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A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR AN OBSERVER BEST ART BOOK OF 2021
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2022 'This is a wonderful
book. A lyrical journey into the natural and unnatural world' Patti
Smith 'Everything Philip Hoare writes is bewitching' Olivia Laing
An illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art
and the sea from the award-winning author of Leviathan. Albrecht
Durer changed the way we saw nature through art. From his prints in
1498 of the plague ridden Apocalypse - the first works mass
produced by any artist - to his hyper-real images of animals and
plants, his art was a revelation: it showed us who we are but it
also foresaw our future. It is a vision that remains startlingly
powerful and seductive, even now. In Albert & the Whale, Philip
Hoare sets out to discover why Durer's art endures. He encounters
medieval alchemists and modernist poets, eccentric emperors and
queer soul rebels, ambassadorial whales and enigmatic pop artists.
He witnesses the miraculous birth of Durer's fantastical rhinoceros
and his hermaphroditic hare, and he traces the fate of the
star-crossed leviathan that the artist pursued. And as the author
swims from Europe to America and beyond, these prophetic artists
and downed angels provoke awkward questions. What is natural or
unnatural? Is art a fatal contract? Or does it in fact have the
power to save us?
Look Again is a new series of short books from Tate Publishing,
opening up the conversation about British art over the last 500
years, and exploring what art has to tell us about our lives today.
Written by leading voices from the worlds of literature, art and
culture, each book sheds new light on some of the most well-known,
best-loved and thought-provoking artworks in the national
collection, and asks us to look again. Author Philip Hoare takes us
on an exploration of the sea and the way it has provided a deep
source of inspiration for artists featured in the Tate collection,
from William Blake to Maggi Hambling. Artists have always seen the
sea as a mirror of their anxieties and desires; an endless resource
for their creativity and their dreams. Under our human sway, the
sea has shifted in meaning, from creation myth to economic wealth,
from mystic wonder to modern exploitation. Look Again: The Sea
dives into the breadth of historical and contemporary works in
Britain's national collection of art, as well as the beloved
literature they have inspired. By reframing them within a social
and political perspective rather than a chronological or
art-historical one, prize-winning author Philip Hoare shows how art
has continually borne witness to the power and allure of the sea.
The story of Netley in Southampton - its hospital, its people and
the secret history of the 20th-century. Now with a new afterword
uncovering astonishing evidence of Netley's links with Porton Down
& experiments with LSD in the 1950s. It was the biggest
hospital ever built. Stretching for a quarter of a mile along the
banks of Southampton Water, the Royal Victoria Military Hospital at
Netley was an expression of Victorian imperialism in a million red
bricks, a sprawling behemoth so vast that when the Americans took
it over in World War II, GIs drove their jeeps down its corridors.
Born out of the bloody mess of the Crimean War, it would see the
first women serving in the military, trained by Florence
Nightingale; the first vaccine for typhoid; and the first purpos-
built military asylum. Here Wilfred Owen would be brought along
with countless other shell-shocked victims of World War I -
captured on film, their tremulous ghosts still haunted the asylum a
generation later. In Spike Island, Philip Hoare has written a
biography of a building. In the process he deals with his own past,
and his own relationship to its history.
From his childhood fascination with the gigantic Natural
History Museum model of a blue whale, to his abiding love of
"Moby-Dick," to his adult encounters with the living animals in the
Atlantic Ocean, the acclaimed writer Philip Hoare has been obsessed
with whales. "The Whale" is his unforgettable and moving attempt to
explain why these strange and beautiful animals exert such a
powerful hold on our imagination.
A startling book, his most personal to date, from Philip Hoare,
co-curator of the Moby-Dick Big Read and winner of the 2009 Samuel
Johnson Prize for 'Leviathan'. The sea surrounds us. It gives us
life, provides us with the air we breathe and the food we eat. It
is ceaseless change and constant presence. It covers two-thirds of
our planet. Yet caught up in our everyday lives, we barely notice
it. In 'The Sea Inside', Philip Hoare sets out to rediscover the
sea, its islands, birds and beasts. He begins on the south coast
where he grew up, a place of almost monastic escape. From there he
travels to the other side of the world - the Azores, Sri Lanka, New
Zealand - in search of encounters with animals and people.
Navigating between human and natural history, he asks what these
stories mean for us now. Along the way we meet an amazing cast;
from scientists to tattooed warriors; from ravens to whales and
bizarre creatures that may, or may not, be extinct. Part memoir,
part fantastical travelogue, 'The Sea Inside' takes us on an
astounding journey of discovery.
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Leviathan (Paperback)
Philip Hoare
1
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R416
R356
Discovery Miles 3 560
Save R60 (14%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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The story of a man’s obsession with whales, which takes him on a
personal, historical and biographical journey – from his
childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions
whale-watching. All his life, Philip Hoare has been obsessed by
whales, from the gigantic skeletons in London’s Natural History
Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves. Whales
have a mythical quality – they seem to elide with dark fantasies
of sea-serpents and antediluvian monsters that swim in our
collective unconscious. In ‘Leviathan’, Philip Hoare seeks to
locate and identify this obsession. What impelled Melville to write
‘Moby-Dick’? After his book in 1851, no one saw whales in quite
the same way again. This book is an investigation into what we know
little about – dark, shadowy creatures who swim below the depths,
only to surface in a spray of spume. More than the story of the
whale, it is also the story of our own obsessions.
A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR AN OBSERVER BEST ART BOOK OF 2021
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2022 'This is a wonderful
book. A lyrical journey into the natural and unnatural world' Patti
Smith 'Everything Philip Hoare writes is bewitching' Olivia Laing
An illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art
and the sea from the award-winning author of Leviathan. Albrecht
Durer changed the way we saw nature through art. From his prints in
1498 of the plague ridden Apocalypse - the first works mass
produced by any artist - to his hyper-real images of animals and
plants, his art was a revelation: it showed us who we are but it
also foresaw our future. It is a vision that remains startlingly
powerful and seductive, even now. In Albert & the Whale, Philip
Hoare sets out to discover why Durer's art endures. He encounters
medieval alchemists and modernist poets, eccentric emperors and
queer soul rebels, ambassadorial whales and enigmatic pop artists.
He witnesses the miraculous birth of Durer's fantastical rhinoceros
and his hermaphroditic hare, and he traces the fate of the
star-crossed leviathan that the artist pursued. And as the author
swims from Europe to America and beyond, these prophetic artists
and downed angels provoke awkward questions. What is natural or
unnatural? Is art a fatal contract? Or does it in fact have the
power to save us? With its wild and watery adventures, its witty
accounts of amazing cultural lives and its delight in the fragile
beauty of the natural world, Albert & the Whale offers
glorious, inspiring insights into a great artist, and his unerring,
sometimes disturbing gaze.
To several generations, actor, playwright, songwriter, and
filmmaker, Noel Coward (1899-1973) was the very personification of
wit, glamour, and elegance. His biographer, Philip Hoare, given
unprecedented access to the private papers and correspondence of
Coward family members, compatriots, and numerous lovers, has
produced the definitive biography of one of the twentieth century's
most celebrated and controversial figures. Philip Hoare's careful
research and lucid presentation in his Noel Coward: A Biography
adds depth to the picture.-New York Times Book Review A
fascinating, in-depth biography.--Library Journal Hoare has
profiled vividly and in-depth a complex legend who had a talent for
creating and recreating both himself and his works.--Publishers
Weekly In the thicket of books about the life and work of Coward,
Philip Hoare's stands out as the most well-documented and
objective.--Los Angeles Times [Hoare's] book, like its subject,
strives for effortless sophistication, and succeeds.--Newsday
Hoare's retelling of Coward's story [is] the most vivid,
insightful, and fascinating so far.--John Lahr, The New Yorker
"Every day is an anxiety in my ways of getting to the water. . . .
I've become so attuned to it, so scared of it, so in love with it
that sometimes I can only think by the sea. It is the only place I
feel at home." Many of us visit the sea. Admire it. Even profess to
love it. But very few of us live it. Philip Hoare does. He swims in
the sea every day, either off the coast of his native Southampton
or his adopted Cape Cod. He watches its daily and seasonal changes.
He collects and communes with the wrack--both dead and never
living--that it throws up on the shingle. He thinks with, at,
through the sea. All of which should prepare readers:
RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR is no ordinary book. It mounts no
straight-ahead argument. It hews to no single genre. Instead, like
the sea itself, it moves, flows, absorbs, transforms. In its pages
we find passages of beautiful nature and travel writing, lyrical
memoir, seams of American and English history and much more. We
find Thoreau and Melville, Bowie and Byron, John Waters and
Virginia Woolf, all linked through a certain refusal to be
contained, to be strictly defined--an openness to discovery and
change. Running throughout is an air of elegy, a reminder that the
sea is an ending, a repository of lost ships, lost people, lost
ways of being. It is where we came from; for Hoare, it is where he
is going. "Every swim is a little death," Hoare writes, "but it is
also a reminder that you are alive." Few books have ever made that
knife's edge so palpable. Read RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. Let it settle
into the seabed of your soul. You'll never forget it.
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