Philip Hoare – författare

Marking the fortieth anniversary of Please, the duo’s first album release, the instant Sunday Times bestseller Pet Shop Boys Volume presents their entire visual output to date in a contemporary literary format. Pet Shop Boys – Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe – are the most successful duo in the history of pop music. Three-time Brit Award winners and six-time Grammy nominees, they have sold more than 50 million records worldwide, including No. 1 hits such as ‘West End girls’, ‘It’s a sin’, and ‘Always on my mind’, and platinum-selling albums Please, Actually, and Very. Uniquely spanning the worlds of music, art, film, theatre, design, and fashion, Pet Shop Boys have forged an identity as unforgettable as their sound. From the seminal graphic design of their record sleeves to their groundbreaking videos and innovative stage shows, they have set the bar for the visual presentation of pop. Celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the release of their first album in 1986, Pet Shop Boys Volume is the definitive retrospective of the duo’s career. Expanding upon Pet Shop Boys Catalogue, published two decades ago, it presents their entire visual output to date, year by year. Sleeve artworks and packaging, stills from every video, film, and performance, stage sets and costume designs, photoshoots, publications, and even Christmas cards all feature, as does every collaboration with luminaries including Mark Farrow, Wolfgang Tillmans, Martin Parr, Bruce Weber, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Derek Jarman, Scott King, Zaha Hadid, Tom Scutt, and Es Devlin. Concise commentaries by Chris Heath and Philip Hoare provide illuminating insights into the genesis of each project. Hoare’s original introduction is accompanied by a new introduction from Libby Sellers who considers the importance of Pet Shop Boys within the history of design, while a new foreword by Jeremy Deller reflects on the enduring impact of their music and image. With a jacket designed by Farrow and a new conversation between Heath, Tennant, and Lowe, Pet Shop Boys Volume is a visual feast and a sumptuous tribute to four decades of creative innovation.

The story of a man’s obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey – from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching.All his life, Philip Hoare has been obsessed by whales, from the gigantic skeletons in London’s Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves. Whales have a mythical quality – they seem to elide with dark fantasies of sea-serpents and antediluvian monsters that swim in our collective unconscious.In ‘Leviathan’, Philip Hoare seeks to locate and identify this obsession. What impelled Melville to write ‘Moby-Dick’? After his book in 1851, no one saw whales in quite the same way again.This book is an investigation into what we know little about – dark, shadowy creatures who swim below the depths, only to surface in a spray of spume. More than the story of the whale, it is also the story of our own obsessions.

Named a BOOK OF THE YEAR by The Times and Sunday Times, New Statesman, Spectator, Prospect, and New Yorker. ‘Undoubtedly Hoare’s masterpiece’ Olivia Laing‘Queer in all senses of the word’ Neil Tennant‘A life-changing book’ Robert Douglas Fairhurst, The Times ‘Fabulously idiosyncratic’ Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman How one visionary inspired 200 years of art, poetry, and protest. Weaving between the historical, cultural and personal, award-winning author Philip Hoare reveals a web of creative minds and artistic iconoclasts fired with the wild and revolutionary genius of William Blake. In 1973, Derek Jarman set off from London to film the stones of Avebury. He was following in the footsteps of Paul Nash, who had photographed the ancient megaliths a generation before. Standing in that muddy field, by those stones, both artists had felt a direct connection to their hero – a man who had died a long, long time ago, yet who remained electrically alive to them.In this alluring and poetic odyssey, Philip Hoare traces the enduring legacy of William Blake and how he came to inspire so many creative lives. Reaching out of his past and into our future, Blake draws together the natural world and metaphysical realms, merging the human and the animal and the spiritual, firing up twentieth-century artists, filmmakers, poets, writers and musicians with his radical promise of absolute freedom. This stirring, deeply felt book brings us back to Blake and shows that art still has the power to create positive change.‘A book that is neither Blake biography nor critical analysis nor legacy-tracing nor personal odyssey but a capacious mixing of them all … a joyful and dizzying romp’ Philip Marsden, Spectator ‘This love letter to William Blake couldn’t be more eccentric … Philip Hoare’s weird and wonderful style soars in this study of the poet and his disciples’ Ian Sansom, Telegraph‘Hoare’s impassioned style, alive with metaphor and wordplay, has often been called “dreamlike”. This is apt, given his total immersion in his subject … Nothing will be as audacious or intriguing as William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love’ Jenny Uglow, Times Literary Supplement

A startling book, his most personal to date, from Philip Hoare, co-curator of the Moby-Dick Big Read and winner of the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for ‘Leviathan’.The sea surrounds us. It gives us life, provides us with the air we breathe and the food we eat. It is ceaseless change and constant presence. It covers two-thirds of our planet. Yet caught up in our everyday lives, we barely notice it.In ‘The Sea Inside’, Philip Hoare sets out to rediscover the sea, its islands, birds and beasts. He begins on the south coast where he grew up, a place of almost monastic escape. From there he travels to the other side of the world – the Azores, Sri Lanka, New Zealand – in search of encounters with animals and people. Navigating between human and natural history, he asks what these stories mean for us now.Along the way we meet an amazing cast; from scientists to tattooed warriors; from ravens to whales and bizarre creatures that may, or may not, be extinct. Part memoir, part fantastical travelogue, ‘The Sea Inside’ takes us on an astounding journey of discovery.

Rich and strange from the tip of its title to its deep-sunk bones’ Robert MacfarlaneFrom the author of Leviathan, or, The Whale, comes a composite portrait of the subtle, beautiful, inspired and demented ways in which we have come to terms with our watery planet.In the third of his watery books, the author goes in pursuit of human and animal stories of the sea. Of people enchanted or driven to despair by the water, accompanied by whales and birds and seals – familiar spirits swimming and flying with the author on his meandering odyssey from suburbia into the unknown.Along the way, he encounters drowned poets and eccentric artists, modernist writers and era-defining performers, wild utopians and national heroes – famous or infamous, they are all surprisingly, and sometimes fatally, linked to the sea.Out of the storm-clouds of the twenty-first century and our restive time, these stories reach back into the past and forward into the future. This is a shape-shifting world that has never been certain, caught between the natural and unnatural, where the state between human and animal is blurred. Time, space, gender and species become as fluid as the sea.Here humans challenge their landbound lives through art or words or performance or myth, through the animal and the elemental. And here they are forever drawn back to the water, forever lost and found on the infinite sea.

A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR AN OBSERVER BEST ART BOOK OF 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2022 ‘This is a wonderful book. A lyrical journey into the natural and unnatural world’ Patti Smith ‘Everything Philip Hoare writes is bewitching’ Olivia Laing An illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art and the sea from the award-winning author of Leviathan. Albrecht Dürer changed the way we saw nature through art. From his prints in 1498 of the plague ridden Apocalypse – the first works mass produced by any artist – to his hyper-real images of animals and plants, his art was a revelation: it showed us who we are but it also foresaw our future. It is a vision that remains startlingly powerful and seductive, even now.In Albert & the Whale, Philip Hoare sets out to discover why Dürer's art endures. He encounters medieval alchemists and modernist poets, eccentric emperors and queer soul rebels, ambassadorial whales and enigmatic pop artists. He witnesses the miraculous birth of Dürer's fantastical rhinoceros and his hermaphroditic hare, and he traces the fate of the star-crossed leviathan that the artist pursued. And as the author swims from Europe to America and beyond, these prophetic artists and downed angels provoke awkward questions. What is natural or unnatural? Is art a fatal contract? Or does it in fact have the power to save us?

Named a BOOK OF THE YEAR by The Times and Sunday Times, New Statesman, Spectator, Prospect, and New Yorker. ‘Undoubtedly Hoare’s masterpiece’ Olivia Laing‘Queer in all senses of the word’ Neil Tennant‘A life-changing book’ Robert Douglas Fairhurst, The Times ‘Fabulously idiosyncratic’ Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman How one visionary inspired 200 years of art, poetry, and protest. Weaving between the historical, cultural and personal, award-winning author Philip Hoare reveals a web of creative minds and artistic iconoclasts fired with the wild and revolutionary genius of William Blake. In 1973, Derek Jarman set off from London to film the stones of Avebury. He was following in the footsteps of Paul Nash, who had photographed the ancient megaliths a generation before. Standing in that muddy field, by those stones, both artists had felt a direct connection to their hero – a man who had died a long, long time ago, yet who remained electrically alive to them.In this alluring and poetic odyssey, Philip Hoare traces the enduring legacy of William Blake and how he came to inspire so many creative lives. Reaching out of his past and into our future, Blake draws together the natural world and metaphysical realms, merging the human and the animal and the spiritual, firing up twentieth-century artists, filmmakers, poets, writers and musicians with his radical promise of absolute freedom. This stirring, deeply felt book brings us back to Blake and shows that art still has the power to create positive change.‘A book that is neither Blake biography nor critical analysis nor legacy-tracing nor personal odyssey but a capacious mixing of them all … a joyful and dizzying romp’ Philip Marsden, Spectator ‘This love letter to William Blake couldn’t be more eccentric … Philip Hoare’s weird and wonderful style soars in this study of the poet and his disciples’ Ian Sansom, Telegraph‘Hoare’s impassioned style, alive with metaphor and wordplay, has often been called “dreamlike”. This is apt, given his total immersion in his subject … Nothing will be as audacious or intriguing as William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love’ Jenny Uglow, Times Literary Supplement

A new reissue of Philip Hoare's singular biography of Stephen Tennant. ‘Witty and amazing … both scholarly and hilarious at the same time’ John Waters, New York Times Philip Hoare’s fascinating profile of Britain’s most legendary and flamboyant aristocratic aesthete. With unparalleled insight into Tennant’s bizarre and outrageously eccentric life, Hoare presents a superb biography that reflects an age of intellect, indolence, narcissism and pure style.

'A shocking tale of heroes and villains.’ Sir Ian McKellenIn 1918, the Imperialist newspaper made a startling claim. The German Secret Service had the names of 47,000 members of the British establishment who were sexual deviants and Britain was losing the war because Germany was blackmailing them. In the sensational libel trial that followed, the main target was Maud Allan, the Salome dancer with high society connections and a dark secret. Meanwhile, Oscar Wilde’s closest friends were drawn into the affair in a bitter battle for his reputation. It was the greatest scandal of the early twentieth century.This is a story of judges and prejudice, of aesthetes and admirals, of MPs and dancing girls, of sex and conspiracy; ingredients for a modern tabloid, yet in a decade that still seems a Victorian legacy. Philip Hoare has produced a revolutionary new portrait of British society, as nineteenth century morality and Edwardian opulence met the modern age.Wilde’s Last Stand tells of transvestites in the trenches, of drug clubs in London, and of the man who sought to be Britain’s first fascist leader. Both revealing and chilling, this is a vital story about the birth of a troubled century.Philip Hoare is an acclaimed author whose works include biographies of Stephen Tennant and Noël Coward, Spike Island and England’s Lost Eden. His book, Leviathan: or, The Whale won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction.'Documented with dazzling brilliance.’ The Sunday Times‘A valuable addition to the alternative history of our century.’ Peter Parker, Observer‘A thrashing good read.’ Independent on Sunday

The story of Netley in Southampton – its hospital, its people and the secret history of the 20th-century. Now with a new afterword uncovering astonishing evidence of Netley's links with Porton Down & experiments with LSD in the 1950s.It was the biggest hospital ever built. Stretching for a quarter of a mile along the banks of Southampton Water, the Royal Victoria Military Hospital at Netley was an expression of Victorian imperialism in a million red bricks, a sprawling behemoth so vast that when the Americans took it over in World War II, GIs drove their jeeps down its corridors. Born out of the bloody mess of the Crimean War, it would see the first women serving in the military, trained by Florence Nightingale; the first vaccine for typhoid; and the first purpos- built military asylum. Here Wilfred Owen would be brought along with countless other shell-shocked victims of World War I – captured on film, their tremulous ghosts still haunted the asylum a generation later. In Spike Island, Philip Hoare has written a biography of a building. In the process he deals with his own past, and his own relationship to its history.

Look Again is a new series of short books from Tate Publishing, opening up the conversation about British art over the last 500 years, and exploring what art has to tell us about our lives today. Written by leading voices from the worlds of literature, art and culture, each book sheds new light on some of the most well-known, best-loved and thought-provoking artworks in the national collection, and asks us to look again.Author Philip Hoare takes us on an exploration of the sea and the way it has provided a deep source of inspiration for artists featured in the Tate collection, from William Blake to Maggi Hambling.Artists have always seen the sea as a mirror of their anxieties and desires; an endless resource for their creativity and their dreams. Under our human sway, the sea has shifted in meaning, from creation myth to economic wealth, from mystic wonder to modern exploitation. Look Again: The Sea dives into the breadth of historical and contemporary works in Britain's national collection of art, as well as the beloved literature they have inspired. By reframing them within a social and political perspective rather than a chronological or art-historical one, prize-winning author Philip Hoare shows how art has continually borne witness to the power and allure of the sea.