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.

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

A glorious essay by Winston Churchill about one of his favourite pastimes, painting.

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.

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.

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.

‘In this wide ranging and comprehensive survey of the designed landscapes of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, James Bartos argues convincingly that ornamental wildernesses should be viewed as distinctive design features which, when linked across an extensive terrain, took on the character of the whole landscape. As a result of this striking analysis, our understanding of the celebrated layouts at Wrest Park, Chiswick and Stowe, and many more besides, must be revised.Contrary to the received wisdom that wildernesses led inexorably to the more informal parkscapes associated with William Kent and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, it was only when they were dismantled in the mid-eighteenth century to provide more loosely controlled, open glades and greensward that the English Landscape Style emerged.This ground-breaking study ranges in its literary compass from classical authors through contemporary writers on gardens and gardening to modern critical authorities, while its visual focus on design manuals and individual gardens and landscapes is presented through a wealth of engraved prints, maps and present day photographs. Bartos considers the making, planting and maintenance of wildernesses, their continental precedents, thematic resonances – Classical, Biblical, Druidic, Patriotic – and the eventual development of these often numinous spaces into mature gardens followed by their inevitable demise.The book has all the attributes of a true wilderness – surprise, variety and, above all, delight – is engagingly written and a tour de force of meticulous scholarship.’ Professor Timothy Mowl FSAThe Ornamental Wilderness in the English Garden reinterprets the English formal garden of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries through the perspective of a typical feature of those gardens, the ornamental grove, called a wilderness. In its mature form, the wilderness constituted most of the garden, shady and private, a place for retreat as well as social activity, with a seeming naturalness achieved through artifice, where cultural incident and nature were equally appreciated.

Since 2003, Hong Kong has changed dramatically. In recent years, the city has been rocked by social instability and Covid-19, yet Hong Kong endures, evolving as it always has.This book is a window into the events of a city that has been the author’s home for over two decades. It captures the events that at times shuddered the city to others that merely needed a mention. From politics to urinating taxi drivers, from culling animals to LGBT rights, it is a historical account and a chronicle of life in Asia's World City. With illustrations by Harry Harrison, cartoonist of the South China Morning Post.

The book shows Yin Zhaoyang’s 12-year retrospective on the series ‘Mount Song’. Yin Zhaoyang is a celebrated contemporary Chinese artist who gained fame in the 1990s for his figurative paintings that depicted people’s psychological struggles during social changes in China. In 2008, he embarked on a new landscape project, with Mount Song as the subject matter. Although landscape art, or Shanshui, has a long history in Chinese art, Yin brought a new spirituality to it that went beyond traditional literati art. His ‘Mount Song’ series is a new topic called Shanhe, where geography and topology are intertwined with contemporary temperament. This echoes Yin’s portraits, which visualise the agitation in nature and culture.

The third and final volume of Kevin J. Last’s books about Cotchford Farm, Hartfield, East Sussex in three different eras. Semi-Detached Suburban Mr Jones is set in the 1960s and tells the story of Brian Jones, the only middle class member of the Rolling Stones and how he came to purchase Cotchford Farm as a country retreat away from the Stones London life. Despite the fact that he was founder of the group, Jones's increasingly wild behaviour ensured that Mick Jagger eventually became the group's leader. Harking back to his roots, Jones saw himself as a Sussex country gentleman but it all went impossibly wrong due to a vicious East End builder, Frank Thorogood, who made life hell for him with Jones eventually drowning in his own swimming pool in suspicious circumstances. How and why this happened is examined in close detail.

Tracks: A Journey Through Metro-Land tells the story of Metro-land and the development of suburbia that grew alongside the Metropolitan Railway. Originally the brainchild of eminent Victorians, the Metropolitan grew to become the queen of underground lines, eventually expanding to a point some fifty miles outside London. Author Kevin J. Last describes how the concept of Metro-land was an aspiration for several levels of society, promising a better lifestyle well away from the deprivations of wartime. The idea that the working man could live comfortably outside the 'smoke' in individually designed houses would mean that he could also thrive at work, largely due to the regular service offered by the new railway. This was quite exceptional in that, while nominally an underground line, most of the Met's route was above ground and, in length, went far beyond other similar lines, far out into the Buckinghamshire countryside. Not marked on any map, Metro-land is as much a concept of the mind as a real place.

This book is a comprehensive collection and exhibition of Chen Yujun’s art, thoroughly introducing the artist’s creative philosophy, origins and stylistic changes to readers in the English-speaking world. With the theme of growth, Chen’s art explores the mutual influence and intertwining of individuals, society, regions and civilisations, innovating and evolving through the exchange of civilisations.The book will accompany Chen Yujun’s retrospective solo exhibition, which will be held at the Long Museum in Shanghai in the summer of 2025.

Paul Goldstein has spent many years at the business end of a camera trying for that elusive ‘impossible shot’. For him, though, his images are just a gateway to highlighting the plight of the Nine Lives species he so treasures. He has spent years putting his body through often tortuous pain to raise money for them, and his images are underwritten frequently by rage at humanity’s savage injustices to the animal kingdom. His campaigns frequently get him into trouble and yet he would have it no other way. He is a multi-award winning photographer, and as a guide has few equals and a massive following, yet his style is not for everybody and as he gets older his impatience grows with the inaction and corruption of those supposed to be protecting the species he values so much.

The chief legacy of William Henry Chignell (1841–1933), the subject of this book, consisted of several hundred hand-painted envelopes sent to amuse his children scattered around Britain and in far-flung corners of the Empire. Each envelope has a water-colour drawing on the front and often the address is incorporated into the design. The drawings show extraordinary talent and range from ironic sketches, to witty commentary, and to beautiful scenes. Accompanying the illustrated envelopes that make up this volume are extracts from the children’s writings providing indications of where they would have been when they received the envelopes and what they must have meant to them and to the communities in which they were living. This gives a wider context for the designs and brings them to life in ways that the envelopes on their own, as truly remarkable as they are, cannot do.

In An Irishman Abroad, Tarka King recalls his feral youth on the periphery of the Anglo-Irish world, his brief UK public school education and a period of extensive travel, followed by a period of soldiering in the Middle East at the height of the Cold War before returning to Ireland. The book identifies the pre-Belfast Good Friday Agreement Ulster Canal project as a way of tackling historic regional socio-economic ills, with supporting opinions from wide range of contacts stretching from senior IRA hunger strikers through to dedicated hardline Unionists. King reflects on how he felt compelled to move to England due to the unrest in the early 1980s and how management of his farm and forests in 'no-man's-land' was not surrendered and his interest in pursuing the Ulster Canal restoration continues.

A Sense of Theatre is an eye-witness account of the birth and subsequent triumph of one of the world’s most famous theatres. Since the iconic building opened in 1976 on London’s South Bank, the National Theatre’s deployment of extraordinary architecture and exemplary theatrical talent has drawn audiences worldwide. However, the 100-year dream of a national theatre for the nation did not happen without crises and setbacks. The theatre architecture has challenged generations of theatre makers, leading to innovation that has changed theatre worldwide. The architect, Sir Denys Lasdun, initially a neophyte in theatre design, subsequently became an initiator of a new way of approaching theatre design: through deep collaboration between architecture and theatre.In 1963, Richard Pilbrow, pioneer of modern stage lighting in Britain, was appointed by Sir Laurence Olivier to help create the National Theatre of Great Britain as a member of the building committee.This book is Pilbrow’s account of that journey, from conception to today. With insight from leading players in British theatre and, for the first time, the minutes of the deliberations between Sir Laurence, architect and leading theatre artists, A Sense of Theatre presents the dramatic quest to create a flagship theatre for the nation.