Abandoned unfinished and left to rot on Venice's Grand Canal, `il palazzo non finito' was once an unloved guest among the aristocrats of Venetian architecture. Yet in the 20th century it played host to three passionate and unconventional women who would take the city by storm. The staggeringly wealthy Marchesa Luisa Casati made her new home a belle epoque aesthete's fantasy and herself a living work of art; notorious British socialite Doris Castlerosse (nee Delevingne) welcomed film stars and royalty to glittering parties between the wars; and American heiress Peggy Guggenheim amassed an exquisite collection of modern art, which today draws visitors from around the world. Each in turn used the Unfinished Palazzo as a stage on which to re-fashion her life, with a dazzling supporting cast ranging from D'Annunzio and Nijinsky, through Noel Coward, Winston Churchill and Cecil Beaton, to Yoko Ono. Individually sensational and collectively remarkable, these stories of modern Venice tell us much about the ways women chose to live in the 20th century.

'They were not just reporters; they were also pioneers, and Judith Mackrell has done them proud.' -Spectator Going with the Boys follows six intrepid women as their lives and careers intertwined on the front lines of the Second World War. Martha Gellhorn got the scoop on D-Day by traveling to Normandy as a stowaway on a Red Cross ship; Lee Miller went from being a Vogue cover model to the magazine's official war correspondent; Sigrid Schultz hid her Jewish identity and risked her life by reporting on the Nazi regime; Virginia Cowles, transformed herself from 'society girl columnist' to combat reporter; Clare Hollingworth was the first English journalist to break the news of the war, while Helen Kirkpatrick was the first woman to report from an Allied war zone to be granted equal privileges to her male colleagues. Barred from official briefings and from combat zones, their lives made deliberately difficult by entrenched prejudice, all six set up their own informal contacts and found their own pockets of war action. In this gripping, intimate and nuanced account, Judith Mackrell celebrates these extraordinary women and reveals how they wrote history as it was being made, changing the face of war reporting forever. 'This is a book that manages to be thoughtful and edge-of-your-seat thrilling.' - Mail on Sunday 'Like the copy filed by her subjects, it is an essential read.' - BBC History Magazine

With over 2,600 entries, the second edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Dance is a unique single volume reference on all aspects of dance performance written by two leading dance writers, Debra Craine and Judith Mackrell. The work covers all aspects of the diverse dance world from classical ballet to modern, from flamenco to hip-hop, from tap to South Asian dance forms and includes detailed entries on technical terms, steps, styles, works and countries, in addition to many biographies of dancers, choreographers, and companies.
During the last thirty years the boundaries of dance have been radically redrawn. There has been an explosion of new activity within traditional forms like ballet, a stream of new dance languages invented by fresh generations of choreographers, and there is a growing appreciation of cultural dance forms from around the world. Fans today are likely to attend performances as varied as Spanish flamenco, Indian bharata natyam, Japanese butoh, classical ballet, and post-modern dance. With an emphasis on performance - the dance we see in our theatres today - readers will find both fact and analysis on a wide range of subjects, from styles of dance and the history of dance companies and their productions, to dancers, choreographers, and technical terms.
With 150 new entries, this new edition charts developments that have occurred over the last ten years, including the rise of new digital technology in the creation and staging of dance and the move to the mainstream of formerly fringe genres such as hip-hop, as well as the arrival of a new generation of dancers and choreographers to the scene.

Commissioned in 1750, the Palazzo Venier was planned as a testimony to the power and wealth of a great Venetian family, but the fortunes of the Venier family waned and the project was abandoned with only one storey complete. Empty, unfinished, and in a gradual state of decay, the building was considered an eyesore. Yet in the early 20th century the Unfinished Palazzo's quality of fairytale abandonment, and its potential for transformation, were to attract and inspire three fascinating women at key moments in their lives: Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse and Peggy Guggenheim. Each chose the Palazzo Venier as the stage on which to build her own world of art and imagination, surrounded by an amazing supporting cast, from d'Annunzio and Nijinsky, via Noel Coward and Cecil Beaton, to Yoko Ono. Luisa turned her home into an aesthete's fantasy where she hosted parties as extravagant and decadent as Renaissance court operas - spending small fortunes on her own costumes in her quest to become a `living work of art' and muse to the artists of the late belle epoque and early modernist eras. Doris strove to make her mark in London and Venice during the glamorous, hedonistic interwar years, hosting film stars and royalty at glittering parties. In the postwar years, Peggy turned the Palazzo into a model of modernist simplicity that served as a home for her exquisite collection of modern art that today draws tourists and art-lovers from around the world. Mackrell tells each life story vividly in turn, weaving an intricate history of these legendary characters and the Unfinished Palazzo that they all at different times called home.

By the 1920s, women were on the verge of something huge. Jazz, racy fashions, eyebrowraising new attitudes about art and sex--all of this pointed to a sleek, modern world, one that could shake off the grimness of the Great War and stride into the future in one deft, stylized gesture. The women who defined this age--Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead, Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Tamara de Lempicka--would presage the sexual revolution by nearly half a century and would shape the role of women for generations to come.In Flappers, the acclaimed biographer Judith Mackrell renders these women with all the color that marked their lives and their era. Both sensuous and sympathetic, her admiring biography lays bare the private lives of her heroines, filling in the bold contours. These women came from vastly different backgrounds, but all ended up passing through Paris, the mecca of the avant-garde. Before she was the toast of Parisian society, Josephine Baker was a poor black girl from the slums of Saint Louis. Tamara de Lempicka fled the Russian Revolution only to struggle to scrape together a life for herself and her family. A committed painter, her portraits were indicative of the age's art deco sensibility and sexual daring. The Brits in the group--Nancy Cunard and Diana Cooper-- came from pinkie-raising aristocratic families but soon descended into the salacious delights of the vanguard. Tallulah Bankhead and Zelda Fitzgerald were two Alabama girls driven across the Atlantic by a thirst for adventure and artistic validation.

But beneath the flamboyance and excess of the 1920s lay age-old prejudices about gender, race, and sexuality. These flappers weren't just dancing and carousing; they were fighting for recognition and dignity in a male-dominated world. They were more than mere lovers or muses to the modernist masters--in their pursuit of fame and intense experience, we see a generation of women taking bold steps toward something burgeoning, undefined, maybe dangerous: a New Woman.

The story of the splendidly unpredictable Russian dancer who ruffled the feathers of the Bloomsbury set and became the wife of John Maynard Keynes Born in 1891 in St Petersburg, Lydia Lopokova lived a long and remarkable life. Her vivacious personality and the sheer force of her charm propelled her to the top of Diaghilev's Ballet Russes. Through a combination of luck, determination and talent, Lydia became a star in Paris, a vaudeville favourite in America, the toast of Britain and then married the world-renowned economist, and formerly homosexual, John Maynard Keynes. Lydia's story links ballet and the Bloomsbury group, war, revolution and the economic policies of the super-powers. She was an immensely captivating, eccentric and irreverent personality: a bolter, a true bohemian and, eventually, an utterly devoted wife.