"Art auctions have long captured the public imagination. They regularly make news headlines and have become synonymous with glamour, money and social distinction. The marketing of auction houses and the works they sell has resulted in firms attaining authoritative positions and the ability both to influence and reflect collecting tastes. Pedigree and panache is the first comprehensive history of the art auction in Australia. In this fascinating work, Shireen Huda investigates the construction of the glamorous reputation of art auctions and art auction houses. Featuring absorbing case studies of key art auctions and major art auction houses in Australia (including Christies, Sothebys and Deutscher-Menzies) the work provides an overview of the origin and international development of art auctions. The development of the Australian marketplace is then explored, detailing colonial inception and continuing until Christies' withdrawal of its saleroom presence in 2006."--Provided by publisher.

This book explores the lives and achievements of two Irish sisters, Edith and Florence Stoney, who pioneered the use of new electromedical technologies, especially X-rays but also ultraviolet radiation and diathermy. In addition, the narrative follows several intertwined themes as experienced by the sisters during their lifetimes. Their upbringing, influenced by their liberal-minded scientist father, set the tone for both their lives. Irish independence fractured their family heritage. Their professional experiences, fulfilling for Florence as a qualified doctor but often frustrating for Edith as a Cambridge-educated scientist, mirrored those of other aspiring women during this period, when the suffragist movement expanded and women’s lobby groups were formed. World War I created an environment in which their unusual specialist knowledge was widely needed, and the sisters’ war experiences are carefully examined in the book. But ultimately this is the extraordinary story of two independent but closely bonded sisters and their abiding love and support for one another.

Fonthill, in Wiltshire, is traditionally associated with the writer and collector William Beckford who built his Gothic fantasy house called Fonthill Abbey at the end of the eighteenth century. The collapse of the Abbey’s tower in 1825 transformed the name Fonthill into a symbol for overarching ambition and folly, a sublime ruin. Fonthill is, however, much more than the story of one man’s excesses. Beckford’s Abbey is only one of several important houses to be built on the estate since the early sixteenth century, all of them eventually consumed by fire or deliberately demolished, and all of them oddly forgotten by historians. Little now remains: a tower, a stable block, a kitchen range, some dressed stone, an indentation in a field. Fonthill Recovered draws on histories of art and architecture, politics and economics to explore the rich cultural history of this famous Wiltshire estate. The first half of the book traces the occupation of Fonthill from the Bronze Age to the twenty-first century. Some of the owners surpassed Beckford in terms of their wealth, their collections, their political power and even, in one case, their sexual misdemeanours. They include Charles I’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the richest commoner in the nineteenth century. The second half of the book consists of essays on specific topics, filling out such crucial areas as the complex history of the designed landscape, the sources of the Beckfords’ wealth and their collections, and one essay that features the most recent appearance of the Abbey in a video game.

The story of the contemporary development of anarchism as told by one of the leading figures in British anarchism.