Description
Napoleon has escaped Elba — and Jack Aubrey sails to stop him. The Hundred Days — the nineteenth Aubrey–Maturin novel, published in 1998 — is set during Napoleon’s dramatic return to power in 1815: Jack races across the Mediterranean to intercept French gold funding the Emperor’s comeback, in a chase with the fate of Europe at stake.
O’Brian — writing in his eighties — brings the series toward its historical climax: Waterloo looms on the horizon, the old world is ending, and Jack and Stephen face their greatest professional and personal challenges. The naval action is as sharp as ever; the valedictory feeling, as the long voyage nears its end, is unmistakable and deeply moving.
Nineteenth of twenty-one — the beginning of the end of one of fiction’s great journeys. For O’Brian devotees: essential, moving, and masterful — the series sailing toward history, and toward farewell.
Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation
Kenneth Clark was the man who brought art history into British living rooms. As the youngest-ever director of the National Gallery, a wartime cultural leader, and the presenter of the landmark 1969 BBC series Civilisation, he shaped how generations saw and understood art. James Stourton’s 2016 biography is the definitive account of his remarkable life.
A Life at the Centre of Culture
Stourton follows Clark from his privileged Edwardian childhood to the corridors of power: directing the National Gallery at just 30, guiding the nation’s art collections through the Second World War, chairing the Arts Council, and becoming the most famous art historian of the television age. Drawing on unpublished letters and diaries, the biography reveals a complex, cultured, and sometimes contradictory figure.
The Definitive Biography
Published by William Collins and running to more than 500 pages, this is a richly detailed portrait of twentieth-century cultural life — its artists, patrons, and politics. For readers of art history and biography alike, it is an engrossing account of a man who believed civilisation itself was worth defending.
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