Richard Cork draws on his impeccable skills as a critic and writer to tell the story of his encounters with some of the world’s most influential artists. Through a series of frank interviews, some scheduled, others serendipitous, he uncovers artists’ inner thoughts, anxieties and creative ambitions, to reveal the personalities behind the art.

From individuals who are able to look back over a lifetime’s work, such as Louise Bourgeois, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns, to young artists encountered at the beginning of their careers, including Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, from a drive through the Yorkshire countryside with David Hockney to a tour of Soho drinking establishments with Francis Bacon, alongside remarkably insightful encounters with artists as varied as Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo, Sonia Boyce, Luc Tuymans and Steve McQueen, Richard Cork has found that ‘talking to artists can in my experience be surprising, revealing, salutary, testing, provocative, stimulating and at times capable of overturning all my preconceptions about the individuals I encounter.’

Cork has played a significant role in popularizing late modern and contemporary art. In the words of art critic Louisa Buck, his ‘lucid, even-handed and at times trenchantly critical judgement has been invaluable in helping to create the multiplicity of approach and vigorous debates of today’s artistic climate’.

While the battles for modern art and society were being fought in France and Spain, it has seemed a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea-shops. In this multi-award-winning book, Alexandra Harris tells a different story. In the 1930s and 1940s, artists and writers explored what it meant to be alive in England. Eclectically, passionately, wittily, 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 photographs for Betjeman’s nostalgic Oxford University Chest.

This modern English renaissance was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, tourists and composers. John Piper, Virginia Woolf, Florence White, Christopher Tunnard, Evelyn Waugh, E. M. Forster and the Sitwells are part of the story, along with Bill Brandt, Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

‘Looking to Sea is a remarkable and compelling book… I loved it.’ Edmund de Waal

‘In her first, transporting book, Lily Le Brun sweeps the beaches of the past century of British art, collecting treasures from sea, shingle and shore… A book to pack in your picnic basket for shivering dips, heatwave day trips and ice-cream Sundays‘ The Times

An alternative history of modern Britain, Looking to Sea is an exquisite work of cultural, artistic and philosophical storytelling.

Looking to Sea considers ten pivotal artworks, from Vanessa Bell’s Studland Beach, one of the first modernist paintings in Britain, to Paul Nash’s work bearing the scars of his experience in the trenches and Martin Parr’s photographs of seaside resorts in the 1980s, which raised controversial questions of class. Each of the startlingly different pieces, created between 1912 and 2015, opens a window onto big ideas, from modernism and the sublime, the impact of the world wars and colonialism, to issues crucial to our world today like the environment and nationhood.

In this astonishingly perceptive portrait of the twentieth century, art critic Lily Le Brun brings a fresh eye to a vast idea, offering readers an imaginative new way of seeing our island nation.

‘Le Brun’s writing is at once bold and delicate, far-reaching and fine-tuned. Her book explores the inexhaustible variety of human perception.’ Alexandra Harris

‘A smart and clear-eyed set of meditations on marine gaze, made with a painterly touch worthy of the chosen artists. Empathy and intelligence lift memoir into cultural history.’ Iain Sinclair

‘Outstanding.’ Daily Telegraph

‘Excellent.’ The Spectator

‘Superb.’ Literary Review

‘Scintillating . . . A gripping, mysterious love story which also sheds light on British culture between the wars.’ Financial Times

In 1922, Cyril Power, a fifty-year-old architect, left his family to work with the twenty-four-year-old Sybil Andrews. They would be together for twenty years. Both became famous for their dynamic, modernist linocuts – streamlined, full of movement and brilliant colour, summing up the hectic interwar years.

Theirs was a scintillating world of Futurists, Surrealists and pioneering abstraction, but alongside the buzz of the new, of machines and speed, shops and sport and dance, they also looked back, to medieval myths and early music, to country ways disappearing from sight.

‘Magisterial… thrilling’ Guardian

‘Terrifically enjoyable’ Daily Telegraph

The beautifully illustrated, long-awaited final volume of John Richardson’s magisterial Life of Picasso, drawing on original research from interviews and never-before-seen material in the Picasso family archives.

The Minotaur Years opens in 1933 with a visit by the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï to Picasso’s château in Normandy, Boisgeloup, where he would take his iconic photographs of the celebrated plaster busts of Picasso’s lover Marie-Thérèse Walter. Picasso was contributing to André Breton’s Minotaur magazine and spending time with the likes of Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Lee Miller, and the poet Paul Éluard, in Paris and the south of France. It was during this time that Picasso began writing surrealist poetry and became obsessed with the image of himself as the mythic Minotaur.

Richardson shows us the artist being as prolific as ever, painting Walter, as well as the surrealist photographer Dora Maar, who became a muse, collaborator and lover. The bombing of Guernica in April 1937 would inspire Picasso’s vast masterwork of the same name, which he painted in just a few weeks for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair. When the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, Picasso chose to remain in the city despite the threat that his art would be confiscated. In 1943, Picasso met Françoise Gilot who would replace Maar and inspire a brilliant new sequence of paintings.

As always, Richardson tells Picasso’s story through his work, analysing how it shows what the artist was feeling and thinking. His fascinating and illuminating narrative immerses us in one of the most exciting moments in twentieth-century cultural history, and brings to a close the definitive and critically acclaimed biography of one of the world’s most celebrated artists.

FINALIST FOR THE PLUTARCH AWARD 2022

‘Must surely be the definitive life of Francis Bacon ? A biography that no Bacon fan – or indeed foe – can afford to overlook ? Mesmerising’ THE TIMES

‘A magnificent triumph ? I was captivated by every line’ OBSERVER

A decade in the making, based upon hundreds of interviews and extensive new material, Pulitzer Prize winners Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan have written a startlingly original portrait – rich, complex, and subtle – of a commanding modern figure.

Bacon concealed many important aspects of his life. He described himself as an asthmatic child in Ireland with foxhunting parents and a tyrannical father, but he was also rescued by a series of formidable women – women who in this biography emerge in their own right. He was never just a dissolute young man but was also a passionate reader, largely self-taught. Early on, influenced by Eileen Gray, he became a hard-working and ambitious designer, a brief career explored here in detail for the first time. He dreamed of remaking the modern room.

Bacon worked no less hard or ambitiously as a painter, at first with little success. Throughout the 1930s and early ’40s he suffered ongoing failures, growing isolated and often ill. His health issues throughout his life were far more significant than he revealed. Then came his astonishing breakthrough in 1944, with Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. In the following decades, he emerged as one of the great iconoclasts and bon vivants of his time, a Wildean figure whom one friend called ‘a terrific grandee.’ Bacon was typically celebrated as a sexual adventurer who liked rough trade, but he never stopped longing for a serious committed relationship, however painful. He continued to make disturbing images of the strangeness within, but developed into a more varied artist than has been recognised, creating in particular an extraordinary series of self-portraits. He was an artist who believed in chance and paradox: the iconoclast eventually became an icon.

This is a story, deeply researched and masterfully told, of a sickly boy who became one of the great figures of his time. The twentieth century does not know itself without Bacon.

‘Geeks triumph over the forces of darkness: nothing could have given me greater pleasure. Combining an exciting story with scrupulous research, Caroline Shenton has done her unlikely heroes proud’ – Lucy Worsley

As Hitler prepared to invade Poland during the sweltering summer of 1939, men and women from across London’s museums, galleries and archives formulated ingenious plans to send the nation’s highest prized objects to safety. Using stately homes, tube tunnels, slate mines, castles, prisons, stone quarries and even their own homes, a dedicated bunch of unlikely misfits packed up the nation’s greatest treasures and, in a race against time, dispatched them throughout the country on a series of top-secret wartime adventures.

National Treasures highlights a moment from our history when an unlikely coalition of mild-mannered civil servants, social oddballs and metropolitan aesthetes became the front line in the heritage war against Hitler. Caroline Shenton shares the interwoven lives of ordinary people who kept calm and carried on in the most extraordinary of circumstances in their efforts to save the Nation’s historic identity.