David Thomson Books

A collection of over thirty visual tricks and illusions involving colors, shapes, patterns, and perspective. Includes 3-D glasses and an answer key.

This guide to Hollywood catalogues major filmic trends from silent films of the 1920s through the Technicolor Age to the electronic era. Visual documentation captures the legendary stars and directors, and each chapter introduces the wider historical and social context of the age.

�Ingrid Bergman was far more than just a sweet, virtuous, �natural� Swedish girl � she was a dark sensualist over whom many men might go mad. Her very gaze delivered a climate of adult romantic expectation.� Adored by millions for her luminous beauty and elegance, at the height of her career Ingrid Bergman commanded a love that has hardly ever been matched, until her marriage fell apart and created an international scandal. Here renowned film writer David Thomson gives his own unique and original take on a woman who was constantly driven by her passions and by her need to act, even if it meant sacrificing everything.

The focus is on the revival of classic literature from the early 1900s and earlier, which has become rare and costly. Hesperides Press aims to make these timeless works accessible by republishing them in high-quality, affordable modern editions, preserving the original text and artwork.

Introduced by Seamus Heaney, The People of the Sea brings to life the legend of the mythical selchies, in beautiful, poetic prose

From the silent films of the 20's through the Technicolor age, to the domination of special effects, this book is a guide to Hollywood's movie industry. Chronicling the glitz, the glamour and the power struggles against a backdrop of the era's historical and social context, it is filled with classic photography of legendary stars and directors.

David Thomson visited the remote sea coasts of the Scottish Isles and the West of Ireland on journeys in search of the legends of the selchies - mythological creatures who transform from seals into humans. A magical world emerged, in which men are rescued by seals in stormy seas, take seal-women for their wives and have their children suckled by seal-mothers. Mysterious and fascinating, these stories retain their spell-binding charm through Thomson's beautiful prose. The People of the Sea is a timeless and haunting book, rich in rewards and surprises.

This book is both more and less than history, a work of imagination in its own right, a piece of movie literature that turns fact into romance.' Gavin Lambert was reviewing the first edition of David Thomson's monumental work in 1975. In the eight years since the third edition was published, careers have waxed and waned, reputations been made and lost, great movies produced, trends set and scorned. This fourth edition has 200 entirely new entries and every original entry has been re-examined. Thus the roster of directors, actors, producers, screenwriters and cameramen is both historical and contemporary, with old masters reappraised in terms of how their work has lasted. Each of the 1,000 profiles is a keenly perceptive, provocative critical essay. Striking the perfect balance between personal bias and factual reliability, David Thomson - novelist, critic, biographer and unabashed film addict - has given us an enormously rich reference book, a brilliant reflection on the art and artists of the cinema.

Set in the 1920s, this marvellously sensitive autobiography recreates the varied community of Nairn, with its fishermen and townsfolk, its crofters and its prosperous upper-middle-classes. Nairn has witnessed many of the triumphs and tragedies of Scottish history, and these are recalled with intuitive understanding.

Ultimately an examination on how movies affect the way we think and how film not only shapes our perceptions and our memories but in some ways comes to stand in for them, Suspects can be read as an unsettling examination of identity and the construction of self through the medium of narratives, or simply as a fascinating take on movie...