20th Century History

Explains the birth, evolution and death of phenomena, trends and groups of artists since the fifties.

Edward W. Said, one of the world's most influential literary and cultural critics, is also one of the leading authorities on the Middle East. This passionate, engaged and constantly insightful...

This textbook assembles key writings on the modern history of the Middle East by some of the most distinguished specialists in the field. The book aims to meet the needs...

Against a background of intrigue and manipulation on both sides, the author charts the experiences and impact of those who helped to define the relationship between Britain and Iran from...

Examining a series of El Nino-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful...

Futurism, brainchild of the Italian writer and impresario, F.T. Marinetti, was the defining avant-garde art movement of the 20th century. This book traces it from its origins in dissident underground...

Modernism is a broad term, used generally to convey a faith in progress and a healthy scepticism for received ideas and traditional values. More specifically, the Modernist tendency has often...

Between 1920 and 1932, Great Britain endeavored unsuccessfully to create a modern democratic state in the region that became known as Iraq. The unwieldy patchwork state it fashioned embodied the...

Over twenty years ago, Sven Lindqvist, one of the great pioneers of a new kind of experiential history writing, set out across Central Africa. Obsessed with a single line from...

Set in Alexandria, this classic and much-loved memoir chronicles the exploits of Andre Aciman's colourful Sephardic Jewish family from its arrival in Egypt at the turn of the century to...

Thanks to a thrown beer bottle and a fan letter to a P.O. box, Melissa Auf der Maur's first band scored an opening slot for the Smashing Pumpkins in her...

Thanks to a thrown beer bottle and a fan letter to a P.O. box, Melissa Auf der Maur's first band scored an opening slot for the Smashing Pumpkins in her...

Tariq Ali revisits his formative years as a young radical. Reissued for the 1968 anniversary, Street-Fighting Years captures the mood and energy of the era of hope and passion as...

On 28 March 1944, six-year-old Tati and her four-year-old sister Andra were roused from their sleep and arrested. Along with their mother, Mira, their aunt, and cousin Sergio, they were...

Winner of the 2014 Annual Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (USA). Contemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent...

Paul Heywood-Smith's interest in the Arab-Israeli conflict commenced in London in 1973 at the time of the Yom Kippur War. He was then a young lawyer imbued with the values...

It's been nearly a century since Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal and called it art. Since then, painting has been declared dead several times over, and contemporary art has now...

The New York Times bestselling author of Rise of ISIS exposes the dangers of radical Islam and the effects it has on the American way of life in this informative...

THE VANITY FAIR DIARIES is the story of an Englishwoman barely out of her twenties who arrives in New York City with a dream. Summoned from London in hopes that...

A broad-ranging assessment of relations between the Muslim and Western worlds in the contemporary era set in the context of the way these have evolved historically. Arguing that the relations...

When Sydney Wignall set off on a climbing expedition to the Himalayas in the 1950s, he little imagined he would become embroiled in an extraordinary, life-threatening adventure that would involve...

A rigorous examination of the failure of the United States as a broker in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, through three key historical moments. Winner of the 2014 Lionel Trilling Book...

Begun as the United States moved its armed forces into Iraq, Rashid Khalidi's powerful and thoughtful new book examines the record of Western involvement in the region and analyzes the...

Winner of the American Publishers Association's Award for an outstanding Professional and Scholarly title and the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion 1996 from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.In...

To oppose the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the USA formed an extraordinary anti-communist alliance with militant Islamic forces in South Asia. In this controversial book, John Cooley provides...

Throughout his working life, Duncan Grant experimented with a variety of styles and techniques, from commercial interior decoration to ceramics, print-making and theatre work, as well as easel painting and...

In 1959, Calvin Tomkins interviewed Marcel Duchamp for Newsweek, beginning his sixdecade-long career writing about art. He then joined The New Yorker, where he has contributed dozens of profiles on...

This entertaining and aesthetically appealing survey of Stanley Spencer's career spans its entire spectrum and places his remarkable oeuvre in the broader context of twentieth-century European art. This edition is...

This volume encapsulates the artistic sensibility and casual sophistication of the Bloomsbury Group. In 1916, Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister, Vanessa Bell, that though the farmhouse at Charleston in...

Many of Cy Twombly's paintings and drawings include handwritten words and phrases--naming or quoting poets ranging from Sappho, Homer, and Virgil to Mallarme, Rilke, and Cavafy. Enigmatic and sometimes hard...

Can European thought be dislodged from the center of the practice of history in a non-European place? What problems arise when we translate cultural practices into the categories of social...

Empires of the Sand offers a bold and comprehensive reinterpretation of the struggle for mastery in the Middle East during the long nineteenth century (1789-1923). This book denies primacy to...

Recognises and celebrates the work of one of Australia's most significant and engaging artists and is the first major book of his work. Born in England in 1929, Larter moved...

'A masterly summational work, the whole story of the Arab peoples is laid out before us.It is difficult to overestimate the signal importance of this book for this time. Here...

In the wake of the Second World War and the realisation that the Soviet Union had set up extensive espionage networks around the world, Australia responded by establishing its own...

Some of Australia's leading historians present new perspectives on social and cultural life in the 1950s. The 1950s is usually treated in the popular media as a metaphor for an...

Until recently, the study of the Middle East has focused almost exclusively on Islam and on the regime, especially on its non-democratic aspects. It has done so at the expense...

The Ottoman Empire was one of the most important non-Western states to survive from medieval to modern times, and played a vital role in European and global history. It continues...

Looking at Art from the Inside Out highlights the role played by the psychological world of the artist in shaping the subject-matter and form of art works. Analysing masterpieces by...

First published in 1996, this irreplaceable resource has now been updated, revised, and expanded by Kristine Stiles to represent thirty countries and more than one hundred new artists. Stiles has...

Extending deconstructive theory to historical and political analysis, Timothy Mitchell examines the peculiarity of Western conceptions of order and truth through a re-reading of Europe's colonial encounter with nineteenth-century Egypt.

Sunday Times Art Book of the Year 2018 'If you are interested in modern British art, the book is unputdownable. If you are not, read it.' - Grey Gowrie, Financial...

Women - as warriors, workers, mothers, sensual women, even absent mothers - haunt 19th- and 20th-century Western painting. This text brings together Linda Nochlin's most important and pioneering writings on...

From mosques to markets, from citadels to cemeteries, this is a panoramic survey of the entire field of Islamic architecture, with contributions by leading experts in the field. Constantly relating...

A fascination with the 'primitive' lies at the heart of some of the most influential developments in Western art between 1890 and 1950 - a time that witnessed both the...

This is a complete illustrated survey of Performance art from the 1960s to the present. The book presents Performance art from its first emergence in the work of Yves Klein,...