Winner of the 2010 Guardian First Book Award: a groundbreaking reassessment of English cultural life in the thirties and forties. In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea shops. Alexandra Harris tells a different story: eclectically, passionately, wittily, urgently, English artists were exploring what it meant to be alive at that moment and in England. They showed that “the modern” need not be at war with the past: constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photos for Betjeman’s nostalgic An Oxford University Chest. A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton. 60 color and 20 black-and-white illustrations

Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper

Arts & Photography

Harris, Alexandra

History & Criticism

Thames&Hudson

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

Following the chronology of Virginia Woolfs life this text considers each of the novels in context gives due prominence to her dazzlingly inventive essays traces the contentious course of her afterlife and shows why 70 years after her death Woolf continues to haunt and inspire us

Virginia Woolf (Paperback) /anglais

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Weatherland (Paperback) /anglais

History

Europe

Romantic Moderns (B-Format Paperback) /anglais

Virginia Woolf (New B-Format ed) /anglais

Arts & Literature

An ideal introduction to the life and work of Virginia Woolf by an award-winning author: the story of a life lived with intensity from moment to moment and shaped into the lasting patterns of art. In 1907, when she was twenty-five and not yet a published novelist, Virginia Stephen had everything still to prove. She felt herself to be at a crossroads: “I shall be miserable, or happy; a wordy sentimental creature, or a writer of such English as shall one day burn the pages.” Today her prose is still blazing; perhaps it burns brighter than ever. This is the story of how a determined young woman with a notebook became one of the greatest writers of all time. It is a story that sparkles with wit and friendship, language and love, wicked jokes and passionate appreciation of ordinary things. In this illuminating new account, Alexandra Harris uses vivid flashes of detail to evoke Woolf’s changing backgrounds and preoccupations. We move from the close-packed rhythms of a Victorian childhood to the experiments of Bloomsbury and Woolf’s trial-and-error answers to the pressing question of how to live. We see her tackling challenging forms of writing, trying out different voices, following flights of fancy, and returning to earth. Above all, we see her making conscious decisions about what to do next. The book considers each of the novels in context, gives due prominence to a range of Woolf’s dazzlingly inventive essays, traces the contentious course of her “afterlife,” and shows why, seventy years after her death, Virginia Woolf continues to haunt and inspire us. 50 black-and-white illustrations

Virginia Woolf

A lively look at the English literary and artistic responses to the weather from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Keats and Ian McEwan In a sweeping panorama, Weatherland allows us to witness England’s cultural climates across the centuries. Before the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxons living in a wintry world wrote about the coldness of exile or the shelters they had to defend against enemies outside. The Middle Ages brought the warmth of spring; the new lyrics were sung in praise of blossoms and cuckoos. Descriptions of a rainy night are rare before 1700, but by the end of the eighteenth century the Romantics had adopted the squall as a fit subject for their most probing thoughts. The weather is vast and yet we experience it intimately, and Alexandra Harris builds her remarkable story from small evocative details. There is the drawing of a twelfth-century man in February, warming bare toes by the fire. There is the tiny glass left behind from the Frost Fair of 1684, and the Sunspan house in Angmering that embodies the bright ambitions of the 1930s. Harris catches the distinct voices of compelling individuals. “Bloody cold,” says Jonathan Swift in the “slobbery” January of 1713. Percy Shelley wants to become a cloud and John Ruskin wants to bottle one. Weatherland is a celebration of English air and a life story of those who have lived in it. 60+ illustrations

Weatherland: Writers & Artists Under English Skies

This publication offers a rich and expansive visual record of Julie Brook's artistic practice, and proposes a unique collaboration between Brook and distinct voices from the nature writing and craftsmanship traditions. Situating Brook's practice in the context of critical reflections by Robert Macfarlane, Alexandra Harris and Raku Jikinyu, the publication presents a striking visual narrative of Brook's landscape and tidal sculptural work, and a sense of its timeless yet contemporary resonance. Documenting in depth a number of recent works made in the Hebrides, Japan and Namibia, their shared attention to the elements and their key pre-occupations of the fleeting, mobile forces of light, time, and gravity demonstrate Brook's coherent vision within vastly contrasting environments. Throughout her oeuvre, the balance between what Brook makes in relation to the environment and materials themselves is paramount. Including film stills, photography and drawing, which are all integral languages for conceptualising and communicating the work, plus insightful extracts from Brook's notebooks, this beautiful publication succeeds in providing the reader with a unique understanding of the art.

What is it that will Last?: Land and Tidal Art of Julie Brook

MacFarlane, Robert

Groom, Simon

Brook, Julie

Jikinyu, Raku

Lund Humphries

British artist Tacita Dean (born 1964) first came to the attention of the art world with her surrealistic 16-mm film “The Story of Beard” (1992), making a name for herself as part of the Young British Artists generation―even if Dean’s slow, subtle films would seem to have little in common with the raucous works of her peers. Dean was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998 and has since been a vocal advocate for the medium of film.
In 2018, Dean brings major exhibitions to three of London’s leading art institutions: the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts. Each exhibition will provide an encounter with the filmmaker’s work through a different lens: landscape, portrait and still life. Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life unites the three exhibitions in one stunning survey volume. Works drawn from Dean’s entire career to the present day are brought together with texts by leading writers Alexandra Harris, Alan Hollinghurst and Ali Smith providing unique insights into Dean’s vision. 
Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life, published at a career-defining moment for the artist, provides a new and authoritative view on a hugely influential filmmaker who has been at the cutting edge of British art for over 20 years. The book is published with three different covers

Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life

Smith, Ali

HOLLINGHURST, Alan

Individual Artists

Royal Academy of Arts

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Books by Harris, Alexandra