Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.

Virginia Woolf

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Margaret Forster

‘I was born on 25th May, 1938, in the front bedroom of a house in Orton Road, a house on the outer edges of Raffles, a council estate. I was a lucky girl.’ 
 
So begins Margaret Forster’s journey through the houses she’s lived in, from that sparkling new council house, to her beloved London home of today. This is not a book about bricks and mortar though. This is a book about what houses are to us, the effect they have on the way we live our lives and the changing nature of our homes: from blacking grates and outside privies; to cities dominated by bedsits and lodgings; to the houses of today converted back into single dwellings. Finally, it is a gently insistent, personal inquiry into the meaning of home.

My Life in Houses

Jean Sprackland

'A refreshingly original meditation... I wish I had written it myself' Literary Review 
 
Graveyards are oases: places of escape, peace and reflection. Liminal sites of commemoration, where the past is close enough to touch. Yet they also reflect their living community - how in our restless, accelerated modern world, we are losing our sense of connection to the dead. 
 
Jean Sprackland - the prize-winning poet and author of Strands - travels back through her life, revisiting her once local graveyards. In seeking out the stories of those who lived and died there, remembered and forgotten, she unearths what has been lost.

These Silent Mansions

A life in graveyards

Shelley Klein

'A charming account of a daughter, a house and a fastidious dad' Sunday Times 
 
Shelley Klein grew up in the Scottish Borders, in a house designed on a modernist open-plan grid. With colourful glass panels set against a forest of trees, it was like living in a work of art. Her father, Bernat Klein, was a textile designer whose pioneering colours and textures were a major contribution to 1960s and 70s style. 
 
Thirty years on, Shelley moves back home to care for her father, now in his eighties: the house has not changed and neither has his uncompromising vision - or his distinctive way of looking at the world. Told with great tenderness and humour, this is Shelley's account of looking after an adored yet maddening parent and a piercing portrait of the grief that followed his death. 
 
'A sad, funny, utterly fascinating book about families, home and how to say goodbye' Mark Haddon 
 
'Original, moving and bracingly honest... often hilarious' Blake Morrison, Guardian 
 
'It is strange that grief should produce such a life-affirming book, but it has. Read it for the solace it contains, or for its captivating descriptions. Either way, it's a delight' Telegraph

The See-Through House

My Father in Full Colour

Adrian Tinniswood

'Glamour, scholarship and superlative storytelling [...] an enthralling read.' 
LUCY WORSLEY 
 
Adrian Tinniswood opens the doors on the excess, intrigue and absurdities of life in the late Victorian and Edwardian country house 
 
In the decades before the First World War, the owners of the nation’s stately homes revelled in a golden age of glory and glamour. Nothing lay beyond their reach in a world where privilege and hedonism went hand-in-hand with duty and honour. 
 
This was a time when the ancestral seats of ancient nobility stood side-by-side with the fabulous palaces of Jewish bankers and Indian princes, when dukes and duchesses mixed with aristocratic society hostesses who had learned to dance in the chorus line and self-made millionaires who had been raised in the slums of Manchester and Birmingham. 
 
The Power and the Glory explores the country house during this golden age, when Britain ruled over a quarter of the world’s population, when its stately homes were at their most opulent and when, for the privileged few, life in the country house was the best life of all. 
 
'A wonderful book.' 
JUDITH FLANDERS 
 
'Scintillating and brilliant, from a master of the subject.' 
GARETH RUSSELL 
 
**A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR**

The Power and the Glory

The Country House Before the Great War

Charlotte Van den Broeck

'Bold Ventures resembles a pop version of Iain Sinclair's psychogeography or Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer's anti-biography of DH Lawrence' Olivia Laing, GUARDIAN 
 
'A marvel: a monument to human beings continuing to reach for the skies, even after their plans dissolve in dust' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
In thirteen chapters, Belgian poet Charlotte Van den Broeck goes in search of buildings that were fatal for their architects - architects who either killed themselves or are rumoured to have done so. They range across time and space from a church with a twisted spire built in seventeenth-century France to a theatre that collapsed mid-performance in 1920s Washington, DC., and an eerily sinking swimming pool in her hometown of Turnhout. 
 
Drawing on a vast range of material, from Hegel and Charles Darwin to art history, stories from her own life and popular culture, patterns gradually come into focus, as Van den Broeck asks: what is that strange life-or-death connection between a creation and its creator? 
 
Threaded through each story, and in prose of great essayistic subtlety, Van den Broeck meditates on the question of suicide - what Albert Camus called the 'one truly serious philosophical problem' - in relation to creativity and public disgrace. The result is a profoundly idiosyncratic book, breaking new ground in literary non-fiction, as well as providing solace and consolation - and a note of caution - to anyone who has ever risked their hand at a creative act. 
 
'What a sensible, intelligent and beautiful book' Stefan Hertmans, author of War and Turpentine

Bold Ventures

Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy

Neil Oliver

For longer than recorded history there have been tales of spirits and of places where our hackles rise and our skin turns cold. 
 
Bestselling historian Neil Oliver travels the British Isles on a deliciously spine-chilling tour that spans several centuries and explores more than 20 sites - castles, vicarages and towers, lonely shorelines and forgotten battlefields - to unpick their stories.. 
 
Oliver invokes his family's history alongside that of kings and queens past as he probes why our emotions and senses are heightened in certain locations where the separation between dimensions seems gossamer thin. Our landscape is riven with these places, creaking from the weight of the secrets they hold, the echoes of tragedy and dark deeds . From Inverness to Devon, Co Dublin to Norfolk, Hauntings casts an enjoyably eerie glow with stories that, told generation after generation, are inextricable from place - and considers why they matter.

Hauntings

A Book of Ghosts and Where to Find Them Across 25 Eerie British Locations

Caleb Femi

What is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were special stops and searches you at 13 because 'you fit the description of a man' - and where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without ever touching the ground? 
 
In Poor, Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls and gentrifying neighbourhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth, and pays tribute to the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives. 
 
Above all, this is a tribute to the world that shaped a poet, and to the people forging difficult lives and finding magic within it. As Femi writes in one of the final poems of this book: 'I have never loved anything the way I love the endz.'

Poor

John Ruskin

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

To call Praeterita an autobiography is to tell only part of the truth. A book like no other, by oneof the greatest masters of English prose., it is less a narrative than the prismatic sotry of an extraordinary mind and a passionate heart told in terms of the author's aesthetic education. Ruskin was not merely the most important anglophone art critic and social commentator of the late nineteenth century: for his admirers - who included Proust - he was a Tolstoyan figure with the magic of an artist and the moral authority of a sage. Yet above all he was loved as a personality by friends and readers alilke, and it is the individual human qualitites which shine through the mercurial pages of Praeterita

Praeterita And Dilecta

Simon Jenkins

The story of Britain is revealed through its buildings, and yet the language of architecture is a mystery to all but a few. In this enlightening history, spanning castles and cathedrals to factories and railway stations, Jenkins translates the hidden narratives infused in the facades we walk past every day. 
 
Britain’s history has been formed by its politics, religion and society and these influences can be seen in the architectural styles that have shaped its landscape. From pre-Roman and the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, Classical and Gothic styles surged and retreated from favour only to then be challenged by a new player: Modernism, a style that reflected the stunning technological advances of the second half of the twentieth century. 
 
In this narrative history, Simon Jenkins – the bestselling champion of our national heritage – introduces us to the singular, eccentric and sometimes rather ordinary characters who shaped Britain. Jenkins teaches readers to see the world anew, demystifying the elitist language of architecture so that we can all appreciate the buildings around us.

A Short History of British Architecture

From Stonehenge to the Shard

Gaston Bachelard

Beloved and contemplated by philosophers, architects, writers, and literary theorists alike, Bachelard's lyrical, landmark work examines the places in which we place our conscious and unconscious thoughts and guides us through a stream of cerebral meditations on poetry, art, and the blooming of consciousness itself. 
 
Houses and rooms; cellars and attics; drawers, chests and wardrobes; nests and shells; nooks and corners: no space is too vast or too small to be filled by our thoughts and our reveries. 
 
With an introduction by acclaimed philosopher Richard Kearney and a foreword by author Mark Z. Danielewski.

The Poetics of Space

Rachel Morley

A transporting and gloriously entertaining journey through the hidden lives of England’s rural parish churches 
 
The poet John Betjeman coined the phrase ‘church crawling’ to describe his days out visiting churches. In the spirit of Betjeman, Morley’s book captures the magical experience of poking around a deserted rural church only to see it transform – through her expert eyes – into a portal to the past, one that brings England’s people and history to life in the most colourful, moving and unexpected ways. 
 
Through their wall-paintings and monuments, their graffiti and plaques, carved beams and crypts, their jumble of furniture and oddities, Morley shows these buildings to be the living expression of centuries of communal history and folk culture, time capsules of wonder and connection. The stories they contain are both boisterous and tender, raucous and sublime, transporting us to the ancient and medieval past, to revolutions and wars, to lives both glorious and humble. 
 
Often the oldest and most significant building in a settlement, churches are where for centuries births have been celebrated, relationships consecrated and deaths memorialised, where the great and enduring mysteries have been contemplated, and where the ghosts of countless, unnamed, normal lives are to be found. As Rachel Morley shows, the concentration of human experience within their walls is so rich and so layered, that they offer as close an encounter with the past as it is possible to get.

Church Crawling

The Secret Lives and Hidden Stories of England’s Churches

Christoph Keller

Most stories of disability follow a familiar pattern: Life Before Accident. Life After Accident. For Christoph Keller, it was different: his childhood diagnosis with a form of Spinal Muscular Atrophy only revealed what had been with him since birth. SMA III, the 'kindest one', allows those who have it to live a long life, and it progresses slowly. There is no cure. By the age of 25, he had to use a wheelchair some of the time. 'There were two of me: Walking Me. Rolling Me.' By 32, he could still walk into a restaurant with a cane or on somebody's arm. At 45, 'Rolling Me' took over altogether. 
 
Intimate, absurdist and winningly frank, Every Cripple a Superhero is at once a memoir of life with a progressive disorder, and a profound exploration of the challenges of loving, being loved, and living a public life - navigating restaurants, aeroplanes, museums and artists' retreats - in a world not designed for you. Threaded throughout are Keller's own photographs of the unexpected beauty found in puddle-filled 'curb cuts', the pavement ramps that, left to disintegrate, form part of the urban obstacle course. Those puddles become portals into a different, truer city; and, as they do, so this book - told with humour and immense grace - begins to uncover a truer world: one where the 'normal' is not normal, where disability is far more widespread than we might think, and where there always exist, just alongside our own, the lives of everyday superheroes.

Every Cripple a Superhero

Francis Pryor

Landscapes reflect and shape our behaviour. They make us who we are and bear witness to the shifting patterns of human life over the generations. Formed by a complex series of natural and human processes, they rarely yield their secrets readily. 
 
Bringing to bear a lifetime's digging, Francis Pryor delves into England's hidden urban and rural landscapes, from Whitby Abbey to the navvy camp at Risehill in Cumbria, from Tintagel to Tottenham's Broadwater Farm. Scattered through fields, woods, moors, roads, tracks and towns, he reveals the stories of our physical surroundings and what they meant to the people who formed them, used them and lived in them. These landscapes, he stresses, are our common physical inheritance. If we can understand how to make them yield up their secrets, it will help us, their guardians, to maintain and shape them for future generations.

Paths to the Past

Encounters with Britain's Hidden Landscapes

Christopher Woodward

Why are we so fascinated by ruins? Do we see them as jig-saws and riddles or romantic evocations of the damage of Time, complete with crumbling stone and ivy?  Do they stir us to remember past glory or warn against future arrogance? In this elegant, provocative book , the brilliant young art-historian Christopher Woodward  looks back to the start of the cult  in the eighteenth century, when follies were built in English landscape gardens,  artists and writers thrilled to Rome's poetry of decay, and in Paris the great chef Careme even served blancmanges shaped like  classical ruins. He takes us from Troy  and Pompei to  Sicilian palaces and Nazi fantasies,  and  whirls us forward to modern times - to the shattered Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes,  to Florida's Museum of Natural Phenomena, designed as a court-house dumped upside-down by a hurricane and to  Chelsea Flower Show's brand-new 'Millennium Ruin'.  Even the decay of an ordinary house can be as moving as the collapse of a temple - with its fascinating stories and characters, and its telling illustrations,  In Ruins is full of strange delights  and  startling surprises,  exploring the mysterious, melancholy charm of eternal fragments.

In Ruins

Owen Hatherley

'In the craven world of architectural criticism Hatherley is that rarest of things: a brave, incisive, elegant and erudite writer, whose books dissect the contemporary built environment to reveal the political fantasies and social realities it embodies' Will Self 
 
During the course of the twentieth century, communism took power in Eastern Europe and remade the city in its own image. Ransacking the urban planning of the grand imperial past, it set out to transform everyday life, its sweeping boulevards, epic high-rise and vast housing estates an emphatic declaration of a non-capitalist idea. Now, the regimes that built them are dead and long gone, but from Warsaw to Berlin, Moscow to post-Revolution Kiev, the buildings, their most obvious legacy, remain, populated by people whose lives were scattered and jeopardized by the collapse of communism and the introduction of capitalism. 
 
Landscapes of Communism is an intimate history of twentieth-century communist Europe told through its buildings; it is, too, a book about power, and what power does in cities. Most of all, Landscapes of Communism is a revelatory journey of discovery, plunging us into the maelstrom of socialist architecture. As we submerge into the metros, walk the massive, multi-lane magistrale and pause at milk bars in the microrayons, who knows what we might find?

Landscapes of Communism

A History Through Buildings

Giorgio Vasari

The painter and architect Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) was a pupil of Michaelangelo who worked mainly in Florence and Rome. He is famous today, however, as the author of LIVES OF THE PAINTERS, SCULPTORS AND ARCHITECTS, the work which effectively founded the study of art history and remains one of its greatest monuments. Vasari's distinctive blend of biography and criticism has exerted an immeasurable influence on all subsequent historians, but its value for contemporary readers consists as much in the liveliness and piquancy of the stories his book contains, and the vivid light it casts on the great masters of early Italian painting.

Lives of the Painters Boxed Set

Paul Hendrickson

From the award-winning and best-selling author of Hemingway's Boat – a ground-breaking biography that illuminates the life, mind and work of one of the icons of twentieth-century America. 
 
 Frank Lloyd Wright has long been known as both a supreme artist and an insufferable egotist who held in contempt almost everything aside from his own genius as an architect. But in this masterly work we discover a man dogged by traumas, racked by lies, and stifled by the myths he wove around himself: a man aware of the choices he made, and of their costs. 
 
 This is the Wright who was haunted by his father, about whom he told the greatest lie of his life. And this is the Wright of many other overlooked aspects of his story: his close, and perhaps romantic, relationship with friend and early mentor Cecil Corwin; the connection between the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 and the murder of his mistress, her two children and four others at his beloved Wisconsin home by a servant gone mad; and the eerie, unmistakable role of fires in his eventful life. 
 
 Showing us Wright's facades along with their cracks, Hendrickson helps us form a deep and more human understanding of the man, and a fresh appreciation of his monumental artistic achievements. With prodigious research, unique vision and his ability to make sense of a life in ways at once unexpected, poetic and brilliant, he has given us the defining book on one of the greatest creative talents of twentieth-century America.

Plagued By Fire

The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright

Kate Hubbard

‘The definitive biography’ Roy Strong 
 
The remarkable story of Bess of Hardwick, her ascent through Elizabethan society and the houses she built that shaped British architectural history. 
 
Born in 1521, Bess of Hardwick, businesswoman, money-lender and property tycoon, lived an astonishing eighty-seven years. Through canny choices, four husbands and a will of steel she rose from country squire’s daughter to Dowager Countess, establishing herself as one of the richest and most powerful women in England, second only to Queen Elizabeth. 
 
Bess forged her way not merely by judicious marriage, but by shrewd exploitation of whatever assets each marriage brought. Wealth took concrete form in her passion for building and she oversaw every stage of the construction of her four houses including Hardwick New Hall, her sole surviving building, which stands as a celebration of one woman’s triumphant progress through Elizabethan England. 
 
‘A dynamic portrait of Bess's life...’ BBC History Magazine

Devices and Desires

Bess of Hardwick and the Building of Elizabethan England

Christopher Somerville

‘Somerville is one of our finest gazetteers of the British countryside. He brings his formidable knowledge to bear on his personal quest to explore the cathedrals in this entrancing book’ 
The Spectator 
 
Christopher Somerville, author of the acclaimed The January Man, pictured cathedrals as great unmoving bastions of tradition. But as he journeys among Britian’s favourites, old and new, he discovers buildings and communities that have been in constant upheaval for a thousand years. Here are stories of the monarchs and bishops who ordered the construction of these buildings, the masons whose genius brought them into being, and the peasants who worked and died on the scaffolding. We learn of rogue saints exploited by holy sinners, the pomp and prosperity that followed these ships of stone, the towns that grew up in their shadows. 
 
Meeting believers and non-believers, architects and archaeologists, the cleaner who dusts the monuments and the mason who judges stone by its taste, we delve deep into the private lives and the uncertain future of these ever-voyaging Ships of Heaven. 
 
‘Somerville paints word pictures of exquisite quality’ 
Church Times

Ships Of Heaven

The Private Life of Britain’s Cathedrals

Simon Inglis

Simon Inglis is a fan with a mission. Fed up with being labelled an anorak, yet repeatedly led astray by the glimpse of a grandstand accross a crowded city, he searches the world for a deeper meaning behind his fascination with stadiums. 
 
What is it, he asks en route from ancient Olympia to Sydney 2000, about men and neatly-edged turf? Why are there more football grounds in Buenos Aires than public libraries? Why do Auckland residents resent their local stadium while those in Chicago celebrate theirs? And what can we learn from the Indians, the Irish and a huckster from Huston? 
 
The perfect companion volume to his bestselling books on football grounds, Sightlines is full of insight, wit, anecdotes and characters from a world beyond that every sports fan will recognise. It is proof that he is not alone.

Sightlines

A Stadium Odyssey

Dan Cruickshank

This is the story of the superbly elegant early eighteenth-century Pallant House in Chichester. It’s the story of 19 Princelet Street in Spitafields, built for a Huguenot silk-weaver, ultimately a synagogue. It’s also the story of – among others – a row of two-up, two-downs in Toxteth, a block of flats in London’s East End, and what Ideal Home’s magazine described in 1926 as Britain’s ‘first modern house’ – in Northampton. 
 
Together these buildings reveal the ways in which English homes have developed and changed over the past few centuries. At the same time, as Dan Cruickshank shows, they have much to tell us about the lives of their first occupants: their aspirations, their struggles, their place within society and relationship with their local community. The English House brilliantly weaves these two strands together, blending architectural and social history to create a series of brilliantly observed portraits of fascinating buildings.

The English House

A History in Eight Buildings

Peter Ackroyd

Much of Peter Ackroyd's work has been concerned with the life and past of London but here, as a culmination, is his definitive account of the city. For him it is a living organism, with its own laws of growth and change, so London is a biography rather than a history. It differs from other histories, too, in the range and diversity of its contents. Ackroyd portrays London from the time of the Druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century, noting magnificence in both epochs, but this is not a simple chronological record. There are chapters on the history of silence and the history of light, the history of childhood and the history of suicide, the history of Cockney speech and the history of drink. 
 
London is perhaps the most important study of the city ever written, and confirms Ackroyd's status as what one critic has called 'our age's greatest London imagination.'

London

The Biography

bell hooks

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

'There must be a revolution in the way we see, the way we look' 
 
In a collection of essays, critiques and interviews, bell hooks responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting and criticizing art and aesthetics in a world increasingly concerned with identity politics. hooks shares her own experience of the transformative power of art whilst exploring topics ranging from art in education and the home to the politics of space and imagination as a revolutionary tool. She positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be empowering within the Black community. 
 
Speaking with artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Alison Saar, and examining the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Art on My Mind is a generous and expansive body of work that has become increasingly relevant since it was first published in 1995. Here is an essential tool for understanding the contemporary moment, and a fundamental text for any reader concerned with making and sustaining a democratic artistic culture.

Art on My Mind

Visual Politics

Tristram Hunt

'History writing at its compulsive best' A. N. Wilson 
 
This is a history of the ideas that shaped not only London, but Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield and other power-houses of 19th-century Britain. It charts the controversies and visions that fostered Britain's greatest civic renaissance. 
 
Tristram Hunt explores the horrors of the Victorian city, as seen by Dickens, Engels and Carlyle; the influence of the medieval Gothic ideal of faith, community and order espoused by Pugin and Ruskin; the pride in self-government, identified with the Saxons as opposed to the Normans; the identification with the city republics of the Italian renaissance - commerce, trade and patronage; the change from the civic to the municipal, and greater powers over health, education and housing; and finally at the end of the century, the retreat from the urban to the rural ideal, led by William Morris and the garden-city movement of Ebenezer Howard.

Building Jerusalem

The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City

Henry Eliot

Quibe

As a rule, we take care not to get lost, so why should we willingly enter a maze? Illustrated with a single red line, Follow This Thread traces dozens of real and historical mazes, and their uses in literature, art and film, from Pac-Man and Picasso to Kubrick and Kafka. 
 
Henry Eliot reveals our abiding, ancient relationship with mazes and labyrinths, and unpicks the paradoxical psychology involved in walking them, combining the myth of the Minotaur with a quest for the legendary Maze King, who disappeared in 1979. The text coils around the pages, recreating the experience of walking a labyrinth, with its twists and turns, frights and fantasies.

Follow This Thread

A Maze Book to Get Lost In

Mark Vanhoenacker

A pilot's love letter to the world's greatest cities from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Skyfaring 
 
 
'A journey around both the author's mind and the planet's great cities that leaves us energised, open to new experiences and ready to return more hopefully to our lives' ALAIN DE BOTTON 
 
Growing up in his small hometown, Mark Vanhoenacker spun the illuminated globe in his bedroom and dreamt of elsewhere - of distant, real cities, and a perfect metropolis that existed only in his imagination. 
 
Now, as a commercial airline pilot, Mark has spent more than two decades crossing the skies of our planet and touching down in the cities he'd always longed to see. Imagine a City celebrates the metropolises he has come to know and love through the lens of the hometown his heart has never left. From the sweeping roads of Los Angeles and the old gates of Jeddah to the intricate, dream-inspired plan of Brasília, he shows us with warmth and fresh eyes the extraordinary places that billions of us call home. 
 
'Vanhoenacker... has a near-bottomless appetite for fresh sights and guidebook curiosities... Intimate and thoughtful' PICO IYER, AIR MAIL 
 
'A love letter to the cities he's returned to again and again... Vanhoenacker captivates when describing the silent beauty of a world glimpsed from above' Washington Post 
 
'Eloquent... A love song to cities the world over' Wall Street Journal

Imagine a City

A Pilot’s Love Letter to the World’s Greatest Cities

A Pilot Sees the World

Ian Nairn

TELEGRAPH BOOKS OF THE YEAR and OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014 
 
'This book is a record of what has moved me between Uxbridge and Dagenham. My hope is that it moves you, too.' 
 
Nairn's London is an idiosyncratic, poetic and intensely subjective meditation on a city and its buildings. Including railway stations, synagogues, abandoned gasworks, dock cranes, suburban gardens, East End markets, Hawksmoor churches, a Gothic cinema and twenty-seven different pubs, it is a portrait of the soul of a place, from a writer of genius.

Nairn's London

Adolf Loos

'But art has nothing to do with forgery, with lies. The paths of art may be thorny, but they are clean.' 
 
Ornament and Crime comprises a selection of essays by celebrated Viennese architect, Adolf Loos, and cover the full range of design - from architecture to jewellery, pottery to plumbing, craft training to printing. A great enthusiast and great hater, Loos and his ideas were absolutely fundamental to 20th century aesthetics, as well as being very enjoyable to read. He extols heroes and denigrates villains, as he makes quite clear: 'If you want to have a contemporary craft, if you want to have contemporary utility objects, then poison the architects'. 
 
The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever.

Ornament and Crime

Miv Watts

In The Maverick Soul, Miv Watts opens the doors to twenty-five authentic bohemian homes, occupied by some of the world&rsquo;s most inspirational free spirits. 
 
 From artists and musicians, to writers, actors, stylists, farmers and more, this is a collection of people who have the courage to live life on their own terms, and are comfortable in their own skin. 
 &#160; 
 From Paris to London, Sydney to New York and various other places across the globe, subjects include Marianne Faithfull, Simon Finch, Wendy Whiteley, Griffin Dunne, Linda Rodin and more. 
 &#160; 
 No one person is a reproduction of another; each of us is unique, shaped by the diversities of our own individual layers, and this book is a celebration of just that.

The Maverick Soul

Inside the Lives & Homes of Eccentric, Eclectic & Free-spirited Bohemians

Jason Hazeley

Joel Morris

These delightful books are the latest in the series of Ladybird books which have been specially planned to help grown-ups with the world about them. 
 
The large clear script, the careful choice of words, the frequent repetition and the thoughtful matching of text with pictures all enable grown-ups to think they have taught themselves to cope. The subject of the books will greatly appeal to grown-ups. 
 
The eight books in the series feature original Ladybird artwork alongside brilliantly funny, brand new text. The other books in the series are: 
 
- The Ladybird Book of Mindfulness 
 
- The Ladybird Book of Sheds 
 
- The Ladybird Book of The Hipster 
 
- The Ladybird Book of the Mid-Life Crisis 
 
- The Ladybird Book of the Hangover 
 
- The Ladybird Book of Dating 
 
- How it Works: The Husband 
 
- How it Works: The Wife

This delightful book is the latest in the series of Ladybird books which have been specially planned to help grown-ups with the world about them. 
 
The large clear script, the careful choice of words, the frequent repetition and the thoughtful matching of text with pictures all enable grown-ups to think they have taught themselves to cope. The subject of the book will greatly appeal to grown-ups. 
 
The eight books in the series feature original Ladybird artwork alongside brilliantly funny, brand new text. The other books in the series are: 
 
- The Ladybird Book of Mindfulness 
 
- The Ladybird Book of Dating 
 
- The Ladybird Book of The Hipster 
 
- The Ladybird Book of the Mid-Life Crisis 
 
- The Ladybird Book of the Hangover 
 
- How it Works: The Husband 
 
- How it Works: The Wife

The Ladybird Book of the Shed

biblio.categories.code

biblio.publicationStatus

biblio.brand

biblio.workEditions.format

biblio.ageRange

biblio.series.seriesName

biblio.imprint.description

biblio.type

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

Search Results

Hunt the Villain

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Fight or Flight (Book 21)

Mum, Tell Me Your Story

Little Black Classics Box Set

Features

Woolf on film

Reading lists

Where to start reading Virginia Woolf

The History of Hogarth Press

A gif of Virginia Woolf next to an image of a table laden with food

12 times Virginia Woolf understood the millennial condition

A collage of images of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf with illustrations of love letters

Virginia Woolf’s (not so) secret lesbian relationship – in her own words

Lifestyle shot of Love Letters: Vita and Virginia, standing on a white marble base against a pale pink wall. A green fabric ribbon is draped across the front of the shot, and a mug and pink flowers stand to the left of the book.

14 romantic quotes from the love letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

Weekly Penguin quiz: How well do you know Watership Down?

Quizzes

Weekly quiz: Are you a Virginia Woolf expert?

A black-and-white photograph of Jeanette Winterson's head and shoulders

Interviews

Jeanette Winterson on the books that changed her life

Nine brilliant pieces of gender-bending fiction

9 brilliant pieces of gender bending fiction

Six Vintage Books Every Aspiring Writer Should Read

An illustration of a group of people celebrating a giant exclamation mark

In defence of the exclamation mark!

Defending The Well of Loneliness

The humble picnic has proved a memorable literary backdrop

The best picnic scenes in literature

10 literary ways to explore London | Curiocity

10 literary hot spots to visit in London

Brilliant LGBTQ+ books you may not have discovered yet

Three copies of Mrs Dalloway on a background that replicates the cover's vivid watercolour splotches.

Why Mrs Dalloway is the perfect novel for our times

Books that defined the 1920s

Deborah Levy on the art of living

Queer classics to read during LGBTQ+ History Month

Life according to Jilly Cooper

From Jane Austen's Chawton to Bram Stoker's Whitby, this is the definitive literary tour of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Showing results for: ‘virginia woolf’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter