Can you be a pilgrim without leaving your life behind? How does it feel to approach everyday places with the same reverence as grand cathedrals? And how are we changed by even the smallest of journeys? James Attlee asks these questions and more in his thoughtful, streetwise, and personal account of a pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew: the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door. Attlee's Cowley has little to do with the dreaming spires of his city. Leaving tourism and student life aside, Attlee instead presents a vital and delightfully motley collection of places, people, languages, and cultures. From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, from halal shops to Brazilian art dealers to reggae clubs to quiet churchyards, Attlee celebrates the appealing and homegrown eclecticism that so often comes under attack from predatory developers. Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy to contemporary art, Isolarion is at once a charming road movie, a battle cry raised against creeping homogenisation, and a love song to the gloriously messy real life of the city he calls home.

As Britain entered lockdown in the spring of 2020, drawings, paintings and messages proliferated in windows and gardens across the country: signs of the eternal human desire to communicate, even as face-to-face contact became impossible. When restrictions temporarily eased, writer James Attlee began ringing doorbells in his hometown of Oxford. On doorsteps and park benches, on council estates and amid genteel terraces, he recorded the voices of those briefly emerging from isolation, winning the trust of rainbow painters and anti-vaxxers, a Covid nurse, an LGBTQ+ artist, a VE Day celebrator, Black Lives Matter protesters, as well as frontline workers in a bakery and a supermarket. Their words, Attlee's pithy observations and sixteen pages of his photographs make Under the Rainbow a unique record of an extraordinary year, and a tribute to creativity and resilience in desperate times.

A brilliant, concise account of the painting often described as the most important work of art produced in the twentieth century, as part of the stunning Landmark Library series. Pablo Picasso had already accepted a commission in 1937 to create a work for the Spanish Republican Pavilion at the Paris World Fair when news arrived of the assault by the German Condor Legion on the undefended Basque town of Guernica, in which hundreds of civilians died. James Attlee offers an illuminating account of the genesis, creation and many-stranded afterlife of Picasso's Guernica. He explores the historical context from which it sprang; the artistic influences that informed its execution; the critical responses that it elicited; its journeyings across Europe and America in the late 1930s; its post-war adoption by new generations of anti-war protestors; and its eventual return to Spain following the death of Franco.

Magical images that defy time from the grand master of conceptual photography. Through his expansive exploration of the possibilities of still images, the internationally renowned artist and photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has created some of the most alluringly enigmatic photographs of our time; pictures that are meticulously crafted and deeply thought-provoking, familiar yet tantalisingly ambiguous. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine is a comprehensive survey of work produced over the past five decades, featuring selections from all of Sugimoto’s major photographic series, as well as lesser-known works that illuminate his innovative, conceptually-driven approach to making pictures. Texts by a collection of international writers, artists and scholars - including Geoffrey Batchen, Edmund de Waal, Mami Kataoka, Ralph Rugoff, Lara Strongman and Margaret Wertheim - will highlight his work’s philosophical yet playful inquiry into the nature of representation and art, our understanding of time and memory, and the paradoxical character of photography as a medium suited to both documenting and invention.

'Through this extraordinary selection of photographs and accompanying text,we follow elephants on their journey from Ancient Rome to Coney Island and beyond. Across battlefields and city bridges, in railway cars and circus rings, adored, applauded and at times brutally mistreated, elephants have truly come to town.' - James Attlee When Elephants Come to Town is a visual celebration of man's timeless fascination with the world's largest land animal through the medium of photography. The joy and excitement elephants arouse when they make an appearance in our lives is brought to life through a combination of iconic photographs by, amongst others, Garry Winogrand and unattributed, archival material. Rather than a series of contemporary nature photographs, the book is a collection of exceptional images from around the world of elephants in captivity, dating from Victorian times to the height of circus culture in the mid-20th century, many of them taken by anonymous photographers. Elephants parade through the streets and perform tricks in circuses and shows, their riders ranging from royalty to children, from showgirls to soldiers. In times of war they assist with logistics, shifting heavy loads, ploughing fields and hauling vehicles; in peacetime they add a touch of glamour and exoticism to locations as varied as casinos, hospital courtyards and amusement parks, and are in turn transformed into elephant-shaped buildings, mechanised automatons or balloons. In the essay that accompanies the photographs, acclaimed British author James Attlee describes the broader context of that relationship through the ages. In doing so, he doesn't shy away from describing the abuse and poor living conditions captive elephants have had to endure; at the same time he evokes the depth of understanding that can exist between man and animal, often in the words of those who have experienced it first-hand. Intensely nostalgic, often poignant and always fascinating, these images capture the complexity of one of the planet's most enduring inter-species relationships.

"Nobody who has not taken one can imagine the beauty of a walk through Rome by full moon," wrote Goethe in 1787. Sadly, the imagination is all we have today: in Rome, as in every other modern city, moonlight has been banished, replaced by the twenty-four-hour glow of streetlights in a world that never sleeps. Moonlight, for most of us, is no more.
So James Attlee set out to find it. "Nocturne" is the record of that journey, a traveler's tale that takes readers on a dazzling nighttime trek that ranges across continents, from prehistory to the present, and through both the physical world and the realms of art and literature. Attlee attends a Buddhist full-moon ceremony in Japan, meets a moon jellyfish on a beach in Northern France, takes a moonlit hike in the Arizona desert, and experiences a lunar eclipse on New Year's Eve atop the snowbound Welsh hills. Each locale is illuminated not just by the moonlight he seeks, but by the culture and history that define it. We learn about Mussolini's pathological fear of moonlight; trace the connections between Caspar David Friedrich, Rudolf Hess, and the Apollo space mission; and meet the inventors of the Moonlight Collector in the American desert, who aim to cure all kinds of ailments with concentrated lunar rays. Svevo and Blake, Whistler and Hokusai, Li Po and Marinetti are all enlisted, as foils, friends, or fellow travelers, on Attlee's journey.
Pulled by the moon like the tide, Attlee is firmly in a tradition of wandering pilgrims that stretches from Basho to Sebald; like them, he presents our familiar world anew.