This book contains catalogues, analyses, photographs and drawings of some 2,000 archaeological artefacts excavated from the Insula of the Menander in Pompeii. The catalogues, and analyses are organized by provenance - buildings, rooms, and location within rooms - so that the reader can understand the artefacts as household assemblages. The functions of artefacts and groups of artefacts are discussed, as are the Latin names which are often given to these artefacts, and the relationships of these assemblages to the state of occupancy of the buildings in the Insula during the last years of Pompeii. This study, therefore, provides a wealth of information, not only on the range and use of artefacts in Pompeian houses but also on Roman artefacts, and Roman society, more generally.

In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century. Funny Weather brings together a career's worth of Laing's writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O'Keeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time. We're often told that art can't change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living.

The author started writing as a child. By seven wanted to be an architect. By twenty-four had become a builder. By thirty-four had become an architect registered and working in the UK. At the age of fifty he decided that architecture as a discipline was a social science of some sort. On this basis he earned a masters at UCL, then a PHD at Heriot Watt for discovering and defending philosophical position based on interpretation that he now calls thermenutics. When teaching about cultural contexts at the university of Ulster architectural school (2001 a " 2010) the link between perception and emotion became central to his interest. At which point he retired to write about understanding, in a series of books, this one being the fourth. The first three were about sharing the management of understanding. This fourth is about the way we share the management of understanding by way of conversations between us that allow us to understand each other.