'Beautifully written and brilliantly argued, Possessed is one of the few things you really need to own' Daniel GilbertHow ownership came to own us - and what we can do about itOur love affair with possessions seems to be all-consuming, even as we face economic and environmental breaking points.
Lunch with the FT has been a permanent fixture in the Financial Times for almost 30 years, featuring presidents, film stars, musical icons and business leaders from around the world.
The final major work by one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth centuryIn the fourth and final volume of his far-reaching and influential study of human sexuality, Foucault turns his attention to early Christianity, exploring how ancient ideas of pleasure were modified into the notion of the 'flesh'.
Dive in to this breathtaking read about the world's oceansExplore the last wilderness left on Earth, with an enhanced and updated edition of this exhaustive guide to the underwater world.
Essentially a domestic biography whose main concern is the tragicomedy of manners enacted by a closely knit group of friends and lovers, Wives and Stunners tells the story of Janey Morris, Georgie Burne-Jones, Lizzie Siddall, Effie Gray and less well-known, Marie Spartali, Aglaia Coronio and Mary Zambacco.
This is the story of Faberge's Imperial Easter eggs - of their maker, of the tsars who commissioned them, of the middlemen who sold them and of the collectors who fell in love with them.
The Edizioni Conz of the Italian collector, publisher and photographer Francesco Conz-including portfolios, large silkscreen prints on fabrics and objects-are among the finest and most elaborate art editions of the second half of the 20th century.
Illuminating reflections on painting and drawing from one of the most revered artists of the twentieth century'Thank God for yellow ochre, cadmium red medium, and permanent green light'How does a painter see the world?
A landmark illustrated history of rural church monuments - the forgotten national treasures of England and WalesDeep in the countryside, away from metropolitan abbeys and cathedrals, thousands of funerary monuments are hidden in parish churches.
Through 140 drawings, thought experiments, recipes, activist instructions, gardening ideas, insurgences and personal revolutions, artists who spend their lives thinking outside the box guide you to a new worldview; where you and the planet are one.
'We live within a spectacle of empty clothes and unworn masks'In this series of remarkable pieces from across his career, John Berger celebrates and dissects the close links between art and society and the individual.
From the bestselling author of Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts, a captivating account of the last surviving relic of Thomas Becket The assassination of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170 is one of the most famous events in European history.
Since its establishment 150 years ago as the world's first urban subway, the London Underground has continuously set a benchmark for design that many transit systems around the world - from New York to Tokyo to Moscow and beyond - have followed.
'Tiepolo: the last breath of happiness in Europe'The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life creating frescoes that are among the glories of Western art, yet he remains shrouded in mystery.
'I have never read such a stimulating short guide to art' Lynn Barber, Sunday Times Now Grayson Perry is a fully paid-up member of the art establishment, he wants to show that any of us can appreciate art (after all, there is a reason he's called this book Playing to the Gallery and not 'Sucking up to an Academic Elite').
A unique opportunity to learn about the lives and creativity of the world's leading artistsHans Ulrich Obrist has been conducting ongoing conversations with the world's greatest living artists since he began in Switzerland, aged 19, with Fischli and Weiss.
This book takes a dramatically original approach to the history of humanity, using objects which previous civilisations have left behind them, often accidentally, as prisms through which we can explore past worlds and the lives of the men and women who lived in them.
Visionary English Socialist and pioneer of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris argued that all work should be a source of pride and satisfaction, and that everyone should be entitled to beautiful surroundings no matter what their class.
John Ruskin overturned Victorian society s ideas about art and architecture, arguing that ancient buildings must be conserved for their deep, mystical links with the past and that creative design is essential not for financial gain, but to communicate eternal human truths.
Leonardo is the greatest, most multi-faceted and most mysterious of all Renaissance artists, but extraordinarily, considering his enormous reputation, this is the first full-length biography in English for several decades.
Setting Realism in its social and historical context, the author discusses the crucial paradox posed by Realist works of art - notably in the revolutionary paintings of Courbet, the works of Manet, Degas and Monet, of the Pre-Raphaelites and other English, American, German and Italian Realists.
In this remarkable collection of 100 manifestos from the last 100 years, Alex Danchev presents the cacophony of voices of such diverse movements as Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Feminism, Communism, Destructivism, Vorticism, Stridentism, Cannibalism and Stuckism, taking in along the way film, architecture, fashion, and cookery.
At thirty one, Michelangelo was considered the finest artist in Italy, perhaps the world; long before he died at almost 90 he was widely believed to be the greatest sculptor or painter who had ever lived (and, by his enemies, to be an arrogant, uncouth, swindling miser).
One of the most widely read books on modern design, Nikolaus Pevsner's landmark work today remains as stimulating as it was when first published in 1936.
Artist, architect, poet and philosopher, Leon Battista Alberti revolutionized the history of art with his theories of perspective in On Painting (1435).
A new selection of Vincent Van Gough's letters, based on an entirely new translation, revealing his religious struggles, his fascination with the French Revolution, his search for love and his involvement in humanitarian causes.
Beginning with Cimabue and Giotto in the thirteenth century, Vasari traces the development of Italian art across three centuries to the golden epoch of Leonardo and Michelangelo.
When John Constable fell in love with Maria Bicknell, granddaughter of a Suffolk country neighbour, he little knew how long it would take to make her his wife.
For nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, the Italian Renaissance was nothing less than the beginning of the modern world - a world in which flourishing individualism and the competition for fame radically transformed science, the arts, and politics.