Volcanoes around the world have their own legends, and many have wrought terrible devastation, but none has caught the imagination like Vesuvius. We now know that immense eruptions destroyed Bronze Age settlements around Vesuvius, but the Romans knew nothing of those disasters and were lulled into complacency-much as we are today-by its long period of inactivity. None of the nearly thirty eruptions since AD 79 has matched the infamous cataclysm that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum within hours. Nearly two thousand years later, the allure of the volcano remains-as evidenced by its popularity as a tourist attraction, from Shelley and the Romantics to modern-day visitors. Vesuvius has loomed large throughout history, both feared and celebrated. Gillian Darley unveils the human responses to Vesuvius from a cast of characters as far-flung as Pliny the Younger and Andy Warhol, revealing shifts over time. This cultural and scientific meditation on a powerful natural wonder touches on pagan religious beliefs, vulcanology, and travel writing. Sifting through the ashes of Vesuvius, Darley exposes how changes in our relationship to the volcano mirror changes in our understanding of our cultural and natural environments.

This new biography of John Evelyn (1620-1706), diarist, scholar and intellectual virtuoso, is the first account to make full use of Evelyn's huge unpublished archive deposited at the British Library in 1995. This crucial source evokes a broader and richer picture of Evelyn, his life and his friendships, than permitted by his own celebrated diaries. Gillian Darley provides a rounded portrait of Evelyn's eighty-five years, his family life first at Sayes Court, Deptford, and later at Wotton, in Surrey, his exile in Paris, his interests and his preoccupations. Evelyn lived through some of England's most tumultuous history, through five reigns, the civil wars, the Restoration and the Revolution of 1688. He was author or translator of countless publications, from pamphlets to large folio editions, on varied contemporary issues. He tackled questions ranging from smoke pollution and the environment, gardening and architecture, to town planning and popular science, libraries and fashion, politics, trade and the visual arts. Endlessly curious and engaged into very old age, Evelyn found nothing unworthy of interest, and this absorbing biography demonstrates the liveliness of his hugely busy mind. Gillian Darley has been writing on architecture and landscape since the mid 1970s. She was architectural correspondent of the 'Observer', 1990-4. Her 'John Soane: An Accidental Romantic' (1999), also published by Yale University Press, was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography.

To mark one year from opening the new station, Art on the Underground launch a new publication on the work of Alexandre da Cunha at Battersea Power Station in London. Sunset, Sunrise, Sunset is a monumental kinetic sculpture for the Underground station. Stretching 95m and 60m in length, the artwork incorporates two friezes that face each other along the length of the ticket hall. The artwork was inspired by the former control room at Battersea Power Station and its system of vertical bars that regulated the production and output of electricity into the city. Combining this with resonances of the daily flow of dawn to dusk, Sunset, Sunrise, Sunset refers to cycles, routine, the everyday and eternity. Designed by Fraser Muggeridge Studio, the book features essays from art historian Dr Lisa Blackmore exploring the artist's practice, a geographical and social history of the local area from architecture and design writer Gillian Darley, an essay on commissioning the work by Eleanor Pinfield and a creative prose work from experimental writer Rebecca Watson.