Personal reminiscences of famous poets, novelists, humorists, actors, musicians, etc.

What are we to make of the Victorians’ fascination with collecting? What effect did their encounters with the curious, exotic and downright odd have on Victorian writers and their works? The essays in this collection take up these questions by examining the phenomenon of bric-à-brac in Victorian literature. The contributors to Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities explore sites of unusual concurrence (including museums, the home, art galleries, private collections) and the way in which bric-à-brac brought the alien into everyday settings, the past into the present and the wild into the domestic. Focusing on the representation of material culture in Victorian literature, the essays in this volume seek out miscellaneous and incongruous objects that take readers beyond the commonplace paradigms associated with commodity culture. Individual chapters analyse the work of writers as different as Edward Lear and John Henry Newman, Robert Browning and George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll. In so doing they shed light on a dizzying array of topics and objects that include class and capitalism, the occult and the sacraments, Darwinism and dandyism, umbrellas, textiles, the Philosopher’s Stone and even the household nail.

Together with Picasso and Matisse, Georges Braque is unquestionably one of the three great pillars of twentieth-century art. Here is the first full-length biography of this remarkable figure. A pioneer of modern art and founder of Cubism, Georges Braque was a creative genius and tireless innovator, constantly pushing back the boundaries of the possible. In this magisterial work, Alex Danchev taps a wide range of new sources to reveal the heart and mind of one who helped usher in the greatest revolution in the ways of seeing since the Renaissance and changed the face of modern art.

"On the Guest List: Adventures of a Music Journalist" is a fun, upbeat memoir about a girl who loves music and life in general. Maryanne paints a vivid picture of being a teenager in the 1970s and young woman in the 1980s -- and how the punk, new wave and rock scene was from a young fan's viewpoint. Life truly comes together for Maryanne once she creates a career for herself reporting on the music she loves, writing for publications such as The Aquarian Arts Weekly, music.com and Punk magazine. Unlike other music memoirs, there is no downward spiral into drugs and addiction. Nor is it a groupie "tell all." "On the Guest List" is simply a compilation of mostly happy memories straight from the pages of Maryanne's diaries -- and of course, her heart.