Roy C. Strong

Cecil Beaton

The Royal Portraits

No other woman in world history has been of such compulsive interest as Elizabeth Tudor. While the rest of the 16th-century Europe was subject to the bloodshed of religious war, Tudor peace brought England its great flowering of the arts. Central to that flowering was the enigmatic legend of the Queen herself, a myth deliberately created and sustained over four decades by public spectacle and courtly chivalry, by private sonnet and official oration.

Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry

The Cult of Elizabeth

The Laskett is an intimate history of the garden Roy Strong made with his wife, Julia Trevelyan Oman--the largest formal garden created in the country since 1945. This personal book is the tale of a marriage as much as the tale of a garden, as into the Laskett they etched their own biographies, including many of the people who have crossed their lives and are commemorated within it.

The Story of a Garden

The Laskett

Roy Strong

"Toenails cut while dining, meals served to wax effigies of the dead, napkins concealing singing birds, dishes descending from the ceiling - these are just a few of the more exotic aspects of everyman at table. From the stupendous banquets of the Ancient Babylonians, Feast covers five millennia of formal eating." "Feast offers a fascinating and, at times, highly unusual mirror of society. It gathers together for the first time all the ingredients which contributed to the phenomenon of the celebratory meal: the people, the clothes, the food, the setting, the action and its circumstances." "In an age which has virtually abolished the shared meal as a central feature of daily living, Feast presents a revelatory picture of a world we have lost. Beautifully illustrated, it traces fashions in food and the etiquette of eating, taking the reader from the elegancies of the Roman villa to the austerities of the monastic refectory, from the splendours of the Renaissance banquet to the rigours of the Victorian dinner party."--Jacket.

A History of Grand Eating

Feast

Bruce Weber

Helmut Newton

Richard Avedon

Gianni Versace

Gianni Versace's unbridled enthusiasm for the baroque finds new expression in Do Not Disturb, his playful peek behind the closed doors of the Versace homes. Versace's Garden of Eden is found at home - be that a stuccoed Ottocento pavilion fronting the Lago di Como, a sumptuous home office in the center of the fashion capital, or an Art Deco pile in South Beach. Versace's Adam and Eve might well be Sylvester Stallone and Claudia Schiffer, modestly shielding themselves from our view with a Gorgon-headed dinner plate. His vision is translated through the lens of the world's most accomplished photographers - Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, and Massimo Listri - and illustrated with a cornucopia of drawings and pastels by Karl Lagerfeld and Gladys Perint Palmer. Sir Roy Strong, a former Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, contributes a stunning text to match the visual feast.

Roy C. Strong

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