Romantic Riddles is a collection of poems that examines the essence of love and the questions, puzzles, and uncertainties that accompany each kiss, intimate encounter, and relationship we experience in our lives. Each poem is infused with some aspect of the heart's greatest puzzle: Love. American Poet John Everett Button asks, "if the heart could speak, what would it say?" In asking that very question, an entire world overcame him. Scenes of unfathomable circumstances consumed him. Everything he experienced became the Romantic Riddles collection. Romantic Riddles is divided into two parts: "The Love Dialectic," which describes the movement of love between two people and "Riddles of the Heart," which are poetic parables about love itself. "The Love Dialectic," describes and demonstrates the natural movement of love between two people through short vivid poems. Insofar as part I is a poetic description of the movement of love itself, part II is a clear but frightening abstraction of this concept. The poetic parables of Part II challenge the reader's expectations and force a deeper reflection of their own heart.

A direct challenge to Milton's vision in Paradise Lost, John Everett Button's Reflexive Conversations offers literature its first truly romantic depiction of Satan in this bold contemporary epic poem. Utterly unique in its intimacy, Button has produced a brave new vision of the Devil's fall from grace and his resulting odyssey to hell. Transcending the bounds of traditional tragedy, Reflexive Conversations rises to become a work of sculpture that is a living representative of the substantive spheres of life, lifting the reader with the voice of raw human emotion, eternally bonding them to this unforgettable masterpiece.

Reprinted for the first time since 1889, this is the first biography and considered appraisal of one of England's most prodigiously talented painters. Sir John Everett Millais, P. R. A. (1829-1896) was the most precociously talented artist England has ever produced. His astonishing facility gained him entry as the Royal Academy's youngest ever pupil. At just 19 he founded with six other painters the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which revolutionized the English art world with a visionary intensity of both subject matter and style. Millais was its most creative member; as Jason Rosenfeld says in the introduction to this volume, "the sheer quality and distinctness of each of Millais's paintings of the 1850s is unmatched by any Western artist of the period." Yet there is much more to Millais' career than Pre-Raphaelitism. Some of the most emotive narrative paintings of the Victorian era, its greatest portraits, and especially some of its most beautiful, if neglected, landscapes, came from his brush--as did some of its most notoriously successful paintings, like "Bubbles," the "fancy picture" that was made into an advertisement for Pears' Soap. This volume includes not only Millais's only published work of art criticism, the pithy "Thoughts on Our Art of Today," but also the first extended biography and appraisal of his work by the important critic M. H. Spielmann. This hugely engaging "Sketch "gives both a warm and personal picture of the man and a level-headed evaluation of the qualities--and defects--of his work as they appeared to contemporaries. Neither essay has been in print for more than a century.

The UK has set a legal target of net-zero global warming emissions for 2050. The evidence concerning the devastating effects of climate change is witnessed all across the world, and yet ownership of emission-intensive Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs) continues to grow at alarming rate: in 2019, about 42% of all new GB car registrations were SUVs or SUV crossovers. "SUV madness" explores this car-buying phenomenon in thorough statistical and anecdotal detail. Although written with sadness, and occasional anger, I have attempted to be honest, understanding, humane and even humorous. "A good read" I hope.