Shakespeare makes it on to the list but there is no place for Austen, Dickens or - thankfully - the Da Vinci Code. Melvyn Bragg is to host a new TV series, 12 Books That Changed The World, about the
Set in Britain during the 1950s, this moving and evocative novel follows the intertwined fates of people crossing boundaries in their lives. As a teenager in the small northern town of Wigton, Joe Richardson falls in love with Rachel, just when her life is about to be uprooted. While his parents, Sam and Ellen, face the frontiers of middle age, Joe finds himself drawn by the intoxicating world outside home, and swept into situations that seem beyond his control. Vividly conveying the spirit of the mid-century and the profound social changes taking place at the time, this is a masterly successor to the award-winning "The Soldier's Return" and "A Son Of War".
" Melvyn Bragg strides confidently through the origins and growth of English. concise as well as learned. an impressive and sage view of the big picture. " New Statesman. " Always readable, often thought-provoking, and consistently entertaining. " Independent. " Bragg's approachable account. gleams with little gems. It has power and clarity. " Sunday Herald. " Intriguing. I share Bragg's linguistic egalitarianism, his respect for dialects, his sense of the expressive richness that borrowed words bring.
In his later career the American artist Andy Warhol (1928–87) was famous simply for being famous, so much had his own celebrity overtaken awareness of the art he actually produced. This paradoxical state of affairs receives a fascinating analysis in this film surveying Warhol’s art. It begins with Warhol’s early success in commercial art and reaction against the prevailing tenets of Abstract Expressionism, tracing his emergence as a leading figure of the American Pop Art movement of the early 1960s. It shows how his repeat images of mundane commodities such as Campbell’s soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles, and the early mega-stars Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, acquired icon status as expressions of the American Dream in its new phase of mass-media culture and machine production. Warhol’s activities as an ‘underground’ film-maker are also covered here in depth, with commentary from the cast members of such films as Sleep and the notoriously sexually explicit Chelsea Girls providing a unique insight beneath the mask-like surface of Warhol’s images.
The story of a love affair that ends in tragedy - a classic theme given fresh and powerful new life by an author cementing his place among the aristocrats of English fiction (Sunday Telegraph).
