The Embarrassment of Riches: an Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
- 698pagine
- 25 ore di lettura
Examines seventeenth-century Dutch life, history, and culture.






Examines seventeenth-century Dutch life, history, and culture.
Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past—including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s, and other places in China during World War II, and traces the happy and desperate events that led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949.
Court physician Robert Merivel has a middle age crisis and sets off for Versailles where he meets Madame de Flamanville, a Swiss botanist, and rescues a captive bear to take back to Bidnold Manor.
The Moor evokes his family's often grotesque but compulsively moving fortunes and the lost world of possibilities embodied by India in this century. His is a tale of premature deaths and family rifts, of thwarted loves and mad passions, of secrecy and greed, of power and money, and of the even more morally dubious seductions and mysteries of art.
Robert Merivel abandons his medical studies for the vibrant Court of Charles II, where he finds unexpected favour with the King and serves as a 'paper groom' to the youngest of the royal mistresses. But by falling in love with her, Merivel violates the one rule that will cast him out from his new found paradise. Driven to work in a Quaker Bedlam, he must endure a yet more painful fall from grace before he can achieve spiritual and social restoration.
At the heart of this story is an interracial couple, Steven and Jabulile, living in a 'free' South Africa. He is a university lecturer and she is a lawyer, both comrades in the Struggle and now parents of children born in freedom.
Set among the hills and gorges of the Cevennes, the dark and beautiful heartland of southern France, 'Trespass' is a novel about disputed territory, sibling love and devastating revenge.
Ian Buruma's epic novel is the richly imagined story of one woman's struggle to survive in the face of war and occupation in the Far East during the Second World War. It should appeal to anyone who loved Memoirs of a Geisha. 'Spare, elegant... Buruma's writing is wonderful... So beautifully executed that the reader is swept along.' Vanora Bennett, The Times