Manifesto

Published in its entirety, Frida Kahlo's amazing illustrated journal documents the last ten years of her turbulent life. These passionate, often surprising, intimate records, kept under lock and key for some 40 years in Mexico, reveal many new dimensions in the complex personal life of this remarkable Mexican artist. The 170-page journal contains the artist's thoughts, poems, and dreams, many reflecting her stormy relationship with her husband, artist Diego Rivera along with 70 mesmerizing watercolor illustrations. The text entries, written in Frida's round, full script in brightly colored inks, make the journal as captivating to look at as it is to read. Her writing reveals the artist's political sensibilities, recollections of her childhood, and her enormous courage in the face of more than 35 operations to correct injuries she had sustained in an accident at the age of 18. This intimate portal into her life is sure to fascinate fans of the artist, art historians, and womens culturalists alike.

'One of the great love stories of history, in a league with Napoleon and Josephine, and Antony and Cleopatra ...Excellent, with dazzling mastery of detail and literary flair' Economist It was history's most successful political partnership - as sensual and fiery as it was creative and visionary. Catherine the Great was a woman of notorious passion and imperial ambition. Prince Potemkin - wildly flamboyant and sublimely talented - was the love of her life and her co-ruler. Together they seized Ukraine and Crimea, defining the Russian empire to this day. Their affair was so tumultuous that they negotiated an arrangement to share power, leaving Potemkin free to love his beautiful nieces, and Catherine her young male favourites. But these 'twin souls' never stopped loving each other. Drawing on their intimate letters and vast research, Simon Sebag Montefiore's enthralling, widely acclaimed biography restores these imperial partners to their rightful place as titans of their age.

Becoming Steve Jobs answers, for the first time, the central question about the life and career of the Apple founder and CEO: how did a young man so reckless and arrogant that he was exiled from the company he founded become the most effective and influential business leader of our time? Revelatory and inspiring, and drawing on extensive new interviews, exclusive access to major figures in Jobs' life and over twenty-five years closely covering the man himself, Becoming Steve Jobs is the most intimate and important biography yet of this legendary figure.

The first biography written with Paul McCartney's approval and with access to family members and friends closest to him. Superbly evoking half a century of popular music and culture, Paul McCartney is the definitive life of a long-misunderstood genius. In this masterly biography, history's most successful songwriter, a man of seemingly effortless talent, beauty and charm, is revealed as a complex, insecure workaholic who still feels as great a need to prove himself in his seventies as when he was a teenager. We learn how his boyhood was blighted by the death of his mother, Mary - later the inspiration for 'Let It Be' - but redeemed by his remarkable father, Jim, a Liverpool cotton-salesman who was his only music-teacher and whose influence has permeated his career. We understand as never before the creative symbiosis between John Lennon and himself that unlocked the extraordinary treasury of their songs for the Beatles when they were barely into their twenties, and the fierce rivalry which lasted beyond the band's break-up to the end of John's life - and still haunts and inspires Paul to this day. Here for the first time is the full story of Paul post-Beatles: his trauma after being brutally sidelined by John, George and Ringo over the appointment of their last manager, Allen Klein; his near-breakdown on his remote Scottish farm and dogged determination to build a new band, Wings, into as big a name in the 1970s as the Beatles had been in the 1960s. Here too is the first inside story of his marriage to Linda Eastman, much criticised at the outset but destined to become the longest and strongest in rock until her death from cancer. Here are the traumatic post-Linda years when his charmed life seemed temporarily to crack up: his whirlwind romance with Heather Mills ending after four years' marriage in one of the most expensive and rancorous divorces in British legal history. As richly fascinating and dramatic as its subject, Paul McCartney: The Biography is the last word on a man whose music has lit up the world.

Elizabeth Taylor is known internationally as one of the most beautiful and talented women ever to grace the silver screen. She has won two Academy Awards and starred in over sixty films. She is just as well known for her tempestuous personal life, marrying eight times and suffering through innumerable health problems. A cultural icon, she has been written about before . . . but never like this. This moving book traces for the first time Elizabeth's journey through the dark and often lonely world of a fame unparalleled in the 1960s and 1970s, a time during which alcohol and drugs played a major part in her life. It would be with her fifth (and sixth) husband Richard Burton (with whom she made twelve movies, including Cleopatra) that she would learn life lessons about love and loyalty that would inform the rest of her life and, finally, be the catalyst for her recovery from alcoholism in the 1980s. This book also details her philanthropic work as an AIDS activist in the 1990s as well as her stunning success as a business woman today (with a multi-million-dollar fragrance). Based on years of research, this is not just a star's biography . . . it's an unforgettable woman's story.