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The Oriental Obsession begins in the early sixteenth century with Cardinal Wolsey waiting two years for the delivery of sixty rare Turkey carpets from Venice, and ends in the age of the great exhibitions and emporia on both sides of the Atlantic, before and after 1900, when Islamic objects were seen, appreciated, and bought by millions of the public. The book is concerned with a subject which has not been treated before - the history over four centuries of Islamic artistic traditions and European ideas of Islam as they affected the visual arts of the west and particularly the English-speaking peoples. Studies of individual aspects have been made previously, but this is the first time that an attempt has been made to consider the subject as a whole. The geographical purview extends from Moorish Spain in the west to British India in the east and, besides architecture, the activities that are involved include painting, ceramics, textiles, metalwork, furniture and bookcrafts.

First published in 1999, this book explores how, from the stone bridges of neoclassicism which soar out of wild woods to span pastoral valleys to the post-1750 engineer's bridge with its links to the more industrial landscape, the bridge was a popular feature in painting throughout the period 1700-1920. Why did so many artists choose to portray bridges? In this lavishly illustrated and intriguing book, John Sweetman seeks to answer this question. He traces the history of the bridge in painting and printmaking through a vast range of work, some as familiar as William Etty's The Bridge of Sighs and Claude Monet's The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil and others less well known such as Wassily Kandinsky's Composition IV and C.R.W. Nevinson's Looking Through the Brooklyn Bridge. Distinctive characteristics emerge revealing the complex role of the bridge as both symbol and metaphor, and as a place of vantage, meeting and separation.

From the withdrawal from Dunkirk in 1940 to the Allied invasion of Germany four and a half years later, RAF Bomber Command was the only British force to strike directly at the enemy homeland. During r