For the Irish historian John Bagnell Bury, history should be treated as a science and not a mere branch of literature. Many contemporary histories written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were poetic and heroic in tone, blending fact and fiction, myths and legends. They sometimes relied on sources from Shakespeare and classical poets. For Bury, the facts of history may be legendary or romantic in nature, but they should be recounted in a scholarly and non-judgmental manner, without the accompanying emotions. His aim was simply to “tell history as it happened.”
A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great was first published in 1900. It wen...
Ce n’était pas une petite tâche que de peindre les deux ou trois mille figures saillantes d’une époque, car telle est, en définitif, la somme des types que présente chaque génération et que La Comédie Humaine comportera. Ce nombre de figures, de caractères, cette multitude d’existences exigeaient des cadres, et, qu’on me pardonne cette expression, des galeries. De là, les divisions si naturelles, déjà connues, de mon ouvrage en Scènes de la vie privée, de province, parisienne, politique, militaire et de campagne. Dans ces six livres sont classées toutes les Études de moeurs qui forment l’histoire générale de la Société, la collection de tous ses faits et gestes, eussent dit nos ancêtre...
Published by Honoré de Balzac in the tempestuous year of 1830, the tale follows the undulating pathways of Sarrasine the sculptor’s shocking journey to his coming of age. As one of the “fathers of realism” Balzac painted with his words a vivid portrait of life in the swirling salons of Europe at the end of the Bourbon monarchy, and we follow Sarrasine from France to Italy in search of both his métier and his muse.
However it is also the story of La Zambinella, an Italian singer with whom Sarrasine falls madly and passionately in love. But that passion holds a secret which Sarrasine spies too late.
Three children sent to stay the night with their Aunt Jane find themselves sharing an enormous bed. So enormous is it, that when they make a tent of the bedsheets and crawl in, they never make it to the foot of the bed, crawling instead into a dreamworld of caves and pirates and adventures.
A year in the life of a New England farm boy at the end of the 19th century (Introduction by LC)