Fascinated by the Mona Lisa, a young girl asks her uncle about the man who painted it. So begins a lively exchange of letters in which she is instructed about the life & work of the immensely gifted Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci.

This is a selection of Leonardo da Vinci's writings on painting. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker have edited material not only from his so-called Treatise on Painting but also from his surviving manuscripts and from other primary sources.

Zoro is the pupil of the painter, sculptor, scientist and inventor, Leonardo da Vinci. He works hard in Leonardo's workshop, but he is never allowed inside the secret locked room, where Leonardo spends hours working on a mysterious invention. Then one day a mischievous boy steals the keys.

Artists’ Letters is a treasure trove of carefully selected letters written by great artists, providing the reader with a unique insight into their characters and a glimpse into their lives. Arranged thematically, it includes writings and musings on love, work, daily life, money, travel and the creative process. On the theme of friendship, for example, letters provide evidence of a creative community between peers, with support and mutual appreciation that helps to dispel the myth of the artist as solitary genius. Letters between Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin show an ongoing conversation and exchange of ideas. We see mutual admiration between Claude Monet and Berthe Morisot, and Picasso’s quick notes to Jean Cocteau illustrate their closeness. Correspondence, some of which includes sketches and drawings, is reproduced with the transcript and some background and contextual information alongside. The book brings together a collection of treasures found in letters, which in our digital age are an increasingly lost art.

Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia—three iconic figures whose intersecting lives provide the basis for this astonishing work of narrative history. They could not have been more different, and they would meet only for a short time in 1502, but the events that transpired when they did would significantly alter each man’s perceptions—and the course of Western history. In 1502, Italy was riven by conflict, with the city of Florence as the ultimate prize. Machiavelli, the consummate political manipulator, attempted to placate the savage Borgia by volunteering Leonardo to be Borgia’s chief military engineer. That autumn, the three men embarked together on a brief, perilous, and fateful journey through the mountains, remote villages, and hill towns of the Italian Romagna—the details of which were revealed in Machiavelli’s frequent dispatches and Leonardo’s meticulous notebooks. Superbly written and thoroughly researched, The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior is a work of narrative genius—whose subject is the nature of genius itself.

Evan Thomas's startling account of how the underrated Dwight Eisenhower saved the world from nuclear holocaust. Upon assuming the presidency in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower set about to make good on his campaign promise to end the Korean War. Yet while Eisenhower was quickly viewed by many as a doddering lightweight, behind the bland smile and simple speech was a master tactician. To end the hostilities, Eisenhower would take a colossal risk by bluffing that he might use nuclear weapons against the Communist Chinese, while at the same time restraining his generals and advisors who favored the strikes. Ike's gamble was of such magnitude that there could be but two outcomes: thousands of lives saved, or millions of lives lost. A tense, vivid and revisionist account of a president who was then, and still is today, underestimated, Ike's Bluff is history at its most provocative and thrilling.