Memoirs of an Aesthete

Memoirs of an Aesthete
Author: Harold Acton
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2008-12
Genre: Authors, English
ISBN: 9780571247660

N this classic memoir Harold Acton offers a witty and vivid account of the first thirty-five years of his life (1904-39): from a boyhood among the dilettanti in Florence before the First World War, through his friendships with some of the great writers of his generation in Oxford and Paris, to his discovery of a spiritual home in Peking.

Prince of Aesthetes

Prince of Aesthetes
Author: Philippe Jullian
Publisher: Viking Adult
Total Pages: 314
Release: 1968
Genre: Aestheticism (Literature)
ISBN:

A biography of a man and his eternal search for Beauty.

Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes

Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes
Author: Andre Bernard
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 808
Release: 2000-09-21
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 0446931268

From Hank Aaron to King Zog, Mao Tse-Tung to Madonna, Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes features more than 2,000 people from around the world, past and present, in all fields. These short anecdotes provide remarkable insight into the human character. Ranging from the humorous to the tearful, they span classical history, recent politics, modern science and the arts. Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes is a gold mine for anyone who gives speeches, is doing research, or simply likes to browse. As an informal tour of history and human nature at its most entertaining & instructive, this is sure to be a perennial favorite for years to come.

Germs

Germs
Author: Richard Wollheim
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2021-02-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 168137496X

A brilliant, sinuous exploration of family and childhood memory by one of the most original British philosophers of the twentieth century. Germs is about first things, the seeds from which a life grows, as well as about the illnesses it incurs, the damage it sustains. Written at the end of his life by Richard Wollheim, one of the major philosophers of the late twentieth century, the book is not the usual story of growing up and getting on but a brilliant recovery and evocation of childhood consciousness and unconsciousness, an eerily precise rendering of that primitive, formative world we all come from in which we do not know either the world or ourselves for sure, and things—houses, clothes, meals, parents—loom large around us, as indispensable as they are out of our control. Richard Wollheim’s remarkably original memoir is a disturbing, enthralling, dispassionate but also deeply personal depiction of a child standing, fascinated and fearful, on the threshold of individual life.

Lost Property

Lost Property
Author: Ben Sonnenberg
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2020-06-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1681374234

A smart and hilarious memoir of privilege and excess told by the son of a powerful, seductive member of the New York elite. Ben Sonnenberg grew up in the great house on Gramercy Park in New York City that his father, the inventor of modern public relations and the owner of a fine collection of art, built to celebrate his rise from the poverty of the Jewish Lower East Side to a life of riches and power. His son could have what he wanted, except perhaps what he wanted most: to get away. Lost Property, a book of memoirs and confessions, is a tale of youthful riot and rebellion. Sonnenberg recounts his aesthetic, sexual, and political education, and a sometimes absurd flight into “anarchy and sabotage,” in which he reports to both the CIA and East German intelligence during the Cold War and, cultivating a dandy’s nonchalance, pursues a life of sexual adventure in 1960s London and New York. The cast of characters includes Orson Welles, Glenn Gould, and Sylvia Plath; among the subjects are marriage, children, infidelity, debt, divorce, literature, and multiple sclerosis. The end is surprisingly happy.

Western Queers in China

Western Queers in China
Author: David Emil Mungello
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2012
Genre: China
ISBN: 1442215577

This unique work examines the role played by sexuality in the historical encounter between China and the West. Distinguished historian D.E. Mungello focuses especially on Western homosexuals who saw China as a place of escape from the homophobia of Europe and North America. His groundbreaking study traces the lives of two dozen men, many previously unknown to have same-sex desire, who fled to China and in the process influenced perceptions of Chinese culture to this day. This escapism engendered casual sexual encounters, serious friendships, and substantive intellectual rela.

Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics

Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics
Author: Frederic Spotts
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-10-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781468316711

Available again, the classic, unprecedented look at how the strategies and ideals of the Third Reich were informed by Adolf Hitler's artistic aspirations. "Grimly fascinating . . . A book that will rightly find its place among the central studies of Nazism. . . . Invaluable." --The New York Times

Queer Kinship after Wilde

Queer Kinship after Wilde
Author: Kristin Mahoney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2022-10-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100902244X

Queer Kinship after Wilde investigates the afterlife of the Decadent Movement's ideas about kinship, desire, and the family during the modernist period within a global context. Drawing on archival materials, including diaries, correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, and photograph albums, it tells the story of individuals with ties to late-Victorian Decadence and Oscar Wilde who turned to the fin-de-siècle past for inspiration as they attempted to operate outside the heteronormative boundaries restricting the practice of marriage and the family. These post-Victorian Decadents and Decadent modernists engaged in translation, travel, and transnational collaboration in pursuit of different models of connection that might facilitate their disentanglement from conventional sexual and gender ideals. Queer Kinship after Wilde attends to the successes and failures that resulted from these experiments, the new approaches to affiliation inflected by a cosmopolitan or global perspective that occurred within these networks as well as the practices marked by Decadence's troubling patterns of Orientalism and racial fetishism.

Nice Guys Don't Work in Hollywood

Nice Guys Don't Work in Hollywood
Author: Curtis Harrington
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781937112073

Nice Guys Don't Work in Hollywood is a fast-paced view of Harrington's journey through the kaleidoscope of the movie business, acting alternatively as personal memoir and cultural history from a veteran of thee entertainment business. In addition, Harrington was living as a gay man in Hollywood and the book gives a rare peek into the hidden world of what was then an elite subculture. Starting in 1940s avant-garde heyday, harrington made several deeply intuitive and evocative films. Against all odds, he then became a Hollywood insider.