Philip Hoare

From his childhood fascination with the gigantic Natural History Museum model of a blue whale to his adult encounters with the living animals in the Atlantic Ocean, the acclaimed writer Philip Hoare has been obsessed with whales. Journeying through human and natural history, The Whale is the result of his voyage of discovery into the heart of this obsession and the book that inspired it: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Taking us deep into their domain, Hoare shows us these mysterious creatures as they have never been seen before. Following in Ishmael's footsteps, he explores the troubled history of man and whale; visits the historic whaling locales of New Bedford, Nantucket, and the Azores; and traces the whale's cultural history from Jonah to Free Willy. Winner of the prestigious BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, The Whale is an unforgettable and often moving attempt to explain why these strange and beautiful animals still exert such a powerful hold on our imagination.

In Search of the Giants of the Sea

The Whale

A startling new book, his most personal to date, from Philip Hoare, 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 where we came from, and it carries our commerce. It represents home and migration, ceaseless change and constant presence. It covers two-thirds of our planet. Yet caught up in our everyday lives, we seem to ignore it, and what it means. 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 family memory and an abiding sense of aloneness and almost monastic escape offered by the sea. From there he travels to the other side of the world, from the Isle of Wight to the Azores, from Sri Lanka to Tasmania and New Zealand, in search of encounters with animals and people - the wild and the tamed, the living and the extinct. Navigating between human and natural history, between science and myth, he asks what their stories mean for us now, in the twenty-first century, when the sea has never been so important to our present, as well as to our past and future. Along the way we meet an amazing cast of recluses, outcasts, and travellers; from eccentric artists and scientists to miracle-working saints and tattooed warriors; from gothic ravens to the greatest whales and bizarre creatures that may, or may not, be extinct. The Sea Inside is part bestiary, part memoir, part fantastical travelogue. It takes us on a magical journey of discovery, filled with astounding tales of faith and fear, wilderness and destruction, mortality and beauty. But more than anything, it is the story of the natural world, and the sea inside us all.

The Sea Inside

An illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art and the sea from the award-winning author of The Whale. In 1520, Albrecht Dürer, the most celebrated artist in Northern Europe, sailed to Zeeland to see a whale. A central figure of the Renaissance, no one had painted or drawn the world like him. Dürer drew hares and rhinoceroses in the way he painted saints and madonnas. The wing of a bird or the wing of an angel; a spider crab or a bursting star like the augury of a black hole, in Dürer's art, they were part of a connected world. Everything had meaning. But now he was in crisis. He had lost his patron, the Holy Roman Emperor. He was moorless and filled with wanderlust. In the shape of the whale, he saw his final ambition. Dürer was the first artist to truly employ the power of reproduction. He reinvented the way people looked at, and understood, art. He painted signs and wonders; comets, devils, horses, nudes, dogs, and blades of grass so accurately that even today they seem hyper-real, utterly modern images. Most startling and most modern of all, he painted himself, at every stage of his life. But his art captured more than the physical world, he also captured states of mind. Albert and the Whale explores the work of this remarkable man through a personal lens. Drawing on Philip’s experience of the natural world, and of the elements that shape our contemporary lives, from suburbia to the wide open sea, Philip will enter Dürer's time machine. Seeking his own Leviathan, Hoare help us better understand the interplay between art and our world in this sublimely seductive book.

Albrecht Dürer and an Artistic Quest the Understand Our World

Albert and the Whale

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.

Leviathan, Or, The Whale

Leviathan, or, The whale

Leviatn o la ballena / Leviathan or, The Whale

Leviatano ovvero la balena

Decadence, Conspiracy & the First World War

Wilde's Last Stand

A fascinating biography of Britain's most legendary and flamboyant aristocratic aesthete. Out of Tennant's bizarre and outrageously eccentric life, Hoare has created a superb biography that reflects an age of intellect, indolence, narcissism, and pure style. 32 pages of photographs; 22 drawings.

The Life of Stephen Tennant

Serious Pleasures

Chris Heath

Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of their first album and coinciding with a major world tour, Pet Shop Boys, Catalogue is a lavish visual retrospective of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe's entire career. Every aspect of their work is featured: all the elegantly designed sleeve artwork and packaging; stills and behind-the-scenes shots from every video, film, concert and theatre show; experimental stage sets and cutting-edge fashion and costume designs; collaborations; publications; and ephemera. A visual feast of art, music and design, the book will appeal to both the devoted Pet Shop Boys fan and anyone interested in contemporary popular culture.

Pet Shop Boys Catalogue

This edition does not include illustrations. 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.

Leviathan

A kaleidoscopic story of myth, Spiritualism, and the Victorian search for Utopia from one of the brightest and most original non-fiction writers at work today. In 1872 there was a bizarre eruption of religious mania in Hampshire's New Forest. Its leader was Mary Ann Girling, a Suffolk farmer's daughter who claimed to be the female Christ and whose sect, the Children of God, lived in imminent anticipation of the Millennium. It was rumoured that Mrs Girling mesmerised her supporters, literally hypnotising them to keep them in her power, other reports claimed that the sect danced naked, and murdered their illegitimate offspring in their Utopian home at 'New Forest Lodge.' Through Mary Ann's story and the spiritual vortex around her, Philip Hoare takes us deeper into the pagan heart of the New Forest.

Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

England's Lost Eden

Rich and strange from the tip of its title to its deep-sunk bones' Robert Macfarlane From the author of Leviathan, or, The Whale, comes a composite portrait of the subtle, beautiful, inspired and demented ways in which we have come to terms with our watery planet. In the third of his watery books, the author goes in pursuit of human and animal stories of the sea. Of people enchanted or driven to despair by the water, accompanied by whales and birds and seals - familiar spirits swimming and flying with the author on his meandering odyssey from suburbia into the unknown. Along the way, he encounters drowned poets and eccentric artists, modernist writers and era-defining performers, wild utopians and national heroes - famous or infamous, they are all surprisingly, and sometimes fatally, linked to the sea. Out of the storm-clouds of the twenty-first century and our restive time, these stories reach back into the past and forward into the future. This is a shape-shifting world that has never been certain, caught between the natural and unnatural, where the state between human and animal is blurred. Time, space, gender and species become as fluid as the sea. Here humans challenge their landbound lives through art or words or performance or myth, through the animal and the elemental. And here they are forever drawn back to the water, forever lost and found on the infinite sea.

Swimming Against the Tide

Una exploración del hechizo del mar y del arte. Del autor de Leviatán o la ballena y El mar interior, llega un maravilloso retrato compuesto por las sutiles, hermosas, inspiradas y enloquecedoras maneras en que el ser humano se ha relacionado con el planeta del agua. En el deslumbrante cierre de su trilogía sobre el mar, Hoare parte de nuevo en un viaje en busca de las historias humanas y animales del mar, desde las personas empujadas a la desesperación, a ballenas, gaviotas y espíritus de las aguas: esta es una odisea personal y literaria que nos llevará desde los suburbios de Londres hasta las costas europeas y del Atlántico. Desfilan por sus páginas William Shakespeare, Henry David Thoreau, Wilfred Owen, Jack London, Herman Melville, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Virginia Woolf, Percy Bysse Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, el almirante Nelson, David Bowie, Stanley Kubrick y muchos otros poetas y artistas, escritores modernistas y héroes famosos o desconocidos, todos ellos relacionados con el mar, a veces de manera fatal y hermosa. "Mitad historia cultural y mitad vibrante narración de su relación con el mar [...] Philip Hoare ha escrito un libro maravilloso que es una delicia leer." The Sunday Times "Hoare escribe sobre Shelley, Byron y Elizabeth Barrett Browning [...] Poetas del mar en manos de un poeta del mar." The Literary Review "Una historia idiosincrática de marineros, aventureros y artistas que evoca la majestuosidad del horizonte marino [...] Es una obra maestra que se eleva al nivel de poesía sublime." The Times "Rara vez he leído un libro que me haya hablado tan directa e íntimamente a mí." The Guardian "Un libro extraño y maravilloso." Robert Macfarlane

El alma del mar

Jean Wainwright

Ship to Shore: Art and the Lure of the Sea emerged from, and was inspired by, an exhibition held across Southampton's John Hansard Gallery and SeaCity Museum in 2014.Based around interviews conducted by Jean Wainwright with sixteen internationally renowned contemporary artists whose works were featured in the show, the book weaves an evocative narrative about the sea and its enduring lure for artists.Powerful meanings of the sea as something seductive or dangerous, a visual metaphor, a political boundary, or the site of trauma or imagination, emerge as the inspiration for these artists and link their very different practices together.As the words and images unfold we are reminded how the sea has enticed us across centuries, thrilling us with its seductive vitality.With framing essays by Jean Wainwright and Philip Hoare.

Art and the Lure of the Sea

Ship to Shore

Angela Cockayne

Throughout history, the whale has fascinated artists, scientists, writers, musicians, storytellers. From the ancient civilisations to aboriginal peoples, from 19th century literature, in the shape of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, to 21st century cinema such as Free Willy and Whale Rider. The Dominion exhibition and Whale Festival at Plymouth, February 2011, the first to be held in the UK, celebrated the iconographic image of the whale and explored its place in literature, biology and history. The festival featured eminent scientists from the field of cetacean studies and explored the cultural significance of the whale through film, music, poetry readings and gallery talks, and sought to explore and celebrate the links between science and the arts. At its centre was the unique collaboration between the artist, Angela Cockayne, Senior Lecturer at Bath Spa University, and the acclaimed writer Philip Hoare.

A Whale Symposium

Dominion

A kaleidoscopic story of myth, Spiritualism, and the Victorian search for Utopia from one of the brightest and most original non-fiction writers at work today.

Philip Hoare

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