A history of Reading's iconic gaol: architectural landmark, cultural emblem and symbol for a community determined to cherish the town's heritage. Layers of history and art are carefully peeled back as Peter Stoneley reveals its past as architectural showcase for Sir George Gilbert Scott's decorative (and expensive!) style, location for experiments in prison reform, training ground for the leaders of the Irish Independence movement and, of course, the inspiration for Oscar Wilde's famous Ballad of Reading Gaol. Bringing the narrative right up to the present day with the discussions over its future use, the impact of the ArtAngel exhibition and Banksy's graffiti, this book is a timely platform for the building to tell us its story.

This book concentrates on the sometimes Greek but largely Roman survivals many travellers set out to see and perhaps possess throughout the immense Ottoman Empire, on what were eastward and southward extensions of the Grand Tour. Europeans were curious about the Empire, Christianity's great rival for centuries, and plenty of information on its antiquities was available, offered here via lengthy quotations. Most accounts of the history of collecting and museums concentrate on the European end. Plundered Empire details how and where antiquities were sought, uncovered, bartered, paid for or stolen, and any tribulations in getting them home. The book provides evidence for the continuing debate about the ethics of museum collections, with 19th century international competition the spur to spectacular acquisitions.

"Framing Consciousness in Art" examines how the conscious mind enacts and processes the frame that both surrounds the work of art yet is also shown as an element inside its space. These 'frames-in-frames' may be seen in works by Teniers, Vela zquez, Vermeer, Degas, Rodin, and Cartier-Bresson and in the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Bun uel. The book also deals with framing in a variety of cultural contexts: Indian, Chinese and African, going beyond Euro-American formalist and aesthetic concerns which dominate critical theories of the frame. "Framing Consciousness in Art "shows how the frames-in-frames in these different contexts question notions of vision and representation, linear time, conventional spatial coordinates, binaries of 'internal' consciousness and 'external' world, subject and object, and the precise anatomy of mental states by which we are meant to carve up the territory of consciousness. The phenomenological experience of art is certainly as important as the folk psychology which scientists and philosophers use to taxonomise ordinary first-person modes of subjectivity. Yet art excels in configuring the visual field in order to articulate and sustain a complex network of higher-order thoughts structuring art and consciousness.