Calum Colvin is one of Scotland’s most innovative and exciting contemporary photographers. In his work he creates a kaleidoscope of figures, symbols and ideas, which are blended into the most vibrant and stimulating images. With this project, Colvin has explored the mysterious world of Ossian. Ossian, a third century Celtic bard, was first discovered by James MacPherson, himself a poet but also a cultural entrepreneur and an adventurer. MacPherson published the ballads of Ossian in the years after 1760. These mournful elegies to the lost world of the Gael became a cause celebre in Enlightenment society. On the one hand, MacPherson was hailed as the discoverer and translator of a “Celtic Homer”, while on the other, he was accused by Samuel Johnson, of having perpetrated a cruel fraud on the public. While this dispute rumbled on, the poems of Ossian became feted throughout Europe and America and touched the art of poets, writers and composers such as Burns, Goethe, Longfellow and Mendelssohn. Colvin has taken these events as the basis for his surreal meditation on contemporary culture. Through the ideas and associations inspired by MacPherson’s Ossian, he has produced a discourse on national identity, “authenticity” and the human psyche. It is characteristic of Colvin that he has successfully explored these difficult themes while simultaneously creating accessible, provocative photographs.

In this increasingly globalized, modernized, interconnected world, what can we learn from the first temples and burial sites built by our ancestors? This handbook brings some of the muddier, forgotten aspects of our shared history to life, offering a compelling insight into the origins of British cultural identity and a reminder of our deep-rooted connection to the earth.

Customers today demand a highly personalized and unique purchasing experience: they require expert guidance in a purchasing process that is relevant and efficient from start to finish. Less Contact, More Impact explores the dynamics of corporate sales today and in the future as a function of trust and cooperation. The RIO model developed by Belgium-based Blinc Sales Institute marks the evolution of a new era in which genuine contact between client and salesperson is crucial to meeting the challenges of customer expectations. The goal of this book is to guide sales in the digital age in order to achieve maximum personal impact, better results, and consistent customer satisfaction in a minimum amount of time.

Humayun, the son of Babur and the second Mughal ruler, reigned in Agra from 1530 to 1540 and then in Delhi from 1555 to 1556. Until now, his numerous achievements, including winning back the throne of Hindustan, have not been well recorded. The Planetary King follows Humayun’s travels and campaigns during the political and social disturbances of the early 16th century. It delves into Humayun’s extraordinary social and intellectual life; demystifies his magico-scientific world view, draws attention to his deep involvement with literature, poetry, painting, architecture, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, occultism and extraordinary inventions, and offers a new analysis of Humayun’s mausoleum as the posthumous sum of his visions and dreams.

The book accompanies the new site museum at Humayun’s tomb created by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture upon the culmination of two decades of conservation work on the World Heritage Site.

Co-published with Aga Khan Trust for Culture, New Delhi. 

Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) was one of the great architects of the twentieth century. His Edwardian country houses, surrounded by rhapsodic gardens, beguiled clients with their romance and wit. After 1918, the war memorials that he created symbolized a grieving nation’s sense of loss. In the new capital of the British Raj, New Delhi, the Viceroy’s House or Rashtrapati Bhavan had a footprint bigger than Versailles. His unfinished Liverpool Cathedral would have rivalled St Peter’s in Rome.

Intensely shy, Lutyens hid his personality behind puns and jokes – and yet he could be called ‘part mystic’, a reference to an inner profundity. Rich in stories, this entertaining and stylish short biography is a major new study incorporating fresh research which shows this most charismatic of architects in a new light.

Relationships between architects and clients – built upon expressed values, as well as their import into the final work of architecture – are typically not discussed in architectural education, rarely considered in architectural criticism or theory, and usually missing in most writing about architecture. This monograph seeks to highlight and address this deficiency. The book focuses on the process that the firm uses to help their clients to define values, and to intone them through architectural design. Exquisitely presented throughout, this volume presents a range of built and in-process works at a variety of scales, complexity, and locations, with various clients. Most of these projects have not been previously published. The projects will be documented and discussed within the context of the value proposition and design process that distinguish Pickard Chilton’s approach to architecture.

Caravaggio’s astonishingly naturalistic and provocative Cupid Victorious hung in the palace of a famous family at the heart of seventeenth-century Rome. Helen Langdon explores how the artist, famed for his originality, created a balance between a suggestion of his own world – a world of lively and rowdy street life – and a complex and ambiguous response to both ancient and Renaissance art and literature. Langdon also looks at the challenge the painting threw out to contemporary painters, whose world was characterized by extreme and bitter rivalries; often they reject his irony, sometimes embellish the painting’s sexuality, and at other times convey an opposing sense of the harmony of the arts.

Miami and the Keys are the cultural and geographical gateways to the United States; where Latin America gracefully blends into North America, and land embraces the sea. This unusual guide leads you along the fulcrum that is Miami and the Keys, laden with world-class architecture, sandy beaches, pristine waters, nightclubs, and trendy hotels. Beneath the well-polished surface lies a history and culture that strays far from the conventional, bubbling up through unexpected places, like a coral fortress built for a spurned lover, a divey laundromat that serves the sweetest café con leche you’ve ever had, or an enclave of houses built on stilts in the midst of the ocean. Lose yourself in a glass rainforest. Glide over the mysterious waters of the Everglades. Visit your own desert island. Drink the sweet nectar of the Cuban coffee gods. Venture into the “other” Miami, beyond the glitz and glamor, steeped in natural beauty and deep-seeded tradition. See why Ernest Hemingway called the Keys his home. Though teeming with tourists, there are still plenty of hidden gems to be unearthed, you just have to know where to look…

Writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II, wine merchant, gentleman soldier and cricketer Ian Maxwell Campbell casts an affectionate and occasionally wistful look back at the Golden Age of wine, when Bordeaux was affordable, Burgundy’s finest vintages tended towards cannibalism and other wines could be… well, surprisingly attractive. Among the tales of convivial drinking and anecdotes involving Winston Churchill and WG Grace, the author paints a vivid picture of a pre-war (and pre-phylloxera) wine world whose horizons were about to expand beyond all imagining.

Wayward Tendrils of the Vine, though, is much more than a collection of reminiscences. As Neal Martin points out in his Introduction: “The title alone is a perfect allegory for how we learn about wine, how knowledge grows organically over time, never knowing what the next bottle will teach us, how it might alter preconceptions or where it might lead.” 

The Classic Editions breathe new life into some of the finest wine-related titles written in the English language over the last 150 years. Although these books are very much products of their time – a time when the world of fine wine was confined mostly to the frontiers of France and the Iberian Peninsula and a First Growth Bordeaux or Grand Cru Burgundy wouldn’t be beyond the average purse – together they recapture a world of convivial, enthusiastic amateurs and larger-than-life characters whose love of fine vintages mirrored that of life itself.  

“If you really want to get under the skin of a city, the 500 Hidden Secrets series, which covers a number of cities from Havana to Ghent, all written by people who know the cities inside out, is ideal. It’s an innovative and refreshing take on the traditional travel guide.” – The Independent

Where are the 5 best places to eat like a Portuguese? Which are the 5 best restaurants for Petiscos? Where can you find the nicest salons and barber shops? Which are the 5 best places to see Azulejos? Where will you find the most unique lifts and elevators? The best Lisbon area beaches? The 500 Hidden Secrets of Lisbon reveals these good-to-know places and many more. An affectionate and informed guide to Lisbon, written by a true local.

This is a book for visitors who want to avoid the usual tourist spots and for residents who are keen to track down the city’s best-kept secrets.

With this new guide in your bag, you’re set to go out and discover the best and most fun places in hotspot Miami: 500 addresses that many tourists don’t know, a bit off the beaten track, but always loved by the locals and worth a visit. The 500 Hidden Secrets of Miami will take you to all the places that make Miami the lively and unique city it is, also known as the ‘Gateway to the Caribbean’, such as: the 5 nicest water views, 5 stunning Mediterranean revival buildings, 5 renowned Miami-based fashion designers, the 5 coolest hotel pools, and 5 wonderful parks, playgrounds, and museums to visit with your kids. It even includes some unusual experiences, such as swimming in a freshwater Venetian pool, or day trips to the Everglades and the Keys.

From the Coolest Corner – Nordic Jewellery presents groundbreaking and fresh jewelry from Northern Europe, a comprehensive selection of current works by artists from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and the Baltic States. The best and most innovative Scandinavian art jewelry is presented, assessing its possibilities and potential at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The project presented in this publication, culminating in a symposium and a traveling exhibition, challenges stereotypical notions of northern European art jewelry. Do the typical Nordic trends of the nineteen-nineties still apply today? Indeed are there currently any general trends at all in Scandinavian design? Or has the orientation towards international design become so dominant that there are no longer any regional characteristics? Renowned experts have made a selection of representative works, as a basis for researching the role of northern European jewelry in the context of international art.

Text in English, Norwegian & Swedish.

With vivid memories of his first visit to the Scottish National Gallery in the 1970s and his initial encounter with Hugo van der Goes’ The Trinity Altarpiece, Rembrandt’s A Woman in Bed, Velázquez’s An Old Woman Cooking Eggs and Degas’ Diego Martelli, Robert Storr discusses the shifting balance of museum collections from historically ‘certified’ classics to art whose status and significance remains in active contention and from singular ‘treasures’ to ensembles that speak to the larger scope of an artist’s endeavor. Also available: Unfinished Paintings: Narratives of the Non-Finito Watson Gordon Lecture 2014 ISBN 9781906270919 ‘The Hardest Kind of Archetype’: Reflections on Roy Lichtenstein The Watson Gordon Lecture 2010 ISBN 9781906270384 Picasso’s ‘Toys for Adults’ Cubism as Surrealism: The Watson Gordon Lecture 2008 ISBN 9781906270261 Sound, Silence, and Modernity in Dutch Pictures of Manners The Watson Gordon Lecture 2007 ISBN 9781906270254 Roger Fry’s Journey From the Primitives to the Post-Impressionists: Watson Gordon Lecture 2006 ISBN 9781906270117

A vibrant, colorful and beautiful book that introduces readers to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. It explains the difference between the two movements and the main artists associated with each. Illustrations are drawn from the renowned and outstanding collection of French art held by the National Galleries of Scotland and they include a number of rarely seen works.

This book tells the fascinating stories of how key paintings and drawings found their way into the collection.

Artists include Monet, Millet, Gauguin, Bastien-Lepage, Charles Jacque, Troyon, Corot, Degas, Seurat, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Vuillard, Bonnard, Derain, Matisse, Legros and Rodin.

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, part of the National Galleries of Scotland, provides a unique visual history of Scotland, told through portraits of the figures who shaped it: royals and rebels, poets and philosophers, heroes and villains. The Gallery is home to Scotland’s collection of portrait miniatures which date from the mid-sixteenth century to the present day.
This book illustrates a selection of works by key miniaturists and features portraits of many important Scottish historical figures such as James Hepburn 4th Earl of Bothwell, the third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, James VI and I and Robert Burns who was depicted in the last year of his life. A complete list of all the works in the collection is also included.

Spirit of the Amazon is the work of photojournalist Sue Cunningham and writer Patrick Cunningham. It is a celebration of cultural difference and a call for better stewardship of the world. Sue’s stunning photographs demonstrate the spiritual and material value of the Xingu tribes to all mankind; they keep the forest alive and they protect the climate of South America and the rest of the world. Their spiritual connection to their environment and the wider Earth shows us an alternative way to connect to the natural richness of the planet, built on foundations completely different from those of global materialism. During their expedition by boat, the authors followed the course of the Xingu river, a tributary of the Amazon, traveling 2,500 km through the heart of Brazil. They visited forty-eight tribal villages in this remote part of the Amazon, accessible only by small plane or by negotiating the rapids of the Xingu. This is the story of the tribal communities they met; their daily lives, their connection to the land and to the rivers, the threats which pervade each day of their lives. It is also a validation of their importance to the rest of the world; why these small, remote and often secretive indigenous communities are so important to our own lives and to our shared planet. It is a celebration of their vibrant cultures, their rituals and their rites of passage, of cultures very different from each other, but with a shared spiritual basis which respects the trees, the rivers and the rain. And it is a call for the world to protect them, their lands and their forests and rivers from the destruction which our avaricious greed for natural resources drives ever closer and deeper into their realm.

Make the most of Norwich with this new guide to the sights and secrets of East Anglia’s premier city, from the unknown treasures of its magnificent cathedral to the legends and stories behind its historic pubs. It’s a place of numerous historical layers, with intrigue and interest lurking on every corner, from the black circus proprietor who inspired one of The Beatles’ most famous songs to remnants of England’s most notorious red-light districts. It’s eminently walkable, too, but you can also bike or even canoe your way around the center, maybe even heading out to explore the natural beauty of Broads National Park which lies just beyond.

“It reveals a unique look into the profession of photography.”—Gerd Ludwig Photography



Charles Moriarty, Stills department manager for Star Wars and photographer for Amy Winehouse, presents Photographers on the Art of Photography: a series of intimate conversations with some of the most highly regarded names in photography. From celebrity portraitists such as Terry O’Neill, to famed fashion photographers like Jerry Schatzberg and wildlife specialists Tim Flach and Sue Flood, this book offers a unique insight into all angles of the profession. Twenty celebrated photographers discuss how they got started, as well as their favored techniques, motivations, inspirations and greatest accomplishments. Discover each artist’s vision in their own words and reflect on what makes their talents unique.

Interviews from: Ed Caraeff (music); Terry O Neill (celebrity portraiture); Norman Seeff (music); Johnathan Daniel Pryce (fashion); Douglas Kirkland (Hollywood); Gerd Ludwig (National Geographic); Slava Mogutin (queer fine art); Jerry Schatzberg (fashion, film, music, portraiture); Tim Flach (wildlife); Richard Phibbs (fashion, commercial, portraiture); Eva Sereny (Hollywood, celebrity portraiture); Sue Flood (wildlife); Tom Stoddard (photojournalism).

This book explores all continents and countries in search of the most extraordinary national parks around the world. Well-known and lesser-known parks are featured, but they are all special because of breathtaking views, a unique atmosphere, or exceptional fauna and flora. In these parks you will experience unforgettable treks and adventures and enjoy magnificent views. From desert parks to safari parks, from jungle areas to the highest mountains; each park has its unique story to tell. This book can serve as a practical travel guide but also as inspiration for those looking for the ultimate next travel destination. A traveler’s bucket list with a selection of the world’s most incredible natural parks.

This volume reveals the roles of foreign and Indian Jews in the Indian national art project and raises issues such as: Is an “Indian artist” any artist born into an Indian family? What role can foreigners and members of Indian minority groups play in the Indian National Art Project as scholars, critics, or artists? Is a piece of work “Indian art” because of its subject matter or its style? Is it possible to utilize “foreign techniques” in creating “Indian art”? Jews and the Indian National Art Project documents the work of artists such as Anna Molka Ahmed, Mirra Alfassa (The Mother), Siona Benjamin, Carmel Berkson, and Fredda Brilliant as well as those of photographers (David Mordecai and Man Ray) and architects (Otto Königsberger, Moshe Safdie). Also covered in this volume are the work of critics, scholars and art patrons like Ernst Cohn-Wiener, Charles Fabri, Stella Kramrisch, and Marion Harry Spielmann.

Religion has always been a fundamental force for constructing identity, from antiquity to the contemporary world. The transformation of ancient cults into faith systems, which we recognize now as major world religions, took place in the first millennium AD, in the period we call ‘Late Antiquity’. Our argument is that the creative impetus for both the emergence, and much of the visual distinctiveness of the world religions came in contexts of cultural encounter. Bridging the traditional divide between classical, Asian, Islamic and Western history, this exhibition and its accompanying catalog highlights religious and artistic creativity at points of contact and cultural borders between late antique civilizations.

This catalog features the creation of specific visual languages that belong to five major world religions: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. The imagery still used by these belief systems today is evidence for the development of distinct religious identities in Late Antiquity. Emblematic visual forms like the figure of Buddha and Christ, or Islamic aniconism, only evolved in dialogue with a variety of coexisting visualizations of the sacred. As late antique believers appropriated some competing models and rejected others, they created compelling and long-lived representations of faith, but also revealed their indebtedness to a multitude of contemporaneous religious ideas and images.

Part of the Library on Display series devoted to exhibitions held at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, this book is divided into two sections: the Papyrus Collection and the Manuscript collection. Between two intentionally striking extremes – a potsherd on which a pupil from the 2nd century BC wrote the ancient verses of one of Sappho’s odes and a 19th century Japanese erotic-grotesque scroll – the entries illustrate the relationship between book form and function, describing manuscripts of different formats and periods, from wax tablets and literary and documentary papyrus rolls to medieval and Renaissance parchment (and subsequently paper) codices from production centres ranging from the imperial scriptorium in Constantinople to high-quality workshops in Italy (particularly 15th century Florence), Europe and Asia, including examples of pocket and giant Bibles. The introductory essay by Guglielmo Cavallo offers a brief overview of the history of the book, a field in which his expertise is virtually unparalleled.