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Window Box2019-03-21T18:53:12+00:00

WINDOW BOX

Please browse our window box for some of our recent pleasures – old and new.

  • The Snow Ball

    Brigid Brophy

    A sparkling, intelligent novel, first published in 1964 and just re-issued by Faber & Faber. It is set over the course of a decadent fancy dress party on a snowy New Year’s Eve, with all the guests in 18th C finery. The unfolding comedy of manners is a tribute to BB’s love of opera, and her heroine’s great obsessions: ‘Mozart, sex and death’.

    Paperback £9.99
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  • Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat – A Biography

    Oliver Soden

    A biography of that most feline and superb of all creatures, Jeoffry, imortalised by Christopher Smart in his glorious mid-C18th paean. Charming, witty, profound, this is a marvellous biography of the poet and his world, as well of his companion, the “compleat cat”: tenacious, grave, wreathing, spraggling… Oliver Soden’s previous book was a much-praised biography of Michael Tippett (2019).

    Clothbound hardback £16.99
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  • Ben Nicholson: Distant Planes 1955-1979

    Edited by Matthew Travers

    Lovely catalogue to the current exhibition at Piano Nobile in Portland Road, London. Sea-green cloth spine and sturdy boards; the cover cunningly reproduces one of Nicholson’s reliefs- in relief. Comprises a mix of his carved abstract reliefs and landscape drawings, 22 in total, beautifully photographed and presented, from the period 1958-onwards when the artist lived in the Ticino, Switzerland. Includes some previously unpublished material on the period.  Accompanied by essays by Lee Beard, Peter Kharoche and Chris Stephens.

    Hardback £45.00
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  • Morozov: The Story of a Family and a Lost Collection

    Morozov: The Story of a Family and a Lost Collection

    Natalya Semenova

    From the author of the biography of Shchukin comes the story of another extraordinary pre-Revolutionary Russian collector of European art. He spent 1.5 million francs on 486 paintings, which stayed in storage for many decades.

    Hardback £25.00
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  • On Seamus Heaney

    On Seamus Heaney

    Roy Foster

    The eminent Irish historian and Yeats biographer works wonders with this assessment of the life, work and times of Seamus Heaney.

    Hardback £14.99
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  • de Gournay: Art on the Walls: Everlasting Beauty, Hand-Painted Interiors

    Claud Cecil Gurney

    Richly illustrated book presenting the gorgeous Chinoiserie floral and avian wallpapers in the houses where they have been used. The author founded the company thirty years ago, setting up a studio in China with local artisans and painters.

    Hardback £59.95
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  • Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Future

    Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Future

    Merlin Sheldrake

    This is an astonishing book that will change our understanding of the world in dizzying ways. Wohlleben’s ‘wood-wide web’ is but a part of the phantasmagoric abundance of fungal life that Sheldrake junior reveals. Everyone should read this.

    Hardback £20.00
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  • Décors Barbares: The Enchanting Interiors of Nathalie Farman-Farma

    Nathalie Farman-Farma, Miguel Flores Vianna

    This will be THE book in interiors for the season. Nathalie & Miguel will sign copies for us, so do let us know if you would like one. We’re only sorry that Covid-19 prevented a splendid party to celebrate this.

    Hardback £50.00
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  • Tales from the life of Bruce Wannell: Adventurer, Linguist, Orientalist

    Edited by Kevin Rushby

    There are those who swear he was a spy, others who insist he was too scatty or essentially lazy to be one. Whatever the truth, he was an exceptional linguist (Iranian, Afghan Persian, Arabic, Pushtu, Urdu, Swahili and the usual European languages) with connections in surprising places. His early death this year was a great sadness to many, including many writers who have contributed to this compendium of biographical tributes, published by Eland.

    Paperback £15.00
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  • Tales from the Colony Room: Soho's Lost Bohemia

    Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia

    Darren Coffield

    The story of London’s notorious drinking den, the realm of the great and foul-mouthed Muriel Belcher. (It features, of course, in David Mitchell’s ‘Utopia Avenue’ – see Fiction, below)

    Hardback £25.00
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  • Summerwater

    Summerwater

    Sarah Moss

    SM has long seemed just on the edge of breaking into the literary big time. Her last novel (Ghost Wall, pbk £8.99) was a slim masterpiece in 2018, and this builds on the same eerie atmosphere and familial claustrophobia. Twelve narrators are trapped by rain in their holiday cottages on the banks of Loch Lomond. Over the course of one day they observe each other – sometimes with amusement, sometimes cruelty – and as the night falls, things begin to go terribly wrong.

    Hardback £14.99
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  • Hamnet

    Hamnet

    Maggie O'Farrell

    Agnes Hathaway, wife of William Shakespeare, is at the heart of this novel: a wild, intriguing character, object of suspicion and fascination, and grief-stricken at the loss of her son. Exquisitely conceived and devastating.

    Hardback £20.00
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  • Ivon Hitchens: The Painter in the Woods

    Andrew Lambirth
    Hardback £16.95
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  • The Lost Library of the King of Portugal (Burlington)

    Angela Delaforce

    A labour of love and scholarship, this is a study of the extraordinary Royal Library of Dom Joao V (1706-1750) of Portugal that was destroyed in 1755 in the Lisbon earthquake. The library contained books, prints, drawings, a cabinet of natural history, scientific instruments, clocks… It was one of the finest royal libraries anywhere in Europe, but hitherto no proper evaluation of its contents and importance to the European Enlightenment has been made.

    This  book describes the creation of the library, the acquisitions (of single volumes as well as of entire libraries across Europe) and the diplomats engaged in negotiating those acquisitions. No general catalogue survives, so the author’s task has not been an easy one, but the result is stupendous.

    Large format, well illustrated.

    Hardback £45.00
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  • New Bats In Old Belfries

    £17.50
    Author Maurice Bowra Published by ISBN 0946976112 EAN 9780946976119 BIC Code Cover Hardback
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  • Derek Jarman: My Garden's Boundaries are the Horizon

    Derek Jarman: My Garden’s Boundaries are the Horizon

    Edited by Christopher Woodward

    Delightful slim volume from the Garden Museum about the garden at Prospect Cottage, in the same format as their recent ones on Cedric Morris and Ivon Hitchens. Includes essays by Howard Sooley, Christopher Lloyd and Anna Pavord, as well as stills, photographs, drawings, paintings and pages from Jarman’s garden book. All the more timely since the news in late March that, after a huge and successful effort to raise funds, Prospect Cottage has been saved for us all.

    Hardback £20.00
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  • Madensky Square

    Madensky Square

    Eva Ibbotson

    One in a second trio of reprints of the adored Eva Ibbotson, and a sadder, more grown-up novel than EI’s other romances. A year in the life of a Viennese square circa 1910, told through the diaries of Susanna Weber, an independent, gentile dress-maker in her 30s. She observes her eccentric neighbours, solves small mysteries and avoids petty disasters, but Susanna has a secret life that Ibbotson conjures with all her usual wit and charm.

    Paperback £8.99
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  • Siberia

    Michael Turek

    A stunning book of Turek’s photographs of Siberia, taken over several trips and often in the company of Sophy Roberts, the author of a brilliant non-fiction debut ‘The Lost Pianos of Siberia’. Turek’s eye is superb; his photos encompass vastnesses of ice, snowy birches in milky light, thawing townscapes, glimpses of domesticity, industrial ravages – a glorious mix of static images and snatched moments  that reveal a beautiful, strange world.

    Hardback £40.00
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  • The Last Footman

    Gillies Macbain

    Macbain was born in Scotland but moved to Ireland in the 1960s with a bicycle, a suitcase and a tent. His subsequent careers have included butler, footman, farmer, a restorer of an ancient house that burnt down, possibly twice. This is a memoir of that first decade, more of less, spent above and below stairs in various crumbling, damp Anglo-Irish piles with a fine spectrum of crumbling, damp owners, as well as the odd jet-setter (Mick Jagger, inevitably, and Marianne Faithful, etc). He finds himself at Mount Melleray, Castletown Kildare, Castle Leslie; Macbain is hell-bent on getting into scrapes… One such delightful misadventure takes place in Dublin just before Christmas, when, warmed and fuddled by a few gins, and with a fine plucked goose under  his arm, he liberates a dog from its plump owner in the Royal Hibernian hotel. Funny, scurrilous, with many bars and bookies. And no capital letters either.

    Paperback £18.00
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  • The Lost Library of the King of Portugal

    Angela Delaforce

    A labour of love and scholarship, this is a study of the extraordinary Royal Library of Dom Joao V (1706-1750) of Portugal that was destroyed in 1755 in the Lisbon earthquake. The library contained books, prints, drawings, a cabinet of natural history, scientific instruments, clocks… It was one of the finest royal libraries anywhere in Europe, but hitherto no proper evaluation of its contents and importance to the European Enlightenment has been made.

    This  book describes the creation of the library, the acquisitions (of single volumes as well as of entire libraries across Europe) and the diplomats engaged in negotiating those acquisitions. No general catalogue survives, so the author’s task has not been an easy one, but the result is stupendous.

    Large format, well illustrated.

    Hardback £45.00
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  • Danish Golden Age

    Cecilie Høgsbro Østergaard

    This gorgeous book was published to accompany an exhibition of art from the Danish Golden Age. The exhibition opened in 2019 in the Stockholm Nationalmuseum (who co-published the book) and moved to the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; and will go to the Petit Palais, Paris, in 2020. There are well known images here from Købke, Eckersberg, Bendz, Juel and others, but they are placed in the broader context of numerous other contemporary artists. Reproductions and text are first rate, making this a fine introduction to one of the most delightful developments of C19th European art.

    Hardback £70.00
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  • Under the Banyan Tree: The Forgotten Story of Barrackpore Park

    Monabi Mitra, Soumen Mitra

    The story of Government House, once the Governor-General’s weekend retreat near Calcutta, then the Viceroy’s. It’s also the story of its occupants. After Independence it became a Police Hospital and then fell into decay; the book has been prompted by a recent restoration of the main house and park.

    Paperback £30.00
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