From the landscapes of Constable to the imagery of Blake and Bacon, this book, published to accompany a major exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, is a lavish survey of British art from 1750 to 1950. Spanning two hundred years, British Vision presents some of the most iconic works in British art history from major public and private collections in Europe and the USA.William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs,William Blake, John Constable, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland, Henry Fuseli, Richard Dadd, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are mong the many outstanding artists whose work appears on the books pages. Essays by a raft of distinguished art historians focus on the two defining characteristics of British art: observation and imagination. This lavishly illustrated catalogue is a sumptuous record of the most comprehensive exhibition of British art to be staged under one roof in recent years, and represents a unique opportunity to discover the creative forces that shaped British art over two centuries.

The second half of the twentieth century has seen British artists, architects, and designers assuming a central role on the world stage. Starting in the years of reconstruction after the war, the young began to challenge accepted artistic values, looking at popular culture for their inspiration; the iconoclasm of the Pop movement has continued to be one of the most vital ingredients of the British art scene. In the year-by-year record that this book provides, the work of newcomers making their first impact is seen alongside that of outstanding artists in their maturity, with connections and contradictions across the entire visual scene-from architecture, interior design, furniture, and the decorative arts to painting, sculpture, and graphic art.

New Britain presents Tony Blair on all the major debates of British public life: from nationalized health care to crime prevention, from the welfare state to monetary policy, from religion to family values, from individualism to isolationism, from taxation to trade unions, from NATO to Northern Ireland, from community rebirth to economic growth. After seventeen years of Conservative Party rule under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, a change in Great Britain's leadership appears imminent. In Blair's Stakeholder Nation, government works in partnership with private and voluntary sectors to harness the pawer of the market to serve the public interest. In New Britain, we read in Blair's own articulate words how to improve the standard of living of all Britain's families; how to base a new social order on merit, commitment, and inclusion; how to decentralize British institutions of political power; and how to expand Britain's leadership in foreign affairs.

During the nineteenth century, Britain became the first gaslit society, with electric lighting arriving in 1878. At the same time, the British government significantly expanded its power to observe and monitor its subjects. How did such enormous changes in the way people saw and were seen affect Victorian culture? To answer that question, Chris Otter mounts an ambitious history of illumination and vision in Britain, drawing on extensive research into everything from the science of perception and lighting technologies to urban design and government administration. He explores how light facilitated such practices as safe transportation and private reading, as well as institutional efforts to collect knowledge. And he contends that, contrary to presumptions that illumination helped create a society controlled by intrusive surveillance, the new radiance often led to greater personal freedom and was integral to the development of modern liberal society. The Victorian Eye’s innovative interdisciplinary approach—and generous illustrations—will captivate a range of readers interested in the history of modern Britain, visual culture, technology, and urbanization.

This book reveals the ways in which seventeenth-century poets used models of vision taken from philosophy, theology, scientific optics, political polemic and the visual arts to scrutinize the nature of individual perceptions and to examine poetry’s own relation to truth. Drawing on archival research, Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England brings together an innovative selection of texts and images to construct a new interdisciplinary context for interpreting the poetry of Cavendish, Traherne, Marvell and Milton. Each chapter presents a reappraisal of vision in the work of one of these authors, and these case studies also combine to offer a broader consideration of the ways that conceptions of seeing were used in poetry to explore the relations between the ‘inward’ life of the viewer and the ‘outward’ reality that lies beyond; terms that are shown to have been closely linked, through ideas about sight, with the emergence of the fundamental modern categories of the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. This book will be of interest to literary scholars, art historians and historians of science.

This book looks at the relationship between culture and power expressed in architectural forms employed by the British in India. These buildings reflect the choices made by the British in their politics as imperial rulers.

When her mom abruptly decides to move across the country, Venice and her quirky family land themselves in a whole new place and in a whole lot of trouble. Just trying to be a normal high school teen, Venice finds that having a not-so-identical twin sister, a dead-beat dad, and a creepy man interested in her mom makes fitting in quite a challenge. But starting over offers her a chance to reinvent herself and to discover that she doesn't have to hold onto the past. Not everything gets left behind, though, and Venice soon unravels a secret that threatens her life and her family. Car chases, kidnapping, high stakes money-grabbing, and a complicated romance ensure that Venice's life is anything but the normal she craves.