Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Art

The First World War is over, and in a quiet Hampshire village, artist Stanley Spencer is working on the commission of a lifetime, painting an entire chapel in memory of a life lost in the war to end all wars. Combining his own traumatic experiences with moments of everyday redemption, the chapel will become his masterpiece. When Elsie Munday arrives to take up position as housemaid to the Spencer family, her life quickly becomes entwined with the charming and irascible Stanley, his artist wife, Hilda, and their tiny daughter, Shirin.

Women’s identity has long been stifled by a limited set of archetypes, found everywhere in pictures from art history’s classics to advertising, while women artists have been overlooked and held back from shaping more empowering roles. In this impassioned book, art historian Catherine McCormack asks us to look again at what these images have told us to value, opening up our most loved images - from those of Titian and Botticelli to Picasso and the Pre-Raphaelites.

In Feeding the Monster, Anna Bogutskaya dispels this notion once and for all by examining how horror responds to and fuels our feelings of fear, anxiety, pain, hunger and power.

Churches are many things to us—they are places of worship, vibrant community hubs and oases of calm reflection. To know a church is to hold a key to the past that unlocks an understanding of our shared history. Andrew Ziminski has spent decades as a stonemason and church conservator, acting as an informal guide to curious visitors. Church Going is his handbook to the medieval churches of the British Isles, in which he reveals their fascinating histories, features and furnishings, from flying buttresses to rood screens, lichgates to chancels.

What should I wear? More than ever, we are told it should be something new. Today, the clothing industry churns out 80 billion garments a year and employs every sixth person on Earth. Historically, the apparel trade has exploited labour, the environment and intellectual property. Best-selling journalist Dana Thomas has travelled the globe to discover the visionary designers and companies who are reclaiming traditional craft and launching cutting-edge sustainable technologies to produce better fashion. 

An indispensable guide to the craft of writing and business of publishing from one of our best-selling and most versatile authors. Onetime teacher and best-selling novelist Joanne Harris has been advising and corresponding with aspirational writers for over six years. This collection of pithy and funny lists of advice provides both hard-won wisdom and insider industry help. All aspects of the writing process and story development are covered - as is the thorny issue of how and where to find readers. 

Commissioned in 1750, the Palazzo Venier was planned as a testimony to the power and wealth of a great Venetian family, but the fortunes of the Venier family waned, and the project was left abandoned and unfinished. Yet in the early 20th century, it attracted three fascinating women: Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse and Peggy Guggenheim.

Hans Holbein the Younger is chiefly celebrated for his beautiful and precisely realised portraiture, which includes representations of Henry VIII, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Anne of Cleves, Jane Seymour and an array of the Tudor lords and ladies he encountered during the course of two sojourns in England. But beyond these familiar images, which have come to define our perception of the world of the Henrician court, Holbein was a protean and multi-faceted genius.

Lee Miller, 1927 - New York: A classically beautiful young woman, she is discovered by Condé Nast. Lee Miller, 1929 - Paris: Protégé and lover of Man Ray, she invents with him the solarization technique of photography, develops into a brilliant Surrealist photographer, and plays the statue in Cocteau's film Blood of a Poet. Lee Miller, 1939-45 - Europe: Living at times with her future husband, the painter Roland Penrose, she becomes a US war correspondent and covers the siege of St Malo and the liberation of Paris. 

This definitive biography of Anna Wintour chronicles the steep climb of an ambitious young woman who would, with singular and legendary focus, become the most powerful woman in media.

With deftness and skill, journalist Lili Anolik uses Babitz, Babitz's brilliance of observation, Babitz's incisive intelligence and, most of all, Babitz's diary-like letters, as the key to unlocking Didion. Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, a mystery behind her dark glasses and cool expression, her marriage to John Gregory Dunne as tortured as it was enduring. It was also the breaking and then the remaking - and thus the true making - of another great American writer: Eve Babitz.

Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. But in a world where our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity...doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance. So argues artist and critic Jenny Odell in this field guide to doing nothing (at least as capitalism defines it). Odell sees our attention as the most precious - and overdrawn - resource we have. 

Bianca Bosker plunges deep inside the world of art and the people who live for it: gallerists, collectors, curators and, of course, artists themselves—the kind who work multiple jobs and let their paintings sleep soundly in the studio while they wake up covered in cat pee on a friend's couch. Encompassing everything from color theory to evolutionary biology, and from ancient cave paintings to Instagram as it attempts to discern art's role in our culture, our economy and our hearts, Get the Picture is a rollicking adventure that will change the way you see forever.

Authors John Dorney, Jessica Regan and Tom Salinsky provide a captivating decade-by-decade exploration of the Oscars. For each decade, they examine the making of classic films, trends and innovations in cinema, behind-the-scenes scandals at the awards ceremony and who won and why. Twenty films are reviewed in-depth, alongside 10 detailed 'making-of' accounts and capsule reviews of every single Best Picture winner in history. In addition, each Best Picture winner is carefully scrutinised to answer the ultimate question: 'did the Academy get it right?'

Gavin Plumley considered himself a distinctly urban being… until he met his rural husband, Alastair. Together, they bought Stepps House—a three-storey building in Pembridge, Herefordshire—on love at first sight. But then came the inevitable question from an insurance salesman: 'How old is it?' The date they'd been given of 1800 seemed out by centuries. As Gavin traced Stepps House through various hands and eras, he uncovers a past steeped in history and art, memory and nature that resonates powerfully with our present.

Birds, Strangers and Psychos is a thrilling anthology that brings together the biggest names in mystery and crime fiction to pay homage to Alfred Hitchcock, the legendary filmmaker whose name is synonymous with suspense. Acclaimed editor Maxim Jakubowski curates 24 original short stories, each inspired by the mood, tension, and style that defined Hitchcock’s groundbreaking work.

At the age of 16, Catherine Tylney Long became the wealthiest heiress in England, and the public found their 'angel'. Witty, wealthy and beautiful, Catherine married for love. Her choice of husband was the charming but feckless dandy William Wellesley Pole, nephew of the Duke of Wellington. But their happiness was short-lived; just a decade later, William had frittered away Catherine's inheritance, and the couple were forced to flee.

Jean Strouse's Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers looks at twelve portraits of one English family painted by the expatriate American artist at the height of his career—and at the intersections of all these lives with the sparkle and strife of the Edwardian age.

In Acts of Resistance, Amber Massie-Blomfield writes about the artists who have treated the protest site as their canvas and contributed to movements that have transformed history—from the musicians in Auschwitz to the four-year Siege of Sarajevo, from the to ACT UP's 1989 invasion of the New York Stock Exchange, to the Niger Delta and indigenous communities in Bolivia.

Born into a wealthy family in Northern England, Ivory Frame rebels. She escapes to interwar Paris, where she finds herself through art and falls in with the most brilliantly bohemian set: the surrealists. But Ivory’s life is violently interrupted by the Second World War. She flees from Europe, leaving behind her friends, her art and her love. Now over 90, Ivory receives unexpected news from the past: she has a grandchild, despite never having had a child of her own....