Search results for ""author francis russell""

This personal, and wonderfully well informed, selection of the most rewarding towns, cities, villages and individual monuments in Italy is the definitive guidebook for the discerning traveller. The author has been visiting Italy, for study, for work and for pleasure, for over fifty years, and is the perfect companion for those who want to know about more than the obvious attractions. As well as comprehensively covering the finest sights in the major tourist centres of Rome, Florence, Venice and elsewhere, Russell discusses and describes the neglected, or little known, masterpieces that are still to be found the length and breadth of the Italian peninsula. In a book that will educate and astonish the expert as surely as it will guide and inform the first-time visitor, the author chooses and explores palaces and gardens, city squares and lonely churches, frescoes and altarpieces, great museums and tiny ruins that together provide a richly textured portrait of a country where the history and patterns of civilization lie more thickly than anywhere else on earth.

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The collection of pictures at Wilton has been celebrated since the seventeenth century; and its historic arrangement is uniquely well documented in a series of catalogues of which the first, issued in 1731, was the earliest such publication about any private collection in England. Of successive owners of the house, three made significant contributions: William, 4th Earl of Pembroke, who commissioned van Dyck’s monumental portrait of his family that dominates the Double Cube Room he had created; his grandson, Thomas, 8th Earl of Pembroke who assembled what was in some respects a pioneering collection of old master pictures for the house; and his grandson, Henry, 10th Earl of Pembroke, patron of Reynolds and Wilson, among others. Such masterpieces as Lucas van Leyden’s Card Players, Cesare da Sesto’s Leda – long attributed to Leonardo – and Ribera’s Democritus are matched by remarkable portrait drawings by Raphael and Holbein. These are complemented by a substantial deposit of family portraits and other pictures that attest to the tastes and interests of successive generations of the Herbert family.

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Treasure Island/The Black Arrow/The Treasure of Franchard/Will o' the Mill/The Sire de Malétroit's Door/The House of Eld/The Song of the MorrowStevenson is one of the world's great storytellers. From the gripping opening of Treasure Island, to the unforgettable portrait of Richard III in The Black Arrow, his gift for driving narrative and marvellously paced prose holds the attention of the reader from beginning to end.This volume is designed to showcase the full range of Stevenson's talents as a writer of adventure. Included are not only some of his most famous works but also lesser known gems from The New Arabian Nights and Fables.

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