Showing 49–60 of 167 resultsSorted by latest
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£30.00
Twenty years ago, Benjamin Moser followed a love affair to an ancient Dutch town. In order to make sense of the place where he had ended up, Moser threw himself into the world of the painters of Dutch Golden Age, Rembrandt, Hals, and Vermeer among them, and found himself confronting the bigger questions those artists asked. Why do we make art, and why do we need it? Who, and what, is an artist? How can art help us see ourselves and others? And in a world without religion, can art provide a substitute for God? As he explored the Dutch museums, Moser met a crowd of fascinating personalities: the stormy Rembrandt, the intimate Ter Borch, the mysterious Vermeer. Now, in this colourful, brilliant and idiosyncratic book, he unveils the whole hidden world of the Dutch Masters (and one Mistress).
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£25.00
This is the story of Britain’s islands and how they are woven into its culture, history and collective psyche. From Neolithic Orkney and druidical Anglesey to the joys and strangeness of modern Thanet, we explore the furthest reaches of Britain’s island topography, once known by the collective term, Britanniae (the Britains). Alice Albinia takes the reader over borders and through disparate island cultures, past and present, listening to neglected voices and subversive stories. ‘The Britannias’ examines how the smaller islands have wielded disproportionate influence on the mainland, becoming the fertile ground of political, cultural and technological innovations which have gone on to change history throughout the archipelago.
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£35.00
Behind this great and famous artist is a volatile, voracious, nervous yet reckless man, largely unknown. Jackie Wullschläger’s enthralling biography, based on thousands of never-before translated letters and unpublished sources, is the first account of Monet’s turbulent private life and how it determined his expressive, sensuous, sensational painting. He was as obsessional in his love affairs as in his love of nature, and changed his art decisively three times when the woman at the centre of his life changed. Enduring devastating bereavements, he pushed the frontier of painting inward, to evoke memory and the passing of time. His work also responded intensely to outside cataclysms – the Dreyfus Affair, the First World War. This rich and moving biography immerses us in that passionate experience, transforming our understanding of the man, his paintings and the fullness of his achievement.
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£25.00
In this work, Nathan Thrall tells a gripping, intimate story of one heartbreaking day in Palestine that reveals lives, loves, enmities, and histories in violent collision.
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£25.00
Sam Bankman-Fried wasn’t just rich. Before he turned 30 he’d become the world’s youngest billionaire, making a record fortune in the crypto frenzy. CEOs, celebrities and world leaders vied for his time. At one point he considered paying off the entire national debt of the Bahamas so he could take his business there. Then it all fell apart. Who was this Gatsby of the crypto world, a rumpled guy in cargo shorts, whose eyes twitched across TV interviews as he played video games on the side, who even his million-dollar investors still found a mystery? Michael Lewis was there when it happened, having got to know Bankman-Fried during his epic rise. In this book, he tells us a story like no other, taking us through the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own.
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£20.00
What do we really know about our cousins, the Neanderthals? For over a century we saw Neanderthals as inferior to Homo Sapiens. More recently, the pendulum swung the other way and they are generally seen as our relatives – not quite human, but similar enough, and still not equal. Now, thanks to an ongoing revolution in palaeoanthropology in which he has played a key part, Ludovic Slimak shows us that they are something altogether different – and they should be understood on their own terms rather than by comparing them to ourselves. As he reveals in this book, the Neanderthals had their own history, their own rituals, their own customs. Their own intelligence, very different from ours. Slimak has travelled around the world for the past thirty years to uncover who the Neanderthals really were.
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£25.00
When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn’t. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger. Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity – all we have to meet the world – so unstable? To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world: one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting ‘the children’).
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£20.00
Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, Hobbes’ cold political vision continues to see through any number of political and ethical vanities. In his stimulating book ‘The New Leviathans’, John Gray allows us to understand the world of the 2020s with all its contradictions, moral horrors and disappointments through a new reading of Hobbes’ classic work.
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£25.00
The year is 1933. Hannah Arendt escapes Berlin, seeking refuge among the stateless gathering in Paris. Simone de Beauvoir reimagines the dance between consciousness and the world outside in a Rouen café. Ayn Rand labours in Hollywood exile on the novel she believes destined to reignite the flame of liberty in her adoptive nation. Simone Weil, disenchanted with the revolution’s course in Russia, devotes her entire being to the plight of the oppressed. ‘The Visionaries’ follows in its protagonists’ footsteps from Leningrad to New York, Spain at civil war to France under occupation, as each is uprooted by totalitarianism’s ascendence.
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£40.00
‘Europe and the Roma’ describes the ‘fascination and fear’ which have marked Europeans’ response to the Romani presence. Countless composers, artists and writers have responded to Romani culture and to fantasies thereof. Their projections onto a group whose illiteracy and marginalization gave it so little direct voice of its own has always been a very uneasy mixture of the inspired, the patronizing and the frighteningly ignorant. But it also shows the link between cultural violence, social discrimination and racist policies that paved the way for the genocide of the Roma.
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£40.00
The three millennia up to the establishment of the first imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BC cemented many of the distinctive elements of Chinese civilisation which are still in place today. Records of these early achievements, and their diverse and unexpected expressions, often lie not in written history, but in how people marked the end of their lives: their dwellings for the afterlife. Beautifully illustrated and drawing on the latest archaeological discoveries, ‘Life and Afterlife in Ancient China’ shows how the tombs form a mosaic of one of the oldest civilisations in the world.
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£25.00
Few images more shocked the French population during the Occupation than the photograph of Marshal Philippe Pétain – the great French hero of the First World War – shaking the hand of Hitler on 20th October 1940. In the radio speech after this meeting, Pétain said ‘It is I alone who will be judged by History.’ Five years later, in July 1945, the hour of judegment – if not yet the judgement of history – arrived. Pétain was brought before a specially created High Court to answer for his conduct between the signing of the armistice with Germany in June 1940 and the Liberation of France in August 1944. Julian Jackson uses Pétain’s three-week trial as a lens through which to examine the central crisis of twentieth-century French history.
