Strange Landscape (BBC Books)

History

Frayling, Christopher

Europe

Penguin Putnam

The second half of the twentieth century has seen British artists, architects, and designers assuming a central role on the world stage. Starting in the years of reconstruction after the war, the young began to challenge accepted artistic values, looking at popular culture for their inspiration; the iconoclasm of the Pop movement has continued to be one of the most vital ingredients of the British art scene. In the year-by-year record that this book provides, the work of newcomers making their first impact is seen alongside that of outstanding artists in their maturity, with connections and contradictions across the entire visual scene--from architecture, interior design, furniture, and the decorative arts to painting, sculpture, and graphic art. Pictures and text explore the many factors that contributed to the special character of British art. The unique system of artists teaching in art schools, the worlds of fashion and pop music, political and social developments: the response of the best artists to these influences has always been original and questioning and has opened new avenues for future development. The book is organized by decade, and the achievements of each are highlighted by statements from a distinguished group of artists, designers, collectors, and critics who have themselves made a significant contribution to each decade. Encouragement, challenge, and opposition have all provided stimulus for creative talents that have been able to override the changes of taste and fashion. The book features the work of more than 250 artists, from Henry Moore, David Hockney, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud to James Stirling, Richard Rogers, Neville Brody, and Damien Hirst. The publication is also a celebration of the first fifty years of Thames and Hudson--founded by Walter Neurath in 1949--and the role that the publishing house has played in educating the public and supporting the arts during this period.

Vision: 50 Years of British Creativity, A Celebration of Art, Architecture and Design

Arts & Photography

HARRISON, Martin

Serota, Nicholas

Craig-Martin, Michael

HOCKNEY, DAVID

BRAGG, MELVYN

SYLVESTER, David

History & Criticism

Thames&Hudson

An entirely new perspective on current scaremongering about China’s global ambitions, and on the Western media’s ignorance of Chinese culture
A hundred years ago, a character who was to enter the bloodstream of 20th-century popular culture made his first appearance in the world of literature. In his day he became as well known as Count Dracula or Sherlock Holmes: he was the evil genius called Dr. Fu Manchu, described at the beginning of the first story in which he appeared as “the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”
Why did the idea that the Chinese were a threat to Western civilization develop at precisely the time when China was in chaos, divided against itself, the victim of successive famines and utterly incapable of being a “peril” to anyone even if it had wanted to be? Even the author of the Dr. Fu Manchu novels, Sax Rohmer, acknowledged that China, “as a nation possess that elusive thing, poise.”
And what do the Chinese themselves make of all this? Is it any wonder that they remember what we have carelessly forgotten–the opium wars; the “unfair treaties” that ceded Hong Kong and the New Territories; and the stereotyping of Chinese people in allegedly factual studies?
Here cultural historian Christopher Frayling takes us to the heart of popular culture in the music hall, pulp literature, and the mass-market press, and shows how film amplifies our assumptions. 60 illustrations in color and black-and-white

The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

An expanded, fully illustrated, and up-to-date edition of the classic cultural history of vampires
Vampyres is a comprehensive and generously illustrated history and anthology of vampires in literature, from the folklore of eastern Europe to the Romantics and beyond. It incorporates extracts from a huge range of sources―from Bram Stoker’s detailed research notes for Dracula to penny dreadfuls, to Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (new to this edition) which is analyzed by the author in a broader cultural context.
This revised and expanded edition of the 1978 classic brings Vampyres up to date with twenty-first-century vampire literature, including new text extracts, commentary, and a revised introduction. For the first time, Christopher Frayling also explores the development of the vampire in the visual arts in four color-plate sections, with illustrations ranging from eighteenth-century prints to twenty-first-century film stills, demonstrating the enduring appeal of the vampire from popular press to fine art and, finally, to film. 60 color illustrations

Vampyres: Genesis and Resurrection: from Count Dracula to Vampirella

Literature & Fiction

Literary

In the early 1960s, an unknown Italian film director named Sergio Leone was given USD200,000 and leftover film stock, and told to make a Western. With a script based on a Samurai epic, an American TV actor called Clint Eastwood, music composer Ennio Morricone and cameraman Massimo Dallamano, Leone was expected to make what was essentially a throwaway film. What he ended up with was A Fistful of Dollars, the first in a trilogy that came to define the Spaghetti Western. The films that complete the trilogy, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, are, like the first film, violent, cynical and visually stunning. This examination of Leone and the Italian Western contains an authoritative text written by film expert and cultural historian Christopher Frayling. It also includes interviews with Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Sergio Leone, Rod Steiger, Ennio Morricone, James Coburn, Lee Van Cleef, Peter Bogdanovich, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jason Robards and Claudia Cardinale, as well as writings by Sergio Leone on film. The text is accompanied by a wealth of visual material, including production stills, lobby cards, pictorial source sketches, costume and set designs, Italian release posters and photographs of original props.

Sergio Leone : Once upon a Time in Italy

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Gardners Books

Showcasing the work of Ken Adam, the man who created some of the most iconic and memorable sets in the history of the movies. Ken Adam is the most distinguished living production designer in the world. His work spans seven decades and more than seventy-five movies, from his revolutionary designs for the first seven James Bond movies to work on Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and Alan Bennett's The Madness of King George, for both of which he won an Oscar. Born in Germany, Adam trained in London as an architect, and his first Art Director credit was on Around the World in Eighty Days in 1956. He has subsequently worked in Hollywood, Italy, and Germany as well as Britain. Ken Adam's extensive personal archive of concept sketches, drawings, set stills, and photographs from every stage of his career forms the basis of this book. Using case studies from the 1950s to the present day, it shows the whole cycle of his production designs, from initial concept to what appears on the screen itself. The result encapsulates the evolving role of the Art Director and Production Designer from the golden age of the big studios to the digital fantasies of the early twenty-first century. The commentary is by Christopher Frayling, Rector of the Royal College of Art, London, Chairman of the Arts Council, England, Chairman of the UK's Design Council, and a Trustee of the Victoria &amp; Albert Museum. 250 illustrations, 180 in color.

Ken Adam Designs the Movies: James Bond and Beyond

Adam, Ken

Reference

The tragic death of Walpole's cat and the Thomas Gray poem written in her honor: the true story of what happened, and a look at the lively social and cultural scene in the eighteenth century. This delightful compendium focuses on one of the best-loved poems in the English language, but in the process it takes the reader on an engaging romp through the literary, intellectual, and cultural world of the eighteenth century. It brings alive a host of engaging characters: Horace Walpole himself (one of the great letter writers of all time, wit, raconteur; the curmudgeonly Dr. Johnson (who nevertheless had “a very fine cat indeed”) and his sometimes recalcitrant biographer James Boswell; and a cast of “handsome cats,” including Selima and Zama. In February 1747, Selima the tabby fell into a Chinese blue and white porcelain tub in Walpole’s house in London’s Mayfair and never returned to dry land. The poem by Thomas Gray, “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold-fishes,” was written as her mock epitaph. Here is the true history of the event, and a look at the sparkling social and cultural life of the period. It is beautifully illustrated with Richard Bentley’s original series of designs for the poem, William Blake’s wonderful watercolors of some fifty years later, and the unpublished color illustrations produced in the 1940s by the noted children’s book illustrator Kathleen Hale, of Orlando the Marmalade Cat fame. 15 color, 15 b&amp;w illustrations

Horace Walpole's Cat

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Pets & Animal Care

Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula

Faber&Faber

The first biography of the Italian director who reinvented the film Western with his series of "spaghetti" westerns. 
The Italian film director Sergio Leone reinvented the American Western with his movie A Fistful of Dollars, a spare reworking of Akira Kurosawa's Japanese outlaw drama Yojimbo transferred to the Texas-Mexican border. In doing so, Leone also created a new kind of Western protagonist--silent, mysterious, morally ambiguous--and found a new star to embody this new archetype: Clint Eastwood. 
Leone's entire life pointed toward his reinvention of the American Western: he grew up during the Nazi occupation of Italy, a period in which he saw terrible parallels to the traditional Western. When he was in a position to direct his own films, the low budget of his first "spaghetti" Western meant that he could only afford to hire a relatively unknown American actor, Clint Eastwood, to star in A Fistful of Dollars, which has been credited with reviving the Western as a credible film genre in the 1960s. This book is the first to document not only Leone's life but also to explore fully the development--and phenomenon--of the Italian film Western. In addition, Christopher Frayling examines Leone's late masterwork, Once Upon a Time in the West, which TimeOut says "ranks among the greatest examples of 'pure cinema' in the history of the medium."

Sergio Leone: Something to Do With Death

Photography & Video

Go behind the curtain of one of the film world’s least understood art forms with the visual architect of 007
Who can forget the eloquence, sex appeal, and sheer luck of James Bond? The bombshells may vary, Bond might be played by Sean Connery or Roger Moore, but the style remains constant, an expectant suit of clothes simply waiting for the right actor to dive in and hoist his (shaken) martini in the air. Populated with international intrigue and riddled with gadgets, the world of Bond introduced a new kind of cinema, the look and feel of which was engineered by Ken Adam.
The mastermind behind seven of the first eleven Bond films, including Dr. No, Adam has been lauded as one of the world’s greatest production designers. First recognized during the filming of Around the World in Eighty Days, he has managed to cultivate a rapt following in one of the cinema’s most underappreciated professions, and with it a reputation for grandly expressionistic sets, such as the war room in Dr. Strangelove and Blofeld’s volcanic headquarters in You Only Live Twice. In this career-spanning series of interviews with Christopher Frayling, Adam shares the inspiration behind his work—from rebuilding eighteenth-century galleons to designing Bond’s moonbuggy—in the process revealing little-known anecdotes of a life begun in Weimar Berlin and nearly ended in World War II, only to piece itself back together and revolutionize the medium of film in its color-saturated golden age.

Ken Adam: The Art of Production Design

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