The English Civil War has become a frequent point of reference in contemporary British political debate. A bitter and bloody series of conflicts, it shook the very foundations of seventeenth-century Britain. This book is the first attempt to portray the visual legacy of this period, as passed down, revisited, and periodically reworked over two and a half centuries of subsequent English history. Highly regarded art historian Stephen Bann deftly interprets the mass of visual evidence accessible today, from ornate tombs and statues to surviving sites of vandalism and iconoclasm, public signage, and historical paintings of human subjects, events, and places. Through these important scenes and sometimes barely perceptible traces, Bann shows how the British view of the War has been influenced and transformed by visual imagery.

In American visual culture, the 1930s and 1940s were a key transitional period shaped by the era of modernism and the global confrontation of World War II. Christof Decker demonstrates that the war and its iconography of destruction challenged visual artists to find new ways of representing its consequences. Dealing with trauma and war crimes led to the emergence of complex aesthetic forms and media crossovers. Decker shows that the 1940s were a pivotal period for the creation of horrific yet also innovative representations that boosted American visual modernism and set the stage for debates about the ethics of visual culture in the post-9/11 era.

The purpose of Weinberg's text is to suggest a way in which the dramatic events of World War II may be seen. Weinberg argues that the war must be seen as a whole, and that the presentation of it in discrete segments covering the European and Pacific portions separately distorts reality and obscures important aspects of the war on both sides of the world. In addition, any understanding of the great struggle requires a mental self-liberation from the certain knowledge of its outcome. In desperate struggles millions fought and died, hopeful or fearful--or both--but without awareness of the end.

'The Decembrists' is an unfinished novel by Leo Tolstoy, who only managed to write three chapters before abandoning it. The hero of his new book was to have been a participant in the abortive Decembrist Uprising of 1825, released from Siberian exile after 1856. It was intended as a sequel to War and Peace.

This important book revisits a major figure from a now somewhat neglected generation who dominated the British art scene in the 1930s and 1940s. Focusing on the period from the mid 1930s, when Sutherland established his identity as a modern painter to the 1950s, when his influence began to wane, it portrays the types of work that gave rise to a widespread consensus amongst fellow artists and critics that Sutherland was the most exciting and compelling voice in contemporary British painting. Two particular strands of his imagery are discussed: the landscapes of Pembrokeshire and the South of France, before and after the Second World War; and the scenes of devastation produced for the War Artists scheme run by Sutherland's great friend Kenneth Clark. The dramatic colour and lighting and the metamorphosis of observed form in his pictures of bombed buildings, tin mines and factory interiors, struck a powerful emotional chord in such traumatic times. The book also includes sections on the early 1920s etchings, which introduced certain fundamentals of his art, and on the initial emergence of his portraiture with the creation of Somerset Maugham in 1949. There are also carefully selected works by other artists, past and present, in whom Sutherland took an interest: such as Blake, Palmer, Nash and Masson. Published to accompany the major exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery in June 2005, this long overdue and much requested book, (there has not been a substantial Sutherland show in London since 1982), comprises eighty oils and works on paper drawn from public and private collections throughout the UK and offers a selective interpretation of his painting rather than the usual career retrospective. The exhibition opens at Dulwich Picture Gallery on 16th June to 25th September 2005 and will travel to the Djanogly Gallery in Nottingham in the autumn. 904009490X

An internationally renowned scholar examines an episode in the chaos & retributive strife that engulfed France during the liberation at the end of World War II.