Drawing from the works of influential figures in art and literature, the author traces the development of romanticism from classicism and the emergence of the modern ego.

Winner of the 2010 Guardian First Book Award: a groundbreaking reassessment of English cultural life in the thirties and forties. In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea shops. Alexandra Harris tells a different story: eclectically, passionately, wittily, urgently, English artists were exploring what it meant to be alive at that moment and in England. They showed that “the modern” need not be at war with the past: constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photos for Betjeman’s nostalgic An Oxford University Chest. A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

(Faber Piano Adventures ). Consists of carefully selected repertoire from the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern periods. Contents: KRIEGER: Minuet in A minor * DUNCOMBE: Fanfare in C Major * LULLY: Minuet in D minor * ANNA MAGDALENA BACH NOTEBOOK: Musette in D Major * Minuet in G Major * Minuet in G minor (PETZOLD) * March in D Major (C.P.E. BACH) * J.C. BACH: Solfeggio in D Major * GOSSEC: Tambourin * HASLINGER: Sonatina in C Major * HAYDN: German Dance in D Major * Minuet in G Major * Allegro in F Major * CLEMENTI: Sonatina in C Major, Op. 36, No. 1 * DIABELLI: Sonatina in G Major, 1st Movement, Op. 168, No. 2 * Rondo for Four Hands, Op. 163, No. 6 * BEETHOVEN: Two German Dances * LEOPOLD MOZART: Allegro in A Major * GURLITT: A Little Flower * BURGMULLER: Arabesque, Op. 100, No. 2 * Ballade, Op. 100, No. 15 * Harmony of the Angels, Op. 100, No. 21 * SCHUMANN: Wild Rider, Op. 68, No. 8 * Melody, Op. 68, No. 1 * ELLMENREICH: Spinning Song, Op. 14, No. 4 * HELLER: Avalanche, Op. 45, No. 2 * REINECKE: Gavotte, Op. 183, No. 1 * REBIKOV: Chinese Figurine * Playing Soldiers, OP. 31, No. 4 * FABER: The Moons of Jupiter * MCKAY: Song of the Range Rider * Cowboy Song * JACOBY: Sonatina

The Romanticism that emerged after the American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789 represented a new flowering of the imagination and the spirit, and a celebration of the soul of humanity with its capacity for love. This extraordinary collection sets the acknowledged genius of poems such as Blake's 'Tyger', Coleridge's 'Khubla Khan' and Shelley's 'Ozymandias' alongside verse from less familiar figures and women poets such as Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. We also see familiar poets in an unaccustomed light, as Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley demonstrate their comic skills, while Coleridge, Keats and Clare explore the Gothic and surreal.

The past ten years have seen a rapidly growing interest in performing and recording Classical and Romantic music with period instruments; yet the relationship of composers' notation to performing practices during that period has received only sporadic attention from scholars, and many aspects of composers' intentions have remained uncertain. Brown here identifies areas in which musical notation conveyed rather different messages to the musicians for whom it was written than it does to modern performers, and seeks to look beyond the notation to understand how composers might have expected to hear their music realized in performance. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that, in many respects, the sound worlds in which Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms created their music were more radically different from ours than is generally assumed.