Modern artists are far from the first to have exploited the power and potential of the self portrait which has become the defining visual genre of our confessional age. Art historian and critic James Hall brilliantly maps the history from the earliest myths of Narcissus and the Christian tradition of 'bearing witness' to the prolific self-image making of today's contemporary artists, the explosion of the genre during the Renaissance, the confessional self portraits of Titian and Michelangelo, Courbet and Van Gogh, the themes of sex and genius in works by Munch, Bonnard and Modersohn-Becker. Comic and caricature, imaginary, key collections such as that of the Medici in Florence, throughout Hall asks why and when artists have chosen to make self portraits and the mindsets of the artists who had created them. Comprehensive and beautifully illustrated, the book features the work or artists including Alberti, Caravaggio, Dürer, Emin, Gauguin, Giotto, Goya, Kahlo, Koons, Magritte, Mantegna, Picasso, Raphael, Rembrandt and Warhol in a lively and rich history which contextualises the tradition in relation to the cultural climate of its time. 120 illustrations, many in colour, 288pp in large Thames & Hudson softback.

A rich exploration of the historical lineage of today's research universities which explains the reasons for their ascendancy in America and their continued international pre-eminence. When universities began in the Middle Ages, Pope Gregory IX described them as 'wisdom's special workshop' although he could not have foreseen how far these institutions would travel and develop. Tracing the 800 year evolution of the elite research university from its roots in medieval Europe to its remarkable incarnation today, this special book places the durable institution in sweeping historical perspective. In particular James Axtell focusses on the ways that the best American universities took on Continental influences from the late 19th century onwards. They proliferated from coast to coast, and their national role expanded greatly during World War Two and the Cold War. Axtell links the legacies of European universities and the Tudor-Stuart Oxbridge to nine colonial and hundreds of pre-Civil War colleges, and delves into how US universities were shaped by Americans who studied in German universities and adopted their discoveries to domestic conditions and goals. The graduate school, the PhD, and the research imperative became and remain the hallmarks of the university system and higher education institutions around the globe. The author writes in his prologue 'I had begun my scholarly publishing career at Yale in the history of education... where I taught an introductory seminar on the subject for two years. My first two books were on the one-time Oxford don John Locke's Educational Career and Writings (1968) and on the full range of education in colonial New England... Then, after the 100th anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee... I was drawn to the ethno-history of Indian-European relations in the colonial Americas which resulted in eight books.' Learn so much more than about the nation's Harvards. Princetons and Stanfords but about what energises and sustains research universities in the high-stakes 'brain race'. 417pp.

Crafting something from scratch means you get to carefully choose the materials you use, your method and philosophy for making it. Here are 15 craft projects for eco-friendly living, to freshen up old curtains with colour and pigments from Mother Nature, dye natural fabrics to bring a tattered chair back to life, repurpose wooden pallets for your next bookcase, learn how to use resin to create unique pieces of furniture for your home and with some basic electronic knowledge, you can turn a classic speaker into a modern Bluetooth radio. Construct a portable greenhouse from old picture frames, create your own drawstring bag for a zero waste, zero plastic shopping trip, upcycle fast furniture, make a paper and plaster lamp, a hanging plant gutter, wine crate garden features, self-watering planters, solar lamp, a ladybird or bee house, a tablet or iPhone sleeve from a sweater, an insulated lunch bag, a Bluetooth radio, your own shampoo and conditioning bars, reusable bulk food bags, print with nature, make a cyanotype chair upholstery, crate or pallet furniture. Practical and useful projects for home and garden. 160pp, 18.8 x 23.8cm, dozens of colour illus.

Retold with soft illustrations by popular artist Maja Dusikova, the story begins: 'Once there was a man and a woman who wanted a child. After waiting many years, the woman became pregnant. A window in their house looked over a garden that was full of flowers and herbs and was surrounded by a high wall. No one ever went into the garden, because it belonged to a powerful enchantress. Standing at the window, the pregnant woman began to long for a leafy plant called rapunzel that she could see. Each day she grew paler, and she said to her husband, 'I am weak because I want rapunzel leaves so much.' Her husband loved her and decided he must go into the walled garden... the enchantress carried the baby away who grew up into a lovely girl with long, long golden hair and was named Rapunzel. She shut her in a tower with a high window but no stairs, deep in the forest and would call each day 'Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!' And the braid hung right to the ground and the old woman would climb up. One day, a King's son was riding through the forest... Beautifully abridged by Joy Cowley for ages 4-7, 32 pages.

Janet is caught between care work and caring for herself. Her life revolves around Sean, a talented fine art student, living and working with cerebral palsy. Both Janet and Sean are new to London and far from their families and both are finding a means of escape through pushing their bodies to the limit. When Sean is faced with an unexpected and deeply personal tragedy, his carer Janet must let her guard down at last and discover what she's prepared to fight for. The whole concept of Sean's art he is able to produce with Janet's help is deeply moving, drawing attention to his body and disability but on his own terms in his own highly original and powerful ways. Shocking and different, this a raw and rather beautiful and unflinching look inside the life of a disabled person and their relationship with their carer, a novel about dignity and intimacy, tenderness and brutality. 259pp, fairly large print.

A powerful novel which brings to life the Bauhaus Movement. Luise Schilling wants to tear down the past and build a new future. At the beginning of the turbulent 1920s, she leaves her father's conservative household in Berlin for Weimar's Bauhaus University, with dreams of studying architecture. But when she arrives and encounters a fractured social world of mystics and formalists, communists and fascists, the dichotomy between the rigid past and a hopeful future turns out to be a lot more muddled than she thought. Luise becomes involved with a cult-like spiritual group, looking for community, and falling in love with elusive art student Jakob. Surrounded by luminaries like Gropius and Kandinsky, Luise throws herself into the dreams and ideas of her epoch. While her art school friends retreat into a world of self-improvement and jargon, her home city of Berlin is embroiled in street fights. Amid the social upheaval, she has to decide where she stands. From technology to art, romanticism to the avant-garde, populism to the youth movement, Luise encounters themes, utopias and ideas that still ring familiar today. Told in the first person, a coming-of-age story to immerse yourself in the atmosphere and setting, first in the Weimar and in the second in Dessau, both reflecting the political and cultural shifts in the schools' movement across Germany and its director Walter Gropius, depicted as a distant, imposing figure. 224pp. One illus.

Book one of a trilogy so the best place to start. The 'prose is sleek and fast as the technology it describes.' - Peter F. Hamilton. Carlos is dead. A soldier who died for his ideals a thousand years ago, he has been reincarnated and conscripted to fight an A.I. revolution in deep space. He's not sure he's fighting for the right side. Seba is alive. By a fluke of nature, a contractual overlap and a loop in its subroutines, this lunar mining robot has gained sentience. Gathering with other 'freeboots', Seba is taking a stand against the corporations that want it and its kind gone. As their stories converge against a backdrop of warring companies and interstellar drone combat, Carlos and Seba must find a way to rise above the games their masters are playing, or die. And even dying will not be the end of it. An epic vision of man and machine in the far reaches of space, the writing is fast, funny and sophisticated. 326pp.

The day of his mother's death when he was five years old was the day the music died for Tony Garnett. His story begins in working-class war-torn Birmingham where he movingly describes the trauma of his mother's death following a back street abortion. 19 days later, stricken with grief, his father committed suicide, and Tony was sent to live with other family members, no longer to hear the soundtrack of his early life, his mother's piano playing. As an angry young man, Tony realised that his passion lay behind the camera and he rebuilt a life in films, pursuing the truth about the world in order to avoid the truth about himself. He eventually moved to London and was part of the counterculture scene in the 1960s. He shares the inside story of his most ground-breaking productions, including Cathy Come Home, Kes and This Life. He gives accounts of angry clashes with the BBC and film executives as he battled to make films that were thought too controversial, films about police corruption and psychiatrists' cruelty, films advocating abortion law reform and the abolition of the death penalty, films about the homeless and the waste of young people in poor schools. He takes us behind the scenes of a selection of his more famous productions and offers secrets and anecdotes, some moving, some amusing and this is a fine and moving memoir of a fine storyteller. 306pp, 16 pages of archive and some colour photos including Garnett with Pauline Letts on the cover of Radio Times for 'The Birth of a Private Man'. He probably was simply the best TV drama creator and producer ever and we all remember his films to this day. Paperback.

Boy meets girl and a modern love story emerges, complete with lots of gritty humour, bad language, sexual references and oh, to be young again! The two voices work really well, and you find yourself laughing out loud one minute then screaming at the book the next and sobbing your heart out in this very easy quick read, designed as young adult fiction. 'It's Leeds, I said, not Hollywood. You're not going to find a hero working down Kwikfit.' Matt and Sophia live in the same city but they come from the opposite side of the track. By rights they should never have met. They definitely should never have fallen in love at first sight, of all cliches. But to their great surprise they do and that's the easy part. It's what to do next that they struggle with. Family, friends and circumstances are mostly against them. They betray themselves and each other. It's true what they say - everybody hurts sometimes but sometimes too, the pain is worth it. Teenage to young adult fiction. 342pp, paperback.

A haunting historical novel which weaves betrayal and sacrifice amid echoes of the Orpheus myth and swirls of magic. It brilliantly explores the fault lines between heroism and complicity, guilt and trauma, love and betrayal and is a book for the grievers and those wishing to remedy past mistakes. A decade after fleeing for his life, a man is pulled back to Argentina by an undying love. In 1976, Tomás Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires where he has moved in the hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of the insurgency fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. Tomás has always been willing to follow her anywhere, to prove himself, yet what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to both of them? It will be years before a summons back arrives, and now he is living as Thomas Shore in New York. It isn't a homecoming that awaits him so much as an odyssey into the past where ghosts lurk there and a reckoning with a fatal gap between who he has become, and who he once aspired to be. A technically challenging and morally complex novel. 294pp.