This edition does not include illustrations. The story of a man’s obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey – from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching.
“Every day is an anxiety in my ways of getting to the water. . . . I’ve become so attuned to it, so scared of it, so in love with it that sometimes I can only think by the sea. It is the only place I feel at home.” Many of us visit the sea. Admire it. Even profess to love it. But very few of us live it. Philip Hoare does. He swims in the sea every day, either off the coast of his native Southampton or his adopted Cape Cod. He watches its daily and seasonal changes. He collects and communes with the wrack—both dead and never living—that it throws up on the shingle. He thinks with, at, through the sea. All of which should prepare readers: RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR is no ordinary book. It mounts no straight-ahead argument. It hews to no single genre. Instead, like the sea itself, it moves, flows, absorbs, transforms. In its pages we find passages of beautiful nature and travel writing, lyrical memoir, seams of American and English history and much more. We find Thoreau and Melville, Bowie and Byron, John Waters and Virginia Woolf, all linked through a certain refusal to be contained, to be strictly defined—an openness to discovery and change. Running throughout is an air of elegy, a reminder that the sea is an ending, a repository of lost ships, lost people, lost ways of being. It is where we came from; for Hoare, it is where he is going. “Every swim is a little death,” Hoare writes, “but it is also a reminder that you are alive.” Few books have ever made that knife’s edge so palpable. Read RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. Let it settle into the seabed of your soul. You’ll never forget it.
From his childhood fascination with the gigantic Natural History Museum model of a blue whale, to his abiding love of Moby-Dick, to his adult encounters with the living animals in the Atlantic Ocean, the acclaimed writer Philip Hoare has been obsessed with whales. The Whale is his unforgettable and moving attempt to explain why these strange and beautiful animals exert such a powerful hold on our imagination.
An illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art and the sea from the award-winning author of The Whale. In 1520, Albrecht Dürer, the most celebrated artist in Northern Europe, sailed to Zeeland to see a whale. A central figure of the Renaissance, no one had painted or drawn the world like him. Dürer drew hares and rhinoceroses in the way he painted saints and madonnas. The wing of a bird or the wing of an angel; a spider crab or a bursting star like the augury of a black hole, in Dürer's art, they were part of a connected world. Everything had meaning. But now he was in crisis. He had lost his patron, the Holy Roman Emperor. He was moorless and filled with wanderlust. In the shape of the whale, he saw his final ambition. Dürer was the first artist to truly employ the power of reproduction. He reinvented the way people looked at, and understood, art. He painted signs and wonders; comets, devils, horses, nudes, dogs, and blades of grass so accurately that even today they seem hyper-real, utterly modern images. Most startling and most modern of all, he painted himself, at every stage of his life. But his art captured more than the physical world, he also captured states of mind. Albert and the Whale explores the work of this remarkable man through a personal lens. Drawing on Philip’s experience of the natural world, and of the elements that shape our contemporary lives, from suburbia to the wide open sea, Philip will enter Dürer's time machine. Seeking his own Leviathan, Hoare help us better understand the interplay between art and our world in this sublimely seductive book.
The definitive biography of one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated and controversial dramatists. To several generations, actor, playwright, songwriter, and filmmaker Noël Coward (1899-1973) was the very personification of wit, glamour, and elegance. Given unprecedented access to the private papers and correspondence of Coward family members, compatriots, and numerous lovers, Samuel Johnson Prize-winning biographer Philip Hoare has produced an illuminating and sophisticated biography of Coward, whose relentless drive for success and approval fueled the stunning bursts of creativity that launched the once-painfully middle class boy from the suburbs of London into a pantheon of theatrical deities that includes Gilbert and Sullivan, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw. As much the embodiment of a lifestyle as an actual inhabitant of it, Coward’s carefully cultivated image defined the aspirations of untold numbers of actors, artists, and writers who succeeded him, and Hoare’s meticulously researched biography peels away the layers of this complex persona to reveal the man underneath it all, whom The Times of London decreed upon his death to be the most versatile of all the great figures of the English theater.
In 1918 the Vigilante newspaper claimed that the German Secret Service held a book containing the names of 47,000 British establishment members who were sexual perverts. It was claimed Britain was losing the war because the Germans were blackmailing these figures and thereby sapping the country's strength. The Vigilante was exploiting popular belief that Britain had become a decadent state still in thrall to the immoral cult of Oscar Wilde. The extreme right wing politics of the newspaper's publisher were becoming dangerously popular and in the sensational libel trial that followed many high society members were drawn in. Wilde's devoted "friend" Robbie Ross and his one time lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, both became embroiled in the bitter battle over Wilde's reputation. The author uses original documents and archives to narrate the history of this bizarre scandal, made all the more unusual by having occurred during the final year of World War I. He produces a portrait of wartime society, telling of transvestites in the trenches, of drug clubs in London, and of the roots of British fascism, discerning the seeds of intolerance which would inform the troubled years to come. 'Hoare has identified one of the key moments in the formation of the modern world, and he has documented it with dazzling brilliance' Simon Callow, Sunday Times
From the author of Leviathan, or, The Whale, comes a composite portrait of the subtle, beautiful, inspired and demented ways in which we have come to terms with our watery planet. In the third of his watery books, the author goes in pursuit of human and animal stories of the sea. Of people enchanted or driven to despair by the water, accompanied by whales and birds and seals - familiar spirits swimming and flying with the author on his meandering odyssey from suburbia into the unknown. Along the way, he encounters drowned poets and eccentric artists, modernist writers and era-defining performers, wild utopians and national heroes - famous or infamous, they are all surprisingly, and sometimes fatally, linked to the sea. Out of the storm-clouds of the twenty-first century and our restive time, these stories reach back into the past and forward into the future. This is a shape-shifting world that has never been certain, caught between the natural and unnatural, where the state between human and animal is blurred. Time, space, gender and species become as fluid as the sea. Here humans challenge their landbound lives through art or words or performance or myth, through the animal and the elemental. And here they are forever drawn back to the water, forever lost and found on the infinite sea.
This ebook contains a limited number of illustrations. The story of Netley in Southampton – its hospital, its people and the secret history of the 20th-century. Now with a new afterword uncovering astonishing evidence of Netley's links with Porton Down & experiments with LSD in the 1950s.
Throughout history, the whale has fascinated artists, scientists, writers, musicians, storytellers. From the ancient civilisations to aboriginal peoples, from 19th century literature, in the shape of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, to 21st century cinema such as Free Willy and Whale Rider. The Dominion exhibition and Whale Festival at Plymouth, February 2011, the first to be held in the UK, celebrated the iconographic image of the whale and explored its place in literature, biology and history. The festival featured eminent scientists from the field of cetacean studies and explored the cultural significance of the whale through film, music, poetry readings and gallery talks, and sought to explore and celebrate the links between science and the arts. At its centre was the unique collaboration between the artist, Angela Cockayne, Senior Lecturer at Bath Spa University, and the acclaimed writer Philip Hoare.
How are Britain's traditional and luxury brands coping with an increasingly egalitarian society? In recognition of the need to broaden their customer bases, a number of traditional and luxury companies have transformed themselves through their engagement with contemporary design. This new approach has taken various forms: the comprehensive rebranding, the introduction of products by high-profile designers, or the overhaul of advertising campaigns. Posh explores this phenomenon through an examination of both the design process in such companies and the shifting meanings of class and taste that have informed them. Featured companies include: Pringle of Scotland, Dunhill, Jaguar, Wedgwood, Garrard and British Airways. Posh is written and curated by Sorrel Hershberg of the British Council's Art, Architecture and Design department with a specially commissioned essay on the evolution of class in Britain by Philip Hoare, author of Spike Island and biographies of Noel Coward and Stephen Tennant. The catalogue is designed by UNA (London) designers and illustrated by Paul Slater.
Armed with this intrepid survey, we can see a brave new world down there on the beach ... Exquisite revelation, of the most wonderful, watery kind.' - Philip Hoare For many, the highlights of seaside holidays are rockpooling and gathering the glorious array of shells left strewn on the beach after the receding tide. Attracted by the infinite variety of shapes and colours, visitors can never resist making a souvenir collection of their own - but little do they suspect the fascinating lives of the animals who once occupied them. What if each shell had a story of its own to tell us, if only we knew the language? Mr Street's delightful, informative guide uncovers the secret history of each common shell, revealing not only which marine creature once inhabited it but the unique challenges of its watery habitat it had to solve. From barnacles to oysters, cockles to sea slugs, winkles to carnivorous snails, molluscs and lesser-known members of the octopus family, Shell Life on the Seashore is the essential primer for recognising and collecting both these curious specimens and the 'empties' they leave behind - and will greatly increase the old-fashioned pleasures of a coastal holiday for all the family.
This publication marks the most comprehensive exhibition by David Austen for over ten years. It brings together a significant body of work including the distinctive paintings and works on paper for which he has become widely known, a recently made film and hanging sculptures, both of which signal a new and important departure. This title includes text by Sally O'Reilly.
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