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Feast: A History of Grand Eating
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Feast: A History of Grand Eating Hardcover - 2003 - 1st Edition

by Strong, Roy

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Details

  • Title Feast: A History of Grand Eating
  • Author Strong, Roy
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition number 1st
  • Edition 1
  • Condition Used - Good
  • Pages 349
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Houghton Mifflin, San Diego, CA, U.S.A.
  • Date November 3, 2003
  • Illustrated Yes
  • Bookseller's Inventory # 0151007586.G
  • ISBN 9780151007585 / 0151007586
  • Weight 1.37 lbs (0.62 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.31 x 6.23 x 1.2 in (23.65 x 15.82 x 3.05 cm)
  • Library of Congress subjects Food habits - History, Dinners and dining - History
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2003049935
  • Dewey Decimal Code 394.1

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Summary

Sharing a grand meal has always been a complex social event. Feasts have been used to celebrate significant occasions, to parade rank and hierarchy, and to flatter and influence people. There has always been a theatrical element to the feast as well-from the nude dancers who entertained dinner guests in ancient Greece to the restrained rigors of the Victorian dinner party.
Sir Roy Strong examines this cultural phenomenon with knowledge, wit, and style-beginning with the ninth century B.C., when a Babylonian emperor discreetly invited seventy thousand guests for a ten-day celebration, and ending early in the twentieth century, by which time feasts had become somewhat more modest. Always attuned to how these celebrations mirror the societies that hold them and to the way they reflect shifts in power and class, this beautifully illustrated book offers a lively and illuminating history of grand eating.
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First line

THE MOST NOTORIOUS description of a feast ever written comes in what survives of a first-century satire, Petronius' Satyricon The host is a former slave, profiteer, food speculator, braggart, drunkard and wife-beater called Trimalchio.

Media reviews

U. K. PRAISE FOR FEAST
"One of Britain's Living National Treasures . . . Strong is an acute observer of social nuance, and never less than a congenial companion through these millennia of convivial excess. Only the puritan-or the seriously dyspeptic-could fail to enjoy this book." -The Independent

"Strong has dug up these gems from what must have been a blizzard of documents and books, but his clear, scholarly eye has focused on the telling detail rather than showy frippery." -The Daily Telegraph