Chronicles the life of Lady Georgiana Spencer, the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales.

A rich, rollicking picture of late-eighteenth-century British aristocracy and the intimate story of a woman who for a time was its undisputed leader. Lady Georgiana Spencer, the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, achieved immediate celebrity at seventeen by marrying one of England's richest and most influential aristocrats, the Duke of Devonshire. Launched into a world of wealth and power, she quickly became the queen of fashionable society. But her public success concealed a personal life fraught with suffering, giving this vibrant story an astonishingly contemporary twist.

“Dray captures the genius and ingenuity of Franklin’s scientific thinking and then does something even more fascinating: He shows how science shaped his diplomacy, politics, and Enlightenment philosophy.” –Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Today we think of Benjamin Franklin as a founder of American independence who also dabbled in science. But in Franklin’s day, the era of Enlightenment, long before he was an eminent statesman, he was famous for his revolutionary scientific work. Pulitzer Prize finalist Philip Dray uses the evolution of Franklin’s scientific curiosity and empirical thinking as a metaphor for America’s struggle to establish its fundamental values. He recounts how Franklin unlocked one of the greatest natural mysteries of his day, the seemingly unknowable powers of lightning and electricity. Rich in historical detail and based on numerous primary sources, Stealing God’s Thunder is a fascinating original look at one of our most beloved and complex founding fathers.

“Sexy, surprising, funny, insightful, and wildly entertaining” ( Huffington Post )—the definitive biography of Giacomo Casanova, the impoverished boy who became the famous writer, notorious libertine, and self-invented genius in decadent eighteenth-century Europe. Today, “Casanova” is a synonym for “great lover,” yet the real story of this remarkable figure is little known. A figure straight out of a Henry Fielding novel, Giacomo Casanova was erotic, brilliant, impulsive, and desperate for recognition; a self-destructive genius. Over the course of his lifetime, he claimed to have seduced more than one hundred women, among them married women, young women in convents, girls just barely in their teens, women of high and low birth alike. Abandoned by his mother, an actress and courtesan, Casanova was raised by his illiterate grandmother, coming of age in a Venice filled with spies and political intrigue. He was intellectually curious and read forbidden books, for which he was jailed. He staged a dramatic escape from Venice’s notorious prison, I Piombi, the only person known to have done so. He then fled to France, ingratiated himself at the royal court, and invented the national lottery that still exists to this day. He crisscrossed Europe, landing for a while in St. Petersburg, where he was admitted to the court of Catherine the Great. He corresponded with Voltaire and met Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte—assisting them as they composed the timeless opera Don Giovanni . And he wrote what many consider the greatest memoir of the era, the twelve-volume Story of My Life . Laurence Bergreen’s Casanova recounts this astonishing life in rich, intimate detail, and at the same time, paints a dazzling portrait of eighteenth-century Europe, filled with a cast characters from serving girls to kings and courtiers, “great fun for any history lover” ( Kirkus Reviews ).

This book shows the transformation of an intelligent, high-strung girl into the first great advocate of female liberation, whose advanced ideas about woman's rights and education were more than a hundred years ahead of their time.

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This provocative analysis of the life and work of Francois Marie Arouet, pseudonymously known as Voltaire, reassesses his life and reevaluates the original impact of his voluminous writings

"Voltaire's Coconuts is a wonderfully engaging and witty combination of history and biography which looks at how Europeans have been fascinated by all that it means to be English. Dutch by birth, Buruma came to live in England in 1990 for the third time in his life and noticed a new mood of introspection. Englishness was a subject of endless discussion. Fox hunting was debated, loyalty to English cricket a hot issue, and the future of the monarchy rarely out of the news. This worrying over Englishness resulted, in Buruma's words, 'in great balls of intellectual wool', obscuring the more practical reasons why Europeans have admired (or hated) Britain in the past: its liberal institutions, its civil liberties, its delicate balance between social order and the free pursuit of self-interest. In this brilliant and elegantly written book Buruma examines these ideas about Englishness and what Europeans admired or loathed about Britain. Voltaire wondered why British laws could not be planted in France, or even Serbia, like the precious seeds of coconut trees. Karl Marx thought the English were too stupid to start a revolution; Goethe worshipped Shakespeare; Baron de Coubertin's idea of the modern Olympic Games was inspired by Tom Brown's Schooldays; Theodor Herzl's dream of the Jewish state was fuelled by his love of British aristocracy; and the German Kaiser was convinced that Britain was run by Jews. Combining biographical stories of these European Anglophiles and Anglophobes with memories of his own Anglo-Dutch-German-Jewish family, Ian Buruma has found a wholly original way of describing the relationship between Britain and Europe. This is a dazzlingly clever book which through its exploration of anglomania shows how much Englishness and people's view of it has shaped modern Europe." --Descripción del editor.

"This new critical biography provides a complete picture of German novelist, playwright and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It offers fresh, thought-provoking interpretations of all the major works, including novels such as The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Elective Affinities, plays such as Egmont and Iphigenia in Tauris, and Goethe's greatest work, Faust. Alongside these works the incidents of his life are analysed, including his love affairs and his meetings with the great people of the age, such as Napoleon Bonaparte. Jeremy Adler shows how Goethe's encyclopedic interest in numerous fields influenced later thinkers such as Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim and Susan Sontag. Goethe has often been called the last Renaissance man. He was in fact the first of the moderns - a maker of modernity."--Page 4 of cover.

This biography looks at the man, the period and its significance in Scottish history by brushing away the dust of legend that blurs the image of the young pretender. The author makes clear how Charles Edward became the Bonnie Prince Charlie of legend and folk memory. As the biography is based almost entirely on contemporary sources, Charles emerges directly from 18th century Europe with all its political and dynastic intrigue and the insights into familiar and unfamiliar events which emerge explain the unwavering appeal that the prince has exerted for so long.

Zum Zeitpunkt seines Todes im Jahr 1820 war Benjamin West der berühmteste Künstler der englischsprachigen Welt und wurde in ganz Europa gefeiert. Aus bescheidenen Verhältnissen in Pennsylvania stammend, hatte er als erster amerikanischer Künstler in Italien studiert und war innerhalb weniger Jahre nach seiner Ankunft in London maßgeblich an der Gründung der Royal Academy of Arts beteiligt und zum Historienmaler von König Georg III. ernannt worden. Wie der Autor in diesem Buch feststellt, gehörte West jedoch zur Avantgarde, die den Neoklassizismus und die Romantik schuf und zu den ersten Malern, die die inspirierenden Qualitäten zeitgenössischer Ereignisse darstellten. Vor allem sein bekanntestes Gemälde, Der Tod des General Wolfe, war ein revolutionäres Werk, das die Kunst nachhaltig veränderte. Es ist das erste Buch, das den Beitrag von West zu den Ideen der Moderne und der Erneuerung der Historienmalerei bewertet und es bietet spannende neue Einblicke in Wests berühmtestes Gemälde.

In 'Dictations', Avital Ronell, one of literary criticism's most imaginative and inimitable mediums, channels Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).

The Burke that emerges from Professor Kramnick's sensitive reinterpretation--the troubled ambivalent bourgeois--is vastly more interesting and truly significant than the mythic defender of the old order that generations have worshipped and misunderstood.

Book and jacket rate fine/like new used better than very good not quite mint.

The first few decades of the eighteenth century witnessed an important moment in Jewish-Christian relations, as influential Christian scholars increasingly looked to Jewish texts to reveal the truths of their own faith. To what extent could postbiblical writings help them better understand the New Testament? And who would best be able to explicate these connections?Connecting the Covenants focuses on two separate but entwined stories, the first centering around the colorful character of Moses Marcus. The English-born son of wealthy parents and the grandson of the famous autobiographical author Glikl of Hameln, Marcus was a prominent Jew educated in the Ashkenazic yeshivah at Hamburg. On New Year's Day, 1723, Marcus was baptized as a Christian, later publishing a justification of his conversion and a vindication of his newly discovered faith in a small book in London. A trophy convert, he was promoted by figures at the highest levels of the Anglican Church as a cultural mediator between Judaism and Christianity. His modest successes in the world of the elite clerical establishment were followed, however, by conspicuous failures, both intellectual and material.The second story that David Ruderman tells emerges against the background of Marcus's professional decline. In the end, the prize convert proved to be a theologian of limited ability, far outstripped in sophistication and openness to rabbinic learning by a circle of Enlightenment Protestant scholars. It was not the Jew who had abjured Judaism who was willing or able to apply the Mishnah and Talmud to Christian exegesis, but figures such as William Whiston, Anthony Collins, William Wotton, and the Dutch scholar William Surenhusius who seized upon the ways to connect the covenants.