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“These are thoughts for us all, sooner or later—and this is a book I'll keep with me, as long as I live.”—David Sexton, The Scotsman In 2008, art critic Tom Lubbock was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor and told he had only two years to live. Physically fit and healthy, and suffering from few symptoms, he faced his death with the same directness and courage that had marked the rest of his life. Lubbock was renowned for the clarity and unconventionality of his writing, and his characteristic fierce intelligence permeates this extraordinary chronicle. With unflinching honesty and curiosity, he repeatedly turns over the fact of his mortality, as he wrestles with the paradoxical question...
“The work of an exceptional woman artist, writing from the inside about the things women have always done: nursing, nurturing, loving.” —The Guardian Winner of the Wellcome Book Prize, and finalist for every major nonfiction award in the UK, including the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Biography Award, The Iceberg is artist and writer Marion Coutts’ astonishing memoir; an “adventure of being and dying” and a compelling, poetic meditation on family, love, and language. In 2008, Tom Lubbock, the chief art critic for The Independent was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The Iceberg is his wife, Marion Coutts’, fierce, exquisite account of the two years leading up to his death. In ...
English Graphic is a book of essays on the subject of illustration, with the focus entirely on English artists using graphic media; drawings, prints and watercolours. The pieces are largely drawn from Tom Lubbock’s weekly Great Works column for the Independent, with some longer pieces originally published as reviews or catalogue essays. The historical span of the book is broad – from the Uffington White Horse to the Winchester Psalter Hellmouth to Harry Beck’s London Underground Map and beyond. The high point of English Graphic art in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century makes up the heart of the book, with Fuseli, Blake, Bewick and Palmer all the subject of extended essays. The fifty or so images range from the visionary to the empirical, from folk art to caricature. Connecting and overlapping ideas on line and shape run through the book; maps, islands, clouds, swarms, wombs, skins, dots, contours and boundaries. Energetic, coherent and strange, English Graphic presents an electrical storm of ideas and illuminations provocatively argued by one of our most brilliant writers on art.
The best of Tom Lubbock, one of Britain's most intelligent, outspoken and revelatory art critics, is collected here. Ranging with passionate perspicacity over 800 years of Western art, Tom Lubbock writes with immediacy and authority about the 50 works which most gripped his imagination.
The renowned Scottish artist, Ian Hamilton Finlay is principally a poet - a Modernist artist who has consistently exploited nature, literature and the potency of words in his art.
A comprehensive guide to ending suffering through the practice of mindfulness In Uncontrived Mindfulness Vajradevi guides us in the practice of exploring our experience as it happens. The emphasis is on cultivating wisdom, using the tools of attention and curiosity to see through the delusion that is causing our suffering.
The Aesthetics of Wine shows that discussing wine within the framework of aesthetics both benefits our understanding of wine as a phenomenon, while also challenging some of the basic assumptions of the tradition of aesthetics. Analyzes the appreciation of wine as an aesthetic practice. Tackles prejudices against bodily senses, showing how they distort traditional aesthetic theory Represents the beginnings of a reformulation of general aesthetics
A tale of forbidden love and inevitable death, the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde recounts the story of two lovers unknowingly drinking a magic potion and ultimately dying in one another's arms. While critics have lauded Wagner's Tristan and Isolde for the originality and subtlety of the music, they have denounced the drama as a "mere trifle"--a rendering of Wagner's forbidden love for Matilde Wesendonck, the wife of a banker who supported him during his exile in Switzerland. Death-Devoted Heart explodes this established interpretation, proving the drama to be more than just a sublimation of the composer's love for Wesendonck or a wistful romantic dream. Scruton boldly attests that Tr...
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The future flashed before my eyes in all its pre-ordained banality. Embarrassment, at first, to the exclusion of all other feelings. But embarrassment curled at the edges with a weariness ... I got a joke in. 'So – we'd better get cooking the meth,' I said to the Poet. In August 2014, Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given 'two or three years' to live. She didn't know how to react. All responses felt scripted, laden with cliché. Being a writer, she decided to write about it (grappling with the unoriginality even of this), and also to tell a story she has not yet told: that of being taken in, aged fifteen, by the author Doris Lessing, and the subsequent fifty years...