In Travels with Plotinus, Moin Mir follows Plotinus's 1,780-year-old journey of personal discovery across India, Egypt, Italy, Greece and Turkey as he tries to understand the core concept of Plotinian thought, derived from studying the Upanishads - 'Unity and Oneness'. He uses Plotinus's philosophy to observe how the free will of intellect uses 'Unity' for good and evil. Intimate conversations with refugees escaping war, innocent boatmen drifting down the Nile, simple farmers and monks in Greece along with observations of ancient art and modern technological accomplishments inform his thoughts and writing on the concept of the oneness of humankind - its immense power to bring good and yet its vulnerability to the stealth of intellect to destroy and self-destruct.
From Market to Stock Market is the astonishing story of Bill Adderley who, from the humblest of beginnings, created one of the most successful retail chains in Britain today. Dunelm, Britain's leading homeware group, has over 180 superstores and a market value on the London Stock Exchange of GBP2.2 billion. The son of poor Irish immigrants, Bill grew up in a council house in Leeds, sharing a bed with his three brothers. He got his first job at fifteen, working as a 'Saturday Boy' at the local Woolworth, and went on to become a Woolworth manager when he was twenty-one. In the 1970s however Woolworth's went into steep decline and Bill left to start up his own business, selling seconds and reject goods on a stall in Leicester market. His first coup was a truckload of reject slippers, followed by reject Marks & Spencer curtains from which he made enough money to start a company that grew into the Dunelm homeware furnishings group. In 2006, Dunelm Group Plc listed on the stock market, since when the shares have increased six-fold. At the age of fifty-eight, Bill passed over the executive reins to his son Will and now lives a quiet life near Leicester with his wife Jean.
Bradfield College first opened in 1850 and this is a pictorial celebration of its rich history. Located in the Pang Valley, Berkshire the school was founded by the Reverend Thomas Stevens and originally called Saint Andrew's College. This book is a beautifully illustrated social history of the buildings, its traditions and challenges, including contributions from students and staff. Bradfield 175 follows changes in education and society from the nineteenth century through to the successful institution it is today.
Written by John Buxton and Don Heath, two experienced rail professionals, Lines of Power delivers a comprehensive record of the stuttering progress of electrification and modernisation of Britain's railway network, exposing the furtive manoeuvring by competing factions within the railway industry during the 1950s. The book is highly critical of the excessive scepticism of the Department of Transport (DoT later DfT) and the frequent disproportionate, and often imprudent, interventions by politicians that have collectively thwarted the opportunity to progress a more comprehensive and cost effective 'rolling programme' of electrification.
This book explores the goals and limitations of twentieth-century art studies (Kunstwissenschaft) as a field, and aims to contribute to future academic research. It is structured around several representative art scientists and their key texts, exploring the theories of influential figures in the field, such as Erwin Panofsky and Aby Warburg (art researchers). This approach allows the book to present the universal construction goals, theoretical sources, thinking logic and academic dilemmas of art history in an interdisciplinary context at that time.
How did a marginal dialect spoken in the late ninth century by 200,000 people become the world's language spoken by 1.6 million people today?In Amorous or Loving - The Highly Peculiar Tale of English and the English, Sir Rupert Gavin charts the unique evolution of our language into the resulting hodge-podge that is now the lingua franca of the world. He argues that English is ideal as the global language, not just by accident of history, but by fundamental construction and constitution. Further, he examines how all of this was determined not just by our unique language, but also our geography, our weather, our religion, the extraordinary status of London, and by a handful of inspirational figures - some well-known and some hardly known today at all.
Fan Zhen is an abstract painter whose art centres on the therapeutic colour field and energy expansion. Her visual creations strongly echo Daoism and Buddhism, which are mysterious yet existentialist. The paintings attempt to grasp the fleeting moments in life and engage the audience directly with purity, blurring the ephemeral and the eternal. Although abstract art in Western senses has exhausted inspiration regarding formal languages and theories, Eastern philosophical thinking, exempt from the modern/postmodern dichotomy, offers new ways of examining the entity of art and life. As a female artist living in China, Fan Zhen endeavoured to convey her art to a much wider audience, with concerns referring but not limited to gender, class, power and ethics. Fan Zhen's art stems from traditional Chinese culture and adopts a contemporary temperament with the need for counter-anxiety caused by rapid change in society. Daoism and Buddhism, as philosophical contexts, have generated a great heritage of visual language that differs from Western abstract art. The book explores Fan Zhen's art, validating the value of life and faith in vision.
The Tan family collection is focused on a selection of significant ceramic masterpieces that demonstrate the evolution of technology and art in China. These masterpieces were previously housed in well-known private institutions such as Meiyintang, Xiaoyazhitang, Alfred Clark, Frank Caro, John Bodie and others. Many of these pieces were featured in prominent public exhibitions and extensively documented in dedicated catalogues. The book showcases eighty ceramic masterpieces from the Tan collection, accompanied by articles and detailed descriptions. These provide insight into the characteristics of Chinese ceramic art and offer accurate records of their provenance. The aim of the book is to shed new light on cross-media cultural history and emphasise the global significance of Chinese ceramic art, a cultural heritage that has captivated the world. It is a testament to the rich and diverse cultural heritage of China, something that all can take pride in and appreciate.
The Architect's Edge is a bold exploration of architecture, leadership and business, offering invaluable insights for creative entrepreneurs and industry leaders. Gareth Stapleton, an award-winning architect and project manager, shares practical wisdom from decades of global experience. Drawing from real-world projects, he demonstrates how architects and leaders can navigate the complexities of modern business while maintaining creative integrity. This book challenges conventional wisdom and offers actionable strategies for driving long-term value and innovation. Whether you're an aspiring architect, a seasoned leader or a creative professional seeking to make an impact, this handbook equips you with the tools to build lasting value, inspire innovation and lead with confidence.
A visually rich and engaging monograph on the life and works of Thomas Archer, one of the most overlooked architects of the English Baroque. The book will cover some of the most famous buildings and landscapes of the eighteenth century and highlight the skill of an architect who has lain outside of the architectural mainstream for too long.
Using timeless imagery of powerful women, sprawling country and scenes of magical surrealism that evoke not-so-distant times and places, Andrea Kowch has risen to be one of the leading figurative realists working today. The Michigan artist is a powerhouse of a painter who is comfortable working large and with complex compositions, and yet her work is also delicate, sensitive and willing to carefully embrace her audience with empathy and compassion. Here in these pages, viewers can step into Kowch's world to meet her strong-willed subjects, live in her gorgeous settings and explore her powerful themes of love, womanhood, strength and independence.
Euphemia Lamb was painted and sculpted by many renowned artists during the period before the First World War, such as Augustus John, Henry Lamb, Ambrose McEvoy, Jacob Epstein and James Dickson Innes. She was at the vanguard of modern British art. She was also a literary muse for many leading writers of the period, including Virginia Woolf, Henri Pierre Roche and Aleister Crowley. Euphemia was the embodiment of the modern woman: sexually liberated, hard-working and ambitious. She used her connections in bohemian London and Paris to educate herself and advance the notion of what a woman could be in early twentieth-century British society. Euphemia was a pioneer who broke down barriers and her legacy survives in art and literature.
'It seems that making art is chasing after an elusive dream of perfection that sits somewhere in my head. It will not go away, even after fifty years of trying. After all this time the process of holding materials, rubbing, crushing, cradling or just placing them violently or tenderly, is what it's about. Every action is a stream of discovery of something that hasn't existed before - it's a miracle and a bloody disaster. And so every sculpture leads to the next piece in the great puzzle. Much of this work is initiated in the subconscious. The different processes connect me with something physical or metaphysical that needs to be understood. In this way I discovered and dealt with past trauma. Things that didn't make sense but once transposed into clay became obvious. In this way personal experiences were opened out into universal experiences.'
Most guitarists today think of the USA as the land of the guitar. Classical guitars come from Spain but rock, jazz and folk guitars must surely be American? They know the 'great' names - Gibson, Epiphone, Fender, Gretsch, Martin. How many of them know that Christian Friedrich Martin was born in Markneukirchen, Germany, in 1796 and emigrated to the USA at the age of thirty-seven? The Bate Collection is a museum of musical instruments in the University of Oxford and owns a collection of guitars donated by the author. Half of them were made by German-speaking Czech craftsmen expelled from their homeland after the Second World War, resettling in Bavaria; the other half by their former neighbours in Saxony, with whom they had worked closely for three centuries but who now found themselves behind the Iron Curtain. This book offers a summary of the socio-political background and the way it led to the decline and almost the extinction of what was once the most productive centre of stringed-instrument making in the world. Lavishly illustrated with photos of all of the carefully-researched instruments in the collection, plus a unique guide to help the collector to identify the maker of his instrument.
The author weaves together history and memory in a wide-ranging exploration of women's attitudes to personal appearance in modern Britain.
Chris Orr, the well known British painter and printmaker, takes us on a tour of his prodigious and penetrating vision of the world over the last twelve years.
The Entrepreneur Within is an innovator's playbook to help ideas gain traction, scale quickly and keep an entrepreneurial mindset alive within any organisation. Large companies often lose the creative spark that brought them success and get weighed down by the complex systems built up within them. Start-up companies often get bloated with too many disparate ideas and get blocked by a lack of basic systems and infrastructure. The proprietary FORGE® Methodology shows how businesses of all stages and sizes can develop creative and viable innovation that makes a difference.
In Capital Offence award-winning investor Paul Musson shows how the world is becoming increasingly divided on many fronts. One of the root causes of this is that well-intended policymakers have drunk the something-from-nothing Kool-Aid and are convinced that there is such a thing as a free lunch. There isn't. They believe that debt-fueled spending is what leads to economic prosperity. It doesn't. The direct result of these central bank-supported policies is growing wealth disparity where some people are able to extract more from our economic system than they create, while others are left to foot the bill. Most books on this subject speak in a language understood only by those steeped in financial jargon; Paul Musson uses everyday language and analogies to help readers understand why the economy is moving in the wrong direction. The next generation is now poised to be worse off than its predecessors, not because they are less productive, but because older generations are benefiting at their expense - an unsustainable and immoral reality. Paul Musson gives us steps for reform, and while the painful choices ahead are inevitable, facing them now will prevent even greater consequences later.
Better known as 'Lizzie Siddal', the model who posed for John Everett Millais's painting Ophelia, Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti is now finally recognised as a Pre-Raphaelite artist in her own right, working alongside her male colleagues on equal terms. Elizabeth's designs were truly original, the creation of her own imagination. They embodied the essence of Pre-Raphaelitism that her husband Gabriel and other members of the circle were striving to achieve. The male members of the group shamelessly copied the ideas from Elizabeth's small sketches to create their own large masterpieces which have since become the epitome of Pre-Raphaelite art. The exclusion of women from the narrative has had a major impact in creating the perception of the Pre-Raphaelites as a predominantly male artistic movement; in Beyond Ophelia Dr Glenda Youde shows Elizabeth not to be a pathetic drowning figure, but as the initiator of a directional change in the visual development of Pre-Raphaelite art. Featuring a unique collection of photographs of Elizabeth's work commissioned by her husband after her death, this book highlights the critical importance of her role within the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and one which ultimately led to the evolution of the Aesthetic Movement.
The Ghurids have their origins in the mountainous region of modern central Afghanistan, from where they established the first Islamic state in India. Some of their ghulams, primarily nomadic Turks from Central Asia, were to become independent rulers, leading to the foundation of the Delhi Sultanate. At its height, in the late-twelfth and early-thirteenth centuries, their domain extended from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the Bay of Bengal and from the Straits of Hormuz to the River Oxus. Mamluks, Conquest and Culture covers both the military and political history of the dynasty and the Persianate cultural world they inhabited and propagated on the subcontinent. The collapse of the Great Seljuk Empire allowed them to expand westwards into Iran. Extensive use of ghulams played a crucial role in their success, and this cavalry was to prove decisive in the campaigns against the Indian dynasties. Their conquests reunited territories to create a transregional empire for the first time in a millennium.
A remarkable painting by the Antwerp painter Maerten de Vos, 'Moses Showing the Tablets of the Law to the Israelites', shows wealthy merchants, artists and poets, a ground-breaking botanist, a pioneer in women's education, and the greatest publisher of the age gathered around a portrayal of Moses and Aaron with the stone tablets of the law engraved with the Ten Commandments in Dutch. In searching for an answer to the question of what brought together this diverse group of influential people in sixteenth-century Antwerp, Richard Willmott turns to their letters, diaries, friendship albums and poetry to write a group biography. As he finds out more about each life and explores the links that brought them together, he shows how a network of friendship and exchange of scholarly ideas that crossed the Channel and Europe's borders lay behind the rich civilisation of sixteenth-century Antwerp, until it was destroyed by the struggle for political and religious power in the Eighty Years War when the Dutch fought the Spanish for independence.
This is a biography lightened with the intimate tone of a social memoir, about a woman who was both a bystander and protagonist through some fifty years of twentieth-century British history. Pamela Berry was the daughter of the famous and brilliant self-made politician and lawyer, F.E.Smith, the first Earl of Birkenhead, and married the son of another self-made buccaneer, William Berry from south Wales, who became Viscount Camrose and the owner of a group of national newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph. She had an unusually glamorous and precocious upbringing, spoiled by her adoring father and much photographed by Cecil Beaton, and in her prime used her position as a newspaper proprietor's wife to become the most famous political and press hostess of her generation, harnessing her beauty and wit to influence the successive governments of the day.
In Real Vanilla, Nature's Unsung Hero LittlePod's founder Janet Sawyer tells of her company's mission over the last fifteen years to save real vanilla which was under threat of being lost within a generation. They have made a huge difference, encouraging the development of vanilla paste in a tube, supporting farming communities in the world's equatorial regions and educating consumers all around the world about the importance and value of vanilla to the planet. Through LittlePod supporting a pioneering polyculture orchard in Indonesia, it has helped educate future generations about a precious plant that is the essence of sustainability. This is a fascinating story of how a determined woman used the 'empty nest' time in her life to build a company whilst learning about biodiversity, supporting farmers' livelihoods and creating a family of human relationships - fondly known as 'LittlePodders'.
Joshua Hagler's Nihil explores in an absolutely unique way the realisation and consummation of the mind, process and application of an artist's life and work. Hagler defi ned for himself nine key tenets to guide his artistic vision and then utilised and inhabited nine spaces in New Mexico to articulate this vision. His site-specific installations and interventions in lost and forgotten buildings, schools, churches and post offices create ghostly imaginative spaces that integrate many times and places hovering within a single moment. This extraordinary and unique sequence of work is documented and recorded in this important publication of a singular artistic vision. 'The law of the conservation of mass states that nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed. Here lies the pathos to Joshua Hagler's convoluted mental and pictorial universe.' - David Anfam, Art Historian & Curator
Pedlars, Poseurs and Performers is a compelling insight into the world of the Portobello Street market. Fifty years of photographs, which go beyond the stalls, shops and cafes normally associated with it. Each picture features, where possible, the subject's name and the date the picture was taken. Some of the characters shared their stories with Brian Jaquest while being photographed in his studio. The non-conformist approach to the layout of the book represents the chaotic experience of a street market. The photographs and texts describe each category in the book's title: pedlars, poseurs and performers. This book is not only a visual record of the characters who have made the Portobello Street market famous over generations but is also a collection of fascinating photographs taken from the point of view of an insider. Pedlars, Poseurs and Performers is an in-depth photographic history which takes the reader into the ticking heart of the Portobello Road.
The beautiful Anglo-Italian artist Maria Cosway was one of the most talented and dynamic women active in Regency England, but one whose achievements have been largely overlooked. Born in Florence in 1760, she was acclaimed at an early age as both a painter and a musician. She exhibited forty-one paintings at the Royal Academy summer exhibition between 1781 and 1801, and hosted regular musical soirees at the Pall Mall house she shared with her husband, Richard Cosway. They were attended by the political and cultural elite of London. Maria's extraordinary network of connections to the great and the good of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, included friendships with, among others, Thomas Jefferson, the Prince of Wales, Pasquale Paoli, the artist Jacques-Louis David, the opera singer Luigi Marchesi, the Duchess of Devonshire, the actress and writer Mary Robinson, and members of the Bonaparte family. Estranged from her husband by 1801, Maria Cosway largely gave up painting and reinvented herself as a progressive educator, founding schools for young women: first in Lyon, later in Lodi, Italy. In recognition of her achievements at Lodi, the Emperor of Austria made her a baroness.
This is the almost incredible but well-documented story of the author's 40-year-long hard-fought battle with naval authorities and government.
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