Jonathan Glancey – författare

A highly-illustrated, pocket-sized guide to understanding the forces that have shaped the world’s cities from the dawn of civilisation to the present day.The fortunes of towns and cities rise and fall along with the fate of the civilisations to which they belong. Some are lost entirely, now no more than ruins; others have thrived as urban centres for millennia; and all contain vital clues embedded in their streets and skylines which reveal why their inhabitants grouped together, and tell of their unique social, political and cultural histories. Packed with plans, maps, and drawings, this book takes you on an international journey of discovery to explore the history of cities from our earliest urban origins to the contemporary world city – from Babylon to Beijing, London to Paris, and from the skyscrapers of New York to the streets of their own home town. A must-read for anyone interested in history, cities, and travel, this fascinating book turns you into an urban detective to see how our towns and cities grew the way they are.

See more than 350 of the world's greatest buildings come to life in the most spectacular way! A world of beauty and genius is unveiled in this comprehensive architecture book. Discover the world's most incredible buildings, from the ancient world to the present day.From the Louvre and the Colosseum to the Sydney Opera House and the Gherkin, this book offers a truly visual worldwide survey of global architecture. Bursting with breathtaking photography and informative entries on more than 350 of the world's most famous buildings, Architecture: A Visual History gives you an unspoilt view of their fascinating features. This accessible reference book will transport you to the most impressive and iconic buildings on earth: - 500 photographs and 13 CGI artworks that dissect magnificent buildings around the world- Clear explanations and cross-sections of each building, along with exquisite photography of specific details- Close-up, detailed photographic reference to the architectural "vocabulary" of the period Explore the Architectural Wonders of the WorldPage after page is dedicated to significant architectural movements, biographies of famous architects and in-depth examinations of their masterpieces. See how and why certain features were common during specific time periods and how these amazing buildings have stood the test of time. Unique specially-commissioned CGI artworks throughout the book showcase more than 10 specific buildings, including The Pantheon and the White House.This stunning guide gives you a closer look at contemporary global architecture as well as sustainable green buildings. It's the perfect gift for architecture students, practising architects, or anyone with an interest in architecture, design, engineering, or art.

Landlocked, almost inaccessible to foreigners, Nagaland has been fighting a secret, often brutal war for independence for more than half a century. Portrayed either as a land of ruthless guerrillas or exotic natives, Nagaland is in fact a complex and divided region, with an incredible history. The breathtaking Naga hills take us to the offices of Adolf Hitler and Emperor Hirohito, via a motley collection of well-meaning colonialists and anthropologists, and one of the most important battles of the Second World War.The third generation of his family to be seduced by Nagaland, Jonathan Glancey tries to reconcile his childhood idealism with the reality he finds there, and explores his family ties to the region. Through his ancestral history, extensive travels beyond the tourist zone, and through the voices of the Nagas he meets, he tells the true story of this forgotten land.

21 March 1945. 1530 hours. Dozens of Allied fighters and bombers sweep over German-occupied Venice. Their mission – destroy Germany’s strategic outposts nestled along the port, while leaving the floating city unscathed.As bombs rained down upon Europe, flattening city after city, Venice – La Serenissima; home of Titian and Veronese; immortalised in the serene landscapes of Canaletto – remained sacrosanct. Its artistic and architectural treasure too considerable, too precious to risk destruction.But, as the push up through Italy reached its final, gruelling months, the Allies were confronted with a terrible dilemma. The ancient city of Venice was now closer and closer to the line of fire. As casualties mounted, the value of art, of history seemed diminished – just a month earlier Allied bombers had reduced the ancient hilltop abbey of Monte Cassino to a stony husk.In a gripping tale, bestselling author Jonathan Glancey reveals the thrilling history of ‘Operation Bowler’. Joining audacious Wing Commander George Westlake DFC and his elite team, Operation Bowler explores how an unlikely squad of pilots executed one of the most meticulous and complex air raids of the Second World War, sparing not only Venice, but its people.

21 March 1945. 1530 hours. Dozens of Allied fighters and bombers sweep over German-occupied Venice. Their mission – destroy Germany’s strategic outposts nestled along the port, while leaving the floating city unscathed. As bombs rained down upon Europe, flattening city after city, Venice – La Serenissima; home of Titian and Veronese; immortalised in the serene landscapes of Canaletto – remained sacrosanct. Its artistic and architectural treasure too considerable, too precious to risk destruction. But, as the push up through Italy reached its final, gruelling months, the Allies were confronted with a terrible dilemma. The ancient city of Venice was now closer and closer to the line of fire. As casualties mounted, the value of art, of history seemed diminished – just a month earlier Allied bombers had reduced the ancient hilltop abbey of Monte Cassino to a stony husk. In a gripping tale, bestselling author Jonathan Glancey reveals the thrilling history of ‘Operation Bowler’. Joining audacious Wing Commander George Westlake DFC and his elite team, Operation Bowler explores how an unlikely squad of pilots executed one of the most meticulous and complex air raids of the Second World War, sparing not only Venice, but its people.

In Concorde, Jonathan Glancey tells the story of this magnificent and hugely popular aircraft anew, taking the reader from the moment Captain Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in 1947 through to the last commercial flight of the supersonic airliner in 2003. It is a tale of national rivalries, technological leaps, daring prototypes, tightrope politics, and a dream of a Dan Dare future never quite realized. Jonathan Glancey traces the development of Concorde not just through existing material and archives, but through interviews with those who lived with the supersonic project from its inception. The result is a compelling mix of overt technological optimism, a belief that Britain and France were major players in the world of civil as well as military aviation, and faith in an ever faster, ever more sophisticated future. This is a celebration, as well as a thoroughly researched history, of a truly brilliant machine that became a sky god of its era.

The 50 most significant principles and styles in architecture, each explained in half a minute. The bestselling 30-Second series offers a new approach to learning about those subjects you feel you should really understand. Every title takes a popular topic and dissects it into the 50 most significant ideas at its heart. Each idea, no matter how complex, is explained using a mere two pages, 300 words, and one picture: all easily digested in only half a minute. 30-Second Architecture presents you with the foundations of architectural knowledge. Expert authors are challenged to define and describe both the principles upon which architects depend, and the styles with which they put those principles into practice. So, if you want to know your arch from your elevation, and your Baroque from your Brutalism, or you wish to top off your next dinner party with a stirring speech on how form follows function, this is the quickest way to build your argument.

What was it really like to take the LNER's Art Deco Coronation streamliner from King's Cross to Edinburgh, to cross the Atlantic by the SS Normandie, to fly with Imperial Airways from Southampton to Singapore, to steam from Manhattan to Chicago on board the New York Central's 20th Century Limited or to dine and sleep aboard the Graf Zeppelin? In the course of The Journey Matters, Jonathan Glancey travels from the early 1930s to the turn of the century on some of what he considers to be the most truly glamorous and romantic trips he has ever dreamed of or made in real life.Each of the twenty journeys allows him to explore the history of routes taken, and the events - social and political - enveloping them. Each is the story of the machines that made these journeys possible, of those who shaped them and those, too, who travelled on them.

Announced in 1912, the Schneider Trophy was a series of glamorous air contests, popularly known as races, that captivated both sides of the Atlantic. While there were many other aviation competitions, the Schneider proved to be, after a rocky start, by far the most memorable attracting a hugely popular and glamorous following whether Trophy races were held in Monaco, the Venice Lido, the Solent or Chesapeake Bay.The Schneider Trophy was a focus not just of remarkable aircraft, derring-do pilots and swooning public attention, but also of fierce rivalries between the competitors: Britain, France, Italy and the United States. It gripped the imaginations of pioneering manufacturers and two of the world's finest aircraft designers ­- Reginald Mitchell and Mario Castoldi - who worked feverishly hard to outdo one another. Perhaps inevitably, the dynamism of rival engineering and politics led to the most potent military fighters of World War Two with Reginald Mitchell's record-breaking Supermarine seaplanes morphing, one way or another, into the Spitfire.Wings Over Water not only tells the story of the Schneider Trophy afresh but also examines the backdrop and legacy of these legendary air races, which became a driver and celebration of speed and engineering prowess for both sea and ground-based aircraft. It is an exhilarating tale of raw adventure, public excitement, engineering genius and the fortunes of flying boats and seaplanes.

Bread and circuses-free food and mass entertainment-was the name contemporary social observers gave to the ancient Roman practice of keeping the common people happy and rebellion-free. Jonathan Glancey, in this personal and passionate essay about the city he loves, suggests that the same unformulated policy is the means by which modern London''s citizens are kept as apolitical and passively pleasure-loving as possible. But shops, restaurants and a few gorgeous buildings are, he maintains, a poor substitute for a creaking infrastructure, and London''s cachet as a boisterously creative but well-run city will plummet if private vice is allowed to triumph over public virtue.

Explore over 500 masterpieces of modern architecture in this celebration of the most iconic buildings in the world. Written by acclaimed architecture expert Jonathan Glancey, Modern Architecture is a beautifully illustrated guide to the key styles, architects and movements that have defined our skylines since the dawn of the twentieth century. From the dizzying heights of the Shard to the exquisite curves of the Sydney Opera House, and from Frank Lloyd Wright to Sir David Adjaye, this is the essential handbook to the creative discipline that shapes our world.'His comments are always informative, unashamedly partisan and often enjoyably tart' – Sunday Telegraph'One of the finest architectural writers in contemporary Britain' – Scotland on Sunday

'Impressive... Glancey has written an engaging and affectionate account of the V-bombers, not least the figures who made it all possible.' TelegraphTHE THREE VERY DIFFERENT models of V class bomber comprising Britain's strategic nuclear strike force - Vickers Valiant, Avro Vulcan and Handley Page Victor - marked a radical change in post-war bomber design. From the time they first entered service between 1955 and 1957, these charismatic, high-flying jets stole the public imagination. Theirs, though, was a terrible beauty. In 1956, over the South Australian desert, Valiant WZ366 was the first British aircraft to drop an operational atomic bomb.The V-bombers were Britain's premier Cold War aircraft. But frictions in Anglo-American relations alongsidedevelopments in radar and surface-to-air missiles led to the Royal Navy taking over Britain's nuclear deterrent role in 1968. Despite this, the V-bombers enjoyed a second life in conventional roles, most notably when Vulcans undertook the longest bombing raids in history in the 1982 Falklands War.V-Force sets these formidable, haunting aircraft in the story of the development of twentieth-century weapons of mass destruction, military rivalries and international politics. It is both an extraordinary ode to the V-bombers and a unique lens through which to view Britain's Cold War experience.

21 March 1945. 1530 hours. Dozens of Allied fighters and bombers sweep over German-occupied Venice. Their mission – destroy Germany’s strategic outposts nestled along the port, while leaving the floating city unscathed.As bombs rained down upon Europe, flattening city after city, Venice – La Serenissima; home of Titian and Veronese; immortalised in the serene landscapes of Canaletto – remained sacrosanct. Its artistic and architectural treasure too considerable, too precious to risk destruction.But, as the push up through Italy reached its final, gruelling months, the Allies were confronted with a terrible dilemma. The ancient city of Venice was now closer and closer to the line of fire. As casualties mounted, the value of art, of history seemed diminished – just a month earlier Allied bombers had reduced the ancient hilltop abbey of Monte Cassino to a stony husk.In a gripping tale, bestselling author Jonathan Glancey reveals the thrilling history of ‘Operation Bowler’. Joining audacious Wing Commander George Westlake DFC and his elite team, Operation Bowler explores how an unlikely squad of pilots executed one of the most meticulous and complex air raids of the Second World War, sparing not only Venice, but its people.

Britain is in the grip of a housing crisis.It has, in fact, been in the grip of a housing crisis since the Industrial Revolution, when the population soared and people crammed into towns and cities in search of work. What followed is a tale of suburbia, green belts and, since the 1980s, the increasingly common sight of mass-produced and near identical housing across the land.This book argues that British house building over the centuries has been an art. An art of which we can be proud and an art we can still learn from. The artistry involved includes not just the design and appearance, but the setting of homes into the fabric of urban and rural landscapes and the very fabric of people's lives. We need to get the art of new housing right before building ever more homes that, while considered a necessity, no one truly likes.Where We Live is at once a critical history of the art of British housebuilding urban, suburban and rural, a study of where British housing has lost its way for the best part of a century, and a source of inspiration and hope for the future.

Updated edition to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. It is difficult to overestimate the excitement that accompanied the birth of the Spitfire. An aircraft imbued with balletic grace and extraordinary versatility, it was powered by a piston engine and a propeller, yet came tantalisingly close to breaking the sound barrier. First flown in 1936, the Spitfire soon came to symbolize Britain's defiance of Nazi Germany in the summer of 1940.Spitfire: The Biography is a celebration of a great British invention, of the men and women who flew it and supported its development, and of the industry that manufactured both the aircraft and the Rolls-Royce engines that powered it. It is also about the ways in which the sight, sound and fury of this lithe and legendary fighter continue to stir the public imagination worldwide more than eighty years on.

'Impressive... Glancey has written an engaging and affectionate account of the V-bombers, not least the figures who made it all possible.' TelegraphTHE THREE VERY DIFFERENT models of V class bomber comprising Britain's strategic nuclear strike force - Vickers Valiant, Avro Vulcan and Handley Page Victor - marked a radical change in post-war bomber design. From the time they first entered service between 1955 and 1957, these charismatic, high-flying jets stole the public imagination. Theirs, though, was a terrible beauty. In 1956, over the South Australian desert, Valiant WZ366 was the first British aircraft to drop an operational atomic bomb.The V-bombers were Britain's premier Cold War aircraft. But frictions in Anglo-American relations alongsidedevelopments in radar and surface-to-air missiles led to the Royal Navy taking over Britain's nuclear deterrent role in 1968. Despite this, the V-bombers enjoyed a second life in conventional roles, most notably when Vulcans undertook the longest bombing raids in history in the 1982 Falklands War.V-Force sets these formidable, haunting aircraft in the story of the development of twentieth-century weapons of mass destruction, military rivalries and international politics. It is both an extraordinary ode to the V-bombers and a unique lens through which to view Britain's Cold War experience.

'Impressive... Glancey has written an engaging and affectionate account of the V-bombers, not least the figures who made it all possible.' TelegraphTHE THREE VERY DIFFERENT models of V class bomber comprising Britain's strategic nuclear strike force - Vickers Valiant, Avro Vulcan and Handley Page Victor - marked a radical change in post-war bomber design. From the time they first entered service between 1955 and 1957, these charismatic, high-flying jets stole the public imagination. Theirs, though, was a terrible beauty. In 1956, over the South Australian desert, Valiant WZ366 was the first British aircraft to drop an operational atomic bomb.The V-bombers were Britain's premier Cold War aircraft. But frictions in Anglo-American relations alongsidedevelopments in radar and surface-to-air missiles led to the Royal Navy taking over Britain's nuclear deterrent role in 1968. Despite this, the V-bombers enjoyed a second life in conventional roles, most notably when Vulcans undertook the longest bombing raids in history in the 1982 Falklands War.V-Force sets these formidable, haunting aircraft in the story of the development of twentieth-century weapons of mass destruction, military rivalries and international politics. It is both an extraordinary ode to the V-bombers and a unique lens through which to view Britain's Cold War experience.

The British designed and built the Harrier, the most successful vertical take-off-and-landing aircraft ever made. Combining state-of-the-art fighter plane technology with a helicopter's ability to land vertically the Harrier has played an indispensable role for the RAF and Royal Navy in a number of conflicts, most famously the Falklands War. Jonathan Glancey's biography is a vividly enjoyable account of the invention of this remarkable aeroplane and a fitting tribute to the inspiration and determination of the men and women who created it, and the bravery of the men who flew it, often in the most dangerous conditions.

Bread and circuses-free food and mass entertainment-was the name contemporary social observers gave to the ancient Roman practice of keeping the common people happy and rebellion-free. Jonathan Glancey, in this personal and passionate essay about the city he loves, suggests that the same unformulated policy is the means by which modern London's citizens are kept as apolitical and passively pleasure-loving as possible. But shops, restaurants and a few gorgeous buildings are, he maintains, a poor substitute for a creaking infrastructure, and London's cachet as a boisterously creative but well-run city will plummet if private vice is allowed to triumph over public virtue.

In Logomotive Ian Logan's photographs are assembled into chapters and picture essays recalling the great days of lines such as the Santa Fe, the Union Pacific, and the Kansas City Southern. Some of his journeys are presented as travelogues in which he meets the Fat Controller, gets to sound the horn, and wanders into freight yards to see the last generation of streamline locomotives rusting amid the weeds. Animal motifs, Native American allusions, advertising slogans, names of famous trains such as the Super Chief and the Wabash Cannonball provide the subject matter for other picture features.

This accessible and comprehensive book shines a light on the design history of the famous Anglepoise lamp. Starting with the beginnings of the company with George Carwardine, the designer behind the lamp, the book takes you through an illuminating journey of the development and influence of this British icon. In 1932, vehicle suspension engineer George Carwardine designed the spring, crank and lever mechanism that became the blueprint for the first Anglepoise lamp. Enchanting the world with its light-to-the-touch and anthropomorphic design, the unique and characterful form has adorned the worktables of everyone, from writers to engineers, from the Second World War through to the21st century. Cozy as it is utilitarian, the intimately focused pool of light the Anglepoise creates around an individual’s work is as poetic as it is practical. Today, the lamp is a sure sign of quality and has been hailed as a hallmark of British design.Spring Light details a fascinating history of this household item that the armchair architect, designer and engineer will enjoy.Chapters include:Foreword by Sir John HegartyA Question of Balance: An introduction to the designLight Engineering: Designer George Carwardine’s beginningsDarkness Visible: the Anglepoise in the Second World War and industryLamps for Sale: the launch of the Anglepoise Model 1227 through advertisingLighting by Design: the development of the Anglepoise lamp from the 1970s through to the 2000s – with collaborations with Paul Smith and Margaret HowellLights for Sore Eyes: the success of the design and imitationsAnglepoise goes to the Movies: the Anglepoise in filmsUndimmed Light: the future of Anglepoise and new designsIn the Beginning: a ruminative essay on the lamp – the pools of light it creates and its unique lightweight engineering – by Jonathan Glancey.