Daisy Hay Knihy

O slavných básnících jsme se všichni jistě učili ve škole. Dozvěděli jsme se, kde se narodili, kde žili a co napsali lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats a další poetové 19. století, kteří vstoupili do čítanek. Víme tedy, co tvořili - víme ale také, jak žili? Pojďme tedy společně pootevřít dveře a nahlédnout do jejich svérázných osudů. Přesvědčíme se, že noviny lze psát a vydávat i ve vězeňské cele, přeměněné v květinové zátiší, do níž se novinář jako Leigh Hunt může dostat za to, co do těch novin psal… Shelley nás vezme na útěk se svou mladičkou milenkou Mary, na útěk plný romantické lásky, která se během let změnila v tragédii… Lord Byron se projeví jako problémový partner a ještě zvláštnější otec, aby se svou smrtí stal mystickým hrdinou… A právě jako v dílech oněch velikých básníků i v jejich vlastních životech se prolíná neštěstí, smrt, mnohdy i vlastní rukou, s velkolepými ideály, krásou přátelství a lásky. Ženy, milované, nenáviděné či jenom trpěné; děti, chtěné i nechtěné, živé i umírající, manželské i nemanželské; přátelé, nepřátelé a zrádci, politika, hádky, nevěry, pomluvy, incest, souboje… osudy žité až na samou dřeň a vydávající své hořkosladké plody. Angličtí romantici. Jejich slova čteme dodnes.

"A portrait of a radical age via the writers who gather around a publisher's dining table - from William Wordsworth to Mary Wollstonecraft. Joseph Johnson became a bookseller and a maker of books in an age when books appeared to have the potential to change the world. Between 1760 and 1809, the years of Johnson's adulthood, Britain experienced a period of political, social, scientific, cultural, religious and scientific change during which nothing was certain and everything seemed possible. On paper Johnson's dinner guests charted the evolution of Britain's relationship first with America and then with Europe: several were intimately involved in the struggles that reformed the world order. They pioneered revolutions in medical treatment and scientific enquiry and they proclaimed the rights of women and children. The men and women who gathered around Johnson had no communal name and they never moved as a single group. Some, like Wollstonecraft, Fuseli, Bonnycastle and Lindsey, frequented his shop and his dining room without waiting to be invited, treating his home as an extension of their own. Others, like Priestley and Barbauld, viewed St Paul's Churchyard as their pole star. Paine, Trimmer and Darwin left fewer textual traces of their physical presence in Johnson's house. One man, Johnson's engraver William Blake, came to dinner only rarely. The poet William Cowper never visited London but he made his presence felt in the dining room just as surely as did those who came to Johnson's shop and home. Johnson turned his home into a place where writers of contrasting politics and personalities could come together. The dining room provided space for thinking and talking but it also symbolised and served as a sanctuary at times of crisis. Johnson's guests had to contend with events that threatened their physical security as well as their intellectual liberty. In the tumultuous years either side of the French Revolution they faced riots, fire, exile and prison, alongside the more quotidian but no less serious threats of homelessness, mental collapse, poverty and the exigencies of childbirth. Throughout Johnson's house provided a refuge, and his labours allowed his visitors to make their voices heard even when external forces conspired to silence them"--Publisher's description

Cats are better than men - fact. When was the last time you had to tell a cat not to embarrass you in public? Would a cat go out for a night on the tiles and come back smelling of anything worse than a fish supper?All the evidence is inside this book - there's nothing mad about being a catwoman!