The conception, creation, recording, and significance of the Beatles’ “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever”John Lennon wrote “Strawberry Fields Forever” in Almería, Spain, in fall 1966, and in November, in response to that song, Paul McCartney wrote “Penny Lane” at his home in London. A culmination of what was one of the most life-altering and chaotic years in the Beatles’ career, these two songs composed the 1967 double A-side 45 rpm record that has often b...

The candid and far-reaching interview with the public intellectual and author of Illness as Metaphor, conducted in 1978 Paris and New York.Over the summer and fall of 1978, Susan Sontag engaged in a series of deeply stimulating, provocative and intimate conversations with Jonathan Cott of Rolling Stone magazine. While the printed interview was extensive, it covered only a third of their twelve hours of discussion. Now, for the first time, the entir...

A wide-ranging collection of interviews and profiles from twenty years of Jonathan Cott’s remarkable writings“All I really need to do is simply ask a question,” Jonathan Cott occasionally reminds himself. “And then listen.” It sounds simple, but in fact few have taken the art of asking questions to such heights—and depths—as Jonathan Cott, whom Jan Morris called “an incomparable interviewer,” one whose skill, according to the great interviewer and oral historian St...

Leonard Bernstein was arguably the most highly esteemed, influential, and charismatic American classical music personality of the twentieth century. Conductor, composer, pianist, writer, educator, and human rights activist, Bernstein truly led a life of Byronic intensity--passionate, risk-taking, and convention-breaking. In November 1989, just a year before his death, Bernstein invited writer Jonathan Cott to his country home in Fairfield, Connecticut for what turned out to be his last maj...

Offering new insight into Lennon and Ono as individuals, artists and lovers, Days That I’ll Remember is a gifted music journalist’s memoir of a seismic time in music, politics and culture and one of the most incisive and affectionate portraits ever written about this world-altering couple.In this rich account of their relationship, Cott tells his own story alongside his many interviews with the couple. While most originally appeared in Rolling Stone, they usually did so in...

Susan Sontag's On Photography is a seminal and groundbreaking work on the subject.Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere, and the 'insatiability of the photographing eye' has profoundly altered our relationship with the world. Photographs have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a ...

The Nobel Prize–winner shares "a masterful journey through humankind's scientific coming-of-age" from the Greeks to modern times (Brian Greene).In this rich, irreverent, and compelling history, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg takes us across centuries of human striving to unravel the mysteries of the world. This sweeping saga ranges from ancient Miletus to medieval Baghdad and Oxford, from Plato's Academy and the Museum of Alexandria to the cathedral s...

"Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories" by Agatha Christie is a comprehensive collection featuring all the short stories that involve the famous Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. This collection spans many years and showcases Poirot's unique detective skills across various intriguing cases. Here is a general overview of some of the stories that are typically included in such a complete collection:

An award-winning journey through Johann Sebastian Bach's six cello suites and the brilliant musician who revealed their lasting genius.One fateful evening, journalist and pop-music critic Eric Siblin attended a recital of Johann Sebastian Bach's Cello Suites—an experience that set him on an epic quest to uncover the mysterious history of the entrancing compositions and their miraculous reemergence nearly two hundred years later. In pursuit of his musicolog...

In "The Education of Henry Adams," the author presents a reflective and autobiographical narrative that traverses the tumultuous years of American society from the Civil War to the dawn of the 20th century. Adams employs a unique literary style that blends historical analysis with personal introspection, utilizing a sophisticated yet accessible prose. The book defies traditional autobiography by presenting its themes through a lens of disillusionment and inquiry, revealing the complexities...

Karl Marx is a magisterial and defining biography that vividly explores not only the man himself but also the revolutionary times in which he lived.Between his birth in 1818 and his death sixty-five years later, Karl Marx became one of Western civilization’s most influential political philosophers. Two centuries on, he is still revered as a prophet of the modern world, yet he is also blamed for the darkest atrocities of modern times. But no matter in what light he is cast, the shor...

The Gilded Stage is a comprehensive tour of the world of opera. From its origins in the courts of northern Italy, to its internationally recognised position in modern culture, Snowman explores the social history of opera houses and impresarios, composers and patrons, artists and audiences.Even the most flamboyant composers could scarcely have imagined the global reach of opera in our own times. More opera is performed, financed, seen, heard, filmed and broadcast than ever ...