Past Imperfect

Author : Julian Fellowes
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
ISBN 13 : 1429929170
Total Pages : 428 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Past Imperfect written by Julian Fellowes and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the creator of the Emmy Award-winning Downton Abbey... "Damian Baxter was a friend of mine at Cambridge. We met around the time when I was doing the Season at the end of the Sixties. I introduced him to some of the girls. They took him up, and we ran about together in London for a while...." Nearly forty years later, the narrator hates Damian Baxter and would gladly forget their disastrous last encounter. But if it is pleasant to hear from an old friend, it is more interesting to hear from an old enemy, and so he accepts an invitation from the rich and dying Damian, who begs him to track down the past girlfriend whose anonymous letter claimed he had fathered a child during that ruinous debutante season. The search takes the narrator back to the extraordinary world of swinging London, where aristocratic parents schemed to find suitable matches for their daughters while someone was putting hash in the brownies at a ball at Madame Tussaud's. It was a time when everything seemed to be changing—and it was, but not always quite as expected. Past Imperfect is Julian Fellowes at his best--a novel of secrets, status, and a world in upheaval.

Author : Tony Judt
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 9780520086500
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Past Imperfect written by Tony Judt and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The uniquely prominent role of French intellectuals in European cultural and political life following World War II is the focus of Tony Judt's newest book. He analyzes this intellectual community's most divisive conflicts: how to respond to the promise and the betrayal of Communism and how to sustain a commitment to radical ideals when confronting the hypocrisy in Stalin's Soviet Union, in the new Eastern European Communist states, and in France itself. Judt shows why this was an all-consuming moral dilemma to a generation of French men and women, how their responses were conditioned by war and occupation, and how post-war political choices have come to sit uneasily on the conscience of later generations of French intellectuals. Judt's analysis extends beyond the writings of fashionable "Existentialist" personalities such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir to include a wide intellectual community of Catholic philosophers, non-aligned journalists, literary critics and poets, Communist and non-Communist alike. Judt treats the intellectual dilemmas of the postwar years as an unfinished history. French intellectuals have not fully come to terms with the gnawing sense of what Judt calls the "moral irresponsibility" of those years. The result, he suggests, is a legacy of bad faith and confusion that has damaged France's cultural standing, notably in newly liberated Eastern Europe, and which reflects the nation's larger difficulty in confronting its own ambivalent past.

Author : Mark C. Carnes
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780805037609
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Past Imperfect written by Mark C. Carnes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1996-11-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays that consider how classic movies have reflected history include the writings of such noted historians as Paul Fussell, Antonia Fraser, and Gore Vidal.

Author : Tony Judt
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814743927
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Past Imperfect written by Tony Judt and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Swept up in the vortex of communism, French postwar intellectuals developed a blind spot to Stalinist tyranny. Albert Camus, who had been an authentic moral voice of the Resistance, pretended not to know about the crimes and terrors of the Soviet Union. Jean-Paul Sartre perverted logic to make an apologia for the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Simone de Beauvoir called for social change to be brought about in a single convulsion, or else not at all. Foolish French thinkers, suffering self-imposed moral anesthesia, defended the credibility of the show trials in Stalinized Eastern Europe. In a devastating study, Judt, a professor of European studies at New York University, argues that the belief system of postwar intellectuals, propped up by faith in communism, reflected fatal weaknesses in French culture such as the fragility of the liberal tradition and the penchant for grand theory. He also strips away the postwar myth that the small, fighting French Resistance was assisted by the mass of the nation.

Author : Joan Collins
Publisher : Simon & Schuster
ISBN 13 : 9780671473600
Total Pages : 358 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Past Imperfect written by Joan Collins and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 1984-01-01 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beautiful and talented actress recounts her professional and personal life, from her childhood in England, through her three broken marriages and love affairs, to her daughter's accident and recovery

Author : Lawrence W. Towner
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226810423
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Past Imperfect written by Lawrence W. Towner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993-06-15 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays and talks gathered in Past Imperfect cover a broad range of topics of continuing relevance to the humanities and to scholarship in general. Part I collects Towner's historical essays on the indentured servants, apprentices, and slaves of colonial New England that are standards of the "new social history." The pieces in Part II express his vision of the library as an institution for research and education; here he discusses the rationale for the creation of research centers, the Newberry's pioneering policies for conservation and preservation, and the ways in which collections were built. In Part III Towner writes revealingly of his co-workers and mentors. Part IV assembles his statements as "spokesman for the humanities," addressing questions of national priorities in funding, and of so-called elitist scholarship versus public programs.

Author : Peter Charles Hoffer
Publisher : PublicAffairs
ISBN 13 : 9781586484453
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Past Imperfect written by Peter Charles Hoffer and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2007-07-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Woodrow Wilson, a practicing academic historian before he took to politics, defined the importance of history: "A nation which does not know what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today." He, like many men of his generation, wanted to impose a version of America's founding identity: it was a land of the free and a home of the brave. But not the braves. Or the slaves. Or the disenfranchised women. So the history of Wilson's generation omitted a significant proportion of the population in favor of a perspective that was predominantly white, male and Protestant. That flaw would become a fissure and eventually a schism. A new history arose which, written in part by radicals and liberals, had little use for the noble and the heroic, and that rankled many who wanted a celebratory rather than a critical history. To this combustible mixture of elements was added the flame of public debate. History in the 1990s was a minefield of competing passions, political views and prejudices. It was dangerous ground, and, at the end of the decade, four of the nation's most respected and popular historians were almost destroyed by it: Michael Bellesiles, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose and Joseph Ellis. This is their story, set against the wider narrative of the writing of America's history. It may be, as Flaubert put it, that "Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times." To which he could have added: falsify, plagiarize and politicize, because that's the other story of America's history.

Author : John Matthews
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780140277548
Total Pages : 626 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Past Imperfect written by John Matthews and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A car accident in California and a deadly assault in Provence leaves two boys 30 years apart battling for their lives. Dominic Fornier is the French detective at the heart of the case which takes him from town hall archives to the corridors of power.

Author : Deborah Turbeville
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9783865214522
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Past Imperfect written by Deborah Turbeville and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Past Imperfect encompasses Deborah Turbevilles ground breaking imagery created between 1974 and 1998. This is the work that the photographer herself puts in italics the narrative work which stands at the very center of her oeuvre. The photographs themselves, with their tension and sense of hidden melodrama, weave together the disparate novellas running through the book. Many of the images, often iconic, are recycled from the unlikely medium of fashion photography, both published and un-published. Some fifteen vignettes capture her unique sensibility and elegant aesthetic. Each vignette is a series of stills, reminding one of films they missed but would have liked to have seen (to quote one critic). It is an unorthodox vision, at once haunting and memorable. The characters (mostly women) interact with their strange, elusive environments as anachronisms; misplaced, out of sync with their time and context. A group of Turbevilles favorite actresses and models (mostly unknown) act as a repertoire cast who interpret these endangered species. Mutations in a mannequin workshop, statues in a Paris art school, automatons in a derelict factory. They reveal inner thoughts, emotions, and a sense of unease. There is a sense of fragmented dreams, dislocation, hallucination, a time without boundaries ongoing the past imperfect.

Author : Grisha Bruskin
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780815609018
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Past Imperfect written by Grisha Bruskin and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2008-06-13 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a soviet underground artist, Grisha Bruskin was propelled to prominence after the unprecedented success of his paintings at the Sotheby Moscow auction of 1988. Since then his work has been exhibited all over the world at the Guggenheim, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Jewish Museum in New York. Past Imperfect deftly captures the artist’s experiences as a Jew in Russia, the reality of life in an empire permeated by ideology, and the centrality of family. Saturated with insight and irony, each story offers a small vignette of Bruskin’s life. Photographs throughout the book create a distinct dialogue between word and image. Alice Nakhimovsky’s elegant translation conveys Bruskin’s sharp wit and strong style, superbly rendering Past Imperfect in English.