Art Nouveau was a phenomenon with many faces. Between 1890 and 1910, artists developed a variety of styles from the plant-like forms of the Belgian-French Art Nouveau to the ornamentation of the Viennese Secession. For a fruitful period between the 1880s and WWI, European and North American culture deferred to nature. With a symphony of flowing lines and organic shapes, Art Nouveau influenced architecture, design, painting, graphic work, applied arts and illustration. Turning to vine tendrils, flowering buds, and bird feathers as ornamental reference, artists pursued not only a linear freedom but also liberation from the weight of artistic tradition and expectation. Highlights include beautiful Tiffany and Gallé vases, the Paris Métro, train stations, department stores, door handles, furniture, dining rooms, cartoons, posters, chairs, porcelainware, Macintosh's Art-Lovers House design, the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Austrian glassware and more. Ther are exquisite multi-coloured glass domes, leaded glass windows like Grasset's Le Printemps, a double page colour spread of Maurice Denis' Palting Badminton with your ladies in white flowing dresses in woodlands to stylised functional and beautiful interiors and Aubrey Beardsley's Arthurian lithographs. This edition considers the style's wider artistic, economic, and political circumstances, as well as its particular flavour in such hubs as Vienna, Glasgow, Munich, Weimar, Brussels, Nancy, Barcelona, Darmstadt, Helsinki and Chicago. Outstanding proponents such as Victor Horta, Antoni Gaudí, Alphonse Mucha, Gustav Klimt, Maximilian Liebenwein, Walter Crane and Charles Rennie Mackintosh are featured in connection with the cities of their greatest activity plus unusual works by the Belgian symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff. Oozing with hundreds of colour photos. 264 pages, softback. 21 x 24cm.
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A beautiful quality item of great functionality, exactly along the lines of Art Nouveau, bursting with colourful flowers in reds, pinks, blues and sunflowers against a green background, and with an iridescent golden stripe, the matching pieces in this set comprise of a very generously sized A4 magazine folder measuring 25.5cm x 32cm tall x 10.5cm, together with a pencil pot, letter rack and filing tray. At the bottom of the magazine holder is a finger hole made of a golden ring to pull forward your file easily off the bookshelf. The letter rack has two generous slots at an angle one above the other, the flat filing tray is for A4 pages and has a blue interior, and the pencil pot approximately a 10" cube. All are in the matching design to grace any desk with this quality stationery item. Would also make a super gift idea.

Hexagonal shaped 7" tall sturdy cardboard case with 3" top in glittering iridescent gold as used by the famous painter Gustav Klimt in his artworks. The image on the 4" below matches the Gift Pen Set code 94267 with its green background, this time large sunflowers and red flowers speckled across the barrel. Life the lid and inside are 12 ready-sharpened full-length HB pencils in exactly the same cheerful design. Ready to use they are located in a foam holder at the base of the case. These items would grace any desk.

Turing said 'If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.' Spring 1940, the Battle of the Atlantic rages. Vulnerable merchant convoys are at the mercy of German U-boats controlled by a cunning system of coded messages created by a machine called Enigma. Only one man believes that these codes can be broken - mathematician and Bletchley Park cryptanalyst Alan Turing. Winston Churchill later describe Turing's success in breaking the Enigma code as the single biggest contribution to the victory against Nazi Germany. Unheralded during his lifetime, he is now recognised as the father of modern computer science and as possessing one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. Here his ground-breaking work and his private side lifts the veil of secrecy, particularly with regard to his post-war contribution to computing science with the Americans and his work as Manchester Computing Machine Laboratory. Only in 1974 was the official ban on any mention of Ultra lifted. Watched by MI5, Turing died of cyanide poisoning. A vat of cyanide was found in the 'nightmare room' between his bedroom and the bathroom, and the coroner ruled that Turing had committed suicide 'while the balance of his mind was disturbed'. Yet no evidence was given about the state of his mind and the verdict has been questioned ever since. Slim illustrated biography, New full price paperback128pp.

Many reminiscent of Arthur Rackham here are 44 beautiful, magical vintage illustrations from early 20th century popular literature including the foremost fantasy illustrators such as Margaret Tarrant, Rene Cloke, Molly Brett and Hilda Miller. Each beautiful colour artwork has on the facing page an outline drawing of the same image for you to colour in, at your own pace, in your own colours if you wish, and either side may be removed for framing. Softback 9" x 11".

An ingenious pre-cut cardboard kit which creates a layered landscape and hand-drawn icons which makes traffic move and brings London to life. The London Eye, Nelson's Column, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Post Office Tower and Big Ben, the Bank of England and city skyscrapers, there are full instructions of which pieces to glue together and piece to the base top or on to the back of buses which should shake when turned! Also a crowd can move too and finally when your model is ready, turn the handle and watch the wheel of the ginormous blue London Eye rotate with a tube train below. A quality National Gallery product, large resealable wallet. Colour.

In 1939, ever increasing numbers of budding cryptanalysts started reporting for wartime duty at a country house in north Buckinghamshire. Musicians, society debutants and novelists were among the women and tweedy, owlish young men, their heads filled with astounding equations and barely comprehensible calculations. The 10,000 men and women who worked at Bletchley Park had to sign the Official Secrets Act and they kept their vow of silence implacably for decades afterwards. Some died without the satisfaction of even their own families knowing about their crucial work breaking the German and Japanese codes. Belatedly however the secret was lifted, and now Sinclair McKay chooses a hundred of Bletchley Park's alumni to tell the stories of their whole lives, and not just the wartime interlude. Sometimes the distinction as chess players, musicians or linguists was what saw these young people selected. For others the intense intellectual crucible seems to have galvanised their ambition and widened their horizons, and sent them out into the post-war world determined to make a difference with their lives. Here then are the historians and archaeologists, novelists and naturalists, but also classics masters, a Nuremberg prosecutor and an associate of Andy Warhol - everyone from Roy Jenkins to the man who wrote the music for the Dracula films, and from the woman who saved St Pancras Station to Prince Philip's first girlfriend, and even those unfairly judged during their lives not to have amounted to much at all. 250pp, eight pages of photos.

From Ancient Greece to dark energy, full of charm and learning, here are vivid and gripping stories. Sub-titled 'How an Ancient Greek Geometry Text Shaped the World', and previously published as 'The Book of Wonders', this is an astonishingly readable and informative history of the greatest mathematical bestseller of all time. Euclid's Elements of Geometry was a book that changed the world and has shaped 2,000 years of art, philosophy and literature, as well as science and maths. With stories of influence on every continent and encounters with the likes of Ptolemy and Isaac Newton, Hobbes and Lewis Carroll, Wardhaugh gives dramatic life to the evolution of mathematics in a fascinating tour through 2,300 years of reading, re-imagining, and responding to perhaps the most important textbook ever written. 403pp, illustrated paperback.

'From whom did you steal that beauty? The rose laughs softly out of shame, but how should she tell?' - Rumi. Acclaimed horticultural historian Jennifer Potter shows that this most fragrant flower, the rose, has potency in societies around the world. She begins her story in the Greek and Roman empires and travels across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Americas to unravel its evolution from a simple briar of the northern hemisphere to the height of cultivated perfection found in rose gardens today. She lays bare the flower's long association with sexuality and secret societies, questioning the Crusaders' role in bringing roses back from the Holy Land, or hunting for its elusive blooms in the gardens of the Empress Josephine at Malmaison. An exquisitely beautiful heavyweight tome printed on quality paper and with hundreds of full page colour plates not only of roses but of archive paintings and historical artifacts and illuminated manuscripts, the book challenges many cherished beliefs about the rose and this thick tome looks to establish itself as the definitive history of the Queen of Flowers. Celebrated as a sacred symbol and as a token of womanhood, the rose unites Venus with the Virgin Mary, the blood of Christ with the sweat of Muhammad, the sacred and the profane, life and death, the white rose of chastity and the red rose of consummation. Not forgetting the delicate petals in different hues in the exquisite perfumes, we learn about roses which came to Europe from Turkey and Bulgaria and the Balkan mountains, rosemania and Redouté's exquisite portraits of their best creations which further inflamed passions. We have a 21st century view of cultivated roses be they old garden roses from Alba to tea and climbing tea, or modern roses like Floribunda to Polyantha. Chinese Whispers, American Beauties, the Housewife's Friend and its uses, here is trade and travel and sex and sorcery. 521 magnificent pages with approximately 100 colour illus. 16.5 x 24.1cm.
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In this wide-ranging and sometimes controversial study, one of our pre-eminent political historians dispels the popular myths that have grown up about this critical period in Britain's story, and argues that it set the scene for much that is laudable about our nation today. He looks at how Britain has been governed, the franchise and electoral system, the House of Lords and the House of Commons, the monarchy, the Cabinet, local government, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, the Empire. He looks at the politics of unionism and the 1895 General Election, at Lord Salisbury's foreign policy and challenges from America, the Middle and Far East. He looks at the war in South Africa and the challenge from the Boers, confident unionism, the Labour Party representing the working class and the trade unions. He does not shy away from the concentration camps in South Africa, Lord Rosebery's return. There was the problem the end of the Victorian Age of reforming education leading into new alignments and the alliance with Japan, the Irish Land Act and devolution, the Corn Duty and its repeal, Home Rule, the 1906 General Election, school meals and medical inspection, old age pensions, the reform of taxation, Churchill and social reform, the constitutional crisis and the end of Balfour's leadership, land reform, female suffrage, and from the entente with France and two world wars. The turbulent years of 1895 to 1914 changed Britain's political landscape for ever. They saw a transition from aristocratic rule to mass politics and heralded a new agenda which still dominates today. Economic modernisation, social welfare and equality, secondary and technical education, a new role for Britain in the world were all complex and difficult issues of the period which proved so thorny that despite the efforts of the Edwardians, they remain among the most pressing problems facing us in the 21st century. Vernon Bogdanor believes that the robustness of Britain's parliamentary and political institutions and her liberal political culture, with the commitment to rational debate and argument, were powerful enough to carry her through one of the most trying periods of her history, and so make possible the remarkable survival of liberal Britain. A thumping 3" thick tome of 880 pages with superb timeline of main events and seven maps in 2022 first edition.