Ern Goldfinger

An explosive and perceptive biography of the British novelist J.G. Ballard To many people, J.G. Ballard will always be the schoolboy in Steven Spielberg's movie Empire of the Sun, struggling to survive as an internee of the Japanese during World War II. Others remember him as the author of CRASH, a meditation on the eroticism of the automobile and the car crash, which also became a film and a cause celebre for its frank depiction of a fetish which, as this book reveals, was no literary conceit but a lifelong preoccupation. In this first biography, John Baxter draws on an admiration of and acquaintance with Ballard that began when they were writers for the same 1960s science fiction magazines. With the help of the few people whom he admitted to his often hermit-like existence, it illuminates the troubled reality behind the urbane and amiable facade of a man who was proud to describe himself as 'psychopathic'.

This selection of groundbreaking essays offers a significant and long overdue reassessment of the aims and intentions of European architecture and urbanism over the period 1880-1960.

The book examines individual and collective visions for the material world of children, from utopian dreams for the citizens of the future to the dark realities of political conflict and exploitation. Surveying more than 100 years of toys, clothing, playgrounds, schools, children's hospitals, nurseries, furniture, posters, animation and books, this richly illustrated catalogue illuminates how progressive design has enhanced the physical, intellectual, and emotional development of children and, conversely, how models of children's play have informed experimental aesthetics and imaginative design thinking.

Some of the most incisive writers on the subject rethink the relationship between Britain, England and English literary culture. It is premised on the importance of devolution, the uncertainty of the British union, the place of English Literature within the union, and the need for England to become a self-determining literary nation.

This book explores the shared qualities of mountains as naturally-formed landscapes, and of megastructures as manmade landscapes, seeking to unravel how each can be understood as an open system of complex network relationships (human, natural and artificial). By looking at mountains and megastructures in an interchangeable way, the book negotiates the fixed boundaries of natural and artificial worlds, to suggest a more complex relationship between landscape and architecture. It suggests an ecological understanding of the interconnectedness of architecture and landscape, and an entangled network of relations. Urban, colonialist, fictional, rural and historical landscapes are interwoven into this fabric that also involves discontinuities, tensions and conflicts as parts of a system that is never linear, but rather fluid and organic as driven by human endeavor.

In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a "make do and mend" aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition. The Ministry of Nostalgia explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth. In coruscating prose-with subjects ranging from Ken Loach's documentaries, Turner Prize-shortlisted video art, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver's cooking-Hatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on.

It is the year 1965. Mary Quant introduces the miniskirt to society in her shop in Chelsea; the Dalek-style Post Office Tower is opened; and the Beatles play their last ever live UK tour date. Most importantly, on 1 April, a new system of city government is introduced and London's thirty-two boroughs are born, revolutionising the capital into the place we know today.New names had to be chosen, councillors elected and policies formed; these boroughs and the Greater London Council between them took control of housing, roads, planning, schools and social services. Half a century on and, though the GLC was abolished in 1986, the boroughs live on, now working alongside a new metropolitan government headed by mayors Ken Livingstone and, since 2008, Boris Johnson.In London's Boroughs at 50, Tony Travers examines the governing system that developed alongside the growing metropolis and, by identifying the unique path each has taken over the years, tells the fascinating story of how our remarkably diverse boroughs have not only survived, but actively shaped both the city and the lives of its inhabitants in their impressive fifty-year history.