4 Art and Architecture


75179 BLOOD SISTERS: The Women Behind the Wars of


the Roses by Sarah Gristwood Exploring what it was like to be a medieval queen here in sensory detail is the ermine cloak, exquisite jewels, Spanish leather, gold cloth and purple velvet. Considered a “cousins’ war” by contemporaries, the series of dynastic conflicts between the Houses of Lancaster and York that ripped apart the ruling


Plantagenet family in the 15th century was, at its heart, a domestic drama, a family feud on a grand scale with the greatest prize of all at stake. Gristwood’s contention is that a handful of powerful women were just as decisive in the outcome as the men who fought and died seeking the throne. Seven women are studied in detail, among them Marguerite of Anjou, wife of Lancastrian Henry VI, who effectively ruled the kingdom as her husband went insane; Cecily Neville, the Yorkist matriarch whose son, Edward IV, had his brother George executed in order to maintain power and Margaret Beaufort, who gave up her own claim to the throne in order that her son, Henry Tudor, could become Henry VII, the first of the Tudor dynasty, after defeating Richard III of York at Bosworth. A richly depicted epic of hopeful births, bloody deaths, romance, brutal pragmatism and enough scheming to put even Machiavelli to shame, this is the history that we know told from a viewpoint rarely adopted. 524pp with 16 pages of colour plates. Written by the Oxford scholar. $29.99 NOW £7


74574 MAID AND THE QUEEN: The Secret


History of Joan of Arc by Nancy Goldstone Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who heard the voices of angels telling her to raise an army and go to the aid of the Dauphin, astonished her contemporaries and continues to intrigue us today. Until now, her relationship with Yolande of Aragon, mother-in-law to the Dauphin has been little understood. Here, the author solves the mystery by showing that, if you pry open the Queen’s secrets, you will find the Maid’s. Just when French hopes of restoring the Dauphin to the throne were at their lowest, a young woman arrived, leading an army. But how was she to gain an audience with the King? Was it God’s hand that moved her, or was it also Yolande of Aragon’s? 296 paperback pages, illus, extended genealogy. $16 NOW £4.50


75664 CHARLES DICKENS -


A LIFE by Claire Tomalin Many of Dickens’s life experiences found their way into his novels. Dickens spent idyllic childhood years in Chatham where his father worked for the Navy, but when they returned to London, John Dickens, who is regarded as a model for the insolvent Mr Micawber, was sent to the Marshalsea prison for bankruptcy.


A kind friend gave Dickens a factory job but the experience was one of humiliation for the young boy, and characters such as Fagin and Smike had their origins in this unhappy period. The young Dickens finally got a job as a journalist which allowed him to marry Catherine Hogarth, but the union was a mistake and he quickly came to feel that they were temperamentally incompatible. Fascinated by the theatre all his life, he chose an actress, Ellen Ternan, as the companion of his mature years. Dickens’s philanthropy was legendary and with the wealthy Angela Burdett Coutts he founded a home for women who were prostitutes. 527pp, photos.


£30 NOW £6.50 74712 LOVE AND CAPITAL: Karl and Jenny


Marx and the Birth of a Revolution by Mary Gabriel


Jenny Marx was descended from Prussian and Scottish nobility and like her husband Karl was a highly educated intellectual, able to hold her own in the passionate political debates of the day. The Marxes were prolific letter-writers. It was during her studies that Jenny met Karl Marx, the son of the town’s first Jewish lawyer. When they married in 1843 Karl was already a known political revolutionary, and by 1851 they were exiled in a two-room attic in London’s Dean Street. The love between Karl and Jenny survived poverty, social ostracism, the deaths of several children and even Marx’s fathering another woman’s child with Helene Demuth. The book delves deep into the story of modern capitalism and reveals that the savage battles Marx’s daughters fought on behalf of working people made his own struggles look relatively tame. 706pp, photos.


$35 NOW £6


74894 GEORGE STEPHENSON: A Shire Book by Adrian Jarvis


Covers places to visit, a chronological summary, what George Stephenson was really like and the work of his biographers, later life and retirement, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway and his early railway projects including the safety lamp or Davy lamp he invented with Sir Humphry Davy. 48pp. Colour and other illus. Paperback.


£5.99 NOW £2.50


74945 CLEOPATRA: The Last Pharaoh by Prudence Jones


We owe much of our knowledge of Cleopatra to her enemy Octavian, the man who had become Rome’s first Emperor Augustus. Cleopatra VII (69-30BC) was the last monarch of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt. Daughter of Ptolemy XII, she ruled with her two brother-husbands, Ptolemy XIII and Ptolemy XIV both of whom she had killed, and with her son Ptolemy XV or Caesarion (44-30BC). A master of self-presentation, she was the first to craft for herself an image or to be precise a number of images as a goddess, a political leader, or an alluring and exotic woman. Roman statesmen manipulated her image for their own political ends. Colour illus, 160pp, softback. 9 x 7". $17.95 NOW £2.75


ORDER HOTLINE: 020 74 74 24 74


74725 SISTER QUEENS: The Noble, Tragic Lives of Katherine of Aragon and Juana, Queen of Castile by Julia Fox


When they were young, the futures of the Sister Queens appeared promising, but the unions for which they had spent their whole lives preparing were fraught with duplicity and betrayal. Juana’s authority was continually usurped by her husband, her father and her son. Katherine, the first queen of King Henry VIII of England, was cruelly tossed aside in favour of his mistress Anne Boleyn. Ousted from the positions of power and influence they had been groomed for, and separated from their children, both Katherine and Juana turned to their rich and abiding faith and deep personal belief in their family’s dynastic legacy, in order to cope with their enduring hardships. 454 pages with plates in colour and b/w, genealogical tables, map. $30 NOW £6


75676 PROUST’S


OVERCOAT: The True Story by Lorenza Foschini and Eric Karpeles


Researching a television programme on the legendary costume designer Tosi, the author took the opportunity to ask him about his fascination with Proust. Proust’s brother, the doctor Robert Proust had inherited some of Marcel’s furniture and clothes including the


famous otter-lined coat in which the genius kept warm while both writing and sleeping. From that moment Jacques Guerin became obsessed with acquiring all the Proust memorabilia he could. A particular source was an insolent young man, Monsieur Werner, who sadistically teased Guerin with offers of further material. Finally he gave Guerin a prized possession, Proust’s legendary overcoat. 128pp. $19.99 NOW £3


75828 SARAH: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt by Robert Gottlieb


This volume, the first English-language biography of Sarah Bernhardt in decades, takes readers into the eccentric world of a woman of relentless energy and will-power, who slept in a coffin, travelled with lion cubs, wore a hat festooned with a stuffed bat, slept with actors, playwrights and kings, and turned her theatre into a working hospital during the Franco-Prussian War. As if this were not enough, she was an accomplished sculptor too. Her indomitable spirit kept her acting until her late seventies. Even after her leg was amputated, she performed under bombardment for soldiers in World War I and worked in America to promote the Allied cause. Few readers will be able to resist this scintillating account of the transformation of the daughter of a courtesan into a heroine, a national icon and a symbol of France. 233 roughcut pages, lavishly illus. £20 NOW £5.75


74727 SOCRATES: A Man For Our Times by Paul Johnson


Cicero said: ‘Socrates was the first to call Philosophy down from the skies... and force her to investigate ordinary life, ethics, good and evil’. Yet, paradoxically, he left no writing of his own. What we know of his ideas we know from the works of his student Plato and other contemporaries. What these reports tell us is as important today as it was in 5th century BC. His credo was that how each of us chooses to live and die has great meaning. He devoted his life to learning, because he believed that education was the surest road to happiness. In his later years, as his home city of Athens slid into civic unrest, there was a backlash against him. He was tried and condemned to death, which he faced with great courage. 208 pages. $25.95 NOW £6


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74962 HENRY: The Prince Who Would Turn Tyrant by David Starkey


Larger than life in every sense, Henry VIII was Britain’s most absolute monarch. Yet he was not born to rule. A Renaissance man of exceeding musical, intellectual and athletic talent, the young king’s promising reign transformed into a quest for fame as obsessive as that of any modern celebrity. His search for glory and yearning for a male heir drove Henry into dangerous territory. A fresh-faced Henry stars in this bright, colloquial biography, loaded with anecdotes. Photos, some in colour. 413pp, paperback. £9.99 NOW £4.50


75094 PITT THE ELDER: Man of War by Edward Pearce


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Posterity has invested William Pitt, first earl of Chatham, and Britain’s Prime Minister, with mystique, and has presented him as heroic, a titan, a brilliant statesman and military strategist. Starting with Britain’s momentous victory against the French at the end of the Seven Years’ War, the author investigates the extent to which Britain’s victories and imperial advances can actually be credited to him personally, and not to a coalition of commanders, naval administrators and foreign allies. He appears vain, ruthless, tortured with physical illness and succumbing to mental collapse. 372 paperback pages, contemporary plates. £12.99 NOW £4


75659 ALICE BEHIND WONDERLAND by Simon Winchester


Alice in Wonderland was an immediate best-seller on its publication in 1865 and has never been out of print. Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, created the story for Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, where Dodgson was a young lecturer. Alice went on to a glittering career as a society beauty, linked with one of Queen Victoria’s sons before Victoria hauled him off to an arranged political marriage. Alice ended up with a rich commoner, losing two sons in the Great War. Among the thousands of images he made using the newly-invented collotype process, there are relatively few of Alice herself. But in the most famous photo, showing her half-naked and dressed as a beggar-girl, many people have seen a disturbing knowingness. Winchester argues that Dodgson’s interest in Alice was not sexual. 110pp. £16.95 NOW £5


ART AND ARCHITECTURE


No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. - Edward Hopper


76582 MAMMOTH BOOK OF


TATTOO ART edited by Lal Hardy The art of tattooing is riding the crest of a wave, with artistic levels higher than ever before. If you are sceptical, just take a peek inside this mind-bogglingly beautiful book. If you think that tattoos are all washed-out air-force blue and boring, then you are in for a shock. Every brilliantly bright colour in the


palette is used to produce these fantastically complex designs and they are real works of art. Many things have contributed to the growth of a practice that was once thought to be the preserve of the under, working and criminal classes, although it is an ancient ritual, and tattoos have been found on mummies from as long ago as 3300 B.C. Changing attitudes can be attributed to the fall of the Iron Curtain, the rise of the internet, and greater Western influences in the Far East. Reality shows, such as London Ink, and others, are responsible for an interest in tattooing that has been unsurpassed in its history. In the UK, Phil Kyle, Nikole Lowe, Louis Molloy - the creator of the famous Beckham angel - and Dan Gold have become household names. The quality of equipment, the wider range of pigments and hygiene procedures are at an all-time high, as is the quality of artistic workmanship. The pages of this lovely book are a showcase for some of the greatest tattooing that is being created in the world today, and we confidently expect readers to find it enlightening and fascinating. 448 paperback pages with over 700 tattoos in full colour by 80 of the world’s leading tattoo artists, with a list of their names, and photos of the artists. £10.99 NOW £5


76012 EADWEARD


MUYBRIDGE: The Human and Animal Locomotion Photographs


by Hans Christian Adam English photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was a pioneer in visual studies of human and animal locomotion. In 1872, he famously helped settle a bet for


former California governor Leland Stanford by photographing a galloping horse. Muybridge invented a complex system of electric shutter releases that captured freeze frames, proving conclusively, for the first time, that a galloping horse lifts all four hooves off the ground for a fraction of a second. For the next three decades, Muybridge continued his quest to fully catalogue many aspects of human and animal movement, photographing hundreds of horses and other animals, and of nude or draped subjects engaged in various activities such as running, walking, boxing, fencing and descending a staircase (the latter study inspired Marcel Duchamp’s famous 1912 painting). This book traces the life and work of Muybridge from his early thinking about anatomy and movement to his latest photographic experiments. Many plates of Muybridge’s groundbreaking Animal Locomotion (1887) are reproduced here. In addition, Muybridge’s handmade and extremely rare first illustrated album, The Attitudes of Animals in Motion (1881) is reproduced in large part. A detailed chronology by British researcher Stephen Herbert throws new light on one of the most important pioneers of photography. 5.7 x 7.7", 704 pages. Text in English, French and German. ONLY £13


75260 POETRY IN DESIGN:


The Art of Harry Leith-Ross by Erika Jaeger-Smith Harry Leith-Ross (1886-1973) was born in Mauritius to his banker father Frederick and mother Sina van Houten, who came from a family of famed Dutch artists. He studied in Paris for two years, then Cornwall to study landscape under the renowned Stanhope Forbes.


He established the New Hope arts community in Pennsylvania. Enjoy his vibrant, colourful, powerful, realistic carefully composed oil paintings and renowned transparent watercolour technique. His use of light is a little like Edward Hopper and his themes range from harboursides, construction workers, cottages, lighthouses and towpaths to watercolours in Holland. 70 of his finest works, mostly oils, 144pp softback, 9"×11½”. £20.50 NOW £8


75157 MONET: Or The Triumph of Impressionism


by Daniel Wildenstein


In 1874, when Claude Monet first exhibited the painting ‘Impressionism, Sunrise’, the critics were outraged. Impressionism went on to become one of the major art movements of the late 19th century but at the time was considered ‘subversive’. Monet lived long enough to become a prophet honoured in his own country and his influence on 20th century art was to be a lasting one. He drew his inspiration from nature - landscapes and the plant life that inhabited them, water and its reflection, the air glittering with light or mistily luminescent. He saw the world as if reflected by the rays of the sun, a dream refracted in a prism and this dream led him in later works to the ‘Water-Lilies’ and the borderline of abstraction. This biography is a revised version of the first volume of the four-volume catalogue also published by Taschen. It is beautifully bound, with most of the hundreds of reproductions in colour. 488 pages. ONLY £12


76398 LEAVES OF GOLD: Manuscript Illumination from Philadelphia Collections


by James R. Tanis


and Jennifer A. Thompson Hand-produced and hand- decorated manuscripts are among the most important and most finely wrought objects to survive from the Middle Ages and in this


lovely book many supremely beautiful examples are brought together for the delectation of the discerning reader. These volumes were at once instruments for the transmission of learning and repositories of a host of essential social and intellectual symbols, literary, artistic, dramatic, musical, legal and many more. Their production demanded the talents of highly skilled scribes, decorators and illustrators, each of whom contributed to the shared task of crafting a book that effectively communicated the substance and meaning of its texts. The very best manuscripts delighted the eyes, stretched the mind and lifted the spirits of their patrons and users, and they were made durable enough to survive for many centuries. The challenge in every case was to find and refine suitable scribal, decorative and illustrative forms which would capture a reader’s attention and stimulate his enjoyment, imagination and memory. The works in this superb collection illustrate the diversity of manuscript production during a period of more than half a millennium. In addition to examples of exquisite works, this treasure of a volume describes the incredible amount of work that went into their production and the precious materials that would be used in the process. For instance, even a medium-sized Book of Hours consisting of 160 folios would have required the skins of 20 newborn calves not to mention a host of tools, including a quantity of the first five flight feathers of a goose, home-made inks and paints and materials for binding and sewing together the pages. Often, very expensive and rare colours such as lapis lazuli and gold leaf were used to embellish the text. Not only was every bit of every volume hand-crafted but the book then had to be pieced together. Here are precious pages from 13th century bibles, leaves from choir books of the mid-15th century, Books of Hours from the 16th century and extracts from famous secular texts such as the Roman de la Rose. With foreword by Anne d’Harnoncourt and Katherine Luber and introduction by James H. Marrow. 242 pages with illustrations in glowing colour, with lists of lenders to the exhibition and glossary. Softback, 30 x 23.6cm.


ONLY £15


75262 THOMAS HOVENDEN: His Art and Life by Anne Gregory Terhune et al


Unusually, the work of Thomas Hovenden (1840-95), which specialised in narrative scenes of domestic rural life and, latterly, on the American Civil War, was acclaimed during his lifetime but


slowly forgotten after his death, until recently. Born in County Cork, the potato famine claimed the lives of his parents when he was six, and he was placed in an orphanage in Cork where he was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker. His new master paid for him to attend the new Cork School of Design when he was 17. He crossed the Atlantic to New York to live with his brother and some 150,000 Cork emigrants who had fled the famine to New York. This was also the time of the Civil War and this plus the vexed issue of slavery would exert a powerful influence upon Hovenden. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Alexandre Cabanel, whereupon he returned to an astonishingly successful career as a painter and teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Thomas Eakins and Thomas Anschutz. Where Hovenden differed from most was in his portrayal of the domestic life of African Americans, recently freed slaves who enjoyed hugely varying levels of “freedom”. In his paintings black families could be going about their daily chores, reading the Bible or receiving a cordial visit from their ex-masters, or they could be fleeing for their lives. His immense (6’6"×5’3") oil on canvas “The Last Moments of John Brown” (1884) depicts the famous abolitionist stopping to kiss a black child on his way to the gallows in 1859. A total of 133 colour and b/w illus. depict the not only the best examples of Hovenden’s work but also that of contemporary artists who were influenced by, or were influences on him, as well as numerous photos and


daguerreotypes. Terhune’s first full-length study of Hovenden provides a detailed biography as well as a detailed examination of his output. Many of the paintings, studies and sketches are reproduced here for the first time. Luxury 276pp, 9"×11½”. £32.49 NOW £10


76059 BABIES by Keith Haring The New York artist Keith Haring was famous for his boldly coloured, outlined cartoon characters. Here he turns his attention to babies. ‘Children are the bearers of life in its simplest and most joyous form. There is nothing negative about a baby, ever. The


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