THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY: THE PREFACE.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art' aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impressions of beautiful things. The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism, is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
These are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.
There is no such a thing as moral or an inmoral book. Books are well written, o bad written.That is all.
The moral life of a man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desire to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.. No artist is even morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, an not life, that really mirrors.

EL GATOPARDO: G. TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA.

El mito de Lampedusa es el revés del mito de Rimbaud: no el muchacho genial que escribe sus libros y que luego se dedica a negocios más productivos y esóticos, sino el señor mayor, que trás una vida dedicada a la lectura y al estudio, escribe, casi a las puertas de la muerte, un tratado de melacolias.
Giuseppe de Lampedusa fué el último eslabon de una princispesca familia siciliana y el autor de una única novela... o mejor dicho de una novela única : El Gatopardo cuya existencia constituye uno de los más inquietantes enigmas de la literatura contemporánea : ¿ como pudo un noble arruinado y taciturno, envenenado de decadencia, allá en la aprtada Sicilia escribir una sola novela que acaba siendo una de las obras narrativas más hermosas y desoladoras de un siglo repleto de buenos y afamados novelistas ?. Y ¿quién fué ese noble arruinado y taciturno? . No fué Lampedusa un hombre de vida aventurera, ni un aristócrata tarumba, ni un escritor especialmente chiflado: su vida transcurrio por un cauce grisáceo y de poca vistosidad, como casi todas las vidad: una extraña e indisciplinada sucesión de alegrias y desdichas, de azares heteróclitosy de malentendidos con uno mismo y con el tiempo que auno le toca vivir.

KARL POPPER

El pensamiento de Karl R. Popper ( 1902- 1994) fraguado en la culta y convulsa Viena de entreguerras, constituye una referencia obligada para entender la filososfia del siglo XX. La publicación en 1934 de La lógica de la investigacion cientifica, fruto en gran parte de su posición discrepante con el Circulo de Viena, marcará la orientación de toda su obra epistemológica. En ella presenta ya su famoso criterio de demarcación entre lo que es cientifico ( cuyas tesis son refutables) y lo que no lo es, asi como su critica de la inducción y su concepción del método cientifico. El resto de su obra - señaladamentre Conjeturas y refutaciones ( 1963) y Conocimiento objetivo ( 1972) - consistirá fundamentalmente en una revisión y ampliación de sus propias tesis, consecuente con el que el mismo caracterizó como " racionalismo critico". Pero acaso Popper haya tenido mayor repercusión pública por su breve dedicación a asuntos de filosofía politica y social, plasmada en La miseria del historicismo ( 1944-45) Y La sociedad abieta y sus enemigos ( 1945). Ambos textos fueron escritos durante sus exilio a Nueva Zelanda y reflejan su evolución politica de joven socialista a maduro enemigo del legado histórico, politico y moral de de Platón Hegel y Marx. Su obra politica tuvo un gran impacto en el contexto histórico de la guera fria.

LORD BYRON, SELECTED POEMS

As the famous portrait by Thomas Phillips of Byron in Albanian costumesmakes clear, Byron himself impersonatedhis most famous portic creation ; the exotic, dashingly handsome, dangerous and seductive Byron hero. When visiting Teresa he had ben delighted by the very "magnifique" Albanian dresses as he wrote his mother, and purchased "some" for himself.
Reading the countenance for its animating sentimentrs and passions. Walter Scott and Coleridge were part of a burning Romantic-era romance with Byron, involving not only brother poets, but also women poets, among them Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, enthralled by his dark and dazzling celebrity.
Byron was born in London on February 22th, 1788, the son of Captain John "Mad Jack" Byron and his second wife, Catherine Gordon, a Scots heiress. The Captain having squandered hers fortune, the family withdrew to Aberdeen in 1789, and he soon decamped to the Continent. In 1798 the fifth Baron Byron "The wicked Lord" died and Byron unexpectedly inherited his title.

ABSOLUTE FRIENDS. - JOHN leCARRÉ

Ted Mundy, British soldier's son born 1947 in an shining new independent Pakistan, and Sasha, refugee son of an East German Lhuteran pastor, first become friends as students in riot-torn West Berlinof the late Sixties. They meet again, in the grimy looking-glass of Cold War espionage and, most terribly, in today's unipolar world of terror, counter-terror and the war of lies.
This is a book that offers a bitter warning even as it delivers inmense reading pleasure. No reader, whatever his politics, could fail to be moved by the passion and intelligence of le Carré.
Le Carré brilliantly manipulates an absorbing plot to give the reader a masterly tour of Cold War Europe. Few could fail to be thilled by the unbridled rage that fuels his storytelling. He has once again demonstrated his mastery of his chosen genre while at the same time giving lesser, ordinary novelists a masterclass in taking nothing for granted.

LA CONJURA DE EL ESCORIAL

Philip II ruled Spain between 1556 and 1598. In July 1561 he chose Madrid as the seat of the Spanish Royal Court, and the permanent residence of the Royal Family. For a host o reasons, the majority of the writers agree that Philip IIprobably made this decisicion to be closer to the El Escorial Monastery, whose construction and running was personally overseen by the monarch.
Once the Court was up and running Madrid became an indispensable stop for merchants, diplomats , soldiers, jesters , princes and members of the religious orders from all nations. The town underwent rapid growth, exceeding all expectations. By tthe end of the 16th Century, madrid had doubled in size and continue to grow at incredible rate. This growth was reflected with the building or squares, gardens, palaces, fountains. convents, churches, bridges etc., which in turn completely changed the makeup and appearance of the city. The different building projects took decades to complete and stretched across the reigns of several monarchs.
To experience Madrid in the times of Philip II, take a stroll through the history of a city that started life, as the seat of Spanish Royal Court. Today there are still numerous monuments and buildings that were designed during that period. Glimpse into the past as you walk past some of the most emblematic of these, sush as the Casa de La Panaderia ( The Bakery) the antigua Carcel de la Corte (former Gaol of the Sanish Court9, Imperial and Sacramento streets, the beautiful Plaza de la Villla of the area around the Descalzas Reales Monastery.

CALIBAN TO THE AUDIENCE : From the Sea and the Mirror.

Author : Wystan Hugh AUDEN.

If now, having dismissed your hired impersonators with verdicts ranging from laudatory orchid to the disgusted and disgusting egg, you ask and, of course, notwithstanding, the concius fact of his irrevocable absence, you instinctively do ask for our so good, so great, so dead author to stand before the finally lowered curtain and take his shyly rsponsible bow for this, his latest, ripest production, it is I _ my reluctance is, I can assure you co-equal with your dismay_ who will always loom thus wretchedly into your confuse picture, for, in default of the all-wise, all-explaining master you would speak to, who else at least can, who else indeed must respond to your bewildered cry, but is very echo, the begged question you would speak to him about.

THE WANDERER.
Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle
Upon what man is fall
In spring day-wishing flowers appearing
Avalanche sliding, white snowfrom rock-face
That he should leave his house
No cloud-soft hand can hold him, restraint by women;
But ever that man goes
Through place-keepers, through forest trees.
A stranger to strangers over undried sea,
Houses for fishes, suffocating water,
Or lonely on fell as chat,
By pot-holed becks
A bird stone-haunting, an unquiet bird.