Deze serie duikt in het levendige hart van metropolen en onderzoekt de ingewikkelde verbanden tussen creatieve zielen en hun stedelijke achtergronden. Volg de reizen van schrijvers, kunstenaars en dromers terwijl hun levens verweven raken met de puls en rust van de stad. Elk verhaal vangt de unieke sfeer en de uitdagingen op die worden aangegaan door degenen die inspiratie en betekenis zoeken te midden van de betonnen landschappen.
Forget the limpid, dreamlike views we saw on the television during the Olympics, the paradise of hedonism represented by Bondi Beach and the rest; Sydney is a savage city, as violent in its setting and its weather as it is in its history. This is a brief and heartfelt account of an expatriate writer revisiting his past, examining as he does so the paradox of a blessed country with a bloody, accursed past. Above all, this book is about Australian mateship, and it is the biographies, jokes and stories of Peter's friends and contemporaries that provide the backbone.
The fourth book in Bloomsbury's Writer and the City series. From one of the foremost chroniclers of the modern European experience, a panoramic view of a city that has seduced and bewitched visitors for centuries. Prague is the magic capital of Europe. Since the days of Emperor Rudolf II, "devotee of the stars and cultivator of the spagyric art", who in the late 1500s summoned alchemists and magicians from all over the world to his castle on Hradcany hill, it has been a place of mystery and intrigue. Wars, revolutions, floods, the imposition of Soviet communism, and even the depredations of the tourist boom after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 could not destroy the unique atmosphere of this beautiful, proud, and melancholy city on the Vltava. John Banville traces Prague's often tragic history and portrays the people who made it: the emperors and princes, geniuses and charlatans, heroes and scoundrels. He also paints a portrait of the Prague of today, reveling in its newfound freedoms, eager to join the European Community and at the same time suspicious of what many Praguers see as yet another totalitarian takeover. He writes of his first visit to the city, in the depths of the Cold War, and of subsequent trips there, of the people he met, the friends he made, the places he came to know.
From the war of Independence, via the turbulence of the nineteenth century to the aftermath of 9/11: three startling visions of New York combine in a book of extraordinary scope.
