Author: David Stafford File Type: epub In June 1940 Britain was driven from the continent by Hitlers conquering armies. As the British stared invasion in the face, a group of unconventional warriors planned a new form of warfareand the Special Operations Executive was born. With a brief from Winston Churchill to set Europe ablaze, this top-secret agency was given the dangerous task of coordinating subversion and sabotage against the enemy by all means necessary using disguise, deception, bribery, explosives (sometimes disguised inside objects such as a dead rat or a chianti bottle), guerrilla warfareand even assassination. The intriguing details of the men and womenmany of them civilians with no qualifications or experiencewho risked their lives to fight this secret war are recounted here. Through the personal reminiscences of these courageous individuals, Secret Agent reveals the covert world of the SOE how the operatives were recruited the daring operations they carried out the radio and coding systems that kept them in touch with London and the James Bond-style gadgets designed to help them carry out their missions. Breaking their long silence, these brave survivors finally tell their own stories in their own words. More than just a war-time thriller, Secret Agent narrates the true story of this remarkable group of people and the secret war they waged behind enemy lines. **

Author: Andrew Hemingway File Type: pdf At a time of growing interest in relations between Marxism and Romanticism, Andrew Hemingway s essays on British art and art theory reopen the question of Romantic painting s ideological functions and, in some cases, its critical purchase. Half the volume exposes the voices of competing class interests in aesthetics and art theory in the tumultuous years of British history between the American Revolution and the 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act. Half offers new perspectives on works by some of the most important landscape painters of the time John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, John Crome, and John Sell Cotman. Four essays are hitherto unpublished, and the remainder have been updated and in several cases substantially rewritten for this volume. **

Author: Luigi Pirandello File Type: pdf In February 1925, the 58-year-old world-famous playwright Luigi Pirandello met Marta Abba, an unknown, beautiful actress less than half his age, and fell in love with her. She was to become, until his death in December 1936, not only his confidante but also his inspiring muse and artistic collaborator, helping him in his plans to reform Italian theater under the Fascist regime. Pirandellos love for the young actress was neither a literary infatuation nor a form of fatherly affection, but rather an unfulfilled, desperate passion that secretly consumed him during the last decade of his life. Bitterly disillusioned by the conditions of the theatrical world in Italy, Pirandello and Abba shared a dream of going abroad to earn their fortune and returning to Italy with the means to establish a national theater dedicated to high artistic standards. In March 1929, when Marta finally yielded to family pressure and left Pirandello alone in Berlin to revive her Italian stage career and to end rumors over their involvement, he endured a devastating heartbreak and fell into a life-threatening depression--more profound and long-lasting than any of his biographers have yet imagined. The hundreds of letters Pirandello wrote to Abba during these years are the only source that reveals the true story of his relentless torment. Selected, translated, and introduced here for the first time in any language, these powerful and moving documents reward the reader with the unique experience of living in intimacy with a profound poet of human pain. Here Pirandello encourages his beloved in her difficult career as actormanager, rejoices in her triumphs, and desperately implores her to return to him. The letters are filled with glimpses of this major artistic personality at some of his most distinctive moments--such as the award of the Nobel Prize, his meetings with Mussolini, and Martas long-dreamed-of success on Broadway--but they remain foremost an authentic confession of a Pirandello, without the mask of his art, telling the story of his real-life tragedy. In 1986, two years before she died, Marta Abba authorized the publication of the present correspondence so that the world might understand how deeply Pirandello had suffered. This English-language volume contains a selection of 164 letters from the complete edition of 552, which Princeton University Press will publish in cooperation with Mondadori, in the original Italian, in 1995. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. **

Author: Natsumi Nonaka File Type: pdf This book is the first study of the portico and its decorative program as a cultural phenomenon in Renaissance Italy. Focusing on a largely neglected group of porticoes decorated with painted pergolas that appeared in Rome and environs in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it tells the story of how an element of the gardenthe pergolabecame a pictorial topos in portico decoration, and evolved, hand in hand with its real cousin in the garden, into an object for cultural emulation among the educated patrons of early modern Rome. The liminality of both the portico and the pergola at the interface of architecture and garden is key to the interpretation of these architectural and painted forms, which rests on the intersecting frameworks of the classical tradition, natural history, and the cultural identity of the aristocracy. In the mediating space of the Renaissance portico, the illusionism pergola created an art gallery, a natural history museum, and a virtual garden where one could engage in leisurely strolls, learned conversations, appreciation of art, and scientific investigation, as well as extensive travel across time and space. The book proposes the interpretation that the illusionistic pergola was an artistic formula for the early modern perception of nature. **