Best Selling Books by Hilary Spurling

This is the first full-scale biographical and critical study of Ann Stokes (b.1922), the widow of the art critic Adrian Stokes and a highly unusual potter who creates bold, uninhibited works. Beautifully illustrated and with three major essays, Ann Stokes: Artists'' Potter is a must for art historians, collectors, decorative arts specialists and cultural historians alike.

Este magno y exhaustivo análisis de Hilary Spurling, premiada por esta obra con el codiciado Premio Whitbread, recorre con minucia la vida y la trayectoria de Matisse, y ésta demuestra ser la mejor manera para comprender tanto las obras individuales del pintor como su impresionante trayectoria y la evolución de sus ideas respecto a las artes plásticas. No sólo nos encontramos ante la más completa y definitiva biografía de uno de los pintores más célebres, sino de un espléndido retrado de los ambientes artísticos en que se desarrolló su obra. A esto se une una investigación muy rigurosa con información inédita del artista procedente de entrevistas y el talento narrativo de Spurling al entreverar la evolución biográfica y personal con la artística.

''It is a real cause for celebration when the best and most subtle literary biography of our time comes back into print, and in a single volume instead of the original two. What Hilary Spurling does, in a beautifully-written book, is to relate the life of Ivy Compton-Burnett] intimately to the work and show in fascinating details, and with wonderful perception, how her subject''s characters mirror aspects of her own nature. The book sends one back to read or re-read the novels - unfashionable, toweringly original tragic-comedies - the most individual novels, it may be, of our time.'' "The Good Book Guide" "" ''Atrue classic of the genre.'' "The Times" "" ""''A biographical triumph ... Hilary Spurling''s portrait - elegant, stylist, witty, tender, immensely acute -dazzles and exhilarates.'' "Literary Review" ""

The author offers a portrait of the enigmatic Paul Scott, detailing his youth, his years in India and the Far East, his career as a literary agent, the development of his writing, and his strange private life

`Set against the backdrop of Gandhi''s calls for independence and a potential Japanese invasion, four masterful historical novels--The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, and A Division of the Spoils--covering the period between the Quit India riots of 1942 and the massacres that accompanied independence and partition in 1947 provide insight into the closing years of British rule in India.

Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Matisse and the Model, at Eykyn Maclean, New York, Curated by Ann Dumas.