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WINNER OF THE LONDON HELLENIC PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE ANGLO-HELLENIC RUNICMAN AWARD A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022 A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022 'A gloriously intimate tour of the body in antiquity' Gavin Francis 'Vout tackles a huge range of ideas and subjects with irrepressible energy ... full of arresting, sometimes startling ideas and facts that topple the Greeks and Romans from their lofty, pristine, snow-white pedestals' Guardian 'A triumph ... an extraordinary book that stopped me in my tracks' Peter Frankopan The Greek and Roman body is often seen as flawless - cast from life in buff bronze and white marble, to sit upon a pedestal. But this, of course, is a lie. Here, classicist Caroline Vout reaches beyond texts and galleries to expose Greek and Roman bodies for what they truly were: anxious, ailing, imperfect, diverse, and responsible for a legacy as lasting as their statues. Taking us on a gruesome, thrilling journey, she taps into the questions that those in the Greek and Roman worlds asked about their bodies - where do we come from? What makes us different from gods and animals? What happens to our bodies, and the forces that govern them, when we die? Vout also reveals the surprising actions people often took to transform their bodies - from sophisticated surgery and contraception to body oils, cosmetics and early gym memberships. You've seen the paintings, read the philosophers and heard the myths - now here's the classical body in all its flesh and blood glory.

'A mind-expanding tour of the world without leaving your paintbox. Every colour has a story, and here are some of the most alluring, alarming, and thought-provoking. Very hard painting the hallway magnolia after this inspiring primer.' Simon Garfield The Secret Lives of Colour tells the unusual stories of the 75 most fascinating shades, dyes and hues. From blonde to ginger, the brown that changed the way battles were fought to the white that protected against the plague, Picasso's blue period to the charcoal on the cave walls at Lascaux, acid yellow to kelly green, and from scarlet women to imperial purple, these surprising stories run like a bright thread throughout history. In this book Kassia St Clair has turned her lifelong obsession with colours and where they come from (whether Van Gogh's chrome yellow sunflowers or punk's fluorescent pink) into a unique study of human civilisation. Across fashion and politics, art and war, The Secret Lives of Colour tell the vivid story of our culture.

<p>From her creation of the &quot;Approval Matrix&quot; in New York magazine in 2004 to her Pulitzer Prize-winning columns for The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum has argued for a new way of looking at TV. In this collection, including two never-before-published essays, Nussbaum writes about her passion for television, beginning with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show that set her on a fresh intellectual path. She explores the rise of the female screw-up, how fans warp the shows they love, the messy power of sexual violence on TV, and the year that jokes helped elect a reality-television president. There are three big profiles of television showrunners-Kenya Barris, Jenji Kohan, and Ryan Murphy-as well as examinations of the legacies of Norman Lear and Joan Rivers. The book also includes a major new essay written during the year of #MeToo, wrestling with the question of what to do when the artist you love is a monster. More than a collection of reviews, the book makes a case for toppling the status anxiety that has long haunted the &quot;idiot box,&quot; even as it transformed. Through it all, Nussbaum recounts her fervent search, over fifteen years, for a new kind of criticism, one that resists the false hierarchy that elevates one kind of culture (violent, dramatic, gritty) over another (joyful, funny, stylized). I Like to Watch traces her own struggle to punch through stifling notions of &quot;prestige television,&quot; searching for a more expansive, more embracing vision of artistic ambition-one that acknowledges many types of beauty and complexity and opens to more varied voices. It&apos;s a book that celebrates television as television, even as each year warps the definition of just what that might mean.</p>

Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities spread new slang and jargon with dizzying speed. What's more, social media is a vast laboratory of unedited, unfiltered words where we can watch language evolve in real time. Even the most absurd-looking slang has genuine patterns behind it. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch explores the deep forces that shape human language and influence the way we communicate with one another. She explains how your first social internet experience influences whether you prefer "LOL" or "lol," why ~sparkly tildes~ succeeded where centuries of proposals for irony punctuation had failed, what emoji have in common with physical gestures, and how the artfully disarrayed language of animal memes like lolcats and doggo made them more likely to spread.

<p><b>'A magisterial contribution to the understanding of the cultural position of Romani people in Europe. ... nothing short of astounding' <i>Literary Review</i></b><br/><br/>This remarkable book describes a dark side of European history: the rejection of the Roma from their initial arrival in the late Middle Ages to the present day. To Europeans, the Roma appeared to be in complete contradiction with their own culture, because of their mysterious origins, unknown language and way of life. As representatives of an oral culture, for centuries the Roma have left virtually no written records of their own. Their history has been conveyed to us almost exclusively through the distorted images that European cultures project.<br/><br/>Persecuted and shunned, the Roma nonetheless spread out across the continent and became an important, indeed indispensable element in the European imagination. It is impossible to conceive of the culture of Spain, southern France and much of Central Europe without this pervasive Romani influence.<br/><br/><i>Europe and the Roma </i>brilliantly describes the 'fascination and fear' which have marked Europeans' response to the Romani presence. Countless composers, artists and writers have responded to Romani culture and to fantasies thereof. Their projections onto a group whose illiteracy and marginalization gave it so little direct voice of its own have always been a very uneasy mixture of the inspired, the patronizing and the frighteningly ignorant. The book also shows the link between cultural violence, social discrimination and racist policies that paved the way for the genocide of the Roma.</p>

<p>In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, morally and materially. The German people stood condemned by history, responsible for a horrifying genocide and a war of extermination. But by 2015 Germany looked to many to be the moral voice of Europe, welcoming almost one million refugees. At the same time, it pursued a controversially rigid fiscal discipline and made energy deals with a dictator. Many people have asked how Germany descended into the darkness of the Nazis, but this book asks another vital question: how, and how far, have the Germans since reinvented themselves?<br/><br/>Trentmann tells the dramatic story of the Germans from the middle of the Second World War, through the Cold War and the division into East and West, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunited nation's search for a place in the world. Their journey is marked by extraordinary moral struggles: guilt, shame and limited amends; wealth versus welfare; tolerance versus racism; compassion and complicity. Through a range of voices - German soldiers and German Jews; environmentalists and coal miners; families and churches; volunteers, migrants and populists - Trentmann paints a remarkable and surprising portrait over 80 years of the conflicted people at the centre of Europe.</p>