Boredom is a brilliant and uncompromising exploration of the relation between sexual obsession, money and masculine identity. Dino is rich and bored. He has given up painting to live from day to day. Then he meets Cecilia, a beautiful young model who is both strangely innocent and experienced, and, as he seeks to take total control of her life, his own spins widely towards destruction. A powerful and disturbing study in the pathology of modern life. Learn More

This anthology establishes failure as a core concern in contemporary cultural production. Learn More

'A portrait of radiance Tracy Chevalier brings the real artist Vermeer and a fictional muse to life in a jewel of a novel.' Time' 'A wonderful novel, mysterious, steeped in atmosphere, deeply revealing about the process of painting truly magical.' Guardian 'It has a slow, magical current of its own that picks you up and carries you stealthily along a beautiful story, lovingly told by a very talented writer.' Daily Mail Learn More

This extensively illustrated book is a lacerating account of the new British art scene which emerged in the 1990s, its legacy in the 21st century, and what it tells us about the fate of high art in contemporary society. Learn More

Muir doesn't put a foot wrong this lucid, lurid, indiscreet memoir of gilded gutters, more drugs than milk , Sensation, Hirst's shark and Emin's bed, is an unrivalled record of 1990s Cool Britannia, when British art wowed the world' Jackie Wullschlagher, Financial Times Learn More

Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere. They have the power to shock, idealise or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. Learn More

A personal encounter with 50 of the world's most significant contemporary artists, pressPLAY draws together the full texts of the complete Phaidon interviews with artists since 1995. Learn More

Nicolas Bourriaud attempts to renew our approach toward contemporary art by getting as close as possible to the artists works, and by revealing the principles that structure their thoughts: an aesthetic of the inter-human, of the encounter; of proximity, of resisting social formatting. Learn More

In this new and engaging study Alex Harris presents a confident case for the interest and importance of the English arts during the modern period. During the 1930s and 1940s, a rich network of cultural and personal encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance, with English artists exploring what it meant to be alive at that moment and in England. Harris examines the work of writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics and composers, some well known and some almost forgotten: John Betjeman, Florence White, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, the Sitwells, John Piper, Cecil Beaton and more. Learn More