Syria's Monuments: their Survival and Destruction examines the fate of the various monuments in Syria (including present-day Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine/Israel) from Late Antiquity to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. It examines travellers' accounts, mainly from the 17th to 19th centuries, which describe religious buildings and housing in numbers and quality unknown elsewhere. The book charts the reasons why monuments lived or died, varying from earthquakes and desertification to neglect and re-use, and sets the political and social context for the Empire's transformation toward a modern state, provoked by Western trade and example. An epilogue assesses the impact of the recent civil war on the state of the monuments, and strategies for their resurrection, with plentiful references and web links.

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.