Scholar, reverend, politician, and perhaps aristocrat... James Arthur Stanley Harley was certainly a polymath. Born in a poor village in the Caribbean island of Antigua, he went on to attend Howard, Harvard, Yale and Oxford universities, was ordained a priest in Canterbury Cathedral and was elected to Leicestershire County Council. He was a choirmaster, a pioneer Oxford anthropologist, a country curate and a firebrand councillor. This remarkable career was all the more extraordinary because he was black in an age - the early twentieth century - that was institutionally racist. Pamela Roberts' meticulously researched book tells Harley's hitherto unknown story from humble Antiguan childhood, through elite education in Jim Crow America to the turbulent England of World War I and the General Strike. Navigating the complex intertwining of education, religion, politics and race, his life converged with pivotal periods and events in history: the birth of the American New Negro in the 1900s, black scholars at Ivy League institutions, the heyday of Washington's black elite and the early civil rights movement, Edwardian English society, and the Great War. Based on Harley's letters, sermons and writings as well as contemporary accounts and later oral testimony, this is an account of an individual's trajectory through seven decades of dramatic social change. Roberts' biography reveals a man of religious conviction, who won admirers for his work as a vicar and local councillor. But Harley was also a complex and abrasive individual, who made enemies and courted controversy and scandal. Most intriguingly, he hinted at illicit aristocratic ancestry dating back to Antigua's slave-owning past. His life, uncovered here for the first time, is full of contradictions and surprises, but above all illustrates the power and resilience of the human spirit.

‘Be original or die would be a good motto for photographers to adopt…let them put life and colour into their work.’ - Yevonde. Yevonde (1893–1975) was a businesswoman and tireless creator, as an innovator committed to colour photography when it was not considered a serious medium, her work is significant in the history of British portrait photography. Yevonde championed photography during a time where there were few women photographers working professionally, and this book tells the story of her life, works, and 60-year career. Yevonde: Life and Colour brings the photographer’s works together again for the first time in 20 years and features previously unpublished works. This book showcases her experimentation with a range of techniques and genres including colour photography, portraiture, still-lifes, solarisation, and the Vivex colour process, and repositions her as a modern artist of the twentieth century. This highly illustrated publication provides in-depth context to Yevonde’s images, considering their aesthetic and mythic references. Yevonde’s portraits embody glorified tradition countered with a desire for the new.  Her most renowned body of work is a series of women dressed as goddesses posed in surreal tableaux from the 1930s.

Oxford University has attracted and produced many of the world's most original thinkers over the centuries. It boasts heads of states, academics, writers, actors, scientists, philosophers and many other luminaries among its alumni. On any tour of the University and colleges famous ex-students - Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher - to name a few are often mentioned - but what about its Black scholars? The University has a long but little known history of attracting Black scholars from Africa, the Caribbean, America and even Australia since the matriculation in 1873 of Christian Fredrick Cole, who became the first African to practise in an English court. He was followed by other outstanding personalities: Alain Locke, the 'Father of the Harlem Renaissance' and the first Black scholar to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1907; Kofoworola Moore, the first African woman to graduate from the University in 1935; Eric Williams, the great historian of the Caribbean, who was elected Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. Oxford's Black alumni include statesmen, lawyers and teachers. More recently, Oxford-educated African American women have risen to high office in the United States. Students from all parts of Africa, the Caribbean and the Commonwealth have made significant contributions and left lasting legacies in the fields of politics, literature, science and the arts. Uncovering the stories of prominent and lesser-known Black students at Oxford, Pamela Roberts reveals a hitherto undocumented strand in the University's history and its relationship with the wider world.