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Maggie Nelson

**AS SEEN ON BBC2's BETWEEN THE COVERS** 
 
A Guardian Book of the Year 
 
Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation - Olivia Laing 
 
Bluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting along the way with famous blue figures, including Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Yves Klein, Leonard Cohen and Andy Warhol. While its narrator sets out to construct a sort of 'pillow book' about her lifelong obsession with the colour blue, she ends up facing down both the painful end of an affair and the grievous injury of a dear friend. The combination produces a raw, cerebral work devoted to the inextricability of pleasure and pain, and to the question of what role, if any, aesthetic beauty can play in times of great heartache or grief. 
 
Much like Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse, Bluets has passed between lovers in the ecstasy of new love, and been pressed into the hands of the heartbroken. Visceral, learned, and acutely lucid, Bluets is a slim feat of literary innovation and grace, never before published in the UK.

Bluets

Will Gompertz

Artists have learnt to pay attention. The rest of us spend most of our time on auto-pilot, rushing from place to place, our overfamiliarity blinding us to the marvellous, life-affirming phenomena of our world. But that doesn't have to be the case. 
 
In his typical engaging style, Will Gompertz takes us into the minds of artists - from contemporary stars to old masters, the well-known to the lesser-so, and from around the world - to show us how to look and experience the world with their heightened awareness. 
 
In See What You're Missing we learn, for example, how Hasegawa Tohaku can help us to see beauty, how David Hockney helps us to see colour, and how Frida Kahlo can help us see pain. In doing so we come to know the exhilarating feeling of being truly alive.

See What You're Missing

31 Ways Artists Notice the World – and How You Can Too

Imani Perry

Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways. Blue skies and blue water offer hope for a life beyond the current conditions. But blue is also the color of deep melancholy and heartache, echoing Louis Armstrong’s question, "What did I do to be so Black and blue?" In Black in Blues, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world’s favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey—an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology. 
 
Drawing deeply from her own life as well as from art and history, Perry traces both blue and Blackness from their earliest roots to their many embodiments of contemporary culture: The dyed indigo cloths of West Africa that were traded for human life in the 16th century. The mixture of awe and aversion in the old-fashioned characterization of dark-skinned people as "Blue Black". The fundamentally American art form of blues music, sitting at the crossroads of pain and pleasure. The blue flowers she plants in memory of a loved one. 
 
Attuned to both the harrowing and the sublime aspects of the human experience, Black in Blues is a poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original work from one of our greatest thinkers.

Black in Blues

How a Color Tells the Story of My People

Charlotte Higgins

A deeply personal, first-hand account of art, survival and resistance in wartime Ukraine 
Charlotte Higgins never imagined she would report on a war. But in the autumn of 2022, seven months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she travelled there to cover a literary festival. The experience would change her life. 
In a war fuelled by the attempted erasure of Ukrainian culture – one that has killed countless artists and created countless more – art has become a matter of life and death. In times of war, art and literature are where difficulty and complexity survive: where the most painful, unspeakable truths can still be faced. 
Drawing on two decades of cultural journalism, three years of reporting trips to Ukraine, and her training as a classicist, Ukrainian Lessons explores the profound connections between war, art and life. It is a searing, urgent and unforgettable book about what artists are prepared to risk – and why culture remains worth fighting for.

Ukrainian Lessons

Art in a Time of War

Josceline Dimbleby

A chance encounter with Andrew Lloyd Webber at a summer party sent Josceline Dimbleby on a quest to uncover a mystery in her own family's past. Her great-aunt Amy Gaskell was the subject of a beautiful dark portrait by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, but all that was known about Amy, according to family lore, was that she had 'died young of a broken heart'. 
 
In her search, Josceline discovered a cache of unpublished letters from Burne-Jones to her great-grandmother May Gaskell, Amy's mother.They formed a passionate and prolific correspondence, of up to five letters a day, from the last six years of the painter's life. As she read, more and more questions were raised: why did Burne-Jones feel he had to protect May from an overwhelming sadness? What was the deep secret she had confided to him? And what was the tragic truth behind beautiful Amy's wayward, wandering life, her strange marriage and her unexplained early death?

A Profound Secret

May Gaskell, her daughter Amy, and Edward Burne-Jones

Marina Picasso

Marina Picasso remembers being six years old and standing awkwardly in front of the gates of Picasso's grand house near Cannes. She was there with her father and eight-year-old brother to collect from her grandfather the weekly allowance that Picasso grudgingly gave his eldest son to support is family. Sometimes they were sent away and on other occasions, the gates would be opened and they would walk into the intimidating, exciting chaos of Picasso's studio to face the man himself and his unpredictable moods. 
 
Looking back, Marina can understand why Picasso had so little interest in his grandchildren; but at the time, she and her brother longed for him to love and understand them. Just a few miles away down the Côte d'Azur, they led a hand-to-mouth existence. Her father was a weak man, reliant on his father for everything and her mother lived in her own fantasy world; the family were therefore utterly dependent on Picasso. 
 
People assumed they were rich and privileged because they were Picassos and they were to live their lives under the burden of these assumptions. It was this that caused Marina's brother to commit suicide and when her father died Marina found herself in the ironic position of being one of the major heirs to Picasso's estate.

Picasso

My Grandfather

Laura Cumming

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD** 
 
Uncovering the mystery of her mother's disappearance as a child: Laura Cumming, prize-winning author and art critic, takes a closer look at her family story. 
 
'A modern masterpiece' Guardian 
 
Autumn 1929 - a young girl is kidnapped from a beach. Five agonising days go by before she is discovered safe and well in a nearby village. The child remembers nothing of these events and at home, nobody ever speaks of them again. 
 
Decades later, Laura Cumming delves into the mystery surrounding her mother's disappearance. Examining everything from old family photos to letters, tickets and recipes, she uncovers a series of secrets and lies perpetuated not just by her family but by the whole community and in doing so unlocks a mystery almost a century old. 
 
'A moving, many-sided human story of great depth and tenderness, and a revelation of how art enriches life' Sunday Times 
 
Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 
Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize

On Chapel Sands

My mother and other missing persons

Hermione Lee

The new, and only, biography of Booker Prize-winning novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, from one of our leading literary biographers 
 
Anita Brookner, art historian and novelist, was an intensely private person, who kept her friends in separate compartments and had secrets she never revealed. She grew tired of the assumption that her lonely heroines were versions of herself, and she resisted autobiographical readings of her books. But she gave away many intriguing glimpses of her own family life in interviews, and her own feelings, experiences and preoccupations fill her writings. Her life-story is both hidden and exposed. 
 
 
Born in south London in 1928, Brookner came from a family of middle-class, Polish-Jewish immigrants, with anxious, unhappy parents. Well into her thirties, she nursed her invalid mother, with a painful mixture of love and resentment. She would have liked a marriage and children; instead, she lived alone and became a great writer of solitude, self-knowledge and survival. For many years she worked at the Courtauld Institute, teaching French Romanticism, and influencing generations of students. In her fifties she began to write fiction: her first novel was the wryly titled A Start in Life. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac; after that, a novel appeared almost every year until her eighties. 
 
In her lifetime Brookner was seen as an object of wonder and fascination. She was a formidable and inspiring teacher, an enormously knowledgeable, witty and perceptive art-historian and critic, and a novelist like no other. Her extraordinary fictions of heroic solitude, romantic passion, longing, and lethal social comedy, written with elegance and impeccable control, gained her a devoted following. But she also attracted some hostility and bafflement, often from readers challenged by the unsentimental realism of her fierce, strange and moving books. 
 
In this groundbreaking biography, Hermione Lee reveals the full story of a brilliant, idiosyncratic and complex woman and goes deep into Brookner’s marvellous work, in all its stylishness and daring.

Anita Brookner

Art and Life

Liliane Lijn

In 1958, talented and fearless and eighteen years old, Liliane Lijn left her family home and moved to Paris alone to become an artist. Once there, she found an art world filled with the wild energy of creative revolution – peopled and controlled almost entirely by men. 
 
In the years that followed, Lijn built a life for herself in the city. She embraced the hectic bohemian spirit of the Left Bank. She befriended artists, painters, poets, gallerists and revolutionaries, as the late Surrealists gave way to a burgeoning Pop Art movement. She had disastrous love affairs with difficult men. She experimented boldly, creating ground-breaking sculptures with light, text and movement. And as her profile steadily grew, she was told again and again that there are no great women artists: ‘There never have been.’ 
 
Liquid Reflections is her memoir of these years of experiment and adventure – years when Lijn was constantly in motion, from Paris to New York to Venice to Athens, from paper and canvas to wax and Perspex to oil and water. In love, she became pregnant but rebelled against the idea that a woman could not be both a great artist and a mother. 
 
And she sought – and found – radical pleasure in the act of creative expression and in the living, sensuous world around her. 
 
Based on personal diaries from the time, this is a riveting and revelatory account of a singular coming of age: a glittering portrait of the artist as a young woman. 
 
'I wrote LIQUID REFLECTIONS because I wanted to take my readers on the journey I made to become an artist. It's the story of an idealistic, inspired young woman who refuses to accept the prejudices of her time. Becoming an artist was also a search for my own identity…’ Liliane Lijn

Liquid Reflections

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was a close friend of Roger Fry for many years - after his death she wrote this loving account of his passion for art, his own painting, and his challenging critical theories. Born in 1866, he was primarily responsible for bringing the post-Impressionist movement to Britain, organising the first exhibitions and establishing the Omega workshops: he was also curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York. Virginia Woolf describes his career and also brings to life Fry's private self, his pain, his resilience, his generosity of spirit, which made him such a powerful influence on his own and future generations.

Roger Fry

John Batchelor

An entertaining account of an extraordinary cultural and historical event: - the establishment by one highly intelligent woman of a salon of the arts in a beautiful country house in Northumberland. Wallington Hall was remote from the major centres of artistic activity, such as London and Edinburgh. Yet Pauline Trevelyan single handedly made it the focus of High Victorian cultural life. Among those she attracted into her orbit were Ruskin, Swinburne, the Brownings, the Rossettis (Dante Gabriel, Christina and William Michael), Carlyle, and Millais and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 
The penniless but clever daughter of a clergyman, Pauline Jermyn married an older man whom she met through a shared passion for geology. Sir Walter Trevelyan was a philanthropist, teetotal, vegetarian, pacificist ... and very rich. With his encouragement, she collected works of art and decorated Wallington Hall with a cycle of vast paintings on the history of Northumberland. She was a patron of the arts who provided a fostering environment for many of the geniuses of her day. After her death, Swinburne wept every time her name was mentioned.

Lady Trevelyan and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The White Pube

Gabrielle de la Puente

Zarina Muhammad

At a moment in which working as a professional artist is an increasingly unattainable luxury, art criticism duo The White Pube investigate why so many artists try anyway. Labelled “the Diet Prada of the art world” by British Vogue, in Poor Artists writers Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad ridicule a contemporary art world that has turned art into artworks, art schools into art universities, and creative expression into cut-throat competition. 
 
Poor Artists follows aspiring artist Quest Talukdar as she embarks on a surreal journey into the creative industry, where she must decide whether she cares more about success or staying true to herself. Featuring dialogue from anonymous interviews with real people who have all had to ask themselves the same question – including a Turner Prize winner or two, a recluse, a Venice Biennale fraudster, a communist messiah, a ghost, and a literal knight – The White Pube tell the story of art like never before.

Poor Artists

'Charlotte Higgins's Red Thread is a masterwork' Ali Smith 
 
A thrillingly original, labyrinthine journey through myth, art, literature, history, archaeology and memoir. 
 
 The tale of how the hero Theseus killed the Minotaur, finding his way out of the labyrinth using Ariadne's ball of red thread, is one of the most intriguing, suggestive and persistent of all myths, and the labyrinth - the beautiful, confounding and terrifying building created for the half-man, half-bull monster - is one of the foundational symbols of human ingenuity and artistry. 
 
 Charlotte Higgins, author of the Baillie Gifford-shortlisted Under Another Sky, tracks the origins of the story of the labyrinth in the poems of Homer, Catullus, Virgil and Ovid, and with them builds an ingenious edifice of her own. Along the way, she traces the labyrinthine ideas of writers from Dante and Borges to George Eliot and Conan Doyle, and of artists from Titian and Velázquez to Picasso and Eva Hesse. 
 
 Her intricately constructed narrative asks what it is to be lost, what it is to find one's way, and what it is to travel the confusing and circuitous path of a lived life. Red Thread is, above all, a winding and unpredictable route through the byways of the author's imagination - one that leads the reader on a strange and intriguing journey, full of unexpected connections and surprising pleasures.

Red Thread

On Mazes and Labyrinths

Stephen Greenblatt

Selected as a book of the year 2017 by The Times and Sunday Times 
 
What is it about Adam and Eve’s story that fascinates us? What does it tell us about how our species lives, dies, works or has sex? 
 
The mythic tale of Adam and Eve has shaped conceptions of human origins and destiny for centuries. Stemming from a few verses in an ancient book, it became not just the foundation of three major world faiths, but has evolved through art, philosophy and science to serve as the mirror in which we seem to glimpse the whole, long history of our fears and desires. 
 
In a quest that begins at the dawn of time, Stephen Greenblatt takes us from ancient Babylonia to the forests of east Africa. We meet evolutionary biologists and fossilised ancestors; we grapple with morality and marriage in Milton’s Paradise Lost; and we decide if the Fall is the unvarnished truth or fictional allegory.

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

The Story that Created Us

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

Shumon Basar

Douglas Coupland

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Planet Earth needs a self-help book, and this is it 
 
The future is happening to us far faster than we thought it would and this book explains why 
 
Fifty years after Marshall McLuhan's ground breaking book on the influence of technology on culture The Medium is the Massage, Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist extend the analysis to today, touring the world that's redefined by the Internet, decoding and explaining what they call the 'extreme present'. 
 
The Age of Earthquakes is a quick-fire paperback, harnessing the images, language and perceptions of our unfurling digital lives. The authors invent a glossary of new words to describe how we are truly feeling today; and 'mindsource' images and illustrations from over 30 contemporary artists. Wayne Daly's striking graphic design imports the surreal, juxtaposed, mashed mannerisms of screen to page. It's like a culturally prescient, all-knowing email to the reader: possibly the best email they will ever read. 
 
Welcome to The Age of Earthquakes, a paper portrait of Now, where the Internet hasn't just changed the structure of our brains these past few years, it's also changing the structure of the planet. This is a new history of the world that fits perfectly in your back pocket.

The Age of Earthquakes

A Guide to the Extreme Present

Orlando Figes

The Europeans is a richly enthralling, panoramic cultural history of nineteenth-century Europe, told through the intertwined lives of three remarkable people: a great singer, Pauline Viardot, a great writer, Ivan Turgenev, and a great connoisseur, Pauline's husband Louis. Their ambitious lives and complex loves were bound up with an astonishing array of writers, composers and painters all trying to make their way through the exciting, prosperous European cultural landscape that came about as a result of huge economic and technological change. This culture - through trains, telegraphs and printing - allowed artists of all kinds to exchange ideas and make a living, as they travelled across the whole continent from the British Isles to Imperial Russia. 
 
The Europeans is Orlando Figes' masterpiece. It describes huge changes through intimate details, little-known stories and through the lens of Turgenev and the Viardots' touching, strange love triangle. Events which we now see as central to European high culture are made completely fresh, allowing the reader to revel in the sheer precariousness with which the great salons, premieres and bestsellers came into existence.

The Europeans

Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture

Evelyn Waugh

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Evelyn Waugh's first book, Rossetti, is an intimate account of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's tragic and mysterious life: the story behind some of the greatest poetry and painting of the nineteenth century. Shot through with Waugh's charm and dry wit, and illuminated by his sense of kinship with the Pre-Raphaelite artist, Rossetti is at once a brilliant reevaluation of Rossetti's work and legacy, as well as a bold gesture of defiance against the art establishment of the 1920s.

Rossetti

His Life and Works

Hisham Matar

Shortly after completing his searing work of non-fiction, The Return, Hisham Matar set off for Siena, a city he had never visited before. His plan was to see the paintings of the Sienese school, to immerse himself in the work of artists he admired perhaps above all others. 
 
This month in Siena would be an extraordinary period in the life of this writer: an immersion in art, a consideration of grief and violence, an intimate encounter with the city and its inhabitants. Hisham Matar's short book is the story of how art can console and disturb in equal measure. It is a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and the human condition.

A Month in Siena

Michael Levey

In this evocative memoir Michael Levey recreates a between-the-wars English childhood outwardly ordinary and undramatic, but inwardly rich, stirring, sometimes bewildering, and altogether far from typical, not least in its pervasive Catholic ethos. An only child, intensely self-aware, devout, yet questioning, as well as imaginative, drawn to Shakespeare and the theatre, and to all things visual, he grew up in Leigh-on-Sea on the Essex coast.  He attended a succession of Catholic schools, before joining the Army at the very end of the War.  Notably entertaining is his account of service life, spent partly in Egypt, as is the final chapter, which finds him arriving at the National Gallery in London, to begin a career that would culminate in his being appointed Director.With its precise evocation of a child's relationship with the world around him and with his parents - a couple united in reticent affection and intelligence, but totally opposed in temperament - The Chapel is on Fire will surely become a classic in the literature of childhood.

The Chapel is on Fire

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

Celia Paul

A unique combination of memoir and artistic biography, interspersed with original artworks, from the acclaimed artist and author of SELF-PORTRAIT. 
 
We are both painters. We can connect to each other through images, in our own unvoiced language. But I will try and reach you with words. Through talking to you I may come alive and begin to speak. 
 
Celia Paul has felt a lifelong connection to the artist Gwen John. There are extraordinary parallels in their lives and work. Both have always made art on their own terms. Both were involved with older male artists. Both worked hard to keep themselves and the sacred flame of their creativity from being extinguished by others. 
 
Letters to Gwen John is Paul&rsquo;s imagined correspondence with this groundbreaking painter. These intimate, passionate, haunting letters offer a unique form of memoir and conversation, and an unforgettable insight into a life devoted to making art. 
 
'Beautiful, tender, and riveting. I have taken this book into my heart' 
CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT 
 
'A beguiling, singular work of art &ndash; a portrait of two lives, entwined through time and space' 
DAILY TELEGRAPH

Letters to Gwen John

Bernadette Murphy

In December 1888, Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear. It is the most famous story about any artist in history. But what really happened on that dark winter night? 
 
In Van Gogh's Ear, Bernadette Murphy reveals the truth. She takes us on an extraordinary journey from major museums to forgotten archives, vividly reconstructing Van Gogh's world. We meet police inspectors and café patrons, prostitutes and madams, his beloved brother Theo and fellow painter Paul Gauguin. 
 
Why did Van Gogh commit such a brutal act? Who was the mysterious 'Rachel' to whom he presented his macabre gift? Did he really remove his entire ear? Murphy answers these important questions with her groundbreaking discoveries, offering a stunning portrait of an artist edging towards madness in his pursuit of excellence. 
 
BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 
PRIMETIME BBC2 DOCUMENTARY WITH JEREMY PAXMAN

Van Gogh's Ear

The True Story

Jean-Paul Kauffmann

Near the end of his life, the great Romantic artist Eug-ne Delacroix (1798-1863) painted one of the most enigmatic episodes from the Bible: Jacob wrestling with the angel. This painting, which decorates the wall of the Chapel of the Holy Angels in the Paris church of Saint-Sulpice, is Delacroix's "spiritual testament". But Sain-Sulpice is a mysterious church where everything happens behind the scenes. A fan of Inspector Maigret, Jean-Paul Kauffmann investigates the painting and the church, paying particular attention to its hidden history. He searches for clues in a bar in Dieppe, a castle in Quercy, a village in the Argonne, an oak tree in the forest at S-nart, even a golf course in the Loiret. The trail leads him to an art critic, a lecturer at the Louvre, and a sculptor who has a studio in the attic of Saint-Sulpice itself. All these intertwining threads finally come together in a central motif in which Kauffmann himself is involved. There comes a time in which everyone must wrestle with the angel.

Wrestling With The Angel

WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK BIOGRAPHY PRIZE 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 
 
Selected as a Book of the Year in the Herald 
 
In 1845, a Reading bookseller named John Snare came across the dirt-blackened portrait of a prince at a country house auction. Suspecting that it might be a long-lost Velázquez, he bought the picture and set out to discover its strange history - a quest that led from fame to ruin and exile. 
 
Fusing detection and biography, this book shows how and why great works of art can affect us, even to the point of mania. And on the trail of John Snare, Cumming makes a surprising discovery of her own. But most movingly, The Vanishing Man is an eloquent and passionate homage to the Spanish master Velázquez, bringing us closer to the creation and appreciation of his works than ever before.

The Vanishing Man

In Pursuit of Velazquez

Marc Chagall

Chagall was born in Witebsk in White Russia, the son of a herring merchant who lived opposite a laundress and a chimney sweep. After the Revolution, while waiting for emigration papers, he wrote his autobiography at the age of 34. 
 
My Life reads like one of Chagall's paintings: emotional, fragmentary, humorous, colourful and dream-like, soaked in nostalgia for Jewish small-town society, familiar to us from The Fiddler on the Roof. It combines a colourist's eye for detail, an artist's passion for life, a satirical sense of humour with a backdrop of Belle Époque Paris and revolutionary Russia. The character sketches are magnificent. 
 
Chagall produced 50 illustrations which accompany the text. The first English translation of My Life was published in 1965 and it has been in print ever since.

My Life

Edmund de Waal

From the author of the bestselling phenomenon The Hare with Amber Eyes 
 
As you may have guessed by now, I am not in your house by accident. I know your street rather well. 
 
 The Camondos lived just a few doors away from Edmund de Waal's forebears. Like de Waal's family, they were part of belle époque high society. They were also targets of anti-Semitism. 
 
Count Moïse de Camondo created a spectacular house filled with art for his son to inherit. Over a century later, de Waal explores the lavish rooms and detailed archives and, in a haunting series of letters addressed to Camondo, he tells us what happened next. 
 
'Illuminating... A wonderful tribute to a family and to an idea' Guardian 
 
'Letters to Camondo immerses you in another age... Dazzling' Financial Times

Letters to Camondo

Ai Weiwei

A FAMILY STORY AND THE TALE OF A NATION. 
 
 
Ai Weiwei - one of the world's most famous artists and activists - weaves a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own life and that of his father, Ai Qing, the nation's most celebrated poet. 
 
'Engrossing...a remarkable story' Sunday Times 
 
Here, through the sweeping lens of his own and his father's life, Ai Weiwei tells an epic tale of China over the last 100 years, from the Cultural Revolution to the modern-day Chinese Communist Party. 
 
Here is the story of a childhood spent in desolate exile after his father, Ai Qing, once China's most celebrated poet, fell foul of the authorities. Here is his move to America as a young man and his return to China, his rise from unknown to art-world superstar and international rights activist. Here is his extraordinary account of how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime. 
 
It's the story of a father and a son, of exceptional creativity and passionate belief, and of how two indomitable spirits enabled the world to understand their country. 
 
'A story of inherited resilience and self-determination' Observer 
 
'A majestic and exquisitely serious masterpiece about his China... One of the great voices of our time' Andrew Solomon 
 
'Intimate, unflinching...an instant classic' Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows

Two lives, one nation and a century of art under tyranny in China

The story of two lives, one nation, and a century of art under tyranny

Grayson Perry

'I have never read such a stimulating short guide to art' Lynn Barber, Sunday Times 
 
Now Grayson Perry is a fully paid-up member of the art establishment, he wants to show that any of us can appreciate art (after all, there is a reason he's called this book Playing to the Gallery and not 'Sucking up to an Academic Elite'). Based on his hugely popular BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures and full of pictures, this funny, personal journey through the art world answers the basic questions that might occur to us in an art gallery but seem too embarrassing to ask.

Playing to the Gallery

Helping Contemporary Art in its Struggle to Be Understood

Patrick Bringley

** THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND SUNDAY TIMES ART BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 ** 
 
A revelatory portrait of a great museum and the moving story of one guard's quest to find solace and meaning in art 
 
'Who would have thought that the outstanding art book of you would have been written not by a curator or an art historian or even an artist - but by a museum guard?' Sunday Times 
 
When Patrick’s older brother dies at twenty-six, all he wants is to retreat. So, he does. He quits his job and seeks refuge in the most beautiful place he can think of: New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. 
 
All the Beauty in the World recounts Patrick’s time as a museum guard, keeping quiet vigil over some of our greatest treasures and uncovering the Met’s innermost secrets. As his connection to the art and the life that swirls around it grows, so does Patrick – and gradually he emerges transformed by heartbreak, community and the power of art to illuminate life in all its pain, pleasure and hope. 
 
'As luminous as the old masters paintings' Daily Mail 
'Consoling and beautiful' Guardian 
'Marvellous' Daily Telegraph 
'A beautiful tale about beauty. It is also a tale about grief, balancing solitude and comradeship, and finding joy in both the exalted and the mundane' Washington Post 
 
*New York Times bestseller, Nov 24

All the Beauty in the World

A Museum Guard’s Adventures in Life, Loss and Art

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The Fall of the West

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

The Mortons

Little Black Classics Box Set

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The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

8 spirited heroes that will inspire you to be brave 

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8 spirited heroes that will inspire you to be brave

6 lessons your child will learn from Terry Pratchett books

6 lessons your child will learn from Terry Pratchett's books

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Where to start with Terry Pratchett's books

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16 books for 9 to 12-year-olds that love adventures

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32 spooky books to read this Halloween

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'At his best, Terry was a teacher': Why we love Terry Pratchett

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