Matthew Sturgis

"The first full biography of Oscar Wilde in more than thirty years"--

A Life

Oscar Wilde

'The Book of the Year, perhaps of the decade, has to be Matthew Sturgis's Oscar' TLS, Books of the Year. NOMINATED FOR THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2019. A SUNDAY TIMESBOOK OF THE YEAR. 'Simply the best modern biography of Wilde ... A terrific achievement'Evening Standard. 'Page-turning ... Vivid and desperately moving. However much you think you know Wilde, this book will absorb and entertain you'Sunday Times. 'Wonderfully exciting ... Sturgis's great achievement is to take on board his great flurry of contradictions'Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday. '[Sturgis] is a tremendous orchestrator of material, fastidious, unhurried, indefatigable'Observer. 'Oscar Wilde is more fashionable than ever ... Sturgis's account of the hearing at the Old Bailey is as gripping as it is grim'Guardian. 'The Book of the Year, perhaps of the decade, has to be Matthew Sturgis's Oscarwhich captures the wit, the love-ability, the dramatic genius, the insane self-destructiveness, the originality of Wilde ... [Sturgis] is the greatest chronicler of the 1890s we have ever had'TLS, Books of the Year. Oscar Wilde's life - like his wit - was alive with paradox. He was both an early exponent and a victim of 'celebrity culture': famous for being famous, he was lauded and ridiculed in equal measure. His achievements were frequently downplayed, his successes resented. He had a genius for comedy but strove to write tragedies. He was an unabashed snob who nevertheless delighted in exposing the faults of society. He affected a dandified disdain but was prone to great acts of kindness. Although happily married, he became a passionate lover of men and - at the very peak of his success - brought disaster upon himself. He disparaged authority, yet went to the law to defend his love for Lord Alfred Douglas. Having delighted in fashionable throngs, Wilde died almost alone: barely a dozen people were at his graveside. Yet despite this ruinous end, Wilde's star continues to shine brightly. His was a life of quite extraordinary drama. Above all, his flamboyant refusal to conform to the social and sexual orthodoxies of his day make him a hero and an inspiration to all who seek to challenge convention. In the first major biography of Oscar Wilde in thirty years, Matthew Sturgis draws on a wealth of new material and fresh research to place the man firmly in the context of his times. He brings alive the distinctive mood and characters of the fin de sièclein the richest and most compelling portrait of Wilde to date.

Oscar

Jessica Fellowes

An official behind-the-scenes reference for the series' third season provides individual character profiles and the inspirations behind them while placing key storylines in a historical context.

A New Era

The Chronicles of Downton Abbey

Nick Briggs

Giles Keyte

Joss Barratt

It is 1920 and Downton Abbey is on the brink of a post-war world. New elements and intrigues thrive as the old social binds weaken. 'The Chronicles of Downton Abbey', carefully pieced together at the heart and hearth of the ancestral home of the Granthams, is a collection of every important member of the Downton estate.

Aubrey Beardsley

Chronicles the brief life of the renowned erotic artist, from his most provocative works through his impact on black-and-white art, describing his relationships with such figures as Oscar Wilde and his manipulation of the press and public. 10,000 first printing.

A Biography

Passionate Attitudes

The English Cat at Home

This richly illustrated short, extracted from the official book The Chronicles of Downton Abbey, focuses on the characters individually, examining their motivations, their actions and the inspirations behind them. Forwarded by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes.

Lady Mary Crawley and Matthew Crawley Esq. (Downton Abbey Shorts, Book 1)

Mr Thomas Barrow and Miss Sarah O’Brien (Downton Abbey Shorts, Book 8)

The painter Walter Sickert was a man of contradictions: a radical reactionary, a reclusive socialite, a traditionalist and an innovator, a philanderer who believed in the sanctity of marriage, an internationalist grounded in the heart of the English school. In this superb biography, Matthew Sturgis provides the first fully documented account of Sickert's long and colorful life, drawing on new sources to capture the spirit of a man whose influence remains visible in the work of artists today.

Walter Sickert

There is no place like Rome. Throughout its long, long history, its many changes in form and fortune, Rome has always been a tourist centre. In every age - Classical, Christian, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, Romantic, Modern, people have flocked to see its wonders. This is the story of what Rome's visitors have looked at over the past two thousand years, the buildings, the statues, the paintings, the artefacts that have most impressed each generation of travellers from the time of the Roman Republic in the second century BC up to the present age of mass tourism. It is the history both of how Rome has changed with the centuries and how the taste of those who have visited the city has changed with it.

2000 Years of Roman Sightseeing

When in Rome

The English Decadence of the 1890s

Dowager Countess of Grantham and Mrs Isidore Levinson (Downton Abbey Shorts, Book 2)

'In the middle of the second century BC Rome was under threat. The danger, however, was not military. It was the one-legged sideboard that, apparently, posed the gravest danger to Rome's power - at least according to the historian Livy. There were other worrying signs: bed curtain, bronze couches and a fad for female lute players at private banquets. To the stern fathers of the Roman Republic these corrupting manifestations of 'Eastern luxury' were deeply troubling.' So begins Matthew Sturgis's book - a guide to Rome with a difference. For over two thousand years Rome has been acknowledged as one of the world's great cities. It has been the hub of a magnificent empire, the birthplace of an enduring Church, the spring from which the Renaissance would draw its knowledge of the Classical past, the goal of every educated European making the Grand Tour and a pre-eminent centre of mass tourism. Here is Rome through the eyes of the travellers who have flocked there over the centuries: from the sophisticated Turkish ambassador who found Republican Rome a bit crude and primitive, really, to the eastern Emperor overawed by the glories of Imperial Rome, to the pilgrims who in the Dark and Middle Ages visited the 'pitiful, malodorous but sanctified rump' that Rome had become; then to the eager classicists and collectors who flocked to Renaissance Rome, followed by the Grand Tourists, the Romantics, and the rather less grand tourists of today.

The fullest, most textural, most accurate—most human—account of Oscar Wilde's unique and dazzling life—based on extensive new research and newly discovered materials, from Wilde's personal letters and transcripts of his first trial to newly uncovered papers of his early romantic (and dangerous) escapades and the two-year prison term that shattered his soul and his life. "Simply the best modern biography of Wilde." —Evening Standard Drawing on material that has come to light in the past thirty years, including newly discovered letters, documents, first draft notebooks, and the full transcript of the libel trial, Matthew Sturgis meticulously portrays the key events and influences that shaped Oscar Wilde's life, returning the man "to his times, and to the facts," giving us Wilde's own experience as he experienced it. Here, fully and richly portrayed, is Wilde's Irish childhood; a dreamy, aloof boy; a stellar classicist at boarding school; a born entertainer with a talent for comedy and a need for an audience; his years at Oxford, a brilliant undergraduate punctuated by his reckless disregard for authority . . . his arrival in London, in 1878, "already noticeable everywhere" . . . his ten-year marriage to Constance Lloyd, the father of two boys; Constance unwittingly welcoming young men into the household who became Oscar's lovers, and dying in exile at the age of thirty-nine . . . Wilde's development as a playwright. . . becoming the high priest of the aesthetic movement; his successes . . . his celebrity. . . and in later years, his irresistible pull toward another—double—life, in flagrant defiance and disregard of England's strict sodomy laws ("the blackmailer's charter"); the tragic story of his fall that sent him to prison for two years at hard labor, destroying his life and shattering his soul.

Eine neue Ära

Die Chroniken von Downton Abbey

The official companion to all three seasons.

Matthew Sturgis

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