The Buen Retiro, a royal retreat and pleasure palace, was built for Philip IV on the outskirts of Madrid in the 1630s. With its superb display of paintings by Vel zquez and other contemporary artists, the palace became a showcase for the art and culture of Spain's Golden Age. A Palace for a King, first published in 1980, provides a pioneering total history of the construction, decoration, and uses of a major royal palace, emphasising the relationship of art and politics at a critical moment in European history. produced on different aspects of the history of the palace and its decoration since the 1970s. A number of new, unpublished illustrations have been added, and many of the plates are now reproduced in colour. The publication of this edition gains added importance from the fact that plans for the expansion of the Prado Museum include the restoration of the Hall of Realms to approximate its original appearance, as reconstructed in this volume.

Once again, Laura Joh Rowland's dazzling combination of history and storytelling draws us into a sumptuous and treacherous world, in The Dragon King's Palace. On a whim of the shogun's mother, a procession has left the sweltering heat of Edo, bound for the cooler climate of Mount Fuji. Among her traveling companions are Reiko, the beautiful wife of Sano Ichiro, the shogun's Most Honorable Investigator of Events, Situations, and People; Reiko's friend Midori, nine months pregnant; and Lady Yanagisawa, the deranged wife of the shogun's powerful second-in-command. None of them look forward to the trip. But their troubles have only begun when their procession is stopped suddenly on a deserted road. The entire retinue is viciously slaughtered and the four women are bound and taken away, imprisoned by a mysterious kidnapper. Sano now finds himself faced with the most important case of his career. The shogun demands quick action, and under the threat of death, Sano is forced to work with his bitter enemies---Chamberlain Yanagisawa and Police Commissioner Hoshina. The women are in imminent danger, and the delivery of a ransom note only complicates matters---forcing both Sano and Reiko to take desperate measures.

THE BEGINNING OF END ​When a sickly boy succumbs t illness only to awaken as a lowly undead named End, his initial reaction is not horror but joy. No longer weak and bedridden, he is eager to experience the freedom of a properly functioning body. Sadly, his delight is cut short when he realizes the shackles of his previous life have simply been replaced by new ones—specifically, the powerful necromancer who revived him. To gain true freedom, he’ll need to overcome the many obstacles in his way...starting with his dark master!

“Timely . . . brilliant . . . hugely enjoyable, magnificently researched and deeply absorbing.”—Jason Goodwin, New York Times Book Review At midnight, December 31, 1925, citizens of the newly proclaimed Turkish Republic celebrated the New Year. For the first time ever, they had agreed to use a nationally unified calendar and clock. Yet in Istanbul—an ancient crossroads and Turkey's largest city—people were looking toward an uncertain future. Never purely Turkish, Istanbul was home to generations of Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, as well as Muslims. It welcomed White Russian nobles ousted by the Russian Revolution, Bolshevik assassins on the trail of the exiled Leon Trotsky, German professors, British diplomats, and American entrepreneurs—a multicultural panoply of performers and poets, do-gooders and ne’er-do-wells. During the Second World War, thousands of Jews fleeing occupied Europe found passage through Istanbul, some with the help of the future Pope John XXIII. At the Pera Palace, Istanbul's most luxurious hotel, so many spies mingled in the lobby that the manager posted a sign asking them to relinquish their seats to paying guests. In beguiling prose and rich character portraits, Charles King brings to life a remarkable era when a storied city stumbled into the modern world and reshaped the meaning of cosmopolitanism.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The “addictively readable” (The Washington Post) inside story of the British royal family’s battle to overcome the dramas of the Diana years—only to confront new, twenty-first-century crises “Frothy and forthright, a kind of Keeping Up with the Windsors with sprinkles of Keats.”—The New York Times (Notable Book of the Year) ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Elle, Town & Country “Never again” became Queen Elizabeth II’s mantra shortly after Princess Diana’s tragic death. More specif­ically, there could never be “another Diana”—a mem­ber of the family whose global popularity upstaged, outshone, and posed an existential threat to the Brit­ish monarchy. Picking up where Tina Brown’s masterful The Diana Chronicles left off, The Palace Papers reveals how the royal family reinvented itself after the trau­matic years when Diana’s blazing celebrity ripped through the House of Windsor like a comet. Brown takes readers on a tour de force journey through the scandals, love affairs, power plays, and betrayals that have buffeted the monarchy over the last twenty-five years. We see the Queen’s stoic re­solve after the passing of Princess Margaret, the Queen Mother, and Prince Philip, her partner for seven decades, and how she triumphs in her Jubilee years even as family troubles rage around her. Brown explores Prince Charles’s determination to make Camilla Parker Bowles his wife, the tension between William and Harry on “different paths,” the ascend­ance of Kate Middleton, the downfall of Prince An­drew, and Harry and Meghan’s stunning decision to step back as senior royals. Despite the fragile monar­chy’s best efforts, “never again” seems fast approaching. Tina Brown has been observing and chronicling the British monarchy for three decades, and her sweeping account is full of powerful revelations, newly reported details, and searing insight gleaned from remarkable access to royal insiders. Stylish, witty, and erudite, The Palace Papers will irrevoca­bly change how the world perceives and under­stands the royal family.