C. R. Ashbee was, some would say, the key man in the British Arts and Crafts movement during the early decades of the twentieth century. Regarded as heir to William Morris in political belief and design reform, Ash bee (and his Guild of Handicraft) gained international fame in his own time and remains a legend today. While much has been written about him, little has been said of his wife. Now Felicity Ashbee breaks the silence in a compelling book about her mother. The book depicts Janet Ashbee as a gifted woman of emotional warmth, strength, and unconventionality, all of which enhanced her husband's work. An accomplished writer and thinker in her own right, Janet Ashbee's life revolved around great historic issues that still resonate today: the socially conscious Arts and Crafts movement, the role of women in contemporary affairs, and embattled ethnic relationships in the Middle East-not to mention marriage and sexual orientation, predicated upon her husband's vibrant and well-known homosexuality. A book of rare insight and significance, Janet Ashbee sheds welcome light on the Arts and Crafts movement and on women in oft-romanticized Victorian and Edwardian British culture.

This is the first in-depth study of the English neurologist and polymath Sir Henry Head (1861-1940). Head bridged the gap between science and the arts. He was a published poet who had close links with such figures as Thomas Hardy and Siegfried Sassoon. His research into the nervous system and the relationship between language and the brain broke new ground. L. S. Jacyna argues that these advances must be contextualized within wider Modernist debates about perception and language. In his time, Head was best known for his research into the human nervous system. He did a series of experiments in collaboration with W. H. R. Rivers in which cutaneous nerves were surgically severed in Head's arm and the stages by which sensation returned were chartered over several years. Head's friend, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, drew out the epistemological implications of how, in this new conception, the nervous system furthered the knowledge of the world.

The Simple Life (1981) was Fiona MacCarthy's first book, written while she was the Guardian's design correspondent (and before her acclaimed lives of Eric Gill, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones.) It tells of a venturesome effort to enact an Edwardian Utopia in a small town in the Cotswolds. The leader of this endeavour was progressive-minded architect Charles Robert Ashbee, who in 1888 founded the Guild of Handicraft in Whitechapel, specialising in metalworking, jewellery and furniture and informed by the desire to improve society. In 1902 Ashbee and his East London comrades removed the Guild to Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire, hoping to construct a socialistic rural idyll. MacCarthy explores the impact of the experiment on the lives of the group and on the little town they occupied - tracing the Guild's fortunes and misfortunes, hilarious and grave, and the many fellow idealists and artists who were involved (among them William Morris, Roger Fry, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb.)

The most pivotal and yet least understood event of Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated life involves the brutal murders in 1914 of seven adults and children dear to the architect and the destruction by fire of Taliesin, his landmark residence, near Spring Green, Wisconsin. Unaccountably, the details of that shocking crime have been largely ignored by Wright’s legion of biographers—a historical and cultural gap that is finally addressed in William Drennan’s exhaustively researched Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders. In response to the scandal generated by his open affair with the proto-feminist and free love advocate Mamah Borthwick Cheney, Wright had begun to build Taliesin as a refuge and "love cottage" for himself and his mistress (both married at the time to others). Conceived as the apotheosis of Wright’s prairie house style, the original Taliesin would stand in all its isolated glory for only a few months before the bloody slayings that rocked the nation and reduced the structure itself to a smoking hull. Supplying both a gripping mystery story and an authoritative portrait of the artist as a young man, Drennan wades through the myths surrounding Wright and the massacre, casting fresh light on the formulation of Wright’s architectural ideology and the cataclysmic effects that the Taliesin murders exerted on the fabled architect and on his subsequent designs. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Association

"A cultural history of Jerusalem under the British Mandate, focusing on the tensions between its architecture and its political divisions"--

A biography of James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) that dispels the popular notion of Whistler as merely a combative, eccentric and unrelenting publicity seeker, a man as renowned for his public feuds with Oscar Wilde and John Ruskin as for the iconic portrait of his mother.

The year 1919 in Jerusalem marked the conclusion of hundreds of years of Ottoman rule and the beginning of Britsh occupation, a period of great change that would transform the city. Felicity Ashbee’s captivating memoir gives the reader a truly original portrait of life in post-WWI Jerusalem as seen through the eyes of a spirited young English girl. The daughter of Charles Robert Ashbee, a disciple of William Morris and prominent player in the Arts and Crafts Movement, Ashbee spent four years, from age six to ten, living in Jerusalem while her father spearheaded the effort to architecturally and artistically restore the city. That golden period of restoration and peaceful mingling of faiths would be brief, thus imbuing the Ashbees’ time in Jerusalem with a retrospective poignancy. Vividly capturing a child’s ingenuous perceptions of place, Ashbee’s story recreates classic nostalgic moments of childhood experience and richly detailed views of her surroundings. Yet it also resonates with constant undertones of radical ideas, from the Ashbees’ own socialist tendencies and engagement in the modernist art movement to the establishment of religion-centered political factions that would erode much of Ashbee’s work soon after his departure. It is this union of childs-eye viewpoint and historical backdrop that makes Ashbee’s work such a compelling memoir.