Magnificent Obsession - Helen Rappaport

This simply splendid book about the death of Prince Albert and how it shaped the monarchy was my Book of the Year 2011.  I reviewed it here.

Delighted to say that this is now available in paperback (love the cover) so if anybody was holding back on purchasing then please do grab a copy as soon as possible.   It is also available in Kindle, but much as I adore my own e-reader and don't want to depress sales, this is the kind of book you really need to have on your shelves and to turn the pages and see the photos properly.

I am a huge admirer of Helen's writing which is both scholarly and immensely readable, not a combination that comes to many, and have reviewed her as often as possible on Random.  I am, therefore, delighted to say that she shows no sign of flagging in her authorship and in January 2013 has another book out which sounds rather intriguing. 

This is what the blurb on Amazon has to say:

Book Description

Capturing the Light starts with a tiny scrap of purple-tinged paper, 176 years old and about the size of a postage stamp. On it you can just make out a tiny, ghostly image of a gothic window, an image so small and perfect that it ‘might be supposed to be the work of some Lilliputian artist’: the world’s first photographic negative. This captivating book traces the lives of two very different men in the 1830s, both racing to be the first to solve one of the world’s oldest problems: how to capture an image and keep it for ever. On the one hand there is Henry Fox Talbot: a quiet, solitary gentleman-amateur tinkering away on his farm in the English countryside. On the other Louis Daguerre, a flamboyant, charismatic French showman in search of fame and fortune. Only one question remains: who will get there first?

About the Author

Roger Watson is a world authority on the early history of photography. He is currently the Curator of the Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock Abbey and an occasional lecturer at DeMontfort University in Leicester. Helen Rappaport is a historian with a specialism in the nineteenth century. She is the author of eight published books, including Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs and Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death that Changed the Monarchy.

Another for my list....

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Random on Rappaport

Beautiful for ever - link here

Ekaterinburg - link here