N. Groom – författare

Thomas Chatterton was a poet, forger, and adolescent suicide, and the debate over his work was a pivotal episode in the history of eighteenth-century literature. It ultimately established Chatterton as the inspiration for Romantic poets like Blake, Coleridge, and Keats. This book is a major collection of diverse new essays by scholars, critics, and writers like Peter Ackroyd and Richard Holmes. They show the mercurial Chatterton in exciting new contexts, and restore him as a seminal figure in English Literature.

Thomas Chatterton was a poet, forger, and adolescent suicide, and the debate over his work was a pivotal episode in the history of eighteenth-century literature. It ultimately established Chatterton as the inspiration for Romantic poets like Blake, Coleridge, and Keats. This book is a major collection of diverse new essays by scholars, critics, and writers like Peter Ackroyd and Richard Holmes. They show the mercurial Chatterton in exciting new contexts, and restore him as a seminal figure in English Literature.

The first edition of this unique book established itself as an unparalleled source of information on perfume. Although it is primarily aimed at perfumers and others in the perfume industry, it has also found substantial sales among a wide range of others including aromatherapists, botanists, and many others who wanted to learn more about this faceted subject. The new edition is now aimed squarely at perfumery marketing specialists and others in the industry world-wide and covers in particular the needs of publicity/advertising teams and journalists, together with sales people and consultants at the counters who like to have a wide range of information at their fingertips. Changes include: an expansion of the number of profiles of the perfume houses, and of the 50 or so new perfumes worthy of record which have been launched since the previous edition. There is also increased coverage of the essences and the plants and other material from which they are derived. Coverage of perfume containers is substantially expanded and linked to other parts of the book.

In 1948 I was posted, as a Political Officer, to a remote part of south-west Arabia on the edge of the great desert called the Empty Quarter. In valleys made fertile by seasonal flood-waters lay the remains of an ancient civilization. I found inscriptions and the ruin sites of towns, palaces and temples. Almost buried under the sand dunes were the tumbled walls of a great city. From here, two thousand years before, huge camel caravans had trudged their way along 1600 miles of burning sand and rocks to Petra and Gaza, burdened with a most precious cargo - frankincense, myrrh and other perfume materials for the courts, temples and perfume shops of Rome. My book Frankincense and Myrrh delved into the details of this romantic trade and led to a broader interest in the perfumes of ancient times. Then, researching on behalf of a perfume house into the Arab contribution to perfumery, I came across the collection of perfume recipes assembled by the Arab philosopher-scientist Yaqub al-Kindi, which have never been translated into English (some, which I have translated myself, are now included in an appendix to this book). I realized that in that work I had found key evidence to demonstrate how the medieval Arab perfume makers had been the bridge in perfume history between ancient and modern times. Perfumery could now be seen as an art with a continuous history of development since the dawn of civilization.