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Window Box2018-11-13T10:59:42+00:00

WINDOW BOX

Please browse our window box for some of our recent pleasures – old and new.
  • Last Days in Old Europe: Trieste '79, Vienna '85, Prague '89

    Last Days in Old Europe: Trieste ’79, Vienna ’85, Prague ’89

    Richard Bassett

    RB embraced Trieste in our Cuckoo Press piece of 2013. Here is the fully-fledged version, with RB as hornist in the Ljubljana opera house, then as Times Foreign Correspondent in Vienna and Warsaw. A memoir of both ease and grit in the last decade of the Cold War, full of irony, subtlety and humour

    Hardback £16.99
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  • Mr Five Per Cent: The many lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, the world's richest man

    Mr Five Per Cent: The many lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, the world’s richest man

    Jonathan Conlin

    Ottoman, Armenian and British, with a French education and a King’s College London degree in petroleum engineering: this is the first biography of this extraordinary man in over a generation. An old-fashioned millionaire (after Eartha Kitt’s heart) with exquisite taste who managed to buy art even from Stalin.

    Hardback £25.00
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  • A Short History of England

    A Short History of England

    Dominic Caldecott

    A highly articulate, intelligent and entertaining look at the history of England, with a somewhat idiosyncratic approach. Politics, trade, government and culture are Caldecott’s bread and butter here, and his sweep is extremely enjoyable – and stimulating: he ends, for instance, his initial and very brief chapter on prehistory thus: “The particular relevance of Roman Britain to English history lies in the English aristocracy’s adoption of the same Augustan culture during its eighteenth-century hegemony”. Privately published.

    Hardback £20.00
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  • Idols: The Power of Images

    Idols: The Power of Images

    Annie Caubet

    Gorgeous, desirable anthropomorphic figures from the Oxus, Indus, Anatolia, Iberia, Cyclades etc. Each one is beautifully pictured, with a scholarly description. Most of the artefacts belong to private collections.

    Hardback £50.00
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  • The Farmer's Year: A Calendar of English Husbandry

    The Farmer’s Year: A Calendar of English Husbandry

    Clare Leighton

    Lambing and lopping, threshing and sowing: first published in 1933 and out of print for many years until Little Toller’s lovely edition. Includes Leighton’s text as well as her 12 marvellous wood engravings illustrating the last vestiges of non-mechanical farming. Her woodcuts are dark and rich, with a powerful energy.

    Paperback £12.00
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  • Italian Frescoes: From Giotto to Tiepolo

    Italian Frescoes: From Giotto to Tiepolo

    Tomaso Montanari

    A superb art book that presents early Renaissance to late Venetian frescoes in stunning detail. No other book does this so well: thoroughly gloatable.

    Hardback £100.00
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  • Unsheltered

    Unsheltered

    Barbara Kingsolver

    Kingsolver’s latest novel combines a family drama with an intriguing historical scandal to demonstrate the struggle between community and truth. Many writers in the last three years have attempted to address contemporary America. Kingsolver does so with a defter touch than most and a cast of engaging characters. Intelligent, funny and moving.

    Hardback £20.00
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  • Hermes: Pop-Up

    Hermes: Pop-Up

    Stephane Foenkinos & Bernard Duisit, introduction by Pierre-Alexis Dumas

    Who could imagine such an eccentric and delightful thing as this? A book of creative wit, taste and imagination, in which mad words accompany the pop-up flights of fancy that are Hermes scarves, with Pegasus as our steed, cockatoos for company and a rooftop party as our destination. Beautiful colour printing on very good paper, this is a treat for hand and eye.

    Hardback £22.50
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  • Living Iron

    Living Iron

    Pauline van Lynden, Vanessa Everts

    The fascinating history of iron and its impact on our lives, from the earliest days of our planet to the 21st century, is presented in this meticulously researched and smartly produced book. The authors delve into the exceptional combination of qualities the metal possesses and explains why, through millennia of rust, recycling and reinvention, this tough stuff continues to reveal enormous potential for our world and our future.

    Paperback £36.00
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  • Lolly Willowes

    Lolly Willowes

    Sylvia Townsend Warner

    A classic cult story about an Edwardian spinster lured into witchcraft. Perfect for any fans of Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, one of our summer favourites, whose number include Patrick Gale and Andrew Miller.

    Paperback £9.99
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  • John Meade Falkner: Abnormal Romantic

    John Meade Falkner: Abnormal Romantic

    Richard Davenport-Hines

    A new and thoroughly researched biography of John Meade Falkner (1858-1932), armaments manufacturer and dealer, writer, and bibliophile, best-known for his three novels, The Lost Stradivarius (1895), Moonfleeet (1898), and The Nebuly Coat (1903).

    Privately printed for The Roxburghe Club in an edition of 500 copies, of which 400 are offered for sale.

    Hardback £95.00
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  • Joyride to a Reunion at Kardamyli

    Tony Scotland

    In October 1990 three wonderful old birds – Coote Heber Percy, Billa Harrod and Freda Berkeley – set off in a car with with indifferent springs for the Peloponnese, to soothe their widowhood by seeking out the warm south and, in particular, their old friends Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor in their beautiful house at Kardamyli.

    This charming account is another of Tony Scotland’s beautifully self-published books to follow ‘Bazouker: The Untold Scandals of Captain Lennox Berkeley, 7th Earl of Berkeley’, ‘Gradual: A Rennaissance Chant Book’ and ‘Fleche: Brief Encounter with Stravinsky”.

    Hardback £17.50
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  • Flush: A Biography

    Virginia Woolf, illustrated by Katyuli Lloyd

    A newly and handsomely illustrated edition of Virginia Woolf’s novel of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning’s courtship and marriage, from the point of view of EBB’s spaniel. A worthy chapter in the literary history of dogs. Short-listed for the V&A Illustration Awards 2016, the book includes a preface by Professor John Sutherland.

    Hardback £14.99
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  • After The Party

    After The Party

    Cressida Connolly

    Well-written and carefully thought, it wears its research lightly yet packs a very powerful punch. It is outstandingly good. Passivity as a route to damnation, the devastating consequences of political naivety, the puncturing of complacency, all set in a comfortable middle-class 1930s England of dinner parties, bossy sisters, holiday camps … What could possibly go wrong?

    It is wrong, all wrong…

    Hardback £14.99
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  • After The Party (Paperback)

    After The Party (Paperback)

    Cressida Connolly

    Well-written and carefully thought, it wears its research lightly yet packs a very powerful punch. It is outstandingly good. Passivity as a route to damnation, the devastating consequences of political naivety, the puncturing of complacency, all set in a comfortable middle-class 1930s England of dinner parties, bossy sisters, holiday camps … What could possibly go wrong?

    It is wrong, all wrong…

    Paperback £8.99
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  • Charmed Lives in Greece: Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor

    Charmed Lives in Greece: Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor

    Edited by Evita Arapoglou

    The beautifully-produced catalogue of a wonderful exhibition that has moved from Cyprus to Athens and now to the British Museum. The friendship of these three men lasted five decades, and is illustrated by a profusion of paintings, letters, photographs, etc. The labyrinthine network of their circle (Stephen Spender, Ann Fleming, Lucian Freud, Nikos Kazantsakis…) is a roll-call of lasting fascination.

    We have imported this from Cyprus, and believe stock may prove limited.

    Paperback £30.00
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  • The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories

    The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories

    Edited by Jay Rubin, introduction by Haruki Murakami

    An anthology from the C19th to the present, ingeniously and painstakingly edited by Rubin whose brief to himself and to colleagues was that the stories selected should be unforgettable and resonant. Not every great Japanese author is represented here, though many are. The thematic ordering of the stories (‘Modern Life and Other Nonsense’, ‘Japan and the West’, ‘Nature and Memory’, ‘Dread’ and more) acts as an unobtrusive guide in a world probably unfamiliar to most of us.

    Includes a tremendously knowledgeable essay by Haruki Murakami.

    Hardback £25.00
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  • Silence Of The Girls

    Silence Of The Girls

    Pat Barker

    The author of the ‘Regeneration’ trilogy turns her clear eye to the domestic side of the Trojan War, if such a thing can be said to exist at all. Avoiding all the sword and sandal cliches of so many others’ attempts to re-invent the classics, Barker’s other side of ‘The Iliad’ centres on Briseis, given as a prize to Achilles and then taken by Agamemnon. Her view of the siege of Troy from within the Greek camp, pegged so closely to Homer’s that reading the novel is almost like watching a split-stage production, is enthralling, terrifying and convincing.

    Hardback £18.99
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  • Putney

    Putney

    Sofka Zinovieff

    A middle-aged woman revisits the affair she had with one of her parent’s friends when she was in her early teens in the 1970s. Love and desire, consent and exploitation, are explored through three voices in this morally complex novel. Zinovieff directs the reader’s sympathies this way and that with great – and disconcerting – skill.

    Hardback £14.99
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  • Album du Comte du Nord: Le Nôtre à Chantilly

    Album du Comte du Nord: Le Nôtre à Chantilly

    Jean-Pierre Babelon

    A facsimile of the ravishing album of Le Nôtre’s plans and elevations of the gardens at Chantilly, with its Chinoiserie kiosk, pavilions, stables, canals, walks etc. It was given to the ‘Comte du Nord’ and his wife, a transparent pseudonym for the future Tsar Paul I and his wife, Maria Feodorovna, travelling incognito. They visited Chantilly in June 1782, when they were given the album. The original was bought back by the French in the 1930s when the Soviets sold the contents of the imperial library. Text in French.

    Hardback £50.00
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  • Feast: Food of the Islamic World

    Feast: Food of the Islamic World

    Anissa Helou

    Helou has been described as both a scholar and a hedonist: in this new book she fulfills both roles once again. Her latest culinary explorations take us from Senegal to Indonesia via the Arabian Peninsula, Persia and North Africa. An expansive and delicious mix of knowledge and recipes.

    Hardback £45.00
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  • Fearless Living

    Fearless Living

    edited by Jean-Philippe Demeyer, Frank Ver Elst & Jean-Paul Dewever

    An extremely gorgeous book by the Belgian decorating partnership. The cover fabric, gold woven with extraordinary eyes – owlish, imaginary, Ancient Egyptian, Nepali stupa eyes – has been designed by Jean-Philippe Demayer, the Belgian interior designer and antique dealer, and Pablo Piatti. Beautifully made from a technical point of view too, the book has immaculately edge-printed pages and opens completely flat without stressing the spine. The contents showcase his company’s decorating style: lavish, eclectic, colourful, comfortable and, in JPD’s own words, “anti-serious”. Jubilant indeed.

     

    Hardback £155.00
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