Jenny Uglow Books

A fully illustrated overview of the life and work of the universally loved Quentin Blake, released ahead of the artist's 90th birthday in December 2022.0 Quentin Blake is an artist who has charmed and inspired generations of readers. Tracing Blake's art and career from his very first drawings - published in Punch when he was 16 - through his collaborations with writers from Roald Dahl and John Yeoman to Russell Hoban and David Walliams, to his large-scale works for hospitals and public spaces and right up to his most recent passions and projects, acclaimed author Jenny Uglow here presents a fully illustrated overview of Quentin Blake's extraordinary body of work, with accompanying commentary by the artist himself.0 With unprecedented access to the artist's entire archive, The Quentin Blake Book reveals the stories behind some of Blake's most famous creations, while also providing readers with an intimate insight into the unceasing creativity of this remarkable artist

In this superb biography, Uglow tells the story of the farmers son who influenced book illustration for a century to come. It is a story of violent change, radical politics, lost ways of life, and the beauty of the wild--a journey to the beginning of a lasting obsession with the natural world.

An exploration of the life and work of Walter Crane, the pioneering British socialist artist who transformed the illustration of children's books.

Where do these human-like animals and birds and these odd adventures - some gentle, some violent, some musical, some wild - come from? In this book the author's many drawings that accompany his verse are almost hyper-real, as if he wants to free the creatures from the page. It depended on patrons and moved in establishment circles.

Thomas Bewick wrote A History of British Birds at the end of the eighteenth century, just as Britain fell in love with nature. This was one of the wildlife books that marked the moment, the first 'field-guide' for ordinary people, illustrated by woodcuts of astonishing accuracy and beauty. But it was far more than that, for in the vivid vignettes scattered through the book Bewick drew the life of the country people of the North East - a world already vanishing under the threat of enclosures. In Nature's Engraver: The life of Thomas Bewick, Jenny Uglow tells the story of the farmer's son from Tyneside who revolutionised wood-engraving and influenced book illustration for a century to come. It is a story of violent change, radical politics, lost ways of life and the beauty of the wild - a journey to the beginning of our lasting obsession with the natural world. Nature's Engraver won the National Arts Writers Award in 2007. Jenny Uglow is the author of, among others, A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration, which was shortlisted for the 2010 Samuel Johnson Prize, Lunar Men and In These Times. 'The most perfect historian imaginable' Peter Ackroyd

The National Portrait Gallery's 'Character Sketches' series provides biographical sketches of a specific group of historical figures from the Gallery's collection, examining the public images and private faces that gave each group its identity.

Elizabeth Gaskell wrote some of the most enduring novels of the Victorian age. This biography traces Elizabeth's youth in rural Knutsford, her married years in the tension-ridden city of Manchester and her wide network of friends, her religious and feminist arguments of nineteenth century Britain, with enjoyment, passion and wit.

A handsome new publication on Grayson Perry CBE RA, one of Britain's best- known artists with an incisive new text by the prize-winning biographer Jenny Uglow.

It looks at how artists have responded to two great, contrasting works, Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress; A brief coda turns to a fourth relationship: writers and artists who collaborate from the start, like Dickens and Phiz, and Lewis Carroll and Tenniel.