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Originally published: London: Quartet Books Limited, 2015.
'One of the most striking books of the year' - Mark Lawson, BBC Radio 4's Front Row
Sleeping with Dogs is the record of one man's passionate affection for the dog, rooted in his early childhood and lasting undiminished into his dotage. These were for the most part dogs discarded and left to fate - tied to the railings of Kensington Gardens, found with a broken leg in the wilds of Turkey, adopted from an animal rescue home, passed on by the vet - but there was also a whippet of noble pedigree and three generations of a family of crossbreeds in which the whippet strain was strong. They were not pets, but indulged friends and companions, with all of whom he shared his bed, and who richly rewarded him with loyalty and affection. This is not a sentimental or determinedly anthropomorphic book - the dogs remain steadfastly dogs. It is observant and records the canine society of dog and dog as much as the relationship of man and dog. It is, at the same time, a deeply touching account of the lives and very different characters of seventeen dogs over eighty years or so, ranging from Jack Russell to Alsatian through half-boxer, half-pointer and half-Karabas, to purest indecipherable mongrel.
Charles Rolls understood cars - how they were made and how to sell them - but Henry Royce didn't want to design just any car; he was determined to create the best car in the world. The meeting of these two great minds, 110 years ago this year, resulted in one of the most iconic feats of engineering then or indeed since: The Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. Critic and car enthusiast Brian Sewell strays from the art world to tell the story of Henry Royce and the creation of the Silver Ghost. Beautifully illustrated and instructive, 'The Best Car in the World' is the perfect book for children and adults alike, a collector's item to keep and to cherish.
This selection of Brian Sewell's criticism from the London Evening Standard is his first collection to be published in nearly twenty years and has been selected from his art reviews of exhibitions by English contemporary artists. The reviews are gathered chronologically under artist or institution and discuss nearly every important contemporary English art exhibition for the past quarter of a century.
Weary of what he called the "tyranny" of western art, Brian Sewell first visited Turkey - a country that had captivated him since he was a boy - in 1975. He thought that there, anything he found would have no relevance to the European art that he had so compulsively "stitched into the dense fabric of my art-historical memory" and that he could therefore enjoy the art for its own sake. But Turkey surprised him and he delighted in the unexpected wealth of Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic cultures there, returning three of four times a year until 1990. The main bulk of this book focuses on his journey from Ephesus to Side one winter. With typically acerbic commentary, Sewell describes (not always favourably) the archaeological and historical sites he comes across, the landscapes that so clearly thrilled him, the encounters he has along the way and the fractious, though wonderfully funny, relationship he forms with Ayhan, his driver. South from Ephesus is an incomparable portrait of Turkey and its artistic heritage - a book that could only have been written by Sewell and which has become a quirky classic of travel literature.
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The loop of an "l," the chewed-on pen, letters tiny or expansive: what we've lost in the error of typing and texting When Philip Hensher realized that he didn't know what a close friend's handwriting looked like, he felt that something essential was missing from their friendship. It dawned on him that having abandoned pen and paper for keyboards, we have lost one of the ways by which we come to recognize and know another person: handwriting. The Missing Ink tells the story of this endangered art. Hensher introduces us to the nineteenth-century handwriting evangelists who traveled across America to convert the masses to the moral worth of copperplate script; he examines the role handwriting p...
To many people, the "Evening Standard" art critic, Brian Sewell, is the most well-informed, articulate and consistently direct of contemporary art critics, a man who gives praise when he thinks it is due but who does not equivocate in his condemnation of the second-rate. Such people enjoy his prose and revere him as a lone voice in an otherwise crazy world.;For others, principally members of the contemporary art establishment, Sewell's reviews frequently deride their art and the exhibitions they put on. On 5th January 1994 the "Evening Standard" published a letter from members of this group demanding that Sewell be sacked on grounds of philistinism and "social and sexual hypocrisy". Thus began a furore which still continues - Sewell and his opponents traded insults on television in the course of which Sewell was described as vicious, ill-informed, misogynist and homophobic. The editor of the "Evening Standard" and hundreds of readers, came out in support of Sewell. Two months later Sewell was voted Art Critic of the Year for the second year running by his fellow journalists.