Alexander Orlov

 

ALEXANDER ORLOV

F Bi’s KGB General

by Edward Gazur

During 1938 at the height of the Spanish civil war , three star soviet general Orlov disappeared. He lived secretly for years in the US hiding from both the KGB and the FBI .In 1953 he came in from the cold and became and still is the highest ranking soviet intelligence officer ever to defect to the west. He brought with him the damning truth about Stalin’s purges and the truth behind the communist regime. Who was this master spy? Was the man who revealed from released KGB files in the 1994 book titled,’ deadly illusions’ ? Gazur , veteran in east European counter espionage was assigned to Orlov in1971 and grew to know him and his wife maria well. He spent many hours talking to Orlov about his life and past encounters. He strongly believes Orlov had been unjustifiably maligned in the in the book on the basis of KGB disinformation. Gazur had kept silent after Orlov’s death and now he felt that he had to put his side. This book is a narrative of his life based on the intimate conversations with Gazur.

Tilt

TILT

Skewed history of the tower of Pisa

By Nicholas Shrady

No, your eyes are not playing you up.

The book is nearly as rhombus shaped, mimicking the degree of the tilt of the world’s most famous impending disaster.

There is nothing skewed at all about the entertaining and informative narrative inside its covers.

Alternately learned and whimsical, here is a biography that like its subject is all the more readable for being thoroughly improbable.

In addition to having defied the known laws of physics, this thousand year old tower has had a chequered history.

From its top askew by five degrees, Galileo is said to have investigated the velocity of falling bodies.

During the World War II, it was suspected as an enemy hide out and being narrowly escaped from being bombed out.

Following thirty million dollar stabilization, lasting more than a decade, this tilting Hilton is now preserved for posterity as an architectural marvel

Matisse

Matisse

One of the principals of the Fauves meaning wild beasts, style of Fauvism painting, and a name bestowed on these artists because of their use of intense colours in a violent, uncontrolled way.

Henri Matisse was born 1869 in France and he qualified the style by stating, ‘Fauvism is when there is a red ‘, asserting that the style arose as a result of their determined rejection of false colour. Exciting, dramatic, lively Matisse’s work can never be called calming or tamed. His creative output was impressive, not just paintings but also sculptures, ceramics, graphics, book designs, wall paper patterns and theatrical scenery. This is a collection of his paintings including portraits, still lifes, flowers and interiors, including among others, his famed ‘red fish’.

Penguin dictionary of art and artists

PENGUIN DICTIONARY OF ART AND ARTISTS

By Peter and Linda Murray

Fully revised seventh edition, one of the most comprehensive art reference work available. Entries of all the major artists of the last seven centuries, short incisive biographies of over 1200 of them, and evaluations of their work, expositions of the best known groups, schools of artists, and movements and descriptions of artistic techniques and styles. Remarkable and indispensable source, intelligently presented and carefully detailed, and abreast of current thought and scholarship. Begins with sixteenth century painter abate and ends with seventeenth century Zurban.  

County Hall

COUNTY HALL

Survey of London monograph 17 by Royal commission on the historical monuments of England.

Commanding riverside position opposite parliament and monumental Edwardian magnificence make county hall one of London’s most recognizable landmarks. Published in 1991, this monograph predates the building’s current use as a gallery. County hall was built after a public competition in 1907-1908. Selection of rejected entries is also reproduced here. Including lutyen’s twin towers and LAN Chester and Richard’s imperial façade, but the young Ralph Knott’s designs had both grandeur and sensitivity to the irregular site. Knott described his design as a free treatment of English renaissance. It was soon made clear that the assessors regarded it as little more than an interim sketch, particularly with regard to the Belvedere road elevation with its recessed public hall. Wedge shaped plan went through numerous adjustments before building was halted by the Great War, and Knott’s master piece was not opened until 1922. Praised for its visual impact, it nevertheless incurred criticism for confusing layout and poor acoustics. Knotts death in 1929 resulted in the building’s completion by Giles Gilbert Scott, with a much later development in 1974. This book describes in detail, with numerous architectural drawings, the slow progress of achieving a multi purpose building on a difficult site that would be visually symbolic of London’s status in the world. Apparently there are some seven miles of underground corridors too.    

Hamlet

HAMLET

By William Shakespeare

Edited, introduced, and annotated by Cedric Watts, Professor of English Literature of the University of Sussex.

Hamlet is not only one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, but also the most fascinatingly problematical tragedy in all the world’s literatures. First performed around 1600, it is a gripping and exuberant drama of revenge, rich in contrasts and conflicts. Its violence alternates with introspection, its Melancholy with humor, Subtlety is with spectacle. Prince, Hamlet himself is depicted as a complex, divided, introspective character. His reflections on death, morality and the very status of human beings make him the ‘first modern man’.

John Donne

JOHN DONNE

The collected poems

Edited by Roy Booth

John Donne (1572-1631) is a poet of concerted emotional and intellectual force whose strenuously original approach to the subject matter, diction and form of the verse re made English poetry. Donne’s poetry combines paradoxical wit, scientific and theological learning with the rhythms and diction of the spoken language. Crises of love, conscience and faith are the great concerns of his poetry which is by turns exalted or disenchanted, direct or oblique, morally profound or outrageously spiteful. This edition makes available of the whole of Donne’s English poetry, and includes a new introduction, chronology, notes and an up to date bibliography.

Birds without wings

BIRDS WITHOUT WINGS

By: Louis de Burniers

Set in the south west Anatolia, acted out against the back ground of the struggling Ottoman empire, for centuries Christians and Muslims have co existed in harmony. Characters such as Isklander the potter, father kristoforos, karatuvek, mehmetclk and the beautiful Philother inhabit the pages of this epic tale, their tragedies and love affairs inter woven against the dry, dusty heat. Mean while the military master mind Mustafa kemel is determined to restructure the region at what ever cost even if it leads to deprivation and carnage. Will harmony ever prevail? Bloch buster novel packed with atmosphere.  

House and its head

HOUSE AND ITS HEAD

By: Ivy Compton Burnett

During the 1920s, this author was well known and was admired for her darkly comic and deeply subversive novels. Writing almost entirely in dialogue, she stage a series of conversational duels in which the destructive inter action of power, desire and domesticity are dramatized. Here too , one of the most unsparing of her novels , Duncan is a tyrannical patter families who cannot stop remarrying, while his daughters cannot get married at all and his nephew cannot stop fooling around. Soon the family’s conflicting interests sets off a series of increasingly appalling actions made al the more terrifying by the ease with which in the end the survivors accept the results.

ENGLISH POEMS OF JOHN MILTON

THE ENGLISH POEMS OF JOHN MILTON

By John Milton

John Milton (1608-74)

He has a strong claim to be considered the greatest English poet after Shakespeare. His early poems collected and published in 1645 include the much loved pair: L’Allegro and I Penseroso – the cheerful man and the thoughtful man, Lycidas – his great clergy on a fellow poet and Camus – the one masque which is still read today. When the civil war began Milton abandoned poetry for politics and wrote a series of pamphlets in defense of the parliamentary party, then in defense of the execution of execution of Charles I: these include his great defense of the freedom of the press, Areopagitica and later his two great epics, Paradise lost and Paradise regained, and his retelling the story of Samson as a Greek tragedy. This edition contains all his poems in English with introduction and notes by Laurence and Lerner.