Search results for ""reaktion books""

How dangerous were fairies? In the late seventeenth century, they could still scare people to death. Little wonder, as they were thought to be descended from fallen angels, and to have the power to destroy the world itself. Such beliefs, along with some remarkably detailed sightings, lingered on well into the twentieth century. In literature and art fairies often retained this edge of danger. From the wild magic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, through the dark glamour of Keats, to the improbably erotic poem `Goblin Market’ or the paintings inspired by opium dreams, the amoral otherness of the fairies ran side-by-side with the newly delicate or feminized creations of the Victorian world. In the past thirty years the enduring link between fairies and nature has been robustly exploited by eco-warriors and conservationists, from Ireland to Iceland. This book, now available in paperback, tells the story of the many fairy terrors that lay behind Titania or Tinkerbell.

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Radio is a medium of seemingly endless contradictions. Now in its third century of existence, the technology still seems startlingly modern; despite frequent predictions of its demise, radio continues to evolve and flourish in the age of the internet and social media. This book explores the history of the radio, describing its technological, political, and social evolution, and how it emerged from Victorian experimental laboratories to become a near-ubiquitous presence in our lives. Alasdair Pinkerton's story is shaped by radio's multiple characters and characteristics--radio waves occur in nature, for instance, but have also been harnessed and molded by human beings to bridge oceans and reconfigure our experience of space and time. Published in association with the Science Museum, London, Radio is an informative and thought-provoking book for all enthusiasts of an old technology that still has the capacity to enthuse, entertain, entice, and enrage today.

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The rose is the world's favourite flower - and always has been. It is the greatest floral symbol of love and romance the world over, and touches people's hearts at many points in their lives as the flower most often chosen to celebrate significant milestones - weddings, anniversaries, births and deaths. This book traces the journey of the rose across the centuries, from battles to bouquets, charting its botanical, religious, literary and artistic history. From Cleopatra's rose-petal-filled bed to Nijinsky's Spectre de la rose, from the highly prized attar of rose oil so beloved by the ancient Persians to top-brand perfume labels today, and from Shakespearean myths about the Wars of the Roses to the significance of Queen Elizabeth I's embroidered dresses, Rose encapsulates the story of what makes this botanical family so loved. Using historical, literary and botanical sources from the world's major rose-growing nations, with vibrant illustrations from across the centuries and tales of medieval best-sellers, nurserymen's rivalries and changing tastes in the flower bed, Rose will be a delight to read for both the gardener and non-gardener alike.

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What's your favorite cookie (or biscuit, for any British baking show buffs)? Chocolate chip, ginger spice, or Oreo? Oatmeal-and-raisin, black-and-white, digestive, or florentine? Or do you just prefer the dough? Our choice biscuits and cookies are as diverse as the myriad forms and flavors these chewy treats take, and well they should be. These baked delights have a history as rich as their taste: evidence of biscuit-making dates back to around 4000 BC. In Biscuit/Cookie, Anastasia Edwards explores the delectable past of these versatile snacks, from their earliest beginnings through Middle Eastern baking techniques, to cookies of Northern Europe in the Middle Ages, and on into the New World. From German lebkuchen to the animal cracker (more than half a billion of which are produced each year in the United States alone), from brownies and sugar cookies in the United States to shortbread and buttery tea biscuits in the United Kingdom, to Anzac and Girl-Guide biscuits in New Zealand and Australia, this book is crammed with biscuit and cookie facts, stories, images, and recipes from around the world and across time. And there's no need to steal from the cookie jar.

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What makes Tony Soprano so likeable? Why would we rather leave the cannoli and take the gun? Do we truly want Scarface’s Tony Montana to succeed? Is Michael Corleone a misunderstood hero or a despicable villain? In The Mafia: A Cultural History, now available in paperback, Roberto M. Dainotto traces the complex and fascinating development of the mafia: its rural beginnings in Western Sicily; its growth into what has been aptly described as a global multinational of crime; and its parallel evolution in music, print and on the big screen. The book probes the tension between the real mafia – its brutal and often violent reality – and how we imagine it to be: a mythical assembly of codes of honour, family values and chivalric masochism. Rather than dismissing such mafia stereotypes as untrue, Dainotto sets out to understand what needs and desires, material and psychic longings, are satisfied by our mafia fantasies. Exploring the rich array of films, books, television, music and even video games portraying and inspired by the mafia, this book offers not only a social, economic and political history of the mafia but a new way of understanding our enduring fascination with what lurks behind the sinister omertà of the family business.

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Vast Expanses is a cultural, environmental and geopolitical history that examines the relationship between humans and oceans, reaching back across geological and evolutionary time and exploring different cultures around the globe. Our ancient connections with the sea have developed and multiplied with industrialization and globalization, a trajectory that runs counter to Western depictions of the ocean as a place remote from and immune to human influence. This book argues that knowledge about the ocean - discovered through work and play, scientific investigation, and also through the ambitions people have harboured for the sea - has played a central role in defining our relationship with this vast, trackless and opaque place. It has helped people exploit marine resources, control ocean space, extend imperial or national power, and attempt to refashion the sea into a more tractable arena for human activity. An understanding of the ocean has animated and strengthened connections between people and their seas. To comprehend this history we must address questions of how, by whom and why knowledge of the ocean was created and used, in both the past and the present; through this, we can forge a healthier relationship with the sea for the future.

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Food has always been a favourite subject of the world’s artists, from still-lifes by Matisse and Picasso to the works of Claes Oldenberg and Andy Warhol. But how do artists eat? The Modern Art Cookbook provides a window into how both great and lesser-known modern artists, writers and poets ate, cooked, depicted and wrote about food. A cornucopia of life in the kitchen and in the studio throughout the twentieth century and beyond, the book explores a wide-ranging panoply of artworks of food, cooking and eating from Europe and the Americas – from the early moderns through the Impressionists, Symbolists, Cubists, Futurists and Surrealists up to today’s art – as well as writing about food from contemporary novelists, writers and poets. Beautifully illustrated and often surprising, this new paperback edition is a joyous guide to the art of food.

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The extraordinary palm: diverse, prolific, essential, symbolic and often sacred, exotic - and at times erotic - exploited and controversial. The signature plant of the tropics and subtropics, these record-breaking botanicals produce the world's biggest and heaviest seed, the longest leaf and the longest stem. Over thousands of years, palms sustained rainforest communities and were bound up with the development of ancient civilizations. They gained mystical and religious meanings and became a plant of abstractions and fantasies, a symbol of being at leisure, away from civilization and closer to nature - and at times of danger and devastation. In the nineteenth century capitalism used palm products to lubricate industry and cleanse empires. Iconic palm houses put on show this exceptional vegetative performer. Far from its natural homelands, it nowadays clothes and glamorizes an astonishing diversity of landscapes. Today oils from palms are consumed daily by millions of people worldwide. The plant is embedded in modern consumer societies, but mired in environmental controversy over the destruction of rainforests. In Palm Fred Gray portrays the cultural and historical significance of this iconic and controversial plant over thousands of years. Superbly illustrated, this lively and engaging book is the first of its kind.

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From ancient Babylon to Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat and the grandiloquent, absent-minded Owl from Winnie-the-Pooh to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, owls have woven themselves into the fabric of human culture from earliest times. Beautiful, silent, pitiless predators of the night, possessing contradictory qualities of good and evil, they are enigmatic creatures that dwell throughout the world yet barely make their presence known. In this classic Reaktion title, now available in paperback, bestselling author and broadcaster Desmond Morris explores the natural and cultural history of one of nature’s most popular creatures. He describes the evolution, the many species and the wide spread of owls around the world, as well as their appearance in folk tales, myths and legends, art, film, literature and popular culture. Originally published in 2009, this new format edition features many telling illustrations from nature and culture and will appeal to the many devotees of this emblematic bird.

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In 1600 the Catholic Inquisition condemned the philosopher Giordano Bruno for his heretical beliefs. He was then burned alive in a public place in Rome. Historians, scientists and teachers usually deny that Bruno was condemned for his beliefs about the universe and that his trial was linked to the later confrontations between the Inquisition and Galileo in 1616 and 1633. Based on new evidence, however, Burned Alive asserts that Bruno's beliefs about the universe were indeed the primary factors that led to Bruno's condemnation: his beliefs that the stars are suns surrounded by planetary worlds like our own, and that the Earth moves because it has a soul. Alberto A. Martinez shows how some of the same Inquisitors who judged Bruno also confronted Galileo in 1616. Ultimately the one clergyman who wrote the most critical reports used by the Inquisition to condemn Galileo in 1633 immediately wrote an unpublished manuscript, in which he denounced Galileo and other followers of Copernicus for believing that many worlds exist and that the Earth moves because it has a soul. This book challenges the accepted history of astronomy and shows how cosmology led Bruno bravely to his death.

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Jean-Francois Lyotard is one of the most important, and complex, French thinkers of the twentieth century. Best known in the English-speaking world for his book The Postmodern Condition, the multi-faceted nature of Lyotard's work has often been obscured by its sometimes problematic association with the postmodern. His life refuses to follow the clear trajectory common to academics in France: it stalls and hesitates, with Lyotard's first 'career' consisting of fifteen years of militant Marxist political engagement. Kiff Bamford traces this circuitous journey, unravelling the thrust of Lyotard's main philosophical arguments, his struggle with thinking and his confrontation with the task of writing and thinking philosophy in a different way. These all take place within a series of very particular contexts: the Algerian war, the experimental university at Vincennes and a sustained engagement with the visual arts. Lyotard's own tentative reflections on his intellectual life help to frame his suspicions of easy narratives and highlight his rejection of 'the delusion that we are able to programme our life'. It is by following these cautions that Kiff Bamford is able to present a compelling portrait of a challenging subject.

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Hippos are well-loved, cumbersome, rotund mammals famous for lounging around semi-submerged in muddy pools. Gregarious herbivores, they emerge after dusk from the water into the cool night air to graze on grass and plants before returning to the water at sunrise. They have huge mouths adapted for grazing as well as large, sharp tusks and jaws powerful enough to bite through crocodiles, small boats and even humans. The common hippo, once found all over Africa, is now largely confined to South and East Africa, while its close relative, the mysterious pygmy hippo, is only found in the forests of Sierra Leone, West Africa. Hippos originated in Asia and share a common ancestry with whales. Until the last Ice Age, they were found across Europe, including Britain. The ancient civilizations of North Africa and the Middle East were familiar with the common hippo, as it was still plentiful along the Nile. To the Egyptians it was a revered deity while at the same time it was hunted for sport. While the Romans imported them into their circus spectacles in Rome, today the best place to see the common hippo is in its natural African environment.

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Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) has become the most popular Russian writer of the twentieth century, even though his works were banned for decades after his death due to the repressive Soviet censorship of literature. His great novel, The Master and Margarita (published only in 1973), was written in complete secrecy during the 1930s for fear of the writer being arrested and shot. In her revelatory new biography J.A.E. Curtis provides a fresh account of Bulgakov's idyllic childhood and youth in Kiev, which was swept away in the turmoil of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Early biographies of Bulgakov were limited in scope by the difficulty of gaining access to archives in the ussr in the 1970s and '80s. Since that time archives have become more accessible, and Curtis makes use of new historical documents, tracing Bulgakov's absolute determination to establish himself as a writer in Bolshevik Moscow, his three marriages and his triumphs as a dramatist in the 1920s. They also reveal how he struggled to defend his art and preserve his integrity in Russia, and the intensely close interest Stalin took in Bulgakov's work, personally weighing up each time whether his plays should be permitted or banned. Based upon many years of research, and taking in previously unpublished family papers and Soviet Politburo discussions, this is an absorbing account of the life and work of one of Russia's most inventive and exuberant novelists and playwrights.

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Joseph Beuys is arguably the most important and most controversial German artist of the late twentieth century, not least because his persona is interwoven with Germany's fascist past. This book illuminates two defining threads in Beuys's life and art: the centrality of trauma, and his sustained investigation of the very notion of art itself. In addition to the materials of fat and felt that Beuys used widely in his oeuvre, numerous Beuys artworks are autobiogra-ph-ical in content. His self-woven legend of rescue and redemption still strikes many as a highly inappropriate fantasy, or even an outright lie, located as it is in the harrowing context of the Second World War as it was lived by a German soldier or 'Nazi'. Nevertheless, Beuys's self-mythology confronted the post-traumatic, foregrounding his struggle for psychic recovery. Perhaps most importantly, this led to his major efforts to expand Western art, freeing artists after him to work in a thoroughly interdisciplinary way and to embrace anthropological conclusions about art and culture. Beuys's lived experience determined a consistent commitment to peaceful change and positive transformation not only through his work, but in the discussions and institutions he initiated. His notion of activism-as-art has not only become a widespread practice, but is predominant in contemporary art of the twenty-first century. Exploring Beuys's expansive conception of art and following him into the realms of science, politics and spirituality, this book, in contrast to many other accounts of Beuys's life, attributes extraordinary importance to his own myth-making as a positive force in the post-war confrontation of Germany's past.

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Throughout human history our relationship with trees, woods and forests has remained central to the development of our technology, culture and expansion as a species. In this engaging book Charles Watkins examines and challenges our historical andmodern attitudes to wooded environments, and our continuing anxiety about humanity's impact on these natural realms.

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As the world rapidly urbanizes, its cities sink themselves into the ground in sprawling tendons of tunnels - conduits for transport, utility, communication, shelter and storage. The excavation of these spaces, at ever-increasing depths and speed, has changed our lives in ways that we tend to take for granted. For the first time, this book charts the global reach of urban underground spaces, bringing together a collection of 80 stories of subterranean sites around the world. The book draws out the extraordinary range of meanings suggested by urban underground spaces, whether their power as places of hope, fear, memory, labour and resistance, or their capacity to evoke both long histories and futures in the making. Illustrated with often breathtaking photographs, Global Undergrounds creates a new sense of the richness and global diversity of urban underground spaces. Its breadth and depth will appeal to all those who are engaged with these spaces: from urban planners, geographers, architects and engineers to urban explorers, photographers and anyone who encounters underground spaces in their cities.Indeed we inhabit a world where the material stuff beneath our feet is constantly in flux, where layer upon layer of things, people and substances circulate, dream and dwell.

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One of the most important things we do every day is eat. The question of eating - what and how - may seem simple at first, but it is dense with possible interpretations, reflecting the myriad roles food plays in our lives. In fact, as Raymond D. Boisvert and Lisa Heldke show in this book, it's difficult to imagine a more philosophically charged act than eating. Philosophers at Table explores the philosophical scaffolding that supports this crucial aspect of everyday life, showing that humans are not just creatures with minds, but creatures with stomachs. Examining a wealth of myths, literary works, histories and films - as well as philosophical ideas - the authors make the case for a philosophy of food. They look at Babette's Feast in a discussion of hospitality as a central ethical virtue. They compare eating a fast-food meal in Accra with dining at a molecular gastronomy restaurant as a way of considering the nature of food as art. And they describe biting into a slug to explore tasting as a learning tool, a way of knowing. A surprising, original take on something we have not philosophically savoured enough, Philosophers at Table invites readers to think in fresh ways about the simple and important act of eating.

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Meteorites are among the rarest objects on Earth, yet they have left a pervasive mark on our planet and civilization. Arriving amidst thunderous blasts and flame-streaked skies, meteorites were once thought to be messengers from the gods, embodiments of the divine. Prized for their outlandish qualities, meteorites are a collectible, a commodity, objects of art and artists' desires and a literary muse. 'Meteorite hunting' is an adventurous, lucrative profession for some, and an addictive hobby for thousands of others. Meteorite: Nature and Culture is a unique, richly illustrated cultural history of these ancient and mysterious phenomena. Taking in a wide range of sources Maria Golia pays homage to the scientists, scholars and aficionados who have scoured the skies and combed the Earth's most unforgiving reaches for meteorites, contributing to a body of work that situates our planet and ourselves within the vastness of the Universe.Appealing to collectors and hobbyists alike, as well as any lovers of nature, marvel and paradox, this book offers an accessible overview of what science has learned from meteorites, beginning with the scientific community's reluctant embrace of their interplanetary origins, and explores their power to reawaken that precious, yet near-forgotten human trait - the capacity for awe.

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Landscape has been central to definitions of Englishness for centuries. David Matless argues that landscape has been the site where English visions of the past, present and future have met in debates over questions of national identity, disputes over history and modernity, and ideals of citizenship and the body. Landscape and Englishness is extensively illustrated and draws on a wide range of material - topographical guides, health manuals, paintings, poetry, architectural polemic, photography, nature guides and novels. The author first examines the inter-war period, showing how a vision of Englishness and landscape as both modern and traditional, urban and rural, progressive and preservationist, took shape around debates over building in the countryside, the replanning of cities, and the cultures of leisure and citizenship. He concludes by tracing out the story of landscape and Englishness down to the present day, showing how the familiar terms of debate regarding landscape and heritage are a product of the immediate post-war era, and asking how current arguments over care for the environment or expressions of the nation resonate with earlier histories and geographies.

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For over a century, the banana has been the world's favourite fruit. Quick and easy to eat, tasty and versatile, the banana is a staple of many diets around the globe. Its history, however, is more than simply a succession of happy family scenes and appealing exotic locations. The growth and development of the fruit we know and love today is entangled with colonial practices, capitalist enterprise, sexual politics and even horrific murders.Banana: A Global History takes us from the agricultural beginnings of the banana in New Guinea to its almost ubiquitous presence in culinary repertoires around the globe, from the United States to the Caribbean, from regions of Africa to the heart of Southeast Asia. The book gives us an insight into the life of the banana over millennia, focusing on our recent history and its cultural affair with the fruit. The global life of the banana is traced in cultural practices, advertising, commercial schemes and the unmissable icons of popular culture, from nineteenth-century medical manuals to cookbooks, songs, the famous 'banana peel gag' and the well-known Miss Chiquita icon.

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Igor Stravinsky lived the life of a celebrity composer in an increasingly celebrity-obsessed age. He was a true modern, a man of his time. In Paris he dined with Joyce, Picasso and Proust, and by the end of his life was being feted by both the White House and the Kremlin as a prime piece of Cold War capital. But his colourful life would be mean little to us were it not for the brilliant and original music he produced, music that reflected and shaped his own times, and which continues to speak today.Born in Russia, Stravinsky spent most of his long life in exile. While he swiftly became a cosmopolitan composer, speaking the international language of modernist 'Western' music, the sting of his estrangement never left him. The sense of distance, loss and nostalgia, the wistful looking back evident in so much of Stravinsky's music, is not only a response to personal tragedy, but also a powerful expression of the deep anxiety and alienation of his age. Igor Stravinsky offers an in-depth critical overview of the life and work of this extraordinary citizen of the 20th Century. Jonathan Cross's accessible and engaging biography offers a new understanding of how Stravinsky's life lived in exile can be understood through his creative work, and gives a fresh portrait of a milieu stretching from St Petersburg, to Paris and Los Angeles, all seen through the eyes of this fascinating composer.

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The second most populous country in the world after China and the seventh largest in area, India is unique among nations in its diversity of climates, languages, religions, tribes, customs and, of course, cuisines. Yet what is it that makes Indian food so recognizably Indian, and how did it get that way? India is at the centre of a vast network of land and sea trade routes - conduits for plants, ingredients, dishes and cooking techniques to and from the rest of the world. Foreign visitors have long marvelled at India's agricultural bounty, including its ancient indigenous plants such as lentils, aubergines, turmeric and pepper, all of which have been central to the Indian diet for thousands of years. Feasts and Fasts: A History of Indian Food is an exploration of Indian cuisine in the context of the country's religious, moral, social and philosophical development. It addresses topics such as dietary prescriptions and proscriptions, the origins of vegetarianism, culinary borrowings and innovations, the use of spices and the inseparable links between diet, health and medicine.This lavishly illustrated book gives a mouth-watering tour of India's regional cuisines, containing numerous recipes to interest and excite readers.

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In this book Gay Watson offers an alternative view of emptiness via a tour of early and non-Western philosophy, taking us from Buddhism, Taoism and religious mysticism to the contemporary world of philosophy, science and art practice. While traditionally most Western philosophies have been concerned with substance and foundation, she finds that modern and postmodern times have seen a resurgence of ideas of emptiness and offers reasons why this concept has attracted contemporary musicians, artists and scientists, as well as pre-eminent thinkers of earlier ages. A Philosophy of Emptiness probes the idea of how a life without transcendence might be lived, and why one might choose it. It links these concepts to current ideas of meditation and the mind, and offers a rich and intriguing take on the idea of emptiness, reclaiming it as a positive, empowering state.

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Pasta, pizza, parmesan cheese - we have Italy to thank for some of our favourite foods. Home to a dazzling array of wines, cheeses, breads, vegetables and salamis, Italy has become a mecca for foodies. Outside Italy, cities around the world are home to Michelin-starred Italian restaurants and television chefs extol the virtues of Italian cuisine, presenting it as a model of fresh and healthy eating. Taking readers across the country's regions and beyond, Al Dente explores how Italy's cuisines became what they are today. For centuries, southern Mediterranean countries such as Italy fought against food scarcity, wars, invasions and an unfavourable agricultural environment. Lacking meat and dairy, Italy developed foodways that depended on grains, legumes and vegetables until a stronger economy in the late 1950s allowed the majority of Italians to afford a more diverse diet. The last half century has seen new packaging, conservation techniques, industrial mass production and more sophisticated systems of transportation and distribution, bringing about profound changes in how the country's population thinks about food. Including historical recipes for delicious Italian dishes to enjoy alongside a glass of crisp Chianti, Al Dente is a fascinating history of what is perhaps the world's favourite cuisine.

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Ask about German food and most people think of beer and sausage, or pretzels and Limburger cheese. However, the 82 million inhabitants of modern-day Germany do not all live exclusively on Oktoberfest fare. In fact, Germans have a long tradition of taking outside influences into their cuisine, and there is a wide variety of food eaten within the various regions of the country. Beyond Bratwurst traces the many traditions that have combined to form German food today. From their earliest beginnings, food and cooking in Germany have been marked by geographic and climatic differences between north and south, as well as continuous cultural influences from bordering countries. The openness of Germans to these influences has resulted in the frequent reinvention of their cuisine. The regional variations of today are based as much on political, cultural and socioeconomic history as on geography: the story of German food includes the back-to-the-land movement of the late nineteenth century and the development of modern mass-market products by Justus von Liebig and Dr Oetker, as well as rationing and shortages under the Nazis, post-war hunger and divisions between East and West.& #8232;
 Beyond Bratwurst describes who eats what, how, where, when and why in Germany, telling the stories of many German specialities such as beer, stollen, rye bread and lebkuchen, as well as more surprising German favourites.

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The hedgehog has long had a close connection with people. It has been an animal of fascination, endearment and cultural significance since the ancient Egyptians. The Romans regarded it as a weather prophet, and modern gardeners depend on the creature to keep their gardens free of pests. This book explores how this and other characteristics of the small creature have propelled it to the top of a number of polls of people's favorite animals. People react with passion and enthusiasm for the hedgehog, as it is, quite unusually, a wild animal that one can connect with. When scared the hedgehog stays still, allowing a closer look. It remains one of the few creatures that people can get close to without the fear of an attack, or it running away at the slightest movement. The hedgehog has spread through Europe and Asia to the foot of Africa, and is a prickly pet in the USA. The hedgehog's appeal and public accessibility has lead to it to be found on numerous products, from advertising to films and children's books. Instantly recognizable, benign in reputation, Hedgehog demonstrates that there is much to admire about this beautiful, and now threatened, icon of wildlife.

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Medusa, literally, petrifies: her face turned the ancients to stone. For Perseus and his patriarchal culture she was a dangerous female monster that had to be destroyed; for Dante she was the erotic power that could destroy men; Freud saw in her hair a nest of terrifying penises signaling castration. Yet in our time Medusa's reputation has improved: feminists see her as a noble victim of the patriarchy, and the designer Versace celebrates the lure of her mysterious face in a logo which stares at us from his ads for men's underwear, haute couture and exotic dinner-ware. In our modern culture she is once again a power-player demanding to be recognized; Medusa, it seems, still has the power to transfix us. Medusa: In the Mirror of Time explores how and why the mythical figure of the gorgon has become one of the most important and enduring ideas throughout human history. This book represents Medusa's biography, searching for the origins of the myth in cultures more ancient than Classical Greece. Ultimately it shows the Medusa myth to be a cultural dream, which continues to develop and change with our times. At the same time it explores what the changing Medusa myth reveals about our culture, and ourselves.

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Reaktion's new 'Botanical' series is the first of its kind, integrating horticultural and botanical writing with a broader account of the cultural and social impact of plants. In that sense, the South African geranium (the enduring, if confusing, common name for the genus Pelargonium) is perhaps the perfect plant to inaugurate the series. The story of the geranium's inexorable rise encompasses many other historical narratives: from plant hunting to commercial cultivation; from the role of plants in alternative medicine and the philanthropic imagination to changing styles in horticultural fashion. Geraniums were first collected by seventeenth-century Dutch plant hunters on the sandy flats near present-day Cape Town, and before long wealthy collectors and enterprising nurserymen were competing for this latest rarity to grace their hothouses. But the geranium was not destined to be a fashionable exotic for long: scarlet hybrids were soon to be found on every cottage windowsill and in every park bedding display, and the horticultural backlash began. Today geraniums can be found throughout the world, their widespread use in food and perfume manufacture as well as floral display exemplifying the global industrialization of plant production. In Geranium, Kasia Boddy details how the cheerful and amenable geranium remains a plant that many love and others love to hate, but above all it is a flower that is seldom ignored. Featuring numerous fine illustrations, Geranium explores the ever-changing image of the plant as portrayed in painting, literature, film and popular culture worldwide.

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Throughout his international career spanning more than thirty years, artist and writer David Batchelor has long been preoccupied with colour. ‘Colour is not just a feature of [my] sculpture or painting,’ he notes, ‘but its central and overriding subject.’ This new publication is devoted to an ongoing series of sculptures titled Concretos. First made in 2011, Concretos combine concrete with a variety of brightly coloured – and often found – materials.The publication features a text by Batchelor charting the origins and development of Concretos. He reveals that the first Concreto was made after encountering coloured glass shards embedded in a concrete wall in the back streets of Palermo. Over time these Concretos, their title a nod to the Latin American art movement to which Batchelor’s work is much indebted, have become more complex adventures in layering, pattern and process. Elements such as acrylic plastic, spray and household gloss paint, steel, fabric and found objects all find themselves set in a concrete base. The most recent works, titled Extra-Concretos (2019–) retain much of the simplicity of the early pieces while working on a much larger scale.In an essay commissioned for the publication, curator Eleanor Nairne considers Concretos in light of their material possibilities. Nairne’s vivid text draws connections between the sculptures and a wide range of art historical and literary references. Some of the playful and sensual characteristics of Batchelor’s artistic vocabulary are considered in relation to floral bouquets, sewing-machines, ice cream and poetry.Architectural historian Adrian Forty’s essay discusses concrete’s physical qualities and relationship with modernity. He notes that the imperfect nature and apparent neutrality of the material is key to its enduring place within architecture, design and in Batchelor’s case, contemporary sculpture. ‘In the Concretos,’ asserts Forty, ‘concrete plays a necessary part in allowing colour to be itself. Present, but at the same time part of the barely noticed, half-invisible infrastructure of the city, concrete’s very neutrality performs an unexpectedly active part in these works.’The publication is edited by David Batchelor and Matt Price, designed by Hyperkit, printed by Park, London, and published by Anomie, London. The publication coincides with the first large-scale survey exhibition of Batchelor’s work taking place at Compton Verney, Warwickshire in 2022. The publication has been supported by Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, and Arts Council England.David Batchelor was born in Dundee in 1955 and lives and works in London. In 2013, a major solo exhibition of Batchelor’s two-dimensional work, ‘Flatlands’, was displayed at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh and toured to Spike Island, Bristol. Batchelor’s work was included in the landmark group exhibition ‘Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015’ at Whitechapel Gallery, London. ‘My Own Private Bauhaus’, a solo exhibition of sculptures and paintings by Batchelor was presented by Ingleby Gallery during the Edinburgh Art Festival, 2019. Between 2017 and 2020 a large-scale work by Batchelor was displayed in the collection of Tate Modern. He is represented by Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, and Galeria Leme, São Paulo. Batchelor’s portfolio also includes a number of major temporary and permanent artworks in the public realm including a chromatic clock titled ‘Sixty Minute Spectrum’ installed in the roof of the Hayward Gallery, London.‘Chromophobia’, Batchelor’s book on colour and the fear of colour in the West, was published by Reaktion Books (2000), and is now available in ten languages. His more recent book, 'The Luminous and the Grey' (2014), is also published by Reaktion. In 2008 he was commissioned to edit ‘Colour’ an anthology of writings on colour from 1850 to the present published by Whitechapel/MIT Press.

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