A racy account of the London contemporary art scene by celebrated art critic Matthew Collings, giving a snapshot of the new Bohemia of the 90s interwoven with episodes from the author's own life in London. From Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst, specially-commissioned photographs by documentary film-maker Ian MacMillan brings London's artists, dealers and critics face to face with the reader.

The definitive survey of Keith Tyson's thirty-year career. British Turner Prize-winning artist Keith Tyson is known for a distinctive and diverse body of work including drawing, painting, installation and sculpture. Showing a wide range of influences, from mathematics and science through to poetry and mythology, he is interested in how art emerges from the combination of information systems and physical processes that surround us every day. For over thirty years, Tyson has probed, dissected, explored and questioned reality. Not fixed to one artistic style, Tyson sets out to challenge himself and the audience, whilst working with diverse materials - paint, clay, metal, resin - to question our knowledge of the world we perceive as real, and art's role in representing it. With newly commissioned texts from an internationally diverse array of writers, and including a previously unpublished interview with the artist, this is the definitive survey of one of the most restless and adventurous creators working today.

In the decade before his death in 2011, John Hoyland began to reckon with mortality. Confronting his own demise, he painted elegies to departed artist friends and tributes to illustrious artistic forebears. Imagery of the void looms large, but it is a void faced with defiance and vitality, less a rumination on the end than a celebration of life. This publication explores the paintings Hoyland made in this decade, including his final series, the Mysteries. Essays by Natalie Adamson, David Anfam, Matthew Collings and Mel Gooding offer a rich and multifaceted account of a complex body of work. Hoyland’s veneration of Vincent van Gogh, his connections to J.M.W. Turner, the use of black as a colour, his deployment of risk and attempts to subvert his own taste, and his development of the cosmic visual language of the Abstract Expressionists are all discussed. Richly illustrated, the book extends our understanding of Hoyland’s late work within the story of modern painting as a whole.

'This is Civilisation' is a greatly elaborated version of the Channel 4 television series of the same name, written and presented by Matthew Collings. Many of the images in the book are stills from the programme.