Gleaming with finds from recent excavations, this accompanies the Fitzwilliam's splendid exhibition of artefacts of the Saka people - ornate metalwork of people and animals, real and imagina... read more
A substantial book on the 1920s' group who turned against modernist abstraction in favour of figurative painting, and were particularly influential oin theatre design, ballet and fashion.
Finally a new edition of this splendid book, which sheds light on the decadent, complex history of this venerable road. Within years of Wilde praising its 'wonderful possibilities', and Whis... read more
Haussmann eat your heart out... these elegant watercolours and ink drawings are a boulevardier's delight. Accompanied by a text by a French ironmaster.
Garments to tents in South Asia in the C16th-C17th. Richly illustrated, this book shows cloth participated in both political and social spheres, and reflected seasonal rhythms.
This recent, fascinating Yale study of the 'lithic imagination' is already out of print in hardback but the paperback is a fine subsitute, and just as well illustrated.
Everyday at least for that great patroness... loved not least because she paid her bills on time. This illustrated chronology of the porcelain, its commissioning and use, is a magnificent bo... read more
This extraordinary Californian garden was the creation of Ganna Walska, a Polish opera singer who bought the estate of Montecito in 1943 while briefly married to her sixth husband. Thereafte... read more
Our use of birds is well-known - feathers for hats as well as for nests, birds deified, personified, caged, used for food and for hunting. Less well know is how birds interact with us. (Not ... read more
An emergency to rival climate change: all of life on earth as we know it relies on insects, and their numbers are in free-fall. Unnerving and important reminder that global pollution and agr... read more
Overlooking the Beaulieu River, Exbury comprises 200 acres of outstanding woodland gardens. Begun in 1919, it became home to countless rare rhododendrons, collected and bred by three generat... read more
Thomas Robins the Elder (1716-1770) recorded the country estates of the Georgian gentry - their orchards, Rococo gardens and potagers - like no other, with both topographical accuracy and de... read more
Lucy Atkinson (1817-1893) was an English Atkinson was an English nanny working in Russia. In 1848 she set out with her new husband on a six-year exploration of Siberia and Central Asia, by f... read more
The story of three friendships made when the author lived in Herat in the 1970s; after the Communist coup, Russian occupation and civil war, she was able to pick up the threads of those frie... read more
A traditional rock climber for a decade or more, Fleming describes the dance between the self and the rock and its electrifying charge. It's also, for her, the ultimate way to connect with n... read more
Forster is always undoing, and no less so in this account of the remote princely court of Dewas in Madhya Pradesh, where he visited and worked as private secretary to the Maharajah in the ea... read more
Marzahn is a suburb of prefab GDR housing on the outskirts of Berlin. This odd but brilliant book, about a chiropodist who talks to her clients, is both memoir and portrait of modern Germany... read more
Jansson's temptation on a winter day, skate with samphire and gooseberries on a summer's one... A few well-considered, simple but richly pleasing recipes for each season. Brown butter, gremo... read more
Elena Zelayeta, a blind chef born in Mexico; Marcella Hazan, whose book on Italian cooking is still monumental; Norma Shirley's take on Jamaican cuisine et al: a joyous celebration of these... read more
100 recipes, 100 photographs: more than a traditional cookbook, this celebrates Lee Miller's polymathic approach to life - surrealist, photographer, model, cook, war correspondent... The aut... read more
Hugely enjoyable and widely researched, this will be accompanied by the happy sound of gender stereotypes being liberated from their historic chains...