David Thomson

"She could look demure while behaving like an empress. Blonde, with eyes like pearls too big for her head, she was very striking, but marginally pretty and certainly not beautiful ... But it was her edge that made her memorable-her upstart superiority, her reluctance to pretend deference to others." Bette Davis was the commanding figure of the great era of Hollywood stardom, with a drive and energy that put her contemporaries in the shade. She played...

"Cooper was heroic, of course, in his own mind as much as in his scripts. He was manly, tall, ruggedly handsome. He was a man for a fight." On screen, Gary Cooper, was the ultimate all-American hero: lean, laconic, and masculine, a lone sheriff battling his enemies in High Noon, or a tough individualist in The Fountainhead. Off-screen he bedded a host of leading ladies and carefully honed his image, making hundreds of movies and winning two Oscars...

Introduced by Seamus Heaney. David Thomson’s travels in the Gaelic world of the Hebrides and the west coast of Ireland brought him into contact with a people whose association with the sea and its fertile lore runs deep. They told of men rescued by seals in stormy seas, of babies suckled by seal-mothers, and of men who took seal-women for wives? stories centuries old, handed down to them by their forefathers. These mysterious and fascinating legends...

Contents Include: Growing Melons in Dung-beds or Pits; Sowing the Seed, and Management of Young Plants; Training and Stopping; Soil and Planting, etc; Moulding Up - Temperature; Impregnation, Watering, etc; Forms of Houses - Depths of Soil; Preparing the Plants, Planting; Watering; Temperature and Syringing; Ventilation; Impregnation, Training and Stopping; Very Early Forcing; Varieties; Insects and Diseases. This book contains classic material,...

From one of the greatest living writers on film, a magisterial look at a century of battle depicted on screen, and a meditation on the twisted relationship between war and the movies. In The Fatal Alliance the acclaimed film critic David Thomson offers us one of his most provocative books yet - a rich, arresting, and troubling study of that most beloved genre: the war movie. It is not a standard history or survey of war films, although Thomson turns...

Behind the scenes at the legendary Warner Brothers film studio, where four immigrant brothers transformed themselves into the moguls and masters of American fantasy Warner Bros charts the rise of an unpromising film studio from its shaky beginnings in the early twentieth century through its ascent to the pinnacle of Hollywood influence and popularity. The Warner Brothers-Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack-arrived in America as unschooled Jewish immigrants,...

How does one package and sell confidence in the stability of a nation riven by civil strife? This was the question that loomed before the Philadelphia financial house of Jay Cooke & Company, entrusted by the US government with an unprecedented sale of bonds to finance the Union war effort in the early days of the American Civil War. How the government and its agents marketed these bonds revealed a version of the war the public was willing to buy and...

With the global economic slowdown, business is entering unchartered territory and most business leaders and managers have not been exposed to prolonged recessionary pressures. However, there are models a unique set of companies that have grown in recessionary times for achieving growth in difficult markets, and David G. Thomson, growth expert and consultant, has identified them and their characteristics. What are these companies doing differently,...