"The author has achieved the near impossible…a must-squeeze-into-hand-baggage or the back pack."—House and Garden
"A minor classic."—The Times Literary Supplement
This personal, and wonderfully well-informed, selection of the most rewarding towns, cities, villages, and individual monuments in Italy is the definitive guidebook for the discerning traveler. The author has been visiting Italy, for study, for work, and for pleasure, for over fifty years, and is the perfect companion for those who want to know about more than the obvious attractions.
As well as comprehensively covering the finest sights in the major tourist centers of Rome, Florence, Venice, and elsewhere, Francis Russell discusses and describes the neglected, or little-known, masterpieces that are still to be found the length and breadth of the Italian peninsula. In a book that will educate and astonish the expert as surely as it will guide and inform the first-time visitor, the author chooses and explores palaces and gardens, city squares and lonely churches, frescoes and altarpieces, great museums and tiny ruins that together provide a richly textured portrait of a country where the history and patterns of civilization lie more thickly than anywhere else on earth.
This book will immeasurably enhance and enrich the visitor's experience of the most visited country in the world, by virtue of its sensitivity, its wisdom, and its deep knowledge, and by means of its vivid, eloquent, and entertaining exposition.
Francis Russell was educated at Oxford. He is deputy chairman of Christies and specializes in Old Master and Italian paintings.

101 Places in Italy: A Private Grand Tour: 1001 Unforgettable Works of Art

Arts & Photography

RUSSELL,Francis

History & Criticism

Wilmington Square Books

Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) was one of Scotland's leading twentieth-century public intellectuals, and famously one of its most brilliant and combative correspondents. His letters raise issues of particular and widespread interest both within Scotland and further afield. His correspondence with Stephen Bann, the English poet and academic, have a very special place in this context. These letters present in a clear and commensurable form the development of his ideas about poetry and art, and increasingly about sculpture and gardening, over this critical five-year period of his creative life.
The letters begin when Bann was still a student at Cambridge, and Finlay was living in considerable hardship in Edinburgh, though he already had a significant international reputation as a poet. They reveal in fascinating and intimate detail the poet's developing creative process, and also record his often turbulent relationship to the worlds of literature, art, and critical journalism. When he settles in Lanarkshire, he begins to develop the ideas that will result in the creation of the world-famous sculpture garden known as Little Sparta.
This book, edited, introduced, and annotated by Bann himself, is a unique and compelling self-portrait of the man who is now recognized not only as a great poet, but also as a major artist and one of the most original garden designers of modern times.
Stephen Bann is a poet, historian, and cultural critic. He is an emeritus professor of the history of art at Bristol University, and the author of numerous books and articles.

Midway: Letters from Ian Hamilton Finlay to Stephen Bann 1964-69

Bann, Stephen

Hamilton Finlay, Ian

Sculpture

When the author bought a falling down fortified house on the Staffordshire moorlands, he had no reason to anticipate the astonishing tale that would unfold as it was restored. A mysterious set of relationships emerged amongst its former owners, revolving round the almost forgotten artist, Robert Bateman, a prominent Pre-Raphaelite and friend of Burne Jones. He was to marry the granddaughter of the Earl of Carlisle, and to be associated with Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, and other prominent political and artistic figures.
But he had abandoned his life as an artist in mid-career to live as a recluse, and his rich and glamorous wife-to-be had married the local vicar, already in his sixties and shortly to die. The discovery of two clearly autobiographical paintings led to an utterly absorbing forensic investigation into Bateman's life.
The story moves from Staffordshire to Lahore, to Canada, Wyoming, and then, via Buffalo Bill, to Peru and back to England. It leads to the improbable respectability of Imperial Tobacco in Bristol, and then, less respectably, to a car park in Stoke-on-Trent. En route the author pieces together an astonishing and deeply moving story of love and loss, of art and politics, of morality and hypocrisy, of family secrets concealed but never quite completely obscured. The result is a page-turning combination of detective story and tale of human frailty, endeavor, and love. It is also a portrait of a significant artist, a reassessment of whose work is long overdue.
Nigel Daly is an antique dealer and house restorer.

The Lost Pre-Raphaelite: The Secret Life and Loves of Robert Bateman

Daly, Nigel

Humor & Entertainment

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, philosophers have pondered the nature and purpose of the arts, but artists have gone on making them and audiences enjoying them regardless of these musings. None of their theories have met with universal or even popular acceptance. But here is theory that places the arts—all the arts—firmly and squarely within everyone's everyday experiences.
Summers of Discontent goes to the heart of the arts. It's an examination of why artists create them in the first place and why we all feel the need for them. Raymond Tallis thinks the arts spring from our inability as humans fully to experience our experiences; from our hunger for a more rounded, more complete sense of the world.
Tallis's thesis is original and fresh, down-to-earth and life-enhancing. Above all it is practical and intelligible. It will inspire anyone who feels the creative urge today, or anyone who wants to understand why and how the arts enrich their lives and those of others.
Raymond Tallis is a leading academic doctor, poet, philosopher, and cultural critic. Author of more than twenty books, he was until his retirement professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester.
Julian Spalding was director, successively of Sheffield and Manchester Art Galleries, and latterly of the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow. He has written over a dozen books on art historical subjects and curated many exhibitions.

Summers of Discontent: The Purpose of the Arts Today

Tallis, Raymond

Spalding, Julian

Our world view has changed from a flat earth under the dome of heaven to a planet spinning in the universe. We perceived the world as a body, like ours, then as a tree, a pyramid, an altar, and finally as a veil which became a window through which we peered only to discover ourselves on a sphere, a bubble which might burst at any moment. Our changing views are interpreted through iconic images of the remote and more recent past: the Venus of Willendorf, the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Taj Mahal, the Scream, Sydney Opera House, and the Guggenheim, Bilbao.

Realisation-from Seeing to Understanding: The Origins of Art

"Exceptional. If there has been a more honest, calm, and profoundly moving memoir written in the last few years, then I've missed it."—Times Literary Supplement
How would you make sense of your life if you thought it might end tomorrow? In this captivating and best-selling memoir, Vesna Goldsworthy tells the story of herself, her family, and her early life in her lost country. There follows marriage, a move to England, and a successful media and academic career, then a cancer diagnosis and its unresolved consequences. A profoundly moving, comic, and original account by a stunning literary talent.

Chernobyl Strawberries

Biographies & Memoirs

Goldsworthy, Vesna

Arts & Literature

An extraordinary collection of over 100 essays which distill and commemorate some of the finest and most memorable art exhibitions of the last three decades. Ranging from early prehistoric art of the Ice Age to the performance art of today, and taking in nearly all the significant art in between, the book is an astonishingly readable and accessible introduction to the work of the world's finest artists.
Richard Dorment was the art critic of London's Daily Telegraph. He wrote almost every week about the most significant art exhibitions throughout the UK, but also in Paris, Amsterdam, New York, and Washington.

Exhibitionist: Writing about Art in a Daily Newspaper

Dorment, Richard

A companion to Midway, this is the second volume of letters of Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006), the leading Scottish poet, artist, sculptor, and garden designer. His garden at Stonypath, now called "Little Sparta" has been described as "the only truly original garden created since 1945."
These letters to and from Finlay's friend, the English poet and scholar Stephen Bann, center on the initial development of the garden near Edinburgh. They cover Finlay's turn away from poetry towards sculpture and garden design and the thinking behind, and consequences of, this development.

Stonypath Days: Letters between Ian Hamilton Finlay and Stephen Bann 1970-72

This personal and well-informed selection and description of the most interesting towns and individual buildings and archaeological sites in Turkey is the definitive guidebook for the discerning traveler. The author has been visiting Turkey for nearly fifty years and is the perfect companion for those who want to know about more than the obvious attractions. This book will immeasurably enhance any thoughtful traveler's visit, but can also be read at home as an aid to planning, or recalling, a trip, or simply as a guide to the astonishing and multi-faceted artistic and architectural riches of that most fascinating country.

123 Places in Turkey: A Private Grand Tour

Until the mid-eighteenth century, Britain’s barren mountains were regarded with fear by all thoughtful people. The romantic movement, with its cult of the ‘sublime’ and of the ‘picturesque’, modified this perception, and the mountainous regions of Wales, the Lake District, and even Scotland, became fashionable to visit and to admire for their ‘beauty, horror and immensity’.   But these tourists never left the well-beaten and recommended path. They did not venture into the hills themselves. Only miners and quarrymen, or shepherds with sheep to find, or pack-horse drivers did that. And when the first eccentric visitors asked to be guided to the summits the locals were amazed and bemused.   When Coleridge, wild, unconventional and physically fearless, arrived to join the Wordsworths in the Lakes in 1799, he immediately set out onto the high fells on his own. His records of these explorations, in his notes and in letters, particularly to his beloved but unattainable Sara Hutchinson, provide a totally new and modern appreciation and understanding of the mountain landscape.   Helvellyn, Skiddaw and most of the now popular summits were visited by him alone, without maps or any equipment beyond his notebook in which he scribbled his impressions and his reactions―‘O joy for me’ he jotted on first seeing Ullswater from the top of Great Dodd. It was not till the very end of the nineteenth century that solitary walking on the fells became acceptable, and then, almost overnight, universally popular and fashionable.   This book explores and explains the experiences of a true pioneer and one of Britain’s greatest and most remarkable creative spirits.

O Joy for me!: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Origins of Fell–Walking in the Lake District 1790-1802

Science & Math

Davidson, Keir

Nature & Ecology

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