Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Michael Symmons Roberts

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Patrick White

Hurtle Duffield is incapable of loving anything except what he paints. The men and women who court him during his long life are, above all, the victims of his art. He is the vivisector, dissecting their weaknesses with cruel precision: his sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion and the passionate illusions of his mistress, Hero Pavloussi. It is only when Hurtle meets an egocentric adolescent whom he sees as his spiritual child does he experience a deeper, more treacherous emotion.

The Vivisector

Luis Bunuel

A master filmmaker, inimitable, and unrelenting in his assault on bourgeois values.  Bunuel's method is free from all artifice, and his honesty and humour are to extreme to accept any compromise in exposing our deceit and our decadence.  Like Pasolini, his work offers a remarkably sophisticated political analysis, but remains based in the essentially peasant values of storytelling, and the purposefully unsystematic supervisions of laughter.

My Last Breath

Roland Barthes

Barthes investigation into the meaning of photographs is a seminal work of twentieth-century critical theory. This is a special Vintage Design Edition, with fold-out cover and stunning photography throughout. 
 
Examining themes of presence and absence, these reflections on photography begin as an investigation into the nature of photographs – their content, their pull on the viewer, their intimacy. Then, as Barthes contemplates a photograph of his mother as a child, the book becomes an exposition of his own mind. He was grieving for his mother at the time of writing. Strikingly personal, yet one of the most important early academic works on photography, Camera Lucida remains essential reading for anyone interested in the power of images. 
 
‘Effortlessly, as if in passing, his reflections on photography raise questions and doubts which will permanently affect the vision of the reader’ Guardian

Camera Lucida

Vintage Design Edition

Reflections on Photography

Simon Schama

‘Great art has dreadful manners… 
 
…The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock and proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality.’ In inimitable style, our greatest historian and master storyteller Simon Schama makes an irresistible case for the power of art and its necessary place in our lives, examining art through the prism of the troubling life and works of Italian master painter, and murderer, Caravaggio. 
 
Selected from The Power of Art 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis 'Great Ideas' series: 
Religion by Karen Armstrong 
Science by Ian McEwan

Vintage Minis

John Lennon

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SIR PAUL MCCARTNEY 
 
First published in 1964 and 1965, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works are a brilliantly inventive and offbeat collection of John Lennon's stories, drawings and poems.

In His Own Write & A Spaniard in the Works

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

Derek Jarman

A poetic, passionate and intensely personal exploration of colour written during the final year of Derek Jarman's life -- with a new introduction by Ali Smith. 
 
In Chroma, his most poetic and lyrical book, Derek Jarman explores the uses of colour. Shifting across the spectrum and from the medieval to the modern, he draws on the work of great colour theorists from Pliny to Leonardo. Interwoven with these musings are evocative memories from Jarman's childhood and illustrious career, along with reflections on his deteriorating health. 
 
Written a year before Jarman’s death, and as his eyesight was failing, this is an intensely personal work; a paean from an artist seeking to memorialise the extraordinary power of colour even while it receded from his own life.

Chroma

A Book of Colour - June '93

Ian McEwan

‘This is a history of intellectual courage, hard work, occasional inspiration and every conceivable form of human failing. It is also an extended invitation to wonder, to pleasure’ 
 
How far have we come in our understanding of the world around us? In this eye-opening collection, Ian McEwan looks back at the history of scientific discovery from Darwin to Dawkins as well as exploring, with brilliant originality, what a future with AI and climate change could hold for us. 
 
Selected from Solar, Enduring Love, Machines Like Me 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis 'Great Ideas' series: 
Religion by Karen Armstrong 
Art by Simon Schama

Science

Impassioned, witty and polemical, At Your Own Risk is Derek Jarman's defiant celebration of gay sexuality. 
 
In At Your Own Risk, Derek Jarman weaves poetry, prose, photographs and newspaper extracts into a rich tapestry of gay experience in the UK. The buttoned-up repression of the fifties and sixties makes way for liberation and free love in the seventies, only to be chased by the terror and pain of HIV/AIDS. This is Jarman at his passionate best, written when he was already ill with HIV and in the midst of the moral panic surrounding the AIDS crisis. Defiant and furious, he not only celebrates his own sexuality but skewers wider society for its brazen homophobia. 
 
Reissued here 25 years after Jarman's death, with an introduction by Straight Jacket author Matthew Todd, At Your Own Risk remains a singular work. It is a powerful reminder of how far we have come and how much further we have left to go. 
 
'It blew my mind quite honestly !', It's A Sin star Olly Alexander via Twitter

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