Eleanor of Aquitaine’s extraordinary life seems more likely to be found in the pages of fiction. Proud daughter of a distinguished French dynasty, she married the king of France, Louis VII, then the king of England, Henry II, and gave birth to two sons who rose to take the English throne—Richard the Lionheart and John. Renowned for her beauty, hungry for power, headstrong, and unconventional, Eleanor traveled on crusades, acted as regent for Henry II and later for Richard, incited rebellion, endured a fifteen-year imprisonment, and as an elderly widow still wielded political power with energy and enthusiasm. This gripping biography is the definitive account of the most important queen of the Middle Ages. Ralph Turner, a leading historian of the twelfth century, strips away the myths that have accumulated around Eleanor—the “black legend” of her sexual appetite, for example—and challenges the accounts that relegate her to the shadows of the kings she married and bore. Turner focuses on a wealth of primary sources, including a collection of Eleanor’s own documents not previously accessible to scholars, and portrays a woman who sought control of her own destiny in the face of forceful resistance. A queen of unparalleled appeal, Eleanor of Aquitaine retains her power to fascinate even 800 years after her death.

The life of one of Western art's most admired and misunderstood painters J.M.W. Turner is one of the most important figures in Western art, and his visionary work paved the way for a revolution in landscape painting. Over the course of his lifetime, Turner strove to liberate painting from an antiquated system of patronage. Bringing a new level of expression and color to his canvases, he paved the way for the modern artist. Turner was very much a man of his changing era. In his lifetime, he saw Britain ravaged by Napoleonic wars, revived by the Industrial Revolution, and embarked upon a new moment of Imperial glory with the ascendancy of Queen Victoria. His own life embodied astonishing transformation. Born the son of a barber in Covent Garden, he was buried amid pomp and ceremony in St. Paul's Cathedral. Turner was accepted into the prestigious Royal Academy at the height of the French Revolution when a climate of fear dominated Britain. Unable to travel abroad he explored at home, reimagining the landscape to create some of the most iconic scenes of his country. But his work always had a profound human element. When a moment of peace allowed travel into Europe, Turner was one of the first artists to capture the beauty of the Alps, to revive Venice as a subject, and to follow in Byron’s footsteps through the Rhine country. While he was commercially successful for most of his career, Turner's personal life remained fraught. His mother suffered from mental illness and was committed to Bedlam. Turner never married but had several long-term mistresses and illegitimate daughters. His erotic drawings were numerous but were covered up by prurient Victorians after his death. Turner's late, impressionistic work was held up by his Victorian detractors as example of a creeping madness. Affection for the artist’s work soured. John Ruskin, the greatest of all 19th century art critics, did what he could to rescue Turner’s reputation, but Turner’s very last works confounded even his greatest defender. TURNER humanizes this surprising genius while placing him in his fascinating historical context. Franny Moyle brilliantly tells the story of the man to give us an astonishing portrait of the artist and a vivid evocation of Britain and Europe in flux.

J.M.W. Turner was a painter whose treatment of light put him squarely in the pantheon of the world’s preeminent artists, but his character was a tangle of fascinating contradictions. While he could be coarse and rude, manipulative, ill-mannered, and inarticulate, he was also generous, questioning, and humane, and he displayed through his work a hitherto unrecognized optimism about the course of human progress. With two illegitimate daughters and several mistresses whom Turner made a career of not including in his public life, the painter was also known for his entrepreneurial cunning, demanding and receiving the highest prices for his work. Over the course of sixty years, Turner traveled thousands of miles to seek out the landscapes of England and Europe. He was drawn overwhelmingly to coasts, to the electrifying rub of the land with the sea, and he regularly observed their union from the cliff, the beach, the pier, or from a small boat. Fueled by his prodigious talent, Turner revealed to himself and others the personality of the British and European landscapes and the moods of the surrounding seas. He kept no diary, but his many sketchbooks are intensely autobiographical, giving clues to his techniques, his itineraries, his income and expenditures, and his struggle to master the theories of perspective. In Turner, James Hamilton takes advantage of new material discovered since the 1975 bicentennial celebration of the artist’s birth, paying particular attention to the diary of sketches with which Turner narrated his life. Hamilton’s textured portrait is fully complemented by a sixteen-page illustrations insert, including many color reproductions of Turner’s most famous landscape paintings. Seamlessly blending vibrant biography with astute art criticism, Hamilton writes with energy, style, and erudition to address the contradictions of this great artist.

This work presents a concise biography of J. M. W. Turner (1775 – 1851). He was an English Romantic painter, printmaker, and watercolorist, known for his emotive colorizations, innovative landscapes, and stormy, often violent marine paintings. The writer, along with the significant events of his life and accomplishments, includes several unknown facts that keep the readers engaged. Contents include: 1775 to 1797. Days of Education and Practice Introductory Early Days—1775 to 1789 Youth—1789 to 1796 1797 to 1820. Days of Mastery and Emulation Yorkshire and the young Academician—1797 to 1807 The "Liber Studiorum" and the Dragons Harley Street, Devonshire, Hammersmith, and Twickenham 1820 to 1851. Days of Glory and Decline Italy and France—1820 to 1840 Light and Darkness—1840 to 1851 Index Chronology Of Turner's Life

Definitive, concise, and very interesting... From William Shakespeare to Winston Churchill, the Very Interesting People series provides authoritative bite-sized biographies of Britain's most fascinating historical figures - people whose influence and importance have stood the test of time. Each book in the series is based upon the biographical entry from the world-famous Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The Very Interesting People series includes the following titles: 1.William Shakespeare by Peter Holland 2. George Eliot by Rosemary Ashton 3. Charles Dickens by Michael Slater 4. Charles Darwin by Adrian Desmond, James Moore, and Janet Browne 5. Isaac Newton by Richard S.Westfall 6. Elizabeth I by Patrick Collinson 7. George III by John Cannon 8. Benjamin Disraeli by Jonathan Parry 9. Christopher Wren by Kerry Downes 10. John Ruskin by Robert Hewison 11. James Joyce by Bruce Stewart 12. John Milton by Gordon Campbell 13. Jane Austen by Marilyn Butler 14. Henry VIII by Eric Ives 15. Queen Victoria by K. D. Reynolds and H. C. G. Matthew 16. Winston Churchill by Paul Addison 17. Oliver Cromwell by John Morrill 18. Thomas Paine by Mark Philp 19. J. M. W. Turner by Luke Herrmann 20. William and Mary by Tony Claydon and W. A. Speck -

The works of French novelist Alexandre Dumas have been reproduced time and again on stage and screen. Based on a genuine memoir by an officer named D'Artagnan, Dumas published The Three Musketeers. The King's Musketeers were formed in 1622 and were populated by young men of noble birth, but often of poorer means. The Musketeers served as a form of military academy, which enabled these men to qualify for commission into the regular army, but the academy was not just a schoolroom the Musketeers served in all major battles and campaigns of the period; their reputation for bravery was well deserved. This title explores the history behind the legends created by Dumas. Drawing on historical and fascinating accounts the truth of this most colourful and flamboyant of units is revealed.

On Turner's 1826 journey through Brittany and up the River Loire, he filled several sketchbooks with hasty impressions of famous chateaux. Many of his sketches are identified and reproduced here for the first time, together with all of the justly celebrated watercolors that Turner produced to be engraved in 1833. Turner was at the forefront of an invasion of the Loire region by artists, most of whom were British, as is plain from illustrated examples by contemporaries such as Samuel Prout, William Callow, and Clarkson Stanfield, as well as views by French artists like Delacroix.