A Writer's Britain by Margaret Drabble - Published: Thames and Hudson Ltd - 07-09-2009 - 288 pages.
Lifestyle - Travel - The love of place is endemic in English literature, from the work of the earliest poets and hermits to the suburban celebrations of John Betjeman, covering all varieties of the British rural and urban landscape. This book presents an image of Britain as seen by writers of different regions and periods, and also illuminates the way in which their work has changed our visual attitudes, our taste in landscape and our relation to nature.
Paula Rego: Nursery Rhymes by Marina Warner - Published: Thames and Hudson Ltd - 24-01-2019 - 72 pages.
Art - Artist Monographs - The bold, distinctive style of Paula Rego’s paintings has acquired for her not only an ever-increasing critical reputation but also an unusually large and enthusiastic following. Her be-ribboned little-girl heroines and fairy-tale characters seem firmly rooted in childhood, yet the innocence of this art is darkened by the underlying themes of power, domination and rebellion, sexuality and gender, that run through her work. Here Rego has turned to the nursery rhyme as a source for her imagery. It is a genre that perfectly complements her art; full of double meanings, rhymes are written from a child’s perspective but are open to adult interpretation. Twenty-six well-known nursery rhymes are accompanied by a series of etchings which she has executed spontaneously as a child might, drawing directly on the plate without preparatory planning. Following the traditions of earlier artists such as Beatrix Potter, she treats the fantastic realistically, dressing animals in human costume and using dream-like dislocations of scale. These are wonderfully comic and rich illustrations with a hint of the sinister, that turn classic nursery rhymes into colourful stories about folly and delusion, cruelty, convention and sex.
The Writer's Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands by Huw Lewis-Jones and Philip Pullman - Published: Thames and Hudson Ltd - 04-10-2018 - 256 pages.
Biography & Literature - Biography & Literature - The Writer's Map winner of Trade Illustrated category in the British Design and Production Awards
Photography & Illustrated Travel Book of the Year at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2019
Maps can transport us, they are filled with wonder, the possibility of real adventure and travels of the mind. This is an atlas of the journeys that writers make, encompassing not only the maps that actually appear in their books, but also the many maps that have inspired them and the sketches that they use in writing. For some, making a map is absolutely central to the craft of shaping and telling their tale. A writer’s map might mean also the geographies they describe, the worlds inside books that rise from the page, mapped or unmapped, and the realms that authors inhabit as they write. Philip Pullman recounts a map he drew for an early novel; Robert Macfarlane reflects on his cartophilia, set off by Robert Louis Stevenson and his map of Treasure Island; Joanne Harris tells of her fascination with Norse maps of the universe; Reif Larsen writes about our dependence on GPS and the impulse to map our experience; Daniel Reeve describes drawing maps and charts for The Hobbit trilogy of films; Miraphora Mina recalls creating ‘The Marauder’s Map’ for the Harry Potter films; David Mitchell leads us to the Mappa Mundi by way of Cloud Atlas and his own sketch maps. And there’s much more besides.
Amidst a cornucopia of images, there are maps of the world as envisaged in medieval times, as well as maps of adventure, sci-fi and fantasy, maps from nursery stories, literary classics, collectible comics – a vast range of genres.
