by Richard Knott (2013)
The Sketchbook War is not a book about art but the story of war artists. How men who had previously made a comfortable living painting in studios were transformed by military uniforms and experiences that were to shape the rest of their lives and the way in which we view war today. Following eight artists who formed a close bond on the frontline, we explore the experiences of: Edward Ardizzone, Edward Bawden, Anthony Gross, Thomas Hennell, Eric Ravilious, Albert Richards, Richard Seddon, and John Worsley. They all went abroad; many of them approached the front line; they heard guns firing in earnest; two were torpedoed; two were taken prisoner; and three died, two of them in 1945 when the war was nearly over. This book is about how war and art came together in a moving and dramatic way.
E.C. Bentley with H. Warner Allen
Philip Trent returns! And this time the erudite investigator and confidant of Scotland Yard finds himself in a most novel situation — under suspicion for murder. Trent is amused by the clumsy attempt to frame him but events take a shocking turn when his closest friend suddenly confesses....
Karen Wilkin
This illustrated monograph explores the career of one of the most original and influential sculptors now working in the modernist tradition. His early work, as part of London's "New Generation," used unexpected materials in sculptures that married form and color in unprecedented ways. They are distinguished by their inventive polychromy and sleek industrial materials (fiberglass, plexiglass, glass, and aluminum tubing along with wood) as well as by their repetitive, curvilinear profiles and bold thrusts into space. Once in the U.S., Witkin continued to explore abstract volume and color in steel. His generously scaled constructions, equally notable for their structural audacity and emotional range, established him as a legitimate heir to the tradition of David Smith. In the early 1980s Witkin shifted to working in bronze, inventing a method of constructing with directly poured elements. This most recent work allows him to combine the sensuality of once-molten metal, the expressiveness of organic forms, the richness of bronze patina, and the immediacy of constructed sculpture. Author Karen Wilkin relates the story of the artist's career to date, discussing the evolution of his work in the context of the modernist tradition as well as the work of Witkin's contemporaries.
Claire Welch
Drawing on the Daily Mirror's outstanding archive and Haynes Publishing's wealth of experience, this book continues the successful 'Crimes of the Century' series. Claire Welch has been given access to thousands of hours of investigative journalism to discover just how depraved some of the killers across the decades in Britain have been. This book takes a look at notorious murderers including Jack Huxley, who killed a family relative after watching hard core pornography for hours on end, Ian Huntley, the Soham murderer who killed two innocent schoolgirls and Robert Black, the serial killer who murdered many known, and many suspected victims, alongside other depraved killers. What drives someone to kill? Do they understand right and wrong? What happened to these killers' moral codes? Just how do these perpetrators blend into society before they are caught?
Stanley Plumly
"Following his 'obsessive, intricate, intimate, and brilliant' (Washington Post) work in Posthumous Keats and The Immortal Evening, renowned poet Stanley Plumly further explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. How is it that this disparate pair will come to be regarded as Britain's supreme landscape painters, precursors to Impressionism and Modernism? How did each painter's life influence his work? Seeking the transcendent aesthetic awe of the sublime and reeling from personal tragedy, these talented painters portrayed the terrible beauty of the natural world from an intimate, close-up perspective. Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists' lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapes takes a wide-angle look at the philosophy of the sublime"--