Critical Lives - Böcker

Hannah Arendt is one of the most renowned political thinkers of the twentieth century and her work has never been more relevant than it is today. Born in Germany in 1906, Arendt published her first book at the age of 23, before turning away from the world of academic philosophy to reckon with the rise of the Third Reich. After the War, Arendt became one of the most prominent – and controversial – public intellectuals of her time, publishing influential works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition and Eichmann in Jerusalem.Samantha Rose Hill weaves together new biographical detail, archival documents, poems and correspondence to reveal a woman whose passion for the life of the mind was nourished by her love of the world.

Born in Germany in 1920 and raised in the United States, the poet, short-story writer and novelist Charles Bukowski occupies a unique place in world literature. Bukowski’s prolific output sits at the confluence of a number of major literary, creative and intellectual traditions; this new interpretation of his life and work details the diverse fields that influenced him – a list that includes German philosophers (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer); Russian writers (Dostoevsky, Gorky); American poets (Whitman, Pound, the Beats); classical music; and the eighth-century Chinese poet Li Po.Also crucial to Bukowski’s development as a writer was his German-American heritage, and in this book David Stephen Calonne reveals this hybrid identity to be as critical to any understanding of Bukowski’s biography and oeuvre as his abusive childhood and discovery in adolescence of the ecstasy of alcohol. Exploring several little-known works of fiction and poetry dating from the early years of his career, his major works, including Post Office and Factotum, and the many volumes of poetry published with Black Sparrow Press, Calonne studies the numerous versions of Bukowski created by the writer himself and his followers.A concise yet comprehensive new account, Charles Bukowski will be of interest to those already fans of this influential figure and an invaluable introduction to those new to his work.

The Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro is one of the most written-about men in the world today. Most approaches to his life are either glowing hagiographies, or critical rants in which he is portrayed as a dictator who has kept the island of Cuba under his heel. By contrast, Nick Caistor brings together personal details and a discussion of the ideas driving Castro throughout his life; his ultimate aim is to give readers the opportunity to judge for themselves whether or not, as Castro himself once said, ‘history will absolve me’.Fidel Castro not only brought revolution to Cuba, but also wielded power there almost unchallenged for nearly 50 years; finally stepping down at the age of 81, due to ill health, in February 2008. Broadcaster and journalist Nick Caistor has interviewed a huge variety of those who have known Castro at different times in his life, and who range from bitter opponents to his staunchest allies. Their stories and opinions in this book enliven the debate about the Cuban leader’s choices, strengths and weaknesses.

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) spent fourteen years creating A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), his magnum opus. Only four of its seven volumes had been published by the time Proust died; he did not live to see it become one of the most important literary works of the twentieth century. Today it still attracts widespread critical attention and Proust’s habits, health and sexual preferences continue to absorb and fascinate his commentators and devotees. This book explores the life and work of a writer whose every experience was stored, dissected and redeployed within a vast work of fiction.Adam Watt considers Proust’s early years of personal and aesthetic experiment and demonstrates how episodes from his childhood and his family life became material for his novel. An engaging account is provided of two central, intertwined processes taking place in Proust’s life against the vibrant backdrop of belle époque Paris and the First World War: the progress of In Search of Lost Time and the simultaneous decline of its author. Proust’s own periods of ill health and isolation nourished his narrator’s thoughts on desire, love and loss, as well as his contemplation of beauty, memory, ageing and the possibility of happiness.Drawing on Proust’s vast correspondence, the accounts of his contemporaries and the insights of recent scholarship, Marcel Proust offers a rewarding new portrait of the novelist once described as ‘the most complicated man in Paris’.

With their complex textures, rich harmonies and elaborate use of leitmotifs, the operas of Richard Wagner remain some of the most influential – and contentious – in the history of the genre. But while Wagner won enormous renown for what he achieved on the stage, his life was marked by political exile, turbulent love affairs, and intermittent poverty. Because Wagner and his music are exceedingly intertwined with the great upheavals of his time, it is difficult to produce an impartial assessment of his work.Published in the bicentennial of his birth, Raymond Furness’s Richard Wagner provides a clear and balanced view of both Wagner’s great successes and the controversies generated by his life and art.Using Wagner’s wide-ranging engagement with Germanic mythology and folk traditions as a starting point, this book explores the composer’s music and prose writings, delving deeply into Wagner’s essential operas, such as The Ring and Tristan and Isolde, and offering new insights. Because the great operatic pieces often overshadow the rest of Wagner’s compositions, Furness also considers neglected fragments like Wieland the Smith, The Mines at Falun and The Visitors, producing a more rounded critical picture of the composer.With up-to-date dissections of recent Bayreuth productions and a refreshingly uncluttered approach to a much-misunderstood life, this book is a rewarding investigation of a true titan of European music.

Frida Kahlo stepped into the limelight in 1929 when she married the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. She was 22; he was 43. Hailed as Rivera’s exotic young wife who ‘dabbles in art’, she went on to produce brilliant paintings, but remained in her husband’s shadow throughout her life. Today, almost six decades after her untimely death, Kahlo’s fame rivals that of Rivera and she has gained international acclaim as a path-breaking artist and a cultural icon.Cutting through ‘Fridamania’, this book explores Kahlo’s life, art and legacies, while also scrutinizing the myths, contradictions and ambiguities that riddle her dramatic story. Gannit Ankori examines Kahlo’s early childhood, medical problems, volatile marriage, political affiliations, religious beliefs and, most important, her unparalleled and innovative art. Based on detailed analyses of the artist’s paintings, diary, letters, photographs, medical records and interviews, the book also assesses Kahlo’s critical impact on contemporary art and culture.Kahlo was of her time, deeply immersed in the issues that dominated the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, as this book reveals, she was also ahead of her time. Her paintings challenged social norms and broke taboos, addressing themes such as the female body, gender, cross-dressing, hybridity, identity and trauma, in ways that continue to inspire contemporary artists across the globe. Frida Kahlo is a succinct and powerful account of the life, art and legacy of this iconic artist.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), as well as being one of the pioneers of psychology, is one of the most controversial of thinkers: in spite of being largely responsible for the introduction of now-familiar psychological terms such as ‘extrovert’ and ‘introvert’, Jung has often been sidelined, remaining on the fringes of academic discourse. In this new account Paul Bishop reclaims Jung as a major European thinker whose true significance, even now, is not fully appreciated.Taking into account the role of Jung’s recently published Red Book in the progression of his thought, Paul Bishop reassesses this divisive personality, reading Jung not only in terms of his biography, but also in light of his extensive reading and output. Jung once remarked that ‘the tragedies of Goethe’s Faust and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra . . . mark the first glimmerings of a breakthrough of total experience in our Western hemisphere.’ In this critical biography Bishop takes up this suggestion and engages with Jung’s scholarship in order to offer one of the fullest appreciations yet of his distinctive approach to culture. He finds in Jung’s attempt to synthesize all the different parts of human life an enterprise that marks him out as one of the most important theorists of the twentieth century.Carl Jung provides a clear, compelling examination of the life and thought of a highly influential figure. Concise and accessible, the book is suitable for general readers as well as having much to say to scholars and students of Jung. Bishop provides a striking, fresh interpretation of this complex thinker – and offers reasons why we should appreciate him too.

Among his many captivating exploits, the French artist Yves Klein (1928–1962) invented his own brand of colour: the inimitable International Klein Blue. Denounced as a charlatan and feted as a mystic, Klein scandalized the art world with his enthusiastic embrace of the highs and lows of post-war mass culture and his exploitation of controversial publicity tactics. Today it is clear that Klein was not only one of the most radical artists of the post-war period but an iconic role model for contemporary practices: he reinvented abstract painting, conceived new horizons for performance art and was a trailblazer in the interdisciplinary realm of land, body and conceptual art.Nuit Banai examines the relationship between Klein’s brief but incandescent life and his wide repertoire of artistic practices. The book establishes that Klein’s brilliance was above all performative, as he created and inhabited a cast of public identities: avant-garde artist, bourgeois, judo expert, painter, charlatan, collaborator, politician, middle-class mystic, fascist and showman. With each persona, Klein invented new ways to communicate his paradoxical message of spiritual enlightenment and Dada iconoclasm to an unsuspecting, bemused and entranced audience.This new critical biography illuminates Klein’s influential and multifaceted artistic career. Alongside contemporaries like Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys and postmodern chameleons like Cindy Sherman, Klein’s protean performance of multiple roles stands as a landmark example of the artist’s transformational status. An invaluable introduction to the life and work of this flamboyant individual, Yves Klein will appeal to students and scholars of Klein as well as those interested in contemporary art and twentieth-century culture.

John Ruskin understood beauty and wonder to be the solution to the miseries of the urban poor and the key to living a worthwhile life. The most prominent critic of art and architecture of the nineteenth century, his books, pamphlets and open letters to the press influenced all classes of society, from labourers to lords. Currently he is perhaps almost as well known for his failed marriage (to Effie Gray, who left him for the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais) as he is for his art writings, but there is far more to Ruskin than is suggested by movies that portray him as a desk-bound effigy, a humourless Victorian prude.Andrew Ballantyne weaves Ruskin’s life and work into a fascinating account of a precocious individual tirelessly campaigning throughout Victorian England, and reveals in what ways and why Ruskin’s critical reputation endures. Encouraged by his parents to write about the ethical and spiritual value of art, it was in their lifetimes that Ruskin produced his best works – Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice and the essays on political economy published as Unto This Last. After their deaths Ruskin was bewildered, but eventually he put himself in the hands of a younger cousin. In relative seclusion at Brantwood, Ruskin’s home in the Lake District, the cousin was able to guard Ruskin’s reputation while, hidden from the public gaze, Ruskin himself suffered a slow decline as his mind became irreversibly unhinged.The originality of Ruskin’s influential books and essays imbued architecture and the arts with a uniquely forceful moral character. With fresh readings of the major texts, this new biography is an engaging, informing study of the life and times of a peerless campaigner of art practice as a means to life.

There are few more divisive names in modern history than that of the diehard revolutionary Leon Trotsky. To some he was a hypocritical totalitarian, while to many others he was a revolutionary liberator, an idealist determined to crush an outdated, oppressive dynasty in order to replace it with a proletarian socialist commonwealth. But one thing is agreed: his impact as a leader in the Russian Revolution and his widely read polemical books and articles make Trotsky one of the most influential political figures of the twentieth century.In this book, Paul Le Blanc delves deep into Trotsky’s life and his social, sexual and political relationships to both criticize and defend the distinctive actions and opinions this complex character generated. He shows how the hero leader of the Red Army in the Revolution found himself in a losing struggle in the 1920s in his efforts to revitalize the revolutionary wing of the labour movement. Gradually marginalized by ideological opponents within the Soviet bureaucracy, notably Stalin, Trotsky was exiled to Central Asia in 1928. The following year he was banished from the USSR. What followed was a series of makeshift homes with his family circle, first on an island near Istanbul, then in France, then Norway until in 1937 Trotsky, his family and his close supporters settled in Mexico, where he was murdered by a Stalinist agent three years later.Drawing from a rich array of sources, Le Blanc offers a balanced portrait of Trotsky in a historical context that will be invaluable for students, scholars or anyone with an interest in political history and extraordinary lives.

One of France’s most high-profile writers, Albert Camus experienced both public adulation and acrimonious rejection during a career cut short by a fatal car accident in 1960. From humble origins in a European family living in colonial Algeria, Camus established himself as a successful novelist, with best-selling titles such as The Outsider and The Plague translated into scores of languages, earning him a reputation as a writer who captured the mood of the age. It was a world dominated, he reflected ruefully, by war and violence. The liberation of France towards the end of the Second World War saw him emerge as one of the country’s most prominent journalists at the newspaper Combat. But his subsequent position on the Cold War, where not unlike Orwell he distanced himself from those sympathetic to the Soviet Union, left him adrift from many on the Left in post-war metropolitan France. The worsening conflict in his native Algeria in the mid- to late-1950s accentuated his sense of alienation, as voices within France increasingly called into question the country’s role in North Africa. Camus reflected on ‘all the errors, contradictions and hesitations’ that had marked his involvement with Algeria but he remained viscerally linked to the place of his birth.In Albert Camus Edward J. Hughes analyses the life of an author whose work and stance were the subject of both intense interest and scrutiny. ‘I do not guide anyone’ Camus was to plead in his last interview, thereby reinforcing the paradox of a leading figure who in private wrestled with the challenge of pursuing his craft as a writer in an age of pressing ideological conflict.

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) was perhaps the twentieth century’s most feted composer, a leading light of modernism and a restlessly creative artist. This book traces the story of Stravinsky’s life and work, setting him in the context of the turbulent times in which he lived. Born in Russia, Stravinsky spent most of his life in exile – and while he swiftly became a cosmopolitan figure, the discomfort of estrangement nonetheless left its mark both on the man and on his work, in the form of an ever-present sense of loss and nostalgia.In this engaging critical biography, Jonathan Cross charts Stravinsky’s work over the course of decades spent in Paris, Los Angeles and elsewhere, in an artistic circle that included Joyce, Picasso and Proust, and which culminated in Stravinsky being celebrated by both the White House and the Kremlin as one of the great artistic forces of the era. A celebrity composer in an increasingly celebrity-obsessed age, Stravinsky’s extraordinary music reflected and shaped his own times, and still resonates with today’s audiences.Approachable and absorbing, Igor Stravinsky tells of a colourful life lived against the backdrop of the twentieth century’s wars and revolutions.

Poet. Actor. Matinee idol. Playwright. Theatre theoretician. Artist. Orientalist. Surrealist. Asylum inmate. Drug addict. Electroshock patient. Antonin Artaud. This biography, exploring the life of one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic personalities and idiosyncratic thinkers, reveals the artist’s navigation through the first half of the century in the company of many of France’s most influential cultural figures. However, Artaud’s own existential journey was a lonely and largely isolated one, an existential ellipsis.Despite being born into the material comfort of a bourgeois family from Marseille, Artaud uncompromisingly rejected such values and norms. Forsaking the renown he had garnered as a stage and film actor, theatre director and published author of The Theatre and its Double and many other writings, Artaud relentlessly challenged contemporary assumptions about the superiority of the West, the function of speech, the purpose of culture and an individual’s agency over his/her body. In his mind, if not his deeds, he incarnated France’s revolutionary tradition. Though conflicted by his inability to align his thoughts with his words, disoriented by his incessant demand for narcotics and debilitated by increasing paranoia, Artaud channelled his intense alienation into an assault on social and cultural conventions through theatre, poetry, essays and art.Preserving the profundity of Artaud’s words without trivializing his complexity, and situating them within his frenetic life, this book is a compelling and fresh interpretation of Artaud and his continuing cultural reverberations.

Few artists have exerted such an influence on modern art as Paul Cézanne. Picasso, Braque and Matisse all acknowledged a profound debt to his painting, and many historians regard him as the father of modernism. This new biography reexamines Cézanne’s life and art, discussing the central events and people who shaped his work and placing his oeuvre in the context of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art and culture.Jon Kear examines Cézanne’s youth in Provence, a formative period which left a deep and abiding impression on the artist’s painting, as well as exploring his turbulent time in Paris and the larger-than-life artistic persona he created for himself during these years. His initial style, characterized by violent and explicit subject-matter and a rugged manner of painting, gave rise to an enduring mythology of the artist. Paul Cézanne explores the personal and artistic relationships that influenced Cézanne: from his close friendship with Émile Zola to his artistic dialogue with Manet, collaboration with Camille Pissarro and association with the Impressionists. Above all, Paul Cézanne tells the story of his life as a part of the pivotal shift towards the twentieth century, illuminating how much his work and ideas helped to usher it in.

Ernest Hemingway has enjoyed a rich legacy as the progenitor of modern fiction, an oversized character in literary lore who wrote some of the most honest and moving accounts of the twentieth century, set against such grand backdrops as the bullrings of Spain, the savannahs of Africa and the rivers of the American Midwest. Verna Kale challenges many of the long-standing assumptions Hemingway’s legacy has created. She offers a real-life portrait of the historical figure as he really was: a writer, a sportsman and a celebrity with a long and turbulent career.Ernest Hemingway follows Hemingway’s adventures as a Red Cross volunteer in the First World War, an expatriate ‘Lost Generation’ poet in 1920s Paris, a young novelist navigating the burgeoning middlebrow fiction market, and a seasoned writer trying to craft his masterpiece – a novel that would blow open the boundaries of American fiction. Exploring his four marriages, his struggles with his celebrity and craft and the steep decline of his health in later life, this concise biography offers an insightful portrait of one of the most important figures of American arts and letters.

When Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky died of cholera in 1893, he was Russia’s most celebrated composer. Drawing extensively on Tchaikovsky’s uncensored letters and diaries, this richly documented biography explores the composer’s life in the artistic culture of nineteenth-century Russian society, revealing how he became a figure of international renown.Setting aside clichés of the composer as a tortured homosexual and naively confessional artist, this engaging biography paints a new and vivid picture of Tchaikovsky that weaves together insights into his music with a sensitive evocation of his inner emotional life. It contains accessible introductions to his key compositions, as well as suggesting less familiar works for readers to explore, making it essential reading for all those who enjoy classical music.

Born in Budapest in 1905, Arthur Koestler was a pivotal European writer and intellectual who inspired, provoked and intrigued in equal measure. Koestler wrote enduring works of reportage and memoir but he is most famous for his political novel Darkness at Noon, which received widespread international acclaim. This book offers a fresh and unbiased account of the life and work of an enigmatic, challenging writer who continues to polarize opinion today.Edward Saunders describes Koestler as a leading documentarist of some of the key moments in twentieth-century European history, paying attention to the writer’s self-staging as a witness to them. He describes Koestler’s struggle with his Jewish identity and also outlines the author’s later ideas on the theory of science with an open mind, illustrating how he tried to imagine the future of science and humankind.Engaging directly with the controversial claims of sexual violence that emerged in the years after Koestler’s suicide, Saunders differentiates between the life Koestler led, the story he wanted to tell about it, and the disintegration of Koestler’s public reputation after his death. The book will appeal to those who are already familiar with Koestler, as well as readers seeking to learn more about a key European writer and thinker.

Gilles Deleuze, the person and philosopher, was both singular and multifaceted. Frida Beckman traces Deleuze’s remarkable intellectual journey, mapping the encounters from which his life and work emerged. She considers how his life and philosophical developments resonate with historical, political and philosophical events, from the Second World War to the student uprisings in the 1960s, the opening of the experimental University of Paris VIII and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Although less of a public figure than many of his contemporaries, Deleuze’s life and philosophy are bound up with his numerous friendships, collaborations and disputes with several of the period’s most influential thinkers, as well as his connections with writers, artists and film scholars.Beckman considers the events, moods and intensities that were generated by this multiplicity of encounters throughout his life. The book follows Deleuze from the salons to which he was invited as a young student through his popularity as a young teacher to the development of the rich phases of his philosophical work. While resisting the idea of ‘Deleuzians’, the book also reviews a post-Deleuzian legacy and the influence of this extraordinary thinker on contemporary philosophy.

Joseph Beuys is arguably the most important and most controversial German artist of the late twentieth century, not least because his persona is interwoven with Germany’s fascist past. This book illuminates two defining threads in Beuys’s life and art: the centrality of trauma, and his sustained investigation of the very notion of art itself.In addition to the materials of fat and felt that Beuys used widely in his oeuvre, numerous Beuys artworks are autobiogra­ph­ical in content. His self-woven legend of rescue and redemption still strikes many as a highly inappropriate fantasy, or even an outright lie, located as it is in the harrowing context of the Second World War as it was lived by a German soldier or ‘Nazi’. Nevertheless, Beuys’s self-mythology confronted the post-traumatic, foregrounding his struggle for psychic recovery. Perhaps most importantly, this led to his major efforts to expand Western art, freeing artists after him to work in a thoroughly interdisciplinary way and toembrace anthropological conclusions about art and culture. Beuys’s lived experience determined a consistent commitment to peaceful change and positive transformation not only through his work, but in the discussions and institutions he initiated. His notion of activism-as-art has not only become a widespread practice, but is predominant in contemporary art of the twenty-first century.Exploring Beuys’s expansive conception of art and following him into the realms of science, politics and spirituality, this book, in contrast to many other accounts of Beuys’s life, attributes extraordinary importance to his own myth-making as a positive force in the post-war confrontation of Germany’s past.

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) has become the most popular Russian writer of the twentieth century, even though his works were banned for decades after his death due to the repressive Soviet censorship of literature. His great novel, The Master and Margarita (published only in 1973), was written in complete secrecy during the 1930s for fear of the writer being arrested and shot. In her revelatory new biography J.A.E. Curtis provides a fresh account of Bulgakov’s idyllic childhood and youth in Kiev, which was swept away in the turmoil of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and Civil War.Early biographies of Bulgakov were limited in scope by the difficulty of gaining access to archives in the ussr in the 1970s and ’80s. Since that time archives have become more accessible, and Curtis makes use of newhistorical documents, tracing Bulgakov’s absolute determination to establish himself as a writer in Bolshevik Moscow, his three marriages and his triumphs as a dramatist in the 1920s. They also reveal how he struggled to defend his art and preserve his integrity in Russia, and the intensely close interest Stalin took in Bulgakov’s work, personally weighing up each time whether his plays should be permitted or banned.Based upon many years of research, and taking in previously unpublished family papers and Soviet Politburo discussions, this is an absorbing account of the life and work of one of Russia’s most inventive and exuberant novelists and playwrights.

Jean-François Lyotard is one of the most important, and complex, French thinkers of the twentieth century. Best known in the English-speaking world for his book The Postmodern Condition, the multi-faceted nature of Lyotard’s work has often been obscured by its sometimes problematic association with the postmodern. His life refuses to follow the clear trajectory common to academics in France: it stalls and hesitates, with Lyotard’s first ‘career’ consisting of fifteen years of militant Marxist political engagement. Kiff Bamford traces this circuitous journey, unravelling the thrust of Lyotard’s main philosophical arguments, his struggle with thinking and his confrontation with the task of writing and thinking philosophy in a different way. These all take place within a series of very particular contexts: the Algerian war, the experimental university at Vincennes and a sustained engagement with the visual arts.Lyotard’s own tentative reflections on his intellectual life help to frame his suspicions of easy narratives and highlight his rejection of ‘the delusion that we are able to programme our life’. It is by following these cautions that Kiff Bamford is able to present a compelling portrait of a challenging subject.

Leonard Bernstein was one of twentieth-century music’s most successful and recognizable figures. In a career spanning five decades, he conducted many of the world’s leading orchestras and composed scores for landmark musicals such as West Side Story. With an iron self-belief, he negotiated risky and challenging musical situations that resulted in always passionate, if sometimes mixed, reviews. Published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of Bernstein’s birth, this engaging new biography provides a concise overview of the life and work of a prodigiously talented, endlessly enthralling and controversial musician.Drawing on more than thirty years of study, leading Bernstein scholar Paul R. Laird describes Bernstein’s work as a conductor, composer, music educator and commentator, evaluating all of his major compositions. Laird also explores the impact of Bernstein’s complicated personal life on his professional work, including his homosexuality and his strong yet difficult marriage. Featuring original insights into Bernstein’s life and work, including information gleaned from a 1982 interview with Bernstein, Laird’s book is the ideal introduction to Bernstein’s eclectic musical style and complex character, showing how both fit within the larger world of twentieth-century music.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born on 30 November 1835 in Monroe County, Missouri, was never one to let the facts get in the way of a good story. A natural-born storyteller, Mark Twain freely adapted the incidents of his life and the stories he heard as a youth to embellish his fiction, as well as his travel writing and autobiography. However, this presents a problem to the modern biographer: in accounts of Twain’s life, how does one tell what is true and what is just a colourful yarn?In this new account of a gifted, charismatic character, Kevin J. Hayes reviews Twain’s life, from his early journalism to his masterpiece Huckleberry Finn, from the travelogue Life on the Mississippi to his final work, the sprawling, episodic Mark Twain’s Autobiography, and the public-speaking engagements that took him around the world. Synthesizing new information and sifting through the evidence, Mark Twain is a fresh, clear-sighted account of a crucial American writer.

Before he had turned 21, Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) upended the house of French poetry and left it in shambles. What makes Rimbaud’s poetry important, argues Seth Whidden, is part of what makes his life so compelling: rebellion, audacity, creativity and exploration.Almost all of Rimbaud’s poems were written between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Against the backdrop of the crumbling Second Empire and the tumultuous Paris Commune, the poet took centuries-old traditions of French versification and picked them apart with an unmatched knowledge of how they fitted together. Combining sensuality with pastoral, parody, political satire, fable, eroticism and mystery, Rimbaud’s works range from traditional verse forms to prose-poetry and the two first free-verse poems written in French.By situating Rimbaud’s writing in Africa as part of a continuum that spans his entire life, this book offers a corrective to the traditional split between his life as a poet and his life afterwards. Written for general readers and students of literature alike, Arthur Rimbaud presents the original damned poet who continues to captivate readers, artists and writers all over the world.

Victor Hugo (1802-85) is an icon of French culture. He achieved immense success as a poet, dramatist and novelist, and he was also elected to both Houses of the French Parliament. Leading the Romantic campaign against artistic tradition and defying the Second Empire in exile, he became synonymous with the progressive ideals of the French Revolution. His State funeral in Paris made headlines across the world and his breadth of appeal remains evident today, not least thanks to the popularity of his bestseller, Les Misérables.This biography, the first in English for over twenty years, provides a concise but comprehensive study of Hugo’s monumental body of work within the context of his dramatic life. Hugo wrestled with family tragedy and personal misgivings while being pulled into the turmoil of the nineteenth century, from the fall of Napoleon’s Empire to the rise of France’s Third Republic. Throughout these twists of fate, he sensed a natural order of collapse and renewal. This unending cycle of creation shaped his ideas about freedom and roused his imagination, which he channelled into his prolific writing and other outlets like drawing. Such vigour also suggests, as Bradley Stephens argues, that Hugo was too restless to sit comfortably on the pedestal of literary greatness.

Sometimes referred to as the ‘Father of Biogeography’, Alfred Russel Wallace is known as the co-founder of the theory of evolution, and was well-versed in zoology, botany, anthropology, politics, astronomy and psychology. Although notorious for his unpopular and eccentric beliefs, he is still recognized as one of the leading figures in nineteenth-century British science.Patrick Armstrong describes Wallace’s long life, from 1823 to the eve of World War I, and shows him to be, in many ways, a more interesting character than his fellow scientist Charles Darwin. This compact yet comprehensive biography takes a psychological approach to give insight into a man who was plagued with misfortune: legal issues, obtaining full-time employment, and relationship troubles all vexed him. The book unlocks the life of a restless traveller who, although he grew up with an ‘ordinary’ education, became one of the most influential scientists of his time.

The most radical and divisive composer of the twentieth century, Arnold Schoenberg remains a hero to many, and a villain to many others. Born in the Jewish quarter of his beloved Vienna, Schoenberg’s early career took him to Berlin, as a leading light of Weimar culture, before he fled in the dead of night from Hitler’s Third Reich. He found himself in the United States, settling in Los Angeles, where he would inspire composers from George Gershwin to John Cage. Schoenberg’s revolutionary approach to musical composition incorporated Wagnerian late Romanticism and the brave new worlds of atonality and serialism, and it changed the history of music forever.In this refreshingly balanced biography, Mark Berry tells the story of Schoenberg’s life and work within the wider context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. He also introduces all of Schoenberg’s major musical works, from his very first compositions such as String Quartet in D Major to his invention of the 12-tone method. This book is essential reading for all those with an interest in the music and history of the twentieth century.

Dmitry Shostakovich was one of the most successful composers of the twentieth century – a musician who adapted as no other to the unique pressures of his age. By turns vilified and feted by Stalin during the Great Purge, Shostakovich twice came close to the whirlwind of political repression and he remained under political surveillance all his life, despite the many privileges and awards heaped upon him in old age. Yet Shostakovich had a remarkable ability to work with, rather than against, prevailing ideological demands, and it was this quality that ensured both his survival and his posterity.Pauline Fairclough’s absorbing new biography offers a vivid portrait that goes well beyond the habitual clichés of repression and suffering. Featuring quotations from previously unpublished letters as well as rarely-seen photographs, Fairclough provides a fresh insight into the music and life of a composer whose legacy, above all, was to have written some of the greatest and most cherished music of the last century.

Polymath Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1913. But Tagore was much more than a writer. Through his poems, novels, short stories, poetic songs, dance-dramas and paintings, he transformed Bengali literature and Indian art. He was instrumental in bringing Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and strove to create a less divided society through mutual respect and understanding, like his great contemporary and close friend, Mahatma Gandhi.In this timely reappraisal of Tagore’s life and work, Bashabi Fraser assesses Tagore’s many activities and shows how he embodies the modern consciousness of India. She examines his ties to his upbringing in Bengal, his role in Indian politics and his interests in international relationships, as well as addressing some of the mis-readings of his life and work through a holistic perspective.