Ruben said 'My talent is such that no undertaking, however vast in size? has ever surpassed my courage.' The name of the great 17th century Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens reminds us of the importance of his contribution to the development of European culture, and his contemporaries praised him as the 'Apelles of our day'. With a short biographical text, the body of this compact small softback are over 100 full page colour images of whole portraits and masterpieces in detail such as The Crown of Thorns (Ecce Homo), Venus and Adonis, Christ with the Adulterous Woman, Venus at a Mirror, Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt, Nature Adorning the Three Graces, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, Virgin with a Periwinkle, Lion Hunt, The Birth of the Dauphin, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, Arrival of Prince Ferdinand (detail), Minerva Protects Pax from Mars and dozens more, each with their year of painting and where they are to be found in museums worldwide in the index. 140pp, paperback.

Our editor Annie adores Purple Ronnie and is the proud owner of one of his original illustrations, so she snapped up these two books of cartoons, this is a companion to For Your Brilliant Birthday code 90818. Purple Ronnie always captures the mood perfectly in his black and white line art cartoons and characters, this time in book form with over 100 to enjoy with blue, red, purple, bright green, pink backgrounds and coloured in cartoon characters. Let's take a duvet day! Nights with You. I knew you were the first one from the first time that we kissed. You're a super five star fittie who I simply can't resist. You make me feel sparkleeeee (where the female character is holding a sparkler, her boyfriend?s arm round her waist). I love holding hands in rain or snow, you?re cuddly and cute and warm. "Best of all is snuggling up close cos together we're safe from the storm" say a girl and boy snow people, holding hands. If we live to be a hundred we might be grey and cranky but I bet we're still in love (without the hanky-panky). Love is... Purple Ronnie. Hugs and smooches. Colour cartoons.

With their perfect soft skin, huge shiny eyes often staring directly at the camera, sweet smiles, chubby cheeks and limbs, here are babies in all manner of poses like lying across a teddy, licking a spoon, in soapy suds in a bath, a little girl in a purple ballerina outfit sticking her finger up her nose, others swaddled in blankets, posed on beautiful bedding or couches or pillows, holding a flower or surrounded by petals. There are sweet quotes from authors like Deepak Chopra: 'It is the nature of babies to be in bliss.' There is a rockabye baby lullaby, bath time swimming lessons, toy time and splish splash, interesting facts about twins, a list of famous fairy tales, a short poem from William Blake, and even specific instruction for how to swaddle a baby correctly and put on a real towelling nappy. Several of these exquisitely cute photographs are in gatefold pages, and all the other approximate 100 examples are full page, close up and colour. The babies range in age from Belle of two weeks to Finn who is 364 days old. A little in the style of Anne Geddes but less kitsch and more natural, there are a few brown babies included and of course all have cute tootsies and squidgy fingers and you just want to pick them up and hug them. An affectionate miscellany by acclaimed photographer Rachael Hale, it is the ultimate gift for new parents, grandparents and those who adore babies. 160pp, 23 x 26.8cm.
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Extremely beautiful silhouette artworks decorate the landscape pages of this compilation of one-of-a-kind buildings - fortresses, palaces, sacred sites, monuments, skyscrapers and cultural hotspots. We travel to the cultural capitals of Paris, Mexico City, Berlin, Beijing, Delhi, Istanbul, Washington DC, Budapest and Rome. To seaside cities like Miami and Helsinki, fortress cities like Marrakech and Prague, Carcassonne and Jaipur, sacred cities like Jerusalem, Lhasa, and Cusco, skyscraper cities and visionary cities like Brasilia, Dubai, Barcelona, Timbuctu and Eutopia. Experts on architecture, design and travel, this journey through 50 skylines of the world's greatest cities is illustrated by Jenny Seddon in beautiful and atmospheric illustrations. There are quotes, short histories capturing the spirit of the places, its past and location. There are double page skyline maps, representations of famous and iconic buildings drawn at the same height and each captioned, quotes and bold headers for the buildings mentioned in the text. Includes maps, colour, a beautiful design and layout, 216pp.
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Fay Wray was most famous as the blonde in a diaphanous gown who captured the heart of the mighty King Kong, the 25 foot 60 tonne gorilla as he placed her, nestled in his 8 foot hand, on the ledge of the 102 story Empire State Building, putting Wray at the height of New York's skyline and cinematic immortality. She starred in more than 120 films opposite Hollywood's biggest stars including Gary Cooper (The Legion of the Condemned, The First Kiss, The Texan, One Sunday Afternoon), Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, William Powell and Charles Boyer and cowboy stars like Ronald Colman (The Unholy Garden), Ralph Richardson and Melvyn Douglas. She was directed by the masters of the age in The Wedding March, The Street of Sin, The Four Feathers and King Kong, Thunderbolt, Behind the Make-Up directed by Dorothy Arzner and Dirigible by Frank Capra among them. The book's and Fay Wray's counterpart Robert Riskin was considered one of the greatest screenwriters of all time. Academy-Award winning writer (nominated for five), producer, ten-year-long collaborator with Frank Capra on pictures such as American Madness, It Happened One Night, Mr Deeds Goes to Town, Lost Horizon and Meet John Doe, he was hailed by many as 'among the best screenwriters in the business' - F. Scott Fitzgerald. Riskin wrote women characters who were smart, sexy and always resilient and made streetwise optimistic films with a sense of humour. The couple lived large lives finding each other after establishing their artistic selves and after each had had many romantic attachments - Wray an 11 year long difficult marriage and a fraught affair with Clifford Odets and Riskin a series of romances with among others Carole Lombard, Glenda Farrell and Loretta Young. Here are their lives, work, their fairy-tale marriage that ended so tragically, told in a dual quintessential biography of American lives, ultimately and blissfully intertwined. The book is written by their daughter, an acclaimed writer and producer. 397 desirable roughcut US pages, approximately 50 illustrations.

Another extraordinary novel from the prolific writer who admits in his foreword that he spent three weeks in New Zealand to research his invented Island in this book. The island finds itself in the position of several real post-colonial, mixed-race modern countries where Wilson met Penny Whistle who throughout his three days in Christchurch could be singing 18th century English songs in a robust baritone among the ruins, never repeating himself. He hopes he will be forgiven for putting Whistle into the story. On The Island, just as on many other islands, marriages are unhappy, people fall in love and the seasons pass. The town of Aberdeen is no different until the earthquakes. These seismic ripples tear down houses, forge bonds, and shake the foundations of humanity and religion. In the midst of it all, Nellie and Ingrid fall in love. Although the English characters inhabit actual place names like Winchester and some named Midland towns, these two are fictitious. There is a funeral in Winchester Cathedral because the author wanted his heroine Nellie to pause beside the grave of Jane Austen. 275pp, paperback.

In the tradition of Alan Furst, the international bestselling author delivers his first stand-alone novel, a psychological thriller set in World War II Nazi Germany and 1970s England. British pilots James Teasdale and Bryan Young have been chosen to conduct a special photo-reconnaissance mission near Dresden, Germany. Intelligence believes the Nazis are building new factories that could turn the tide of the war. When their plane is shot down, the pilots know they will be executed if captured. Wounded and bleeding, they manage to jump on a passing train, narrowly escaping capture, but they are not out of trouble yet as they discover they have boarded a carriage full of injured SS men being evacuated from the Eastern Front. In a moment of desperation they throw two patients off the train and take their places, but their act is too convincing and they end up in the Alphabet House, a mental hospital located far behind enemy lines, where German doctors subject their patients to daily rounds of shock treatments and experimental drugs. Their only hope is to fake insanity and their friendship and courage are put to the ultimate test. A novel packed with historical interest and an air of urgency. 531pp, paperback.

Kenneth Clark and Mary Beard both presented television programmes entitled "Civilisation", 50 years apart, and both admitted the difficulty of defining what the term actually means. The author of this book, which examines the concept as it has played out in Europe since World War II, comments that "civilisation" is most often invoked at times of cultural and moral breakdown, for instance at the end of the War or after 9/11. Unlike the 19th century missionary approach to civilisation, the post-war understanding was shaped by insecurity and the daunting task of starting over. Disillusionment with western values prompted curiosity about other civilisations, and the birth of the United Nations immediately after the war was an ambitious experiment in internationalism. The New York Post went so far as to call it "the most important human gathering since the Last Supper", representing as it did a transition to the language of individual rights and collective security. The author discusses the effect of the loss of empire in western and eastern Europe, Africa, and the Soviet Union, and the consequent repurposing of the concept of civilisation for political ends. An example is the way Eastern Europeans have championed the preservation of indigenous Third World traditions in the name of anti-imperialism and international fellowship. The material the author uses includes interviews and telling cultural artefacts such as west German guide books about how to behave in different situations, and he does not hesitate to challenge the narrative of the EU being a peacekeeping response to racial arrogance and totalitarianism. 536pp, black and white photos.

Astrology combines two powerful human tendencies: our compulsion to find connections in everything, and our fascination with ourselves. The earliest civilisations had astrological structures, most famously Egypt's pyramids and our own Stonehenge, and what they may have meant for their originators is a centuries-old conundrum. For Boxer, astrology is intimately bound up with the development of science, and to start with he takes us through "a quick spin around the celestial sphere". In second-century Alexandria, the intellectual capital of the world, a remarkable collection of 123 unique horoscopes have been preserved, prompting the author to compute mathematically the probability of a horoscope's being repeated. Is it really unique? A chapter on algorithms follows, with the author discussing a 13th century system of Houses which seems to him to embody a theoretical ideal. Tycho, Kepler and the Gregorian Calendar play their part in the story, and "Big Astrology" examines the popular revival of astrology that strangely coincided with 20th century space exploration of the moon, turning it into a source of empirical data. The astrological almanac trade was at its highest in the 16th century and then became eclipsed, as one might say, until Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society gave it new impetus in the late 19th century. In 1930 the Sunday Express in London became the first modern newspaper to publish a horoscope, and it struck lucky by predicting that the infant Princess Margaret would experience important events at the age of seven, which she did in the form of the abdication that made her father King. A fascinating history. 319pp, colour photos, diagrams.

Meet Richard Sharpe, a great British hero. Newly promoted, Major Richard Sharpe is given the task of rescuing a group of well-born women, held hostage high in the mountains by a rabble of deserters. One of the renegades is Sergeant Hakeswill, Sharpe's bitter enemy. Sharpe has only the support of his own company and the new Rocket Troop, the last word in military incompetence, but he cannot afford to contemplate defeat because to surrender or to fail would mean the end of the war for the Allied armies. The book is almost entirely fictional and based on Charles Oman's 'A History of the Peninsular War' where he mentions bands of 'floating scum of unlicensed marauders'. With map, facsimile reprint of the 1985 paperback edition with added historical notes. 350pp, paperback.