Search results for ""Author Marie-José Gransard""

A unique and captivating guide to the literary heritage of Venice. Venice, La Serenissima, is one of the most breath-taking cities in the world. From its earliest beginnings in the 7th century, Venice has been a magnetic centre of trade and culture, wealth and power and has acted as a crossroads for an array of religious pilgrims and refugees, diplomats, crusading armies and merchants. The city is a floating labyrinth; the world's greatest museum, frozen in time; a cultural jewel, slowly sinking into the lagoon from which it rose; tourist-trap, irresistible muse. Later, Venice's fabled beauty and reputation as a haven for freedom of expression seduced some of the most celebrated figures in history: artists such as Durer, Bellini and Turner; writers Dickens, Byron, Kafka, Poe, Rousseau, Thomas Mann, Ruskin and Ezra Pound and composers Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Verdi and Stravinsky. In this guide to literary Venice, the author uncovers the city's myriad of secrets, revealing how every floating palace, gilded church and bustling square is imbued with the lives and creations of those who were inspired by the city, which still echoes with their voices.

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Paris is the crowning jewel of France, and this literary guide for travellers explores its 20th century history, from 1900-1950. Paris at the turn of the twentieth century had become the cultural capital of the world. Artists and writers came to contribute to flourishing avant-garde movements, as the Left Bank became a new centre of creativity. It drew tourists and travellers, but also many exiled from their home countries or escaping political persecution, and those seeking freedom from social constraints. The romantic myth of Paris persists, but Marie-José Gransard explores the darker side of the City of Lights. She brings her subjects to life by describing where and how they lived, what they wrote and what was written about them, through a wide-ranging literary legacy of diaries, memoirs, letters, poetry, theatre, cinema and fiction. In Twentieth-Century Paris: A Literary Guide for Travellers (1900-1950) both the visitor and the armchair traveller alike will find familiar names, from Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell to Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, and they will encounter unfairly forgotten or neglected writers, and many artists and musicians, famous and less well-known Russians, and writers and thinkers from as far as the Caribbean and Latin America.

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