating in my brain.' Within months of the publication and immediate success of her book, she had embarked on her journey.Mary Berry and Mary Wollstonecraft had much in common. Both were from middle-class backgrounds, but had seen the prospects of family wealth squandered by rogue relatives. At the time of their travels, neither was married. Both had overcome prejudices against female advancement and become published authors. And both would find the experience of foreign travel stimulating and cathartic. It is no accident that the metaphor of travel has long been used to represent the twists and turns, discoveries and drudgery of intellectual and psychological development.Travel and the knowledge collected along the way gave currency to the metaphor of 'the path to enlightenment'. By the end of the eighteenth century, the term was taken much more literally, and directed many women in their quests for improvement to the Continent. Letters and journals recorded their responses to life abroad, and in turn their discoveries about themselves. Travel writing, which included letters written home, presented a rare opportunity for Georgian women to articulate views on the world around them and their responses to it. Partly personal, biographical and intimate, their writings were often also political, descriptive, forthright and polemical. Through travel women of a certain status could fashion themselves into informed, discriminating observers, acute socialcommentators and listened-to cultural critics.Berry and Wollstonecraft were but two of a wide range of women determined to elevate themselves through travel. By the end of the eighteenth century, 'ladies of letters' had begun to settle into their pursuit of a 'life of the mind': continental travel allowed them to carve out niches in the intellectual geography of Enlightenment England. Many women who had the chance to travel were changing the course of common assumptions and showing others how travel could help them arrive at a new position -- personally and socially -- in polite society.A number of 'bluestocking' women, noted for their intellectual accomplishments, also left the droning world of polite drawing-room conversation to exercise their minds, enjoy social independence and cultivate new tastes, and romances, abroad. Travel helped women to develop views on the opportunities and rights to education; it guided those seeking separation from unhappy domestic circumstances; it worked to improve mental and physical health...
Bent
Martin Sherman - 1979
Martin Sherman's worldwide hit play Bent took London by storm in 1979 when it was first performed by the Royal Court Theatre, with Ian McKellen as Max (a character written with the actor in mind). The play itself caused an uproar. "It educated the world," Sherman explains. "People knew about how the Third Reich treated Jews and, to some extent, gypsies and political prisoners. But very little had come out about their treatment of homosexuals." Gays were arrested and interned at work camps prior to the genocide of Jews, gypsies, and handicapped, and continued to be imprisoned even after the fall of the Third Reich and liberation of the camps. The play Bent highlights the reason why - a largely ignored German law, Paragraph 175, making homosexuality a criminal offense, which Hitler reactivated and strengthened during his rise to power.
Beam Me Up, Scotty
James Doohan - 1996
The book covers this as well as his childhood and wartime experiences, including taking part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy.
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
Bertolt Brecht - 1941
A dizzyingly intelligent political satire on the (ir)resistibleness of political thuggery, Arturo Ui satirizes the rise of Hitler in Nazi Germany by dressing it up as “the gangster film” we thought we knew. In Arturo Ui, the metamorphosis of thug-to-politician through corruption, intimidation and all manner of brutality is thinly masked by a Chicago gangland epic where the young Arturo Ui stages a violent takeover of the green grocer trade.