I grew up in Yorkshire and spent many happy hours as a teenager wandering about the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, looking at giant Henry Moores in the rolling landscape. I subsequently trained as an art historian and have spent the last thirty years writing about art, from the YBAs to our prehistoric roots. A Little History of Art was borne out of this journey. Increasingly I have been drawn to researching what art can tell us about British history. My bookshelves groan with monographs but these five volumes have helped me think more deeply about Britain’s landscapes and its past. I hope they will do the same for you.
Why did our ancestors make art? What did it mean to them, and what does their art mean for us today? Why is art even important at all? This little history takes us on a thrilling journey through 100,000 years of human creativity. From prehistoric handprints and the Terracotta Army to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and Rachel Whiteread’s House, this vibrant new history roams from Japan and India to South America and the Middle East. It showcases a host of overlooked artists – including over 100 women artists – and celebrates art’s crucial role in understanding our collective culture.
This book expanded how I thought about time and about the landscape we take for granted.
It opened up the prehistoric world from a contemporary perspective, showing how a sense of deep geological time can help us understand our own place in the world better today.
Gordon explains why categories of things can be useful in deepening our understanding of a place: as she says, ‘a named landscape thickens.’
I also found this book so useful in working out how to cram 100,000 years of history into one volume for my book!
'Astounding ... To call this a "history" does not do justice to Helen Gordon's ambition' Simon Ings, Daily Telegraph
'Awe-inspiring ... She has imbued geological tales with a beauty and humanity' Shaoni Bhattacharya-Woodward, Mail on Sunday
The story of the Earth is written into our landscape: it's there in the curves of hills, the colours of stone, surprising eruptions of vegetation. Wanting a fresh perspective on her own life, the writer Helen Gordon set out to read that epic narrative.
Her odyssey takes her from the secret fossils of London to the 3-billion-year-old rocks of the Scottish Highlands, and from…
What do we mean by landscape? What do we mean by Britain?
Radical Landscapes has been a springboard for me for the book I am currently researching for Yale on British Art.
It is the exhibition catalogue for a wide-ranging exhibition that was held at Tate Liverpool in 2022 and offers twelve essays on the latest thinking on queer theory, folk art, geopolitics, community spaces, and more.
Internal landscapes, botanical specimens, protests, maps – this book helped me expand my thinking about landscape beyond the picturesque and the sublime.
Throughout the twentieth-century artists have responded to the landscape in emotional, physical and political ways: exploring themes of belonging to the land by interrogating the relationship between landscape history and identity, the enclosure or militarisation of land, to artists creating works that harness or dramatise natural earth processes. As the custodian of the national collection of British art, Tate's climate emergency declaration points to a wider concern and care for the environment that underpins the themes in Radical Landscapes. Structured on three broad thematic sections; 'Trespass', 'Landscape and Identity', and 'Climate Breakdown', there will be around 100 works in total…
I don’t know why there aren’t more books like this – England on Fire comprises twelve visual essays that span 2,000 years of English art, from a Celtic sculpture of a head from c.100–300AD (that looks like a Modigliani) to new work by Cathy de Monchaux, Claire Partington and George Shaw.
Themes are broad, such as ‘Myth, Magic and Ritual’ and 'Rebellious Nature’ and chapters include folk rituals, landscape vistas, photographic tableaux, stained glass, and prints.
It picks a romantic path through time, with multiple works by William Blake, Samuel Palmer, and Frederick H. Evans, and it is a great way to view different interpretations of the English landscape.
Forget the tired rogues' gallery of lords and ladies, forget the tall ships and haywains. These images cut to the heart of England's psychic landscapes to portray an Albion unhinged, where magic and rebellion and destruction are the horses to which the country is hitched. On these fabled shores we are all castaways, whether our family has lived here for four thousand years or for four.
Here you will find depictions of ancient trackways, chalk carvings and standing stones, of animal-masked community rituals, of streets set ablaze in protest, of…
I first read this book when I was trying to pull together all the disparate locations, time periods, and art movements for my book.
This task was a little overwhelming and Digging Up Britaintaught me how to make choices about what to include and what to leave out, how to weave it all into a narrative that makes sense, and how to bring prehistory to life.
Unusually, this book travels back in time as we travel through it. It is like an archaeological dig – we start with the Vikings and then the Staffordshire Hoard but end up with the Star Carr deer hunters and a million years of history.
It is a book you can dip into or read cover to cover (as I did) and it has some good illustrations and maps throughout.
Britain has long been fascinated with its own history and identity, as an island nation besieged by invaders from beyond the seas: the Romans, Vikings and Normans. The long saga of prehistory is often forgotten - but our understanding of our past is changing.
Mike Pitts presents ten astounding archaeological discoveries that shed new light on those who came before us, and radically altered the way we think about our history. His compelling, sometimes teasing, archaeological odyssey illustrates the diversity, complexity and sheer strangeness of the lives that represent Britain's past.
I read an early proof of this book (it is published on 13 April 2023) and was hooked from the first page.
Owens opens with footfall on medieval castle stairs and the tread of time – only the stairs she walks on are seventeenth-century copies and are part of the ongoing mythologising of England’s past.
She covers King Arthur and the Crusades, Beowulf and Tennyson, Shell tourist guides, and the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. Her excellent earlier bookSpirit of Place (Thames & Hudson) is focused more squarely on the British landscape but this new book connects to the myth of England, how it has been and still is constructed in all our minds.
Imagining England's Past takes a long look at the country's invented histories, from the glamorous to the disturbing, from the eighth century to the present day.
England has long built its sense of self on visions of its past. What does it mean for medieval writers to summon King Arthur from the post-Roman fog; for William Morris to resurrect the skills of the medieval workshop and Julia Margaret Cameron to portray the Arthurian court with her Victorian camera; or for Yinka Shonibare in the final years of the twentieth century to visualize a Black Victorian dandy?
Reading was a childhood passion of mine. My mother was a librarian and got me interested in reading early in life. When John F. Kennedy was running for president and after his assassination, I became intensely interested in politics. In addition to reading history and political biographies, I consumed newspapers and television news. It is this background that I have drawn upon over the decades that has added value to my research.
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
Long before Trump, each of these phenomena grew in importance. The John Birch Society and McCarthyism became powerful forces; Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first “personal president” to rise above the party; and the development of what Harry Truman called “the big lie,” where outrageous falsehoods came to be believed. Trump…
Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism
It didn't begin with Donald Trump. The unraveling of the Grand Old Party has been decades in the making. Since the time of FDR, the Republican Party has been home to conspiracy thinking, including a belief that lost elections were rigged. And when Republicans later won the White House, the party elevated their presidents to heroic status-a predisposition that eventually posed a threat to democracy. Building on his esteemed 2016 book, What Happened to the Republican Party?, John Kenneth White proposes to explain why this happened-not just the election of Trump but the authoritarian shift in the party as a…
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