‘Outstanding’ – The Guardian
‘Superb’ – The Telegraph
‘A must read’ – Anne Sebba
‘Lively’ – The Times

They seemed to be polar opposites . . .

Augustus: vivid, volatile and promiscuous. He was a hero among romantics and bohemians, celebrated as one of the great British talents of his generation.

Gwen’s art was magnificent, but she was also more reserved, and as a woman she struggled for the recognition which has only come to her now, years after her death.

Artists, Siblings, Visionaries is a riveting story of love, infidelity, betrayal, and of two extraordinary siblings whose art and lives subverted society’s expectations.

‘This is a must read . . . a deeply moving account of a family bursting with talent’ – Anne Sebba

In Artists, Siblings, Visionaries, acclaimed biographer Judith Mackrell turns her attention to British brother and sister artists Gwen and Augustus John.

In many ways they were polar opposites.

Augustus was the larger of the two; vivid, volatile and promiscuous, he was a hero among romantics and bohemians, celebrated as one of the great British talents of his generation.

As a woman, Gwen’s place in the art world was much smaller, and her private way of working and reserved nature meant it was only long after her death that her tremendous gifts were fully acknowledged. But her temperament was as turbulent as her brother’s. She formed passionate attachments to men and woman, including a long affair with the sculptor Rodin.

And there were other ways in which the two Johns were remarkably alike, as Mackrell vividly reveals. The result is a powerful portrait of two prodigiously talented artists and visionaries, whose experiments with form and colour created some of the most memorable work of the early twentieth century.

‘This is a book that manages to be thoughtful and edge-of-your-seat thrilling.’ Mail on Sunday

‘Like the copy filed by her subjects, it is an essential read.’ BBC History Magazine

On the front lines of the Second World War, a contingent of female journalists were bravely waging their own battle. Barred from combat zones and faced with entrenched prejudice and bureaucratic restrictions, these women were forced to fight for the right to work on equal terms as men.

Going with the Boys follows six remarkable women as their lives and careers intertwined: Martha Gellhorn, who out-scooped her husband Ernest Hemingway on D-Day by traveling to Normandy as a stowaway on a hospital ship; Lee Miller, who went from being a Vogue cover model to the magazine’s official war correspondent; Sigrid Schultz, who hid her Jewish identity and risked her life by reporting on the Nazi regime; Virginia Cowles, a ‘society girl columnist’ turned combat reporter; Clare Hollingworth, the first journalist to report the outbreak of war; and Helen Kirkpatrick, the first woman to report from an Allied war zone with equal privileges to men.

This intricately layered account captures both the adversity and the vibrancy of the women’s lives as they chased down sources and narrowly dodged gunfire, as they mixed with artists and politicians like Picasso, Cocteau, and Churchill, and conducted their own tumultuous love affairs. In her gripping, intimate, and nuanced portrait, Judith Mackrell celebrates these courageous reporters who risked their lives for a story and who changed the rules of war reporting for ever.

Each in turn used the Unfinished Palazzo as a stage on which to re-fashion her life, with a dazzling supporting cast ranging from D’Annunzio and Nijinsky, through Noël Coward, Winston Churchill and Cecil Beaton, to Yoko Ono. Individually sensational and collectively remarkable, these stories of modern Venice tell us much about the ways women chose to live in the 20th century.