Unicorn – serie

In 1997 sixty-two containers fell off the cargo ship Tokio Express after it was hit by a rogue wave off the coast of Cornwall, including one container filled with nearly five million pieces of Lego, much of it sea themed. In the months that followed, beachcombers started to find Lego washed up on beaches across the south west coast. Among the pieces they discovered were octopuses, sea grass, spear guns, life rafts, scuba tanks, cutlasses, flippers and dragons. The pieces are still washing up today.

First published in 1956, Swifts in a Tower still offers astonishing insights into swifts' private lives along with thoughts about their life style and wider issues. Now more than sixty years later swifts have been studied even more thoroughly, with technology unimaginable in the 1950s. This continues to reveal even more of their secrets, so this edition, published in association with the RSPB for their Oxford Swift City project includes a new chapter by Andrew Lack, bringing the story of this remarkable bird into the 21st Century.

Energy is Life: Why Environmentalism Went Nuclear follows Zion Lights’s personal and powerful journey: from grassroots green activism to becoming one of the UK’s leading advocates for nuclear energy. In a time of climate crisis, energy poverty and growing demand for clean power, she examines why long-established environmentalists like herself once feared nuclear energy, why many have since come to embrace it, and makes a compelling case for why nuclear energy must be part of the solution. Accessible, evidence-based, and deeply human, this book challenges common myths and invites readers to rethink what it really means to care for people and planet alike. If you believe in a greener, fairer future, this book just might change your mind – and give you hope.

Most guitarists today think of the USA as the land of the guitar. Classical guitars come from Spain but rock, jazz and folk guitars must surely be American? They know the ‘great’ names – Gibson, Epiphone, Fender, Gretsch, Martin but few non-German speakers know that Bohemia and neighbouring Saxony, where Christian Friedrich Martin was born in 1796, produced for over three centuries a massive proportion of the world’s stringed instruments – lutes, fiddles, cellos, double basses and guitars.Authors Cameron Brown and Stefan Lob are two of the world’s experts on the subject and this book, the first in the English language, is informed by many years of research. The Bate Collection is a museum of musical instruments at the University of Oxford and it owns a collection of 110 guitars donated by Cameron Brown. Half of them were made by German speaking Czech craftsmen expelled from their homeland after the Second World War, resettling in Bavaria, the other half by their former neighbours in Saxony, now behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany. This book shows the complete collection (and more), summarises the socio-political background and the way it led to the decline – and almost the extinction – of what was once the most productive centre of stringed-instrument making in the world, plus a unique guide to help collectors identify the makers of their instruments.

Written by Bernard Leach, the father of British studio pottery, this seminal book is the first treatise to be written by a potter on the workshop traditions handed down from the greatest period of Chinese ceramics in the Sung dynasty. With this book, potters can learn everything from how to adapt recipes for pigments and glazes to designing kilns.

Forget polished playbooks and sanitized lessons. This is a business memoir and career journey rooted in lived experience, not theory. It's the raw, unfiltered story of a woman who began as a casino dealer and went on to sell her startup in one of the fastest exits in the industry.What if the greatest gambles are not on the cards, but on the life you dare to build? Karolina Pelc wasn't born into boardrooms. Her story started on the casino floor in post-communist Poland, launching a non-linear career that took her across countries and continents through the global gaming, entertainment, and technology industries — before she founded, scaled, and sold her disruptive startup to FanDuel, the number-one gaming brand in the U.S., in under three years.But Her Play: Make Your Own Luck is not a startup manual or a how-to guide.In this fiercely honest leadership memoir, Karolina plunges readers into the realities of career and chaos, power dynamics and personal pivots, bold decisions, and private reckonings that shaped an unconventional path. From gritty encounters and psychedelic insights to building a career while navigating profound personal challenges, she shares raw stories from high-pressure environments in a male-dominated industry.Before she built and exited her company, Karolina navigated a world of sustained pressure, uncertainty, and scrutiny. From casino floors where every decision was visible to the complex dynamics of international business, gaming, and technology, her career unfolded far from predictable paths. Alongside the visible hustle ran the private battles: doubt after public setbacks, heartbreak behind closed doors, ambition, and the audacity required to keep moving forward when outcomes were anything but guaranteed.As this business memoir and career journey unfolds, Karolina reflects on inherited beliefs, broken assumptions, and the risks she took before knowing whether they would cost her everything. From sailing the globe on cruise ships to taking early leaps into the emerging world of online gaming and tech, Her Play lays bare the experiences that forged her leadership mindset.More than a chronicle of professional milestones, Her Play explores the internal mechanics of risk, confidence, and decision-making under pressure. Drawing on Karolina Pelc's original mindset framework, the book offers a reflective lens on how setbacks can be reframed and how opportunities are often created long before they appear. It is an inspirational leadership memoir about learning to trust your instincts, rewrite the rules on your own terms, and practise the art of engineered serendipity — making your own luck, one bold decision at a time.This book is for readers who:● Are building ambitious careers without a clear or linear map — and feeling the cost of it● Have taken risks that came without guarantees, applause, or safety nets● Are navigating leadership, identity, and pressure at the same time, often in silence● Want insight, not instruction — and lived experience, not templates

Glasgow Museums has the finest and most comprehensive collection of Italian paintings of any civic museums service in the United Kingdom.

Longford Castle is a fine Elizabethan country house, home to a world-class collection of art built up in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the Bouverie family and still owned today by their descendants. Until now, it has been relatively little known amongst the pantheon of English country houses.This book, richly illustrated and based on extensive scholarly research into the family archive, tells a comprehensive story of the collectors who amassed these treasures. It explores the acquisition and commission of works of art from Holbein’s Erasmus and The Ambassadors, to exquisite landscapes by Claude and Poussin, and family portraits by Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds. It explores how Longford, an unusual triangular-shaped castle that inspired Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Disney’s The Princess Diaries, was decorated and furnished to house these works of fine art, and how the Bouverie family patronised the best craftsmen and furniture makers of the day. The book brings the story up to the present day, with an introduction and conclusion by the current owner, the 9th Earl of Radnor, himself a keen collector of art, to celebrate this remarkable house and collection in the tercentenary year of its purchase by the Bouverie family.

The year 2023 sees the 150th anniversary of the death of William Harry Rogers. Rogers was one of the finest artist-designers of the Victorian period in Britain, someone to be considered in the same company as Pugin, William Burges, Owen Jones and Christopher Dresser. His designs won several prize medals at the Great Exhibition of 1851, the event which provides a ubiquitous reference point for cultural histories of the nineteenth century. He subsequently specialised in designing the appearances of books and his work in this field in the 1850s and 1860s was unrivalled, with many of his designs appearing also in the USA. The present book is the first to be devoted to Rogers and aims to be definitive, containing comprehensive accounts of his work and his life in Soho and the then village of Wimbledon. It includes many new discoveries, and hundreds of colour illustrations.

Four popular novelists of the same generation each wrote a novel inspired by a holiday that the author spent in France. In the nineteen-fifties, Rumer Godden based The Greengage Summer on her recollections of her family’s 1923 battlefield-tour manqué in the Champagne region. Margery Sharp’s 1936 holiday in Southern France led to ‘Still Waters’ and The Nutmeg Tree: both the short story and the novel are set in and around the region of Aix-les-Bains. In 1955, Daphne Du Maurier first visited the department of Sarthe to research French family history; the novel The Scapegoat was the immediate result of the holiday. And in 1966, Stella Gibbons’ last trip to the continent took the form of a visit to an old friend in her summer home near Grenoble. The stay is obliquely reflected in The Snow-Woman, in which a similar holiday leads a never-married septuagenarian to experience a renaissance of sorts.

The name Farsons is as synonymous with Malta as Guinness is with Ireland. Louis Farrugia’s visionary decision to conduct a European architectural competition has resulted in a stunningly beautiful and brilliant transformation of the 1951 Art Deco Farsons Old Brewhouse buildings. The gardens-courtyards-campus masterplan and architecture has been designed by the internationally renowned architects - ritchie*studio – led by Ian Ritchie, and realised in collaboration with Alex Torpiano’s engineering-focused Maltese practice TBA Periti, and environmental physicist Doug King. Inspired by Maltese palace gardens and the coloured architectural elements of the island’s vernacular buildings, and designed with respect for the force of the Mediterranean sun, this utterly contemporary mixed-use commercial architecture is a masterpiece of form, light and shade, sustainability and environmental engineering.Richard England, the celebrated Maltese architect wrote: “It is perhaps the finest building our island has seen over many a decade. It proves that real estate development can be produced enriched with what Vitruvius termed ‘Venustas’. Rarely has Malta seen architecture of this excellence.”

Henri Matisse described the Chapel of the Rosary, the chief labour of his final years, as the 'gathering together' of his lifetime's work. Although widely known as 'Matisse's Chapel', the building's remarkable 'modern' design and decoration emerged from a surprising friendship and artistic engagement with a group of Dominican sisters and brothers keen to see the Church embrace 'Modern Art' and modern artists. With the advantage of hitherto unexplored archive and printed materials this study highlights that mutual encounter and explores how their shared artistic adventure became for Matisse himself an opportunity to express his 'religious' vision of art and to rediscover his natal Catholic Faith in its post-war avant-garde form.

Jean Etienne Liotard (1702-1789) was one of the most accomplished, idiosyncratic and witty artists of 18th-century Europe. Born in Geneva, he pursued a remarkable career, travelling across the continent and the Near East, portraying a riveting cross-section of society. Liotard worked in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Venice, Constantinople and Vienna and excelled as a specialist in the delicate art of pastel. He became renowned for the uncanny realism of his portraits as well as the beauty of his drawings, while also experimenting with watercolour, oil painting, printmaking and enamels. In Britain he enjoyed notoriety because of his exotic persona, and received commissions from royalty, aristocrats, grand tourists and celebrities. LIOTARD: A Portrait of Eighteenth-Century Europe plots the career and practice and reputation of an extraordinary artist who deserves to be better known. This new study throws light on the wider cultural environment he navigated, illuminating connected themes, including fashion history, orientalism and the promotion and display of portraits in the public and private spheres of Enlightenment Europe.

The painter and collagist Wilfred Avery (1926 2016) tackled just two subjects in his career: landscape and the male body. A sixty-year investigation into both subjects developed out of his fascination with the unconscious mind as well as an exploration (and acceptance) of his own sexuality. By the end of his life - one led with a rare and intense creative focus - he had unified his two chosen subjects into one compelling whole.Untrained in any conventional sense and largely unrecognised, Wilfred's style evolved outside of any popular movement. He worked in self-imposed isolation from his creative contemporaries. Struggling to find his work a home in London's commercial art scene, he would remain adamant that he was making work for future audiences.

This story began a hundred years ago when a child became the inspiration for his famous father, A. A. Milne, who created one of the best known children's characters in recent history. His parents wanted a girl and to begin with treated him as one. They were initially quite distant from him and his upbringing was left to a loyal and loving nanny. Unfortunately, this left Christopher Robin Milne terminally shy and lacking in self-confidence. Unable to escape from the shadow of his fictional self, he became an object of continued interest from a non-understanding public. His salvation started with being sent away to Stowe School, going to Cambridge and joining the Army in the Second World War as a sapper. After an unhappy and directionless time immediately post-war in London, he eventually married and, very successfully, ran a bookshop in the South West for twenty-one years. His life was dominated by a love of the countryside, learned at his parents' country home, Cotchford Farm in Hartfield, East Sussex, and much later in Devon. How he turned his life round, against the odds, is the subject of this biography.

In Unravelled the author unpicks the threads of her comically nuclear family with its deep silences to find what lay hidden, never to be spoken of.Beneath the carefully woven fabric of her family life, she finds clash of cultures – on one side Jews fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe, and on the other the highest levels of the British aristocracy, from the Earl of Erroll of White Mischief fame to the Twenties socialite Mimi Wimborne. The writer and thinker John Berger mysteriously links both worlds. She finds two grandmothers whose bids to find freedom and fulfilment ended in utter disaster. Her parents, shiny young communists of the 1950s airbrushed both women out of history. But what happens when you deny the past? How do you negotiate your sense of identity?

An authoritative guide to what is needed for AI governance and regulation from expert authors internationally involved in the practical world of AI. This book tackles the question of why AI is a distinct challenge from other technologies and how we should seek to implement innovation-friendly approaches to regulation. It sets out many of the risks to be considered, why regulation is needed, and the form this should take to promote international convergence on AI governance and the responsible deployment of AI.This is a highly readable prescription for AI governance and regulation designed to encourage the technological goals of humanity whilst ensuring that potential risks are mitigated or prevented and, most importantly, that AI remains our servant and does not become our master.

Benjamin Ferrey (1810–1880) is remembered today as the childhood friend and biographer of A.W.N. Pugin, but that represents only one episode in a fascinating career spanning some of the most eventful decades in architectural history. After showing early promise as a draughtsman, Ferrey was sent to train in London under Pugin’s father. There he found himself at the forefront of a newly flourishing Gothic Revival. From the Pugin school, a long and varied career followed during which Ferrey worked on a series of major churches, houses, and public buildings including the National Gallery and Bagshot Park. After the death of his estranged childhood friend, Ferrey set about recording the life of Pugin and thus became his first biographer. However, until now Ferrey has suffered the fate of many biographers and faded into relative obscurity.

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things is a new edition book of classic short, Japanese, horror stories written by Lafcadio Hearn over a century ago. Hearn was an Irishman who was born in Greece, grew up in Ireland, and emigrated to the US where he became a writer. He later moved to Japan and married a Japanese woman, had children, and became a professor. He traveled all around in Japan with his wife and heard many strange traditional folklore stories. Kwaidan is a collection of those short stories that he wrote in English for western population. He died in Japan soon after the publication of Kwaidan. Those stories are now visually revitalized by accompanying photographs by award winning photographer Hiroshi Watanabe, who has lovingly brought this edition into print.

Bernard Leach (1887-1979) was as renowned in Japan and the East as in Europe and America,both as an artist-craftsman and as a thinker. His interpretation of the traditions of the Orientin the making of pots - and in evolving a philosophy of life - was a lodestar for many potters inthe West. Beyond East and West, first published in 1978, is more than an autobiography. Full of sharply-etched and amusing recollections, it contains much of Leach’s deeper thought and a great dealtoo about the practical application of his ideas. Its recurrent theme is the meeting of East andWest at all levels - artistic, cultural, social, political.

Monemvasia has a powerful visual and emotive separation from the world. The‘Castro’ or fortress is set on a rock in the southern Peloponnese of the Aegean Sea, joinedby a causeway to the Greek mainland. Inhabitants are further isolated behind the fortifiedwalls, with only one gateway into the Castro. From the 6th century AD it has played a significantrole in Byzantine and Mediterranean history. The unique environment determined how thecommunity evolved through periods of social change. The photographic collection spans over a century, from 1890 until the present day, andalongside historic and contemporary quotations, provides a graphic description of Monemvasiansociety throughout its recent history. It is an illustration of how a community, living inunique, physical and historical surroundings, may flourish and recreate within itself a strongbond of solidarity, pride and continuity. This interaction determines the pattern of the book.It is a journey, on a physical and emotional level, through Monemvasia. The chapters movethrough the public spaces and activities into the private experiences of family life.

There is no journal with a livelier and richer history than The Spectator. As well as being the world’s oldest current affairs magazine, none has been closer to spheres of power and influence in Britain. Since its first appearance in 1828, during the dying days of the Georgian era, The Spectator has been ready to spar – with the Tories and their Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, with a corrupt political system, and with the lacklustre literary world of the day. Over the subsequent 54 Prime Ministers, The Spectator has not just watched the world go by but has waded into the fray: it has campaigned on consistently liberal lines, fighting for voters’ rights, free trade, the free press and the decriminalisation of homosexuality, while offering open-minded criticism of every modern taboo and orthodoxy. 10,000 Not Out marks the magazine’s 10,000th issue by recounting the turbulent and tortuous tale of its history, of 192 years chock-full of crises and campaigns, of literary flair and barbed wit. Eight chapters chart the evolution of the title – from radical weekly newspaper, to moralising Victorian guardian, to wartime watchdog, to satirical magazine, to High-Tory counsellor, to the irreverent but influential Spectator of the twenty-first century. The book weaves together copious quotations from the magazine’s unparalleled archive, the contemporary press, private letters and staff anecdote.

Hsiao Chin spent his formative years in Europe experiencing the Western Modern Art movement. As a leading post-war Asian artist, he has contributed immensely to the development of avant-garde art and established himself prominently in the modern abstract movement in Asia. As a co-founder of Punto Movement in Milan during 1961-1966, Hsiao is the first and only post-war Chinese artist attempting to convey Eastern philosophical ideas and the concepts of mindfulness and self-contemplation in the Western pictorial language of abstraction. Hsiao’s works are not only artistic representations of Asian philosophy but, in a broader context, are an intellectualised expression of Asian ideas in their essential forms. The understanding of the entire post-war avant-garde art scene would not be complete without mentioning Hsiao Chin and the Punto Movement, along with American Abstract Expressionism, French Lyrical Abstraction, and Japanese Gutai.This book records 13 Punto exhibitions, which demonstrates Hsiao’s contribution to the international cultural realm throughout his artistic career. Included here are in-depth articles on Hsiao‘s historical significance in the twentieth century. The book also introduces his iconic oeuvres over the last six decades; work that reconciles Eastern and Western art prospects.

Discovering painting at the age of 40, Sir Winston Churchill revelled in his new pastime. He went on to produce over 550 paintings, with over 130 of them on the French Riviera.The fellow artist and Riviera resident Paul Rafferty has tracked down many of the locations Churchill used in Provence, an area the great man so aptly called 'paintatious'. Many of these locations are newly discovered and his 'fearless impressions' stand alongside to illustrate how Churchill captured them on canvas.

Only Us is a comprehensive, photographic portrait of humanity; a tapestry of mankind. As a species we are incredibly diverse, yet remarkably similar in so many ways. Our ability to adapt is unrivalled; from the four corners of the planet there are few places we have not succeeded in inhabiting.Only Us is a unique look at what essentially makes us human. Intended to expand the appreciation of its audience, drawing upon parallels we all have, transporting the viewer from their living room to far flung lands full of colour, inspiration and natural beauty.

In this first book to explore the entire history of triumphal arches, from their Roman origins to the present day, the Classicist and architectural historian Peter Howell describes arches through time, in terms of their cultural and historical significance. He also discusses the form of the arch in Renaissance painting and the rather surprising use of arches as war memorials. The erection of arches is far from dead, and Howell shows us examples, taken from over thirty years of research, from around the world.

For much of the nineteenth century, women artists laboured under the same restrictions and taboos they had endured for centuries, and it was assumed that marriage and child-bearing were their goals in life. However, by the 1870s female art students of every nation were flocking to Paris in search of instruction in the city’s private art schools. With proper training, they now had the confidence to tackle a wider range of subjects and by the century’s end they were at last able to study the nude figure. During these breakthrough years, women won the right to work and exhibit alongside men, both in Europe and America, and the advent of art galleries and art dealers opened up new ways of selling their work. This book is full of surprising adventures: young women, still not allowed to visit a museum unchaperoned, travelled thousands of miles in a quest for first-class tuition; several Americans, while still in their twenties, journeyed to Rome to study sculpture; numerous free and independent women joined the artists’ colonies that sprang up all over Europe, where they made lasting friendships, painting from dawn to dusk en plein air and enjoying the bohemian life. These trailblazing women rose to the challenges of the century’s dramatic development in art styles – from Realism to the Avant-Garde – and triumphantly succeeded in becoming successful professional artists.

Sempre Avanti. Ever Forward. That’s the motto on the Gelardi family shield and it’s a philosophy that has directed the lives and careers of four generations of hoteliers – Giuseppe, Giulio, Bertie and Geoffrey. Giuseppe managed hotels in his native Italy in the nineteenth century but his son Giulio was more ambitious and came to London, working first at Walsingham House – which was to later to become the Ritz – and managing the Savoy and Claridges in London and the Waldorf Astoria in New York. His son Bertie worked alongside Lord Forte to create the international Trust Houses Forte empire and acquiring, amongst others, the George V and Plaza Athenée in Paris, Sandy Lane in Barbados and the Pierre in New York. Geoffrey, Bertie’s son and the fourth generation Gelardi to make his mark in the luxury hotel business, spent years in the USA at the Bel Air in Los Angeles and the Sorrento in Seattle before returning to the UK to open the Lanesborough in 1991 – then, and still, London’s leading luxury hotel. Interweaved into this fascinating history we encounter royalty, celebrities, politicians and film stars – Mussolini, King Edward VII, Lilly Langtry, Ronald Reagan, various Atlantic City mafia figures, Frank Sinatra, Arnold Swartzenegger, Sophia Loren, Madonna, Michael Jackson, HRH The Queen, Princess Diana and many, many more.

Countless dollars of art are stolen or looted every year, yet governments often consider art theft a luxury problem. With limited public law enforcement, what prevents thieves, looters and organised criminal gangs from flooding the market with stolen art? How can theft victims get justice – even decades after their loss? What happens if the legal definition of a good title is at odds with what is morally right? Enter the Art Loss Register, a private database dedicated to tracking down stolen artworks. Blocking the sale of disputed artworks creates a space for private resolutions – often amicable and sometimes entertainingly adversarial. This book is based on ten cases from the Art Loss Register’s archive, showing how restitutions were negotiated, how priceless objects were retrieved from the economic underworld and how thieves and fences end up in court and behind bars. A fascinating guide to the dark side of the global art market.