Butter, oil, tallow, lard, schmaltz—nutritionally crucial yet often villainized, at once rich yet cheap, fat is one of the most paradoxical categories of foods we consume. Shaping every cuisine on ear
Gleaming and perfect, gold has beguiled humankind for many millennia, attracting treasure hunters, adorning the living and the dead, and symbolizing wealth, power, divinity, and eternity. This book of
In his lifetime the early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch was famous for his phantasmagoric images, and today his name is synonymous with the infernal. The creator of expansive tableaus of fant
As David Matless argues in this book—updated in this accessible, pocket edition—landscape has been central to definitions of Englishness for centuries. It is the aspect of English life where visions o
Modern Architectures In History`This book is thoroughly researched from wide-ranging archival material, extensively illustrated and knowingly written from an insider's perspective. Spanning from the 1
Human beings have always smoked, and they probably always will. Every culture in recorded history has smoked something, whether as a cure or for pleasure, whether as part of a ritual or as an aspect
Forestsand the trees within themhave always been a central resource for the development of technology, culture, and the expansion of humans as a species. Examining and challenging our historical and m
In this comprehensive study of the artistic culture of the region between the Iron Curtain and the former Soviet Union, Piotr Piotrowski chronicles the relationship between avant-garde art production
Imagine barnacle geese—creaturesthat begin life as leaves on a tree growing above water, but turn into small birds as soon as they fall in. Orthe Lamb of Tartary that gestates insid
The Edo period (1603–1868) in Japan is famous as a time of relative peace and prosperity, a time of rapid urbanization that coincided with a rise in literacy as well as international contact, and—espe
Paul Nash (1889-1946) has long been admired as one of the outstanding English landscape painters of the twentieth century. He has a deep affinity for sites in southern England, including the rolling d
Since ’45 details the collision of American history and modern art. For the more than a half-century since World War II, New York has been the indisputable center of the art world, and as Katy Si
"Forgetting is a strange power, because it makes memory possible. That is why all architecture from the past is something like the music of space, which surrounds us and sends us images that we have c
In sixteenth-century Northern Europe, during a time of increasing religious and political conflict, Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel explored how people perceived human nature. Bruegel turned his critic
Most of the stories we tell are about great feats, dangerous journeys, or daring confrontations—exceptional moments in our existence. But what about how we live every single day? In Everyday Life, Jos
For those who visit the United Arab Emirates (UAE), staying in its the lavish hotels and browsing in the ultra-modern shopping malls of Abu Dhabi or Dubai, the country can be a mystery, a glass and co
From the inception of the Daguerreotype in 1839, photography has been widely deployed to document sports as an important social activity. In the earliest days, these photos took the form of staged gen
Today, buying shoes, wearing shoes, and collecting shoes is for many of us a habit that borders on fetish. Shoe lover or not, we all make choices every day about which shoes to wear. But why do we cho
Few artists have exerted as much influence on modern art as Paul Cezanne. Picasso, Braque, and Matisse all acknowledged a profound debt to his painting, and many historians regard him as the father of
In the glorious, boozy party after the first World War, a new being burst defiantly onto the world stage: the so-called flapper. Young, impetuous, and flirtatious, she was an alluring, controversial f
