Anka Muhlstein

Each year of their 30-year marriage, Louis Begley, the award-winning author of Wartime Lies, and his wife Anka Muhlstein have spent long, enjoyable months in Venice. They write and live there and over the decades La Serenissima has become their second home. The owners of their favourite restaurants have become their friends and they share the lives of the locals, far off the welltrodden tourist track. Begley tells the story of how he fell in love with and in Venice, though as he makes clear when writing on Venice's pivitol role in world literature, he was not the only one - Henry James, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann are only three of his most illustrious predecessors.

Venice for Lovers is a memorable collaboration by two fine stylists who have fashioned their own personal homages to Venice, one with a novella, the other with a personal essay. Every year for all the thirty they have been married, Begley and Muhlstein have escaped to Venice to write. In her contribution to the book, Muhlstein charmingly describes how she and her husband dine at the same restaurant every night for years on end, and how becoming friends with restaurateurs has been an unsurpassed means of getting to know the city and its inhabitants, far from the tourists in San Marco Square. In his short novella, Begley writes a story of falling in love with?and in? Venice. His twenty-year-old protagonist, enamored with an older, far worldlier woman of twenty-seven, is lured by her to the City of Water, only to be unceremoniously dumped and left to fend for himself after a brief rendezvous. But he discovers a lasting love for Venice itself?not an uncommon romance, as Begley’s brilliant literary essay on the city’s place within world literature demonstrates: Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann were all illustrious predecessors.

The acclaimed biographer offers a fresh, insightful view of Balzac's life, time, and works through the lens of food. "Tell me where you eat, what you eat, and at what time you eat, and I will tell you who you are." This is the motto of Anka Muhlstein's erudite and witty book about the ways food and the art of the table feature in Honor de Balzac's The Human Comedy. Balzac uses them as a connecting thread in his novels, showing how food can evoke character, atmosphere, class, and social climbing more suggestively than money, appearances, and other more conventional trappings. Full of surprises and insights, Balzac's Omelette invites you to taste anew Balzac's genius as a writer and his deep understanding of the human condition, its ambitions, its flaws, and its cravings.

From the acclaimed biographer and author of Balzac's Omelette, an engaging new work on the life of "the father of Impressionism" and the role his Jewish background played in his artistic creativity. The celebrated painter Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) occupied a central place in the artistic scene of his time: a founding member of the new school of French painting, he was a close friend of Monet, a longtime associate in Degas's and Mary Cassatt's experimental work, a support to C zanne and Gauguin, and a comfort to Van Gogh, and was backed by the great Parisian art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel throughout his career. Nevertheless, he felt a persistent sense of being set apart, different, and hard to classify. Settled in France from the age of twenty-five but born in the Caribbean, he was not French and what is more he was Jewish. Although a resolute atheist who never interjected political or religious messages in his art, he was fully aware of the consequences of his lineage. Drawing on Pissarro's considerable body of work and a vast collection of letters that show his unrestrained thoughts, Anka Muhlstein offers a nuanced, intimate portrait of the artist whose independent spirit fostered an environment of freedom and autonomy.

CELEBRATING THE 150th ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF MARCEL PROUST "Proust not only brought to the fore the beauty of centuries past but also set the scene for the era of modernism. This genius could not have so gloriously entered the twentieth century had he not proudly stood on the shoulders of giants." --From the Conclusion Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a character without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated among them find it natural to speak in quotations. Proust made literary taste a means of defining personality and gave literature an actual role to play in his fiction. In this wonderfully entertaining book, scholar and biographer Anka Muhlstein draws out these themes in Proust's work and life, thus providing not only a friendly introduction to the momentous In Search of Lost Time, but also allowing glimpses at some of the highlights and lost treasures of French literature.

Written over the course of four decades, Fran ois-Ren de Chateaubriand's epic autobiography has drawn the admiration of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Proust, Barthes, and Sebald. Here, in the first books of his massive Memoirs, spanning the years 1768 to 1800, Chateaubriand looks back on the already bygone world of his youth. He recounts the history of his aristocratic family and the first rumblings of the French Revolution. He recalls playing games on the beaches of Saint-Malo, wandering in the woods near his father's castle in Combourg, hunting with King Louis XVI at Versailles, witnessing the first heads carried on pikes through the streets of Paris, meeting with George Washington in Philadelphia, and falling hopelessly in love with a young woman named Charlotte in the small Suffolk town of Bungay. The volume ends with Chateaubriand's return to France after seven years of exile in England. In this new edition (the first unabridged English translation of any portion of the Memoirs to be published in more than a century), Chateaubriand emerges as a writer of great wit and clarity, a self deprecating egotist whose meditations on the meaning of history, memory, and morality are leavened with a mixture of high whimsy and memorable gloom.

A scintillating glimpse into the lives of acclaimed writers and artists and their inspiring, often surprising convergences, from the author of Monsieur Proust's Library With the wit and penetration well known to readers of Anka Muhlstein's previous books, The Pen and the Brush revisits the delights of the French novel. This time she focuses on late 19th- and 20th-century writers--Balzac, Zola, Proust, Huysmans, and Maupassant--through the lens of their passionate involvement with the fine arts. She delves into the crucial role that painters play as characters in their novels, which she pairs with an exploration of the profound influence that painting exercised on the novelists' techniques, offering an intimate view of the intertwined worlds of painters and writers at the time. Muhlstein's deftly chosen vignettes bring to life a portrait of the nineteenth century's tight-knit artistic community, where C zanne and Zola befriended each other as boys and Balzac yearned for the approval of Delacroix. She leads the reader on a journey of spontaneous discovery as she explores how a great painting can open a mind and spark creative fire.

'Tell me where you eat, what you eat, and at what time you eat, and I will tell you who you are'. This is the motto of Anka Muhlstein's erudite and witty book about the ways food and the art of the table feature in Honore de Balzac's writings. It is not a coincidence that Balzac was the first in French literature to tackle this appetizing topic. Before the French Revolution, a traveller in France was apt to find local food scarce, tasteless, and of doubtful appearance. Restaurants did not even exist! Just as the art of the table became a centrepiece of French mores, Balzac used it as a connecting thread in his novels, showing how food can evoke character, atmosphere, class, and social climbing. Full of surprise and insights, "Balzac's Omelette" invites you to taste a new French literature and cuisine.

Die fesselnde Geschichte zweier außergewöhnlicher Frauen, wie sie gegensätzlicher nicht sein können - Anka Muhlstein erzählt in ihrem spannenden Bestseller das Leben der Königinnen Elisabeth I. und Maria Stuart, erzählt von ihrer Suche nach Anerkennung und Liebe und von ihrem Kampf um die Macht in Europa am Beginn der Neuzeit. Sie sind Cousinen, und beide sind mit demselben Problem konfrontiert: sich zu verheiraten und ihrem Land - England bzw. Schottland - einen Erben zu hinterlassen. Elisabeth, die Frau der politischen Macht, ordnet sich keinem Mann unter, Maria Stuart geht drei Ehen ein. Ihr Leben im 16. Jahrhundert wird zu einem düsteren Kapitel der Weltgeschichte, bestimmt von Liebe, Haß und Intrigen.

In 1812, when Napoleon opened hostilities against Tsar Alexander I, one of his ministers declared: "The Emperor is mad; he'll toss us in the air, ass first, and all this will end in a frightful catastrophe." Napoleon's entire career was based on daring exploits. But what made him take on such an extreme challenge as the conquest of Russia? And why was it finally impossible to avert the disaster which some had foretold? Underestimating the Tsar's and his loyal subjects' will to resist, ignoring the harsh reality of the terrain and the climate, Napoleon thought he was assured a quick victory. If they were to defeat Russia, the Napoleonic armies had to advance - and to keep on advancing - until the final takeover of Moscow. But by the time they reached the city, Moscow was in flames and its inhabitants had fled. Napoleon was defeated even before the onset of winter. Ignorance is frequently the crucial factor that explains the defeat of many leaders. Napoleon has attained international legendary status; biographies about him are extremely popular in France and worldwide. This book offers a new interpretation of the man and his psychology. After winning so many battles, what made Napoleon take such an I'mense gamble and lose everything in trying to conquer Moscow? The author sees Napoleon's defeat as the tragedy of a failed conquest. The Russian campaign is one of the key moments in the last days of the dying Empire. In that chain of events, what parts were played respectively by resolve and chance? With the great art of a true storyteller, Anka Muhlstein traces the end of this epic tale and examines the limits of the strength of the Napoleonic Army. Far from attempting to rewrite History with a capital "H" or to draw timeless, abstract lessons from the past, Muhlstein offers a fascinating, detailed account, based on a variety of sources. The result is a powerfully dramatic reconstitution of the day-to-day life of an army - as it marches toward its doom. Anka Muhlstein is a historian and a biographer with a special interest in great queens such as Elizabeth I, Mary Stuart and Queen Victoria. She is the author of Elisabeth d'Angleterre et Marie Stuart (2004), Reines ph m res, m res ternelles (2001), Adolphe de Custine (1996), Cavelier de la Salle (1992) and Victoria (1978).

The Marquis de Custine's record of his trip to Russia in 1839 is a brilliantly perceptive, even prophetic, account of one of the world's most fascinating and troubled countries. It is also a wonderful piece of travel writing. Custine, who met with people in all walks of life, including the Czar himself, offers vivid descriptions of St. Petersburg and Moscow, of life at court and on the street, and of the impoverished Russian countryside. But together with a wealth of sharply delineated incident and detail, Custine's great work also presents an indelible picture-roundly denounced by both Czarist and Communist regimes-of a country crushed by despotism and "intoxicated with slavery." Letters from Russia, here published in a new edition prepared by Anka Muhlstein, the author of the Goncourt Prize-winning biography of Custine, stands with Tocqueville's Democracy in America as a profound and passionate encounter with historical forces that are still very much at work in the world today.