Download Free The Grand Affair Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Grand Affair and write the review.

A Wall Street Journal and Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year | Long-listed for the Plutarch Award A bold new biography of the legendary painter John Singer Sargent, stressing the unruly emotions and furtive desires that drove his innovative work and defined the transatlantic, fin de siècle culture he inhabited. A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is also an abiding enigma. While dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona, he scandalized viewers on both sides of the Atlantic with the frankness and sensuality of his work. He charmed the nouveaux riches as well as the old money, but he reserved his greatest sympathies for Bedouins, Spanish dancers, and the gondoliers of Venice. At the height of his renown in Britain and America, he quit his lucrative portrait-painting career to concentrate on allegorical murals with religious themes—and on nude drawings of male models that he kept to himself. In The Grand Affair, the historian Paul Fisher offers a vivid life of the buttoned-up artist and his unbuttoned work. Sargent’s nervy, edgy portraits exposed illicit or dark feelings in himself and his sitters—feelings that high society on both sides of the Atlantic found fascinating and off-putting. Fisher traces Singer’s life from his wandering trans-European childhood to the salons of Paris, and the scandals and enthusiasms he caused, and on to London. There he mixed with eccentrics and aristocrats, and the likes of Henry James and Oscar Wilde, while at the same time forming a close relationship with a lightweight boxer who became his model, valet, and traveling partner. In later years, Sargent met up with his friend and patron Isabella Stewart Gardner around the world and devoted himself to a new model, the African American elevator operator and part-time contortionist Thomas McKeller, who would become the subject of some of Sargent’s most daring and powerful work. Illuminating Sargent’s restless itinerary, Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de siècle sexuality and art, fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life.
Fans of Louise Douglas, Dinah Jeffries and Kristin Hannah will love this compelling and enthralling read from bestselling author Charlotte Bingham. The 1950s are brought vividly to life - as is the real battle between desire and duty that Ottilie faces. A real page-turner! 'The author perfectly evokes the atmosphere of a bygone era... ' -- Woman's Own 'This is great summer escapism from an award-winning romantic novelist' -- CHOICE 'I couldn't put it down' -- ***** Reader review 'Absolutely riveting' -- ***** Reader review 'A wonderful read' -- ***** Reader review ******************************************************************************* SOME THINGS NEED SAVING...BUT AT WHAT COST? Ottilie Cartaret is born in London into a family of boys dominated by their genial mother, Ma O'Flaherty. For the first four years of her life, all Ottilie knows is love until, that is, the erring father of the boys, sends enough money from America for the O'Flahertys to move to what Ma imagines will be rural bliss in Cornwall. True, St Elcomb is by the sea and in 1950s Britain is certainly rural but, for the O'Flahertys, it is not bliss. Never mind their poverty - the enmity of the local people is what proves insuperable. Ottilie is ultimately adopted by Mr and Mrs Cartaret, a wealthy couple who run the Grand Hotel in St Elcomb. Here she becomes pampered and spoilt, not just by her adopted parents but by all the visitors to the hotel. Times however are changing and not just for Ottilie but for the hotel too, and as the regulars to the now decaying hotel die off, the Cartarets find they are unable to adapt to modern ways. There is no doubt that Ottilie is their greatest asset and they live to rejoice in the day they adopted but is Ottilie perhaps expected to sacrifice too much herself to save the Grand?
Ottilie Cartaret is born in London into a family of boys dominated by their genial mother, Ma O'Flaherty. For the first four years of her life, all Ottilie knows is love until, that is, the erring father of the boys, the ever absent Mr O'Flaherty, sends enough money from America for the O'Flahertys to move to what Ma imagines will be rural bliss in Cornwall. True, St Elcomb is by the sea and in 1950s Britain is certainly rural but, for the O'Flahertys, it is not bliss. Never mind their poverty or the damp cottage which Ma has bought for them, the enmity of the local people is what proves insuperable. The family unit having been destroyed by Ma's death, Ottilie is adopted by Mr and Mrs Cartaret, a wealthy couple who run the Grand Hotel in St Elcomb. It is to these palatial surroundings that Ottilie is removed, away from her brothers and everything which she loves. Here she becomes pampered and spoilt, not just by her adopted parents but by all the visitors to the hotel, with the exception of their mysterious annual guest whom Ottilie nicknames 'GREY LADY'. Times however are changing and not just for Ottilie but for the hotel too, and as the regulars to the now decaying hotel die off, the Cartarets find they are unable to adapt to modern ways. That Ottilie becomes their greatest asset and they live to rejoice in the day they adopted her is undoubted, but that Ottilie perhaps sacrifices too much herself to save the Grand is something she soon comes to realize...
Making it up the aisle was the easy part: Rebecca "Bex" Porter must survive her own scandals and adjust to royal British life in this "positively delicious" follow-up to The Royal We that's "just as fun, charming, and delightful as the first" (Taylor Jenkins Reid). After a scandalous secret turns their fairy-tale wedding into a nightmare, Rebecca "Bex" Porter and her husband Prince Nicholas are in self-imposed exile. The public is angry. The Queen is even angrier. And the press is salivating. Cutting themselves off from friends and family, and escaping the world's judgmental eyes, feels like the best way to protect their fragile, all-consuming romance. But when a crisis forces the new Duke and Duchess back to London, the Band-Aid they'd placed over their problems starts to peel at the edges. Now, as old family secrets and new ones threaten to derail her new royal life, Bex has to face the emotional wreckage she and Nick left behind: with the Queen, with the world, and with Nick's brother Freddie, whose sins may not be so easily forgotten—nor forgiven.
"An examination of how the work of the American painter John Singer Sargent was displayed, collected, and influential in the civic and cultural development of Chicago, Illinois during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries"--
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE The secret daughter of a French politician and a famous actress drops the startling revelation that will shatter her family in this beguiling debut novel of intrigue and betrayal. NAMED ONE OF SUMMER’S BEST BOOKS BY The Skimm • Marie Claire • LitHub • Subway Book Review • Paperback Paris Margot Louve is a secret: the child of a longstanding affair between an influential French politician with presidential ambitions and a prominent stage actress. This hidden family exists in stolen moments in a small Parisian apartment on the Left Bank. It is a house of cards that Margot—fueled by a longing to be seen and heard—decides to tumble. The summer of her seventeenth birthday, she meets the man who will set her plan in motion: a well-regarded journalist whose trust seems surprisingly easy to gain. But as Margot is drawn into an adult world she struggles to comprehend, she learns how one impulsive decision can threaten a family’s love with ruin, shattering the lives of those around her in ways she could never have imagined. Exposing the seams between private lives and public faces, The Margot Affair is a novel of deceit, desire, and transgression—and the exhilarating knife-edge upon which the danger of telling the truth outweighs the cost of keeping secrets.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The first novel in the renowned Thursday Next series, which “combines elements of Monty Python, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (The Wall Street Journal). “A literary wonderland [that] recalls Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker series [and] the works of Lewis Carroll.”—USA Today Meet Thursday Next, “part Bridget Jones, part Nancy Drew, and part Dirty Harry” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times), a literary detective without equal, fear, or boyfriend—and welcome to a surreal version of Great Britain, circa 1985, where time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wadsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, until someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature. When Jane Eyre is plucked from the pages of Brontë’s novel, Thursday must track down the villain and enter a novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide. Don’t miss any of Jasper Fforde’s delightfully entertaining Thursday Next novels: THE EYRE AFFAIR • LOST IN A GOOD BOOK • THE WELL OF LOST PLOTS • SOMETHING ROTTEN • FIRST AMONG SEQUELS • ONE OF OUR THURSDAYS IS MISSING • THE WOMAN WHO DIED A LOT
This book was a total delight -- Cat Sebastian, author of Two Rogues Make a Right on Best Laid Plaids Have kilt, will travel. Sweden, 1930 Two years ago, Dr. Ainsley Graham proved the existence of ghosts and fell in love—hard to top that. But a trip to Sweden to research at a prestigious university for the summer is nothing to sneeze at, especially since his partner, psychologist Joachim Cockburn, will be teaching alongside him. A change of scenery might be just the thing. Their idyllic trip to Sweden is interrupted by a ghost with a proclivity for rude hand gestures and graphic curse words—and a ghastly history begging to be investigated. Life among the living is complicated, too, by a gruff professor who can’t take his eyes off Ainsley, and an enticing new job offer for Joachim. What starts as an adventurous trip abroad turns into mayhem, murder, and…a magical moose? And everyone—well, perhaps not the moose—is a suspect in the death of the ghostly young man who brings them together to expose secrets, loves lost, and a crime that will shock them all. Kilty Pleasures Book 1: Best Laid Plaids Book 2: Where There’s a Kilt, There’s a Way