For many of us the moon, and the chill light it casts, are things we either ignore or take for granted. It wouldn't enter our heads therefore to set off around the world in search of moonlight. But, as James Attlee's eccentric quest proves, we couldn't be more wrong.  From Normandy to Naples, Wales to Arizona, Las Vegas to Japan, Attlee explores moonlight's many moods and meanings. Taking in the ancient and modern, art and literature, science and music, Nocturne travels far and deep to provide a portrait of an enigmatic light increasingly endangered in our over-illuminated world.

Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight and Its Meanings - In Art, Literature, Music and Our Lives

Attlee, James

Travel

Hamish Hamilton

“Nobody who has not taken one can imagine the beauty of a walk through Rome by full moon,” wrote Goethe in 1787. Sadly, the imagination is all we have today: in Rome, as in every other modern city, moonlight has been banished, replaced by the twenty-four-hour glow of streetlights in a world that never sleeps. Moonlight, for most of us, is no more. So James Attlee set out to find it. Nocturne is the record of that journey, a traveler’s tale that takes readers on a dazzling nighttime trek that ranges across continents, from prehistory to the present, and through both the physical world and the realms of art and literature. Attlee attends a Buddhist full-moon ceremony in Japan, meets a moon jellyfish on a beach in Northern France, takes a moonlit hike in the Arizona desert, and experiences a lunar eclipse on New Year’s Eve atop the snowbound Welsh hills. Each locale is illuminated not just by the moonlight he seeks, but by the culture and history that define it. We learn about Mussolini’s pathological fear of moonlight; trace the connections between Caspar David Friedrich, Rudolf Hess, and the Apollo space mission; and meet the inventors of the Moonlight Collector in the American desert, who aim to cure all kinds of ailments with concentrated lunar rays. Svevo and Blake, Whistler and Hokusai, Li Po and Marinetti are all enlisted, as foils, friends, or fellow travelers, on Attlee’s journey. Pulled by the moon like the tide, Attlee is firmly in a tradition of wandering pilgrims that stretches from Basho to Sebald; like them, he presents our familiar world anew.

Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey

Through the centuries, people from all walks of life have heard the siren call of a pilgrimage, the lure to journey away from the familiar in search of understanding. But is a pilgrimage even possible these days for city-dwellers enmeshed in the pressures of work and family life? Or is there a way to be a pilgrim without leaving one’s life behind? James Attlee answers these questions with Isolarion, a thoughtful, streetwise, and personal account of his pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew—the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door. Isolarion takes its title from a type of fifteenth-century map that isolates an area in order to present it in detail, and that’s what Attlee, sharp-eyed and armed with tape recorder and notebook, provides for Cowley Road. The former site of a leper hospital, a workhouse, and a medieval well said to have miraculous healing powers, Cowley Road has little to do with the dreaming spires of the tourist’s or student’s Oxford. What Attlee presents instead is a thoroughly modern, impressively cosmopolitan, and utterly organic collection of shops, restaurants, pubs, and religious establishments teeming with life and reflecting the multicultural makeup of the surrounding neighborhood. From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, Attlee investigates every aspect of the Cowley Road’s appealingly eclectic culture, where halal shops jostle with craft jewelers and reggae clubs pulsate alongside quiet churchyards. But the very diversity that is, for Attlee, the essence of Cowley Road’s appeal is under attack from well-meaning city planners and predatory developers. His pilgrimage is thus invested with melancholy: will the messy glories of the Cowley Road be lost to creeping homogenization? Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy to contemporary art, Attlee is a charming and companionable guide who revels in the extraordinary embedded in the everyday. Isolarion is at once a road movie, a quixotic stand against uniformity, and a rousing hymn in praise of the complex, invigorating nature of the twenty-first-century city.

History

Europe

Through the centuries, people from all walks of life have heard the siren call of a pilgrimage, the lure to journey away from the familiar in search of understanding. But is a pilgrimage even possible these days for city-dwellers enmeshed in the pressures of work and family life? Or is there a way to be a pilgrim without leaving one’s life behind? James Attlee answers these questions with Isolarion, a thoughtful, streetwise, and personal account of his pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew—the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door. Isolarion takes its title from a type of fifteenth-century map that isolates an area in order to present it in detail, and that’s what Attlee, sharp-eyed and armed with tape recorder and notebook, provides for Cowley Road. The former site of a leper hospital, a workhouse, and a medieval well said to have miraculous healing powers, Cowley Road has little to do with the dreaming spires of the tourist’s or student’s Oxford. What Attlee presents instead is a thoroughly modern, impressively cosmopolitan, and utterly organic collection of shops, restaurants, pubs, and religious establishments teeming with life and reflecting the multicultural makeup of the surrounding neighborhood. From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, Attlee investigates every aspect of the Cowley Road’s appealingly eclectic culture, where halal shops jostle with craft jewelers and reggae clubs pulsate alongside quiet churchyards. But the very diversity that is, for Attlee, the essence of Cowley Road’s appeal is under attack from well-meaning city planners and predatory developers. His pilgrimage is thus invested with melancholy: will the messy glories of the Cowley Road be lost to creeping homogenization? Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy to contemporary art, Attlee is a charming and companionable guide who revels in the extraordinary embedded in the everyday. Isolarion is at once a road movie, a quixotic stand against uniformity, and a rousing hymn in praise of the complex, invigorating nature of the twenty-first-century city.

“Nobody who has not taken one can imagine the beauty of a walk through Rome by full moon,” wrote Goethe in 1787. Sadly, the imagination is all we have today: in Rome, as in every other modern city, moonlight has been banished, replaced by the twenty-four-hour glow of streetlights in a world that never sleeps. Moonlight, for most of us, is no more. So James Attlee set out to find it. Nocturne is the record of that journey, a traveler’s tale that takes readers on a dazzling nighttime trek that ranges across continents, from prehistory to the present, and through both the physical world and the realms of art and literature. Attlee attends a Buddhist full-moon ceremony in Japan, meets a moon jellyfish on a beach in Northern France, takes a moonlit hike in the Arizona desert, and experiences a lunar eclipse on New Year’s Eve atop the snowbound Welsh hills. Each locale is illuminated not just by the moonlight he seeks, but by the culture and history that define it. We learn about Mussolini’s pathological fear of moonlight; trace the connections between Caspar David Friedrich, Rudolf Hess, and the Apollo space mission; and meet the inventors of the Moonlight Collector in the American desert, who aim to cure all kinds of ailments with concentrated lunar rays. Svevo and Blake, Whistler and Hokusai, Li Po and Marinetti are all enlisted, as foils, friends, or fellow travelers, on Attlee’s journey. Pulled by the moon like the tide, Attlee is firmly in a tradition of wandering pilgrims that stretches from Basho to Sebald; like them, he presents our familiar world anew.

Through the centuries, people from all walks of life have heard the siren call of a pilgrimage, the lure to journey away from the familiar in search of understanding. But is a pilgrimage even possible these days for city-dwellers enmeshed in the pressures of work and family life? Or is there a way to be a pilgrim without leaving one’s life behind? James Attlee answers these questions with Isolarion, a thoughtful, streetwise, and personal account of his pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew—the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door.Isolarion takes its title from a type of fifteenth-century map that isolates an area in order to present it in detail, and that’s what Attlee, sharp-eyed and armed with tape recorder and notebook, provides for Cowley Road. The former site of a leper hospital, a workhouse, and a medieval well said to have miraculous healing powers, Cowley Road has little to do with the dreaming spires of the tourist’s or student’s Oxford. What Attlee presents instead is a thoroughly modern, impressively cosmopolitan, and utterly organic collection of shops, restaurants, pubs, and religious establishments teeming with life and reflecting the multicultural makeup of the surrounding neighborhood.From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, Attlee investigates every aspect of the Cowley Road’s appealingly eclectic culture, where halal shops jostle with craft jewelers and reggae clubs pulsate alongside quiet churchyards. But the very diversity that is, for Attlee, the essence of Cowley Road’s appeal is under attack from well-meaning city planners and predatory developers. His pilgrimage is thus invested with melancholy: will the messy glories of the Cowley Road be lost to creeping homogenization?Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy to contemporary art, Attlee is a charming and companionable guide who revels in the extraordinary embedded in the everyday. Isolarion is at once a road movie, a quixotic stand against uniformity, and a rousing hymn in praise of the complex, invigorating nature of the twenty-first-century city.

Business & Money

Biography & History

Black Swan.

An important new book that considers the life and work of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) whose influence, despite his tragically short career, is ever more pervasive. Central to the explosion of creativity in New York's SoHo in the 1970s, Matta-Clark turned his focus on the city itself, slicing through abandoned buildings to create works that were at once large-scale sculptural environments, social commentary and urban performance pieces.

Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between

Arts & Photography

Le Feuvre, Lisa

Photography & Video

Nazraeli Pr

A brilliant, concise account of the painting often described as the most important work of art produced in the twentieth century, as part of the stunning Landmark Library series. Pablo Picasso had already accepted a commission to create a work for the Spanish Republican Pavilion in 1937 when news arrived of the bombing of the undefended Basque town of Gernika. James Attlee offers an illuminating account of the genesis, creation and complex afterlife of Picasso's Guernica. He explores the historical and cultural context from which the painting sprang and the meanings it accrued during its travels across Europe and the Americas, as well as its influence on artists both living and dead. Finally, he argues for its continuing importance as a warning of what happens when the forces of darkness go unchallenged. Praise for Guernica: 'Helps you appreciate Guernica's daring and resonance' Literary Review 'An impressive overview of the painting's conception and execution, and its subsequent life as an exhibit and a symbol ... Attlee's book succeeds in showing how influential Guernica has been' Sunday Times 'Attlee digs up rich examples of the debate and devotion that invariably attended the painting ... Guernica literature abounds; but this book is a worthwhile addition' Spectator

Guernica: The Life and Travels of a Painting (The Landmark Library) (The Landmark Library, 5)

Head of Zeus

Review\n'An impressive overview ... Succeeds in showing how influential Guernica has been, and how it continues to be used as a reference point in political and military conflicts of today' Sunday Times\n'Attlee digs up rich examples of the debate and devotion that invariably attended the paining ... Guernica literature abounds; but this book is a worthwhile addition' Spectator\n'[Guernica], which is clearly written and beautifully produced, both updates the tale and adds something fresh to the mix ... Attlee's book helps you appreciate [Guernica's] daring and resonance' Literary Review\n" Eccentric, rambling, charming . . . by turns erratic and spellbinding. Attlee is an entertaining writer, pulling off strange and daring leaps . . . thrilling. * New York Times Book Review on Nocturne\nA brilliant, concise account of the painting often described as the most important work of art produced in the twentieth century, as part of the stunning Landmark Library series. 
Pablo Picasso had already accepted a commission to create a work for the Spanish Republican Pavilion in 1937 when news arrived of the bombing of the undefended Basque town of Gernika. 
James Attlee offers an illuminating account of the genesis, creation and complex afterlife of Picasso's Guernica. He explores the historical and cultural context from which the painting sprang and the meanings it accrued during its travels across Europe and the Americas, as well as its influence on artists both living and dead. Finally, he argues for its continuing importance as a warning of what happens when the forces of darkness go unchallenged.

Guernica: Painting the End of the World (The Landmark Library, 5)

Apollo

Graham Dean, one of Britain’s leading figurative painters, has resolutely followed his own path. In particular he has challenged accepted ideas about watercolor, wresting it away from its eighteenth-century roots in landscape painting choosing instead to apply it to making monumental, life-size depictions of the human body. His striking, large-scale paintings can take years to complete and are celebrated for having a depth and vividness of color more often associated with work in oils. In this first comprehensive and lavishly illustrated survey of Dean’s work, James Atlee takes us inside Dean’s studio and offers an intimate conversation with the painter about his life and career. Dean discusses the details of his unusual technique, and he reflects on the role of the model in his artistic practice as well as the people and influences that have shaped his career, including the importance of his early years in Liverpool. In addition, the book provides valuable insights into key works among his oeuvre. Containing nearly one hundred and fifty works lushly reproduced in color, this book will appeal to the many aficionados of Dean’s art and offer a perfect introduction for those encountering it for the first time.  

Graham Dean

Unicorn Publishing Group

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Attlee, James. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Attlee, James

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Attlee, James. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight and Its Meanings - In Art, Literature, Music and Our Lives

Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight

Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey

Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey

Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight

Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey

Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between

Guernica: The Life and Travels of a Painting (The Landmark Library) (The Landmark Library, 5)

Guernica: Painting the End of the World (The Landmark Library, 5)

Graham Dean