I am an old woman now, and things are very different to what they were in my youth. Then we, who travelled, travelled in coaches, carrying six inside, and making a two days’ journey out of what people now go over in a couple of hours with a whizz and a flash, and a screaming whistle, enough to deafen one. Then letters came in but three times a week: indeed, in some places in Scotland where I have stayed when I was a girl, the post came in but once a month;—but letters were letters then; and we made great prizes of them, and read them and studied them like books. Now the post comes rattling in twice a day, bringing short jerky notes, some without beginning or end, but just a little sharp sentence, which well-bred folks would think too abrupt to be spoken. Well, well! They may all be improvements,—I dare say they are; but you will never meet with a Lady Ludlow in these days.

The story follows a young Russian landowner named Dimitry Sanin who falls deliriously in love for the first time while visiting the German city of Frankfurt. It is widely held as one Turgenev's greatest novels as well as being highly autobiographical in nature.

Candide is characterised by its sarcastic tone, as well as by its erratic, fantastical and fast-moving plot. A picaresque novel with a story similar to that of a more serious bildungsroman, it parodies many adventure and romance clichés, the struggles of which are caricatured in a tone that is mordantly matter-of-fact. Still, the events discussed are often based on historical happenings, such as the Seven Years' War and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. As philosophers of Voltaire's day contended with the problem of evil, so too does Candide in this short novel, albeit more directly and humorously. Voltaire ridicules religion, theologians, governments, armies, philosophies, and philosophers through allegory; most conspicuously, he assaults Leibniz and his optimism. Voltaire's men and women point his case against optimism by starting high and falling low. A modern could not go about it after this fashion.?He would not plunge his people into an unfamiliar misery. He would just keep them in the misery they were born to. But such an account of Voltaire's procedure is as misleading as the plaster cast of a dance. Look at his procedure again. Mademoiselle Cunégonde, the illustrious Westphalian, sprung from a family that could prove seventy-one quarterings, descends and descends until we find her earning her keep by washing dishes in the Propontis. The aged faithful attendant, victim of a hundred acts of rape by negro pirates, remembers that she is the daughter of a pope, and that in honor of her approaching marriage with a Prince of Massa-Carrara all Italy wrote sonnets of which not one was passable. We do not need to know French literature before Voltaire in order to feel, although the lurking parody may escape us, that he is poking fun at us and at himself. His laughter at his own methods grows more unmistakable at the last, when he caricatures them by casually assembling six fallen monarchs in an inn at Venice. A modern assailant of optimism would arm himself with social pity. There is no social pity in "Candide." Voltaire, whose light touch on familiar institutions opens them and reveals their absurdity, likes to remind us that the slaughter and pillage and murder which Candide?witnessed among the Bulgarians was perfectly regular, having been conducted according to the laws and usages of war. Had Voltaire lived today he would have done to poverty what he did to war. Pitying the poor, he would have shown us poverty as a ridiculous anachronism, and both the ridicule and the pity would have expressed his indignation. About Author: VOLTAIREFran?ois-Marie Arouet (1694 – 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken advocate, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day.

A collection of three enchanting plays adapted from popular fairy tales and suitable for family audiences:?Tin Soldier (adapted from The Steadfast Tin Soldier by Hans Christian Andersen), A Tasty Tale (Hansel and Gretel), Hood in the Wood (Little Red Riding Hood). Acclaimed playwright Noel Greig, has recreated these well-known tales for the stage with wit and imagination. All three plays have been performed throughout the UK by Tangere Arts, winning a? Time Out Critics' Choice Award . Teachers, youth theatres and amateur groups working with young performers will use this collection time and again for productions, drama classes and workshops - whether for one performer or many. Suitable for children aged 7+ The simple form and language of the plays belie their theatrical and psychological sophistication. Tin Soldier ' a powerful poetic drama, an epic fable for our times.' **** ?Independent A Tasty Tale (Hansel and Gretel) ' Delicious moments... fashioned into a rhyming feast.' ****?Time Out Hood in the Wood (Little Red Riding Hood) ' a first-rate piece of storytelling that will make children squeal with terrified delight and parents shiver with recognition. ' **** ?Guardian

莱昂纳多·达·芬奇（1453—1519）不仅仅是位出神入化的画家，也是一位科学家、解剖师、雕塑家、建筑家、音乐家、工程师、发明家，乃至更多。那么也许该这么问：他不是什么呢？在意大利文艺复兴时期，他为意大利美第奇家族和法国王室创作了美的作品。达·芬奇深受同辈的钦佩，是个闻名全世界的少有而高尚的天才。即使是今天，人们对达·芬奇和他的作品的兴趣仍然丝毫没有消退；时代前沿的艺术家们仍然在研习他的作品和书法，希望能够揭开这位远见卓识的艺术家的秘密。

Edvard Munch, born in 1863, was Norway's most popular artist. His brooding and anguished paintings, based on personal grief and obsessions, were instrumental in the development of Expressionism. During his childhood, the death of his parents, his brother and sister, and the mental illness of another sister, were of great influence on his convulsed and tortuous art. In his works, Munch turned again and again to the memory of illness, death and grief. During his career, Munch changed his idiom many times. At first, influenced by Impressionism and Post-impressionism, he turned to a highly personal style and content, increasingly concerned with images of illness and death. In the 1892s, his style developed a ‘Synthetist' idiom as seen in The Scream (1893) which is regarded as an icon and the portrayal of modern humanity's spiritual and existential anguish. He painted different versions of it. During the 1890s Munch favoured a shallow pictorial space, and used it in his frequently frontal p

Marc Chagall was born into a strict Jewish family for whom the ban on representations of the human figure had the weight of dogma. A failure in the entrance examination for the Stieglitz School did not stop Chagall from later joining that famous school founded by the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and directed by Nicholas Roerich. Chagall moved to Paris in 1910. The city was his “second Vitebsk”. At first, isolated in the little room on the Impasse du Maine at La Ruche, Chagall soon found numerous compatriots also attracted by the prestige of Paris: Lipchitz, Zadkine, Archipenko and Soutine, all of whom were to maintain the “smell” of his native land. From his very arrival Chagall wanted to “discover everything”. And to his dazzled eyes painting did indeed reveal itself. Even the most attentive and partial observer is at times unable to distinguish the “Parisian”, Chagall from the “Vitebskian”. The artist was not full of contradictions, nor was he a split personality, but he always remained different; he looked around and within himself and at the surrounding world, and he used his present thoughts and recollections. He had an utterly poetical mode of thought that enabled him to pursue such a complex course. Chagall was endowed with a sort of stylistic immunity: he enriched himself without destroying anything of his own inner structure. Admiring the works of others he studied them ingenuously, ridding himself of his youthful awkwardness, yet never losing his authenticity for a moment. At times Chagall seemed to look at the world through magic crystal – overloaded with artistic experimentation – of the Ecole de Paris. In such cases he would embark on a subtle and serious play with the various discoveries of the turn of the century and turned his prophetic gaze like that of a biblical youth, to look at himself ironically and thoughtfully in the mirror. Naturally, it totally and uneclectically reflected the painterly discoveries of Cézanne, the delicate inspiration of Modigliani, and the complex surface rhythms recalling the experiments of the early Cubists (See-Portrait at the Easel, 1914). Despite the analyses which nowadays illuminate the painter’s Judaeo-Russian sources, inherited or borrowed but always sublime, and his formal relationships, there is always some share of mystery in Chagall’s art. The mystery perhaps lies in the very nature of his art, in which he uses his experiences and memories. Painting truly is life, and perhaps life is painting.

毕加索出生于西班牙，正如人们说的那样，他还未呀呀学语就已经开始了涂鸦。在1899年到1900年期间,毕加索绘画的主题是"终真理",即人生的虚幻无常和死亡的不可避免。在早期作品后是他的“蓝色时期”，然后是“玫瑰时期”，在1906年冬至1907年春期间，裸体女性形象对毕加索来说尤其重要，他独自完成了一幅不同寻常的画作《亚威农的少女》。1908年秋天，毕加索和乔治·布拉克成为了朋友，并且共同领导了立体派*的六年。在二十世纪二十年代期间,毕加索的画风回到了一种更形象化和接近于超现实主义的风格，在他晚年成名之前，他开始临摹艺术大师的画作，比如委拉斯奎兹，普桑,戈雅,马奈,库尔贝和德拉克洛瓦。

在电子游戏发明之前，希罗尼穆斯波希（Hieronymus Bosch）的笔下就已经创作出了恐怖但丑萌的怪物，还带有一点小幽默。他的作品是自信的宣言，有力地挑战了背叛基督教教义之人的精神恐慌。波希生于1450年，死于1516年，他的出生之时正值文艺复兴的高潮时期，也见证了这一时期的宗教战争。中世纪传统和价值观轰然倒塌，为新世纪的到来开辟了道路。在这样的新世纪里，信念失去了力量和魔力。 ?波希开始警告那些不信教者和对上帝丧失了信仰的人——等待是危险的。波希相信所有人必须要有自己的道德选择，他关注地狱、天堂和欲望的主题，才华横溢地挖掘了水果和植物的象征意义，让他的意向充满了强烈的性欲色彩。这本独特的选集展示了波希为引人入胜的作品，小巧的形式也让它成为了一份完美的礼物。

Goya is perhaps the most approachable of painters. His art, like his life, is an open book. He concealed nothing from his contemporaries, and offered his art to them with the same frankness. The entrance to his world is not barricaded with technical difficulties. He proved that if a man has the capacity to live and multiply his experiences, to fight and work, he can produce great art without classical decorum and traditional respectability. He was born in 1746, in Fuendetodos, a small mountain village of a hundred inhabitants. As a child he worked in the fields with his two brothers and his sister until his talent for drawing put an end to his misery. At fourteen, supported by a wealthy patron, he went to Saragossa to study with a court painter and later, when he was nineteen, on to Madrid. Up to his thirty-seventh year, if we leave out of account the tapestry cartoons of unheralded decorative quality and five small pictures, Goya painted nothing of any significance, but once in contro

埃贡·席勒（Egon SchieleA）的作品是如此与众不同，他拒绝被分类。席勒在年仅十六岁的时候被维也纳艺术学院录取，很早就成为了出色的艺术家。他对于线条的完美把控，使得作品充满了紧张的表现张力。他深刻地坚信自己作为艺术家的重要性，在短暂的年轻岁月中完成了很多其他艺术家一生的艺术成就。他扎根在维也纳分离艺术中的“青年风格，和那一代人一样，他受到了维也纳*魅力和名气的艺术家古斯塔夫·克里姆特（Gustav Klimt）的影响。克里姆特也认识到了席勒那超凡脱俗的分才能，他开始支持这位年轻的艺术家。席勒在短短几年的时间里，便脱离了他导师的性感装饰影响，独具一格。1910年开始席勒进行了大量而创新的创作，坚定不移地揭示人类的形式——不仅仅是他自身——如此深刻，也展现了他正在经历更加心理的、精神和情感的解剖，而非物理上的解剖。他绘画了很多城镇、乡村的风景，也创作了不少正式的肖像画和寓言神话的人物。但正是他极其坦率的作品，有些时候甚至带有明显的色情，以及他与未成年的模特的合作使他在吹毛求疵的道德观念面前有些脆弱无力。在1912年，他因冒犯道德的嫌疑——包括绑架、强奸和伤风败俗——而锒铛入狱。严重的指控（差不多指的是伤风败俗）没有成立，但席勒却在监狱中度过了绝望的三个星期。德国的表现主义画家圈子对席勒的作品的接受程度不温不火。他的同胞奥斯卡·柯克西卡（Kokoschka）的待遇却要好得多。他崇拜慕尼黑艺术家蓝骑士（Der Blaue Reiter），但蓝骑士却断然回绝了他。之后，在次世界大战期间，他的作品逐渐小有名气。在1916年的一次事件中，他被柏林的表现主义杂志Die Aktion认定为左翼。席勒是一种嗜好。在很早的时候，他便被认为是天才，这为他招揽了一小群长期沉迷其中的收藏家和崇拜者。但虽然如此，多年来他的生活和经济状况都岌岌可危。他经常欠债，也偶尔会被迫用一些廉价的材料，在发黄的皱巴巴的纸上画画或是用硬纸板，而不是画家的画纸或画布。只有在1918年他才在维也纳拥有了次实质性的成功。悲剧的是，不久之后，他和他的妻子伊迪丝(Edith)便被1918年大规模的流感所击倒，席勒及其妻子和千千万万其他受害者一样都去世了。那年，席勒才年仅二十八岁。

让我们去发现保罗·塞尚（Paul Cezanne）的作品，他对于技巧和形式的探讨定义了绘画的后印象主义运动，也为立体主义的出现搭建了艺术的舞台。他大胆地运用亮丽的色彩，影响了之后好几代艺术家，也让今天的我们感到惊喜和愉悦。这本Mega Square收录了大量这位重要的法国画家的作品——当然，对于任何一位艺术粉丝来说，都是一份至上的礼物。

At fifteen, Turner was already exhibiting View of Lambeth. He soon acquired the reputation of an immensely clever watercolourist. A disciple of Girtin and Cozens, he showed in his choice and presentation of theme a picturesque imagination which seemed to mark him out for a brilliant career as an illustrator. He travelled, first in his native land and then on several occasions in France, the Rhine Valley, Switzerland and Italy. He soon began to look beyond illustration. However, even in works in which we are tempted to see only picturesque imagination, there appears his dominant and guiding ideal of lyric landscape. His choice of a single master from the past is an eloquent witness for he studied profoundly such canvases of Claude as he could find in England, copying and imitating them with a marvellous degree of perfection. His cult for the great painter never failed. He desired his Sun Rising through Vapour and Dido Building Carthage to be placed in the National Gallery side by side w

Picasso was born a Spaniard and, so they say, began to draw before he could speak. As an infant he was instinctively attracted to artist’s tools. In early childhood he could spend hours in happy concentration drawing spirals with a sense and meaning known only to himself. At other times, shunning children’s games, he traced his first pictures in the sand. This early self-expression held out promise of a rare gift. Málaga must be mentioned, for it was there, on 25 October 1881, that Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born and it was there that he spent the first ten years of his life. Picasso’s father was a painter and professor at the School of Fine Arts and Crafts. Picasso learnt from him the basics of formal academic art training. Then he studied at the Academy of Arts in Madrid but never finished his degree. Picasso, who was not yet eighteen, had reached the point of his greatest rebelliousness; he repudiated academia’s anemic aesthetics along with realism’s pedestrian prose and, quite naturall

Rembrandt is completely mysterious in his spirit, his character, his life, his work and his method of painting. What we can divine of his essential nature comes through his painting and the trivial or tragic incidents of his unfortunate life; his penchant for ostentatious living forced him to declare bankruptcy. His misfortunes are not entirely explicable, and his oeuvre reflects disturbing notions and contradictory impulses emerging from the depths of his being, like the light and shade of his pictures. In spite of this, nothing perhaps in the history of art gives a more profound impression of unity than his paintings, composed though they are of such different elements, full of complex significations. One feels as if his intellect, that genial, great, free mind, bold and ignorant of all servitude and which led him to the loftiest meditations and the most sublime reveries, derived from the same source as his emotions. From this comes the tragic element he imprinted on everything he pa

来吧，来翻来书页欣赏优美的画作，来探索后印象主义的创造性天才——文森特·梵高（Vincent van Gogh）。生动活泼的色彩，异想天开的画笔，这些画作让我们能够洞察梵高波动的内心世界。这本Mega Square的小册子带你领略这位成就非凡的画家。

马克·夏加尔出生于一个家风严谨的犹太家庭，人性被教条主义压抑。1910年他搬到巴黎，希望“探索万物”。对于他欣赏的作品，夏加尔率直地学习，他摆脱了自己的年轻的尴尬，却不失内心的真挚。他从细微处着手，认真反映世纪的变化，作品自然地带有塞尚的艺术感觉，莫迪利亚尼的精妙灵感，以及早期立体派的几何形画面结构的复杂感。夏加尔的画作里总有一些神秘感，那也许是他作品的本性，源于他的经历与记忆。

John Constable was the first English landscape painter to take no lessons from the Dutch. He is rather indebted to the landscapes of Rubens, but his real model was Gainsborough, whose landscapes, with great trees planted in well-balanced masses on land sloping upwards towards the frame, have a rhythm often found in Rubens. Constable’s originality does not lie in his choice of subjects, which frequently repeated themes beloved by Gainsborough. Nevertheless, Constable seems to belong to a new century; he ushered in a new era. The difference in his approach results both from technique and feeling. Excepting the French, Constable was the first landscape painter to consider as a primary and essential task the sketch made direct from nature at a single sitting; an idea which contains in essence the destinies of modern landscape, and perhaps of most modern painting. It is this momentary impression of all things which will be the soul of the future work. Working at leisure upon the large canva

伦勃朗的思想、生活和工作都是神秘的，我们只能够通过他的画作和他琐碎的或者说悲惨的不幸生活来猜测他的本性。悲剧的元素被他画在每一幅画上，不论主题；他的画作有不平等的也有崇高的，这可以被看做是这个混乱的存在所引发的不可避免的后果。然而在绘画方面，他并没有马上找到让我们赞美的在成熟的晚期作品中体现出的大胆、多样和原创性的方法来表达那些他不得不说的却又让人费解的东西。尽管有些微妙，但在他全盛时期，那些野蛮的判定也确实有助于他远离社会纷扰。他满怀好奇前往伟大的威尼斯，学习神话和宗教，他还从现实生活和其他人的画作吸收知识形成自己的风格。

皮埃尔-奥古斯特·雷诺阿生活和呼吸着的是一种新的艺术风格，对他来说，次印象派画展意义重大，他的画作得到艺术家们的肯定。1873年他搬到了蒙马特并在那里度过了一生，在那里有他需要的“外光”题材，他的模特，以及他的家人。在夏季，雷诺阿大量的室外画作是和莫奈一起完成，有时还有爱德华·马奈。在1877年，在第三次印象派画展，雷诺阿展示了超过二十余幅画作，并且在1880年后，他取得了“持续性的成功”。他受雇于富有的金融家，画作在伦敦和布鲁塞尔，以及1886年在法国乔治·帕蒂举办的第七届国际展览会上展出。

对于克劳德·莫奈，“印象派大师”的称号始终是他自豪的源泉，他始终是一名坚定的印象主义者直到生命终结，或许因为只坚持印象艺术的创作，放弃了很多机会但是他有惊人的天赋作支撑。他只创作风景画，并且他达到了同时代人无可以超越的完美程度。当一个记者问他的画室在哪，他回答道：“我的画室！我从来没有画室，我不明白为什么要把一个人关在屋子里。绘画，是的。涂色，不 。”然后，他指向塞纳河，指向山丘，指着小镇的剪影，他宣称：“这里就是我的画室。”莫奈的一个朋友，作家奥克塔夫·米尔博写到，他完成了一个奇迹，在画布上重新创造出了几乎不可能被捕获的景象：他用无数的倒影把阳光重塑。