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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

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

Robert Hughes

A timeline of artistic endeavour from the formal resources of the past to the boom-and-bust media hype of a postmodern age. 
 
In these celebrated essays Robert Hughes explores the lives and works of more than 80 artists, from Hans Holbein to Andy Warhol and beyond, assessing their achievements (or lack of them) and how they altered the history of art for better or for worse. Castigating the excesses of the 1980s New York art scene, with its manufactured celebrity and inflated prices, he argues for the real values of art and outlines the way ahead for a new generation of artists.

Nothing If Not Critical

David Lodge

The British Museum is Falling Down is a brilliant comic satire of academia, religion and human entanglements. First published in 1965, it tells the story of hapless, scooter-riding young research student Adam Appleby, who is trying to write his thesis but is constantly distracted - not least by the fact that, as Catholics in the 1960s, he and his wife must rely on 'Vatican roulette' to avoid a fourth child.

The British Museum Is Falling Down

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

Bill Cunningham

An enchanting memoir by the legendary New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham 
 
 *A Financial Times Book of the Year 2018* 
*The New York Times Bestseller* 
 
‘I took to New York life like a star shooting through the heavens…’ 
 
Bill Cunningham’s first love was fashion but the big city came a close second. He left for New York aged nineteen, losing his family’s support but enjoying the infinite luxury of freedom. Living on a scoop of Ovaltine a day, he would run down to Fifth Avenue to feed on the spectacular sights of the window displays – then run back to his tiny studio to work all night. 
 
Working as ‘William J’ (to spare his parents’ blushes), Bill became one of the most celebrated hat designers of the 1950s, creating elegant town hats for movie stars and playful beach hats for the summer set. Bill’s mission was to bring happiness by making beautiful things – even if it meant pawning his bike to fund fancy-dress outfits for all his friends. 
 
When women stopped wearing hats and his business was forced to close, Bill worked as a fashion journalist, touring the couture houses of Europe. But New York remained his home, and it was as a street photographer of the fashions of the city that he became well known, in a job that would last almost forty years. 
 
Fashion Climbing is the enchanting memoir he left behind, capturing the madcap times of his early career and the fashion scene of the mid-century. 
 
 Written with the spark and wit of Holly Golightly, and brimming over with Bill’s infectious joy for life, it is a gift to all who seek beauty, whatever our style or status.

Fashion Climbing

A New York Life

Laura Cumming

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

Don McCullin

'He has known all forms of fear, he's an expert in it. He has come back from God knows how many brinks, all different. His experience in a Ugandan prison alone would be enough to unhinge another man - like myself, as a matter of fact - for good. He has been forfeit more times than he can remember, he says. But he is not bragging. Talking this way about death and risk, he seems to be implying quite consciously that by testing his luck each time, he is testing his Maker's indulgence' - John le Carre 
 
'McCullin is required reading if you want to know what real journalism is all about' - The Times 
 
'From the opening...there is hardly a dull sentence: his prose is so lively and uninhibited... An excellent book' - Sunday Telegraph 
 
'Unsparing reminiscences that effectively combine the bittersweet life of a world-class photojournalist with a generous selection of his haunting lifework... A genuinely affecting memoir that reckons the cost and loss involved in making one's way on the cutting edge of conflict' - Kirkus Reviews 
 
'If this was just a book of McCullin's war photographs it would be valuable enough. But it is much more' - Sunday Correspondent

Unreasonable Behaviour

An Autobiography

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

Dora Carrington

Carrington's beguiling letters take us beyond the Bloomsbury group to discuss sexual mores, how to be an artist, and what it is to be truly oneself. 
 
Known only by her surname, Dora Carrington was the star of her year at the Slade School of Fine Art, and was friends with some of the greatest minds of her day, including Virginia Woolf, Rosamund Lehmann and Maynard Keynes. 
 
For over a decade she was the companion of homosexual writer Lytton Strachey, and - stricken without him- killed herself when he died in 1932. Though she never achieved the fame her early career promised, in her determination to live life according to her own nature – especially in relation to her work and her fluid attitude to sex, gender and sexuality – she fought battles that remain familiar and urgent today. 
 
Now, through her passionate, playful and honest letters, we can encounter the maverick artist and compelling personality afresh and in her own words.

Carrington's Letters

Her Art, Her Loves, Her Friendships

Charlotte Higgins

'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

Daniel Farson

Widely regarded as the best British painter since Turner, very little is known about Francis Bacon's life. In this, the first-ever book to be written about him, Daniel Farson, friend and confidant to Bacon for over forty years, gives a highly personal, first-hand account of the man as he knew him. From his sexual adventures to his rise from obscurity to international fame, Farson gives us unique insight into Bacon's genius.

The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon

The Authorized Biography

Lynn Knight

A wooden box holds the buttons of three generations of women in Lynn Knight’s family – each one with its own tale to tell... 
 
Tracing the story of women at home and in work, from the jet buttons of Victorian mourning, to the short skirts of the 1960s, taking in suffragettes, bachelor girls, little dressmakers, Biba and the hankering for vintage, The Button Box lifts the lid on women’s lives and their clothes with elegance and wit.

The Button Box

The Story of Women in the 20th Century Told Through the Clothes They Wore

Lifting the Lid on Women's Lives

Peter Everett

Alfred Wallis was born in 1855 and died in a workhouse in Cornwall in 1942. A fisherman, sailing from Newlyn, Mousehole and St Ives, he began to paint in the 1920s - strange, brilliant pictures of ships and the sea. In 1928 he was discovered in St Ives by Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood and for the rest of his life, alone in his tiny cottage, attacked by periods of madness, he painted furiously. In MATISSE'S WAR, Peter Everett explored the psyche of one of the most celebrated painters of our age. Here he performs a similar feat for another artist, one who knew no fame in his lifetime but whose paintings have found vast popularity since his death.

The Voyages Of Alfred Wallis

Ann Wroe

'She's a genius, I believe, because she lights up every subject she touches.' Hilary Mantel 
 
A Spectator Book of the Year 
 
Goethe claimed to know what light was. Galileo and Einstein both confessed they didn't. On the essential nature of light, and how it operates, the scientific jury is still out. There is still time, therefore, to listen to painters and poets on the subject. They, after all, spend their lives pursuing light and trying to tie it down. 
 
Six Facets of Light is a series of meditations on this most elusive and alluring feature of human life. Set mostly on the Downs and coastline of East Sussex, the most luminous part of England, it interweaves a walker's experiences of light in Nature with the observations, jottings and thoughts of a dozen writers and painters - and some scientists - who have wrestled to define and understand light. From Hopkins to Turner, Coleridge to Whitman, Fra Angelico to Newton, Ravilious to Dante, the mystery of light is teased out and pondered on. Some of the results are surprising. 
 
By using mostly notebooks and sketchbooks, this book becomes a portrait of the transitoriness, randomness, swiftness, frustrations and quicksilver beauty that are the essence of light. It is a work to be enjoyed, pondered over, engaged with, provoked by; to be packed in the rucksack of every walker heading for the sea or the hills, or to be opened to bring that outside radiance within four dark town walls. 
 
Lifescapes by Ann Wroe is coming in August 2023.

Six Facets Of Light

Richard Weight

Welcome to the world of the sharp-suited ‘faces’. The Italianistas. The scooter-riding, all-night-dancing instigators of what became, from its myriad sources, a very British phenomenon. 
 
Mod began life as the quintessential working-class movement of a newly affluent nation – a uniquely British amalgam of American music and European fashions that mixed modern jazz with modernist design in an attempt to escape the drab conformity, snobbery and prudery of life in 1950s Britain. But what started as a popular cult became a mainstream culture, and a style became a revolution. 
 
In Mod, Richard Weight tells the story of Britain’s biggest and most influential youth cult. He charts the origins of Mod in the Soho jazz scene of the 1950s, set to the cool sounds of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. He explores Mod’s heyday in Swinging London in the mid-60s – to a new soundtrack courtesy of the Small Faces, the Who and the Kinks. He takes us to the Mod–Rocker riots at Margate and Brighton, and into the world of fashion and design dominated by Twiggy, Mary Quant and Terence Conran. 
 
But Mod did not end in the 1960s. Richard Weight not only brings us up to the cult’s revival in the late 70s – played out against its own soundtrack of Quadrophenia and the Jam – but reveals Mod to be the DNA of British youth culture, leaving its mark on glam and Northern Soul, punk and Two Tone, Britpop and rave. 
 
This is the story of Britain’s biggest and brassiest youth movement – and of its legacy. Music, film, fashion, art, architecture and design – nothing was untouched by the eclectic, frenetic, irresistible energy of Mod.

From Bebop to Britpop, Britain’s Biggest Youth Movement

Paul Strathern

Lorenzo de' Medici: 
The embodiment of Florence's most powerful family, a brutal man who ruled the city with an iron fist, whilst protecting it from the shifting mire of Italian politics. 
 
Fra Girolamo Savonarola: 
An unprepossessing provincial monk whose sermons, filled with Old Testament fury, resonated with the disenfranchised population of the city. 
 
The battle between these two men would be a fight to the death, a series of sensational events - including a mighty foreign invasion, trial by fire, the 'Bonfire of the Vanities', terrible executions and mysterious deaths - featuring a cast of the most important and charismatic Renaissance figures.

Death in Florence

The Medici, Savonarola and the Battle for the Soul of Man

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

At seventy, Henri Matisse is a trim, clean old gentleman with a passion for naked women. He is UN MONSTRE SACRE who depicts with passion and conviction only what he takes pleasure in, only what he chooses to see. He is art personified. If there were no Matisse there would be no art as such. . . . He has purged everything from his painting except anxieties concerning structure and colour; his struggle is with these alone! MATISSE'S WAR is a minutely researched yet fictional account of Matisse's life during the years 1939-1945. It is also a superb portrait of the lives of the major French artists and writers under the German occupation. Louis Aragon, Malraux, Picasso and Bonnard all appear prominently in the narrative.

Matisse's War

Jarvis Cocker

The Sunday Times bestselling hit memoir from Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker. 
 
'It's real gold... its storytelling first class' Sunday Times 
 
What if the things we keep hidden say more about us than those we put on display? 
 
We all have a random collection of the things that made us - photos, tickets, clothes, souvenirs, stuffed in a box, packed in a suitcase, crammed into a drawer. When Jarvis Cocker starts clearing out his loft, he finds a jumble of objects that catalogue his story and ask him some awkward questions: 
 
Who do you think you are? 
 
Are clothes important? 
 
Why are there so many pairs of broken glasses up here? 
 
From a Gold Star polycotton shirt to a pack of Wrigley's Extra, from his teenage attempts to write songs to the Sexy Laughs Fantastic Dirty Joke Book, this is the hard evidence of Jarvis's unique life, Pulp, 20th century pop culture, the good times and the mistakes he'd rather forget. 
 
This is not a life story. It's a loft story. 
 
'Nostalgic, playful and beautifully designed' Daily Mail 
 
'Brilliant...lurid, entertaining' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Terrific... Very funny' Guardian 
 
* A Book of the Year in the Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Daily Mail and Uncut *

Good Pop, Bad Pop

Haruki Murakami

A mindbending new collection of short stories from the unique, internationally acclaimed author of Norwegian Wood and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. 
 
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
The eight masterly stories in this new collection are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From nostalgic memories of youth, meditations on music and an ardent love of baseball to dreamlike scenarios, an encounter with a talking monkey and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world. Occasionally, a narrator who may or may not be Murakami himself is present. Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides. 
 
Philosophical and mysterious, the stories in First Person Singular all touch beautifully on love and solitude, childhood and memory. . . all with a signature Murakami twist. 
 
A GUARDIAN AND SUNDAY TIMES 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK

First Person Singular

mind-bending new collection of short stories from the internationally acclaimed author of NORWEGIAN WOOD

Stories

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

Rachel Kushner

From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Mars Room, a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture. 
 
In The Hard Crowd, Rachel Kushner gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times - and illuminates the themes and real-life terrain that underpin her fiction. 
 
In razor-sharp essays spanning literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, Kushner takes us from Jeff Koons and Marguerite Duras to a Palestinian refugee camp, from her love of classic cars to her young life in the music scene of San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing. 
 
'I'm glad to taste something this sharp, this smart' Olivia Laing 
 
'Wild, wide-ranging and unsparingly intelligent throughout' Vogue 
 
'An exciting book... Kushner writes from the inside out and gives us the true story, the real deal' Kevin Barry, New Statesman, Books of the Year

The Hard Crowd

Essays 2000–2020

Grant Morrison

In 1938 Action Comics #1 introduced the world to Superman. In a matter of years, the skies of our imaginations were filled with mutants, aliens and vigilantes. Batman, Wonder Woman and the X-Men - in less than a century they've gone from not existing at all to being everywhere we look. But why? 
 
For Grant Morrison, possibly the greatest of contemporary superhero storytellers, these heroes are not simply characters but powerful archetypes whose ongoing story arcs reflect and predict the lives we live. In this exhilarating book, Morrison draws on history, art, mythology, and his own astonishing journey to provide the first true chronicle of the superhero.

Supergods

Our World in the Age of the Superhero

Alexandra Lapierre

Artemisia Gentileschi is one of the most fascinating artists in history. Apprenticed at an early age to her father, the seventeenth-century painter Orazio Gentileschi, she rapidly became more famous than he was, for her rich, dramatic canvases. But her fame was tarnished by scandal. At the age of seventeen, she was violently raped by Agostino Tassi, an artist friend of Orazio's. On discovering Tassi's betrayal, Orazio took the case to court and there followed, in 1612, eight months of humiliation for Artemisia as the inhabitants of Rome's colourful artist's quarter came to give evidence. Their testimony - frank, partial, often cruel - in this first rape trial ever to be fully documented, made Artemisia and her father notorious.

Artemisia

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

Simon Schama

Passionate, provocative, entertaining and informative, Scribble, Scribble, Scribble ranges far and wide: from cookery and family to Barack Obama, from preaching and Shakespeare to Victorian sages, from Charlotte Rampling and Hurricane Katrina to 'The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of The Osbournes'.

Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

Writing on Ice Cream, Obama, Churchill and My Mother

Günter Grass

The final work of Nobel Prize-winning writer Günter Grass – a witty and elegiac series of meditations on writing, growing old, and the world. 
 
Suddenly, in spite of the trials of old age, and with the end in sight, everything seems possible again: love letters, soliloquies, scenes of jealousy, swan songs, social satire, and moments of happiness. 
 
Only an ageing artist who had once more cheated death could get to work with such wisdom, defiance and wit. A wealth of touching stories is condensed into artful miniatures. In a striking interplay of poetry, lyric prose and drawings, Grass creates his final, major work of art. 
 
A moving farewell gift, a sensual, melancholy summation of a life fully lived.

Of All That Ends

Peter Gay

In his most ambitious endeavour since Freud, acclaimed cultural historian Peter Gay traces and explores the rise of Modernism in the arts, the cultural movement that heralded and shaped the modern world, dominating western high culture for over a century. 
 
He traces the revolutionary path of modernism from its Parisian origins to its emergence as the dominant cultural movement in world capitals such as Berlin and New York, presenting along the way a thrilling pageant of hereitcs that includes Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Walter Gropius and Any Warhol. The result is a work unique in its breadth and brilliance. 
 
Lavishly illustrated, Modernism is a superb achievement by one of our greatest historians.

Modernism

The Lure of Heresy - From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond

Carola Hicks

The vivid scenes on the Bayeux Tapestry depict the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings in 1066. It is one of Europe's greatest treasures and its own story is full of drama and surprise. 
 
Who commissioned the tapestry? Was it Bishop Odo, William's ruthless half-brother? Or Harold's dynamic sister Edith, juggling for a place in the new court? Hicks shows us this world and the miracle of the tapestry's making: the stitches, dyes and strange details in the margins. For centuries it lay ignored in Bayeux cathedral until its 'discovery' in the eighteenth century. It became a symbol of power as well as art: townsfolk saved it during the French Revolution; Napoleon displayed it to promote his own conquest; the Nazis strove to make it their own; and its influence endures today. 
 
This marvellous book, packed with thrilling stories, shows how we remake history in every age and how a great work of art has a life of its own.

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