Musical Truth
£12.99With a signed bookplate
This extraordinary retelling of Black British history will dazzle readers of all ages.
£14.99
A history of women designers and consumers from 1900 to the present day.
The work of women designers has not traditionally been the focus of mainstream histories of design. By revealing the untold story of female design pioneers, this comprehensive introduction celebrates their crucial role in the history of modern processes of making.
Arranged chronologically, this guide considers the structural barriers to professional success and how women overcame these hurdles, charting the success of designers including Anni Albers at the Bauhaus, the architect Eileen Grey, interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe and fashion icon Mary Quant, focusing on the key subjects of architecture, craft, fashion, furniture, graphics, interior, product and textile design. The link between early twentieth-century revolutionary design and lifestyle is explored, as well the ideas of shopping and consumerism as a liberating activity. The important contribution of designers during and after the Second World War is also discussed, along with design activism, design collectives and the current success of women working transnationally in architecture and design.
With a signed bookplate
This extraordinary retelling of Black British history will dazzle readers of all ages.
When we look at the landscape, what do we see? Do we experience the view over a valley or dappled sunlight on a path in the same way as those who were there before us? We have altered the countryside in innumerable ways over the last thousand years, and never more so than in the last hundred. How are these changes reflected in – and affected by – art and literature?
Spirit of Place offers a panoramic view of the British landscape as seen through the eyes of writers and artists from Bede and the Gawain-poet to Gainsborough, Austen, W. G. Sebald and Barbara Hepworth. Shaped by these distinctive voices and evocative imagery, Susan Owens describes how the British landscape has been framed, reimagined and reshaped by each generation. Each account or work of art, whether illuminated in a manuscript, jotted down in a journal or constructed from sticks and stones, holds up a mirror to its maker and their world.
With 80 illustrations
This is a son’s search for his father. A familiar theme, but one that, across the generations, can occasionally unearth something rather powerful. In The Distance Between Us that son is Renato Cisneros, a talented writer and a well-known journalist, and that father is the former Army General Luis Federico ‘El Gaucho’ Cisneros, one of the most important figures in the recent history of Peru.
Renato Cisneros digs into his own family history to understand and demystify the figure of ‘El Gaucho’: the controversial Secretary during the regime of Francisco Morales Bermúdez and, shortly after, the country’s Minister of War. In this book, the intimate perspective and the passage of time reveal the unknown truths about a man, a family and an entire country.
The compelling story of over 5,000 years of Scottish art, told by Lachlan Goudie, renowned contemporary Scottish artist, broadcaster and presenter of BBC Four ‘s ‘The Story of Scottish Art’.
This is the story of how Scotland has defined itself through its art over the past 5000 years, from the earliest enigmatic Neolithic symbols etched onto the landscape of Kilmartin Glen to Glasgow’s fame as a centre of artistic innovation today. Lachlan Goudie brings his perspective and passion as a practising artist and broadcaster to narrate the joys and struggles of artists across the millennia striving to fulfil their vision and the dramatic transformations of Scottish society reflected in their art.
The Story of Scottish Art is beautifully illustrated with the diverse artworks that form Scotland’s long tradition of bold creativity: Pictish carved stones and Celtic metalwork; Renaissance palaces and chapels; paintings of Scottish life and landscapes by Horatio McCulloch, David Wilkie and Joan Eardley; designs by master architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh; and collage and sculpture by Pop Art pioneer Eduardo Paolozzi. Lachlan tells the compelling story of how and why these and many other Scottish masterpieces were created, and the impact they have had on the world.
A compelling and lively history that examines the lives of British artists from the late-19th century to today.
In This is Tomorrow Michael Bird takes a fresh look at the ‘long twentieth century’, from the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign to the turn of the millennium, through the lens of the artists who lived and worked in this ever-changing Britain. Bird examines how the rhythms of change and adaptation in art became embedded in the collective consciousness of the nation and vividly evokes the personalities who populate and drive this story, looking beyond individual careers and historical moments to weave together interconnecting currents of change that flowed through London, Glasgow, Leeds, Cornwall, the Caribbean, New York, Moscow and Berlin. From the American James McNeill Whistler’s defence of his new kind of modern art against the British art establishment in the latter half of the 19th century to the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson’s melting icebergs in London, he traverses the lives of the artists that have recorded, questioned and defined our times.
At the heart of this original book are the successive waves of displacement caused by global wars and persecution that conversely brought fresh ideas and new points of view to the British Isles; educational reforms opened new routes for young people from working-class backgrounds; movements of social change enabled the emergence of female artists and artists of colour; and the emergence of the mass media shaped modern modes of communication and culture. These are the ebbs and flows that Michael Bird teases out in this panoramic account of Britain and its artists in across the twentieth century.
Literary Lives is a book of decidedly unauthorised biographies by the acclaimed caricaturist Edward Sorel, who has long believed, that next to composers, writers are the craziest people in the world. The ten writers he has used to prove this thesis are Norman Mailer, George Eliot, Marcel Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lillian Hellman, Leo Tolstoy, Bertolt Brecht, William Butler Yeats, Carl Jung and Ayn Rand. Although these comic strips are clearly meant to amuse, and the facts uncovered are sometimes hard to believe, each and every statement is absolutely true.