I.B. TAURIS

Few states have achieved such rapid and fundamental change in so short a time as Dubai. From palmfrond huts to sumptuous hotels; from remote oases to vast man-made islands, this desert outpost has in just a few years been transformed into a dynamic and cosmopolitan centre of trade, enterprise and - most recently - tourism. This book captures the...

Widely regarded as one of the most significant prophets of modern architecture, Adolf Loos was a star in his own time. His work was emblematic of the turn-of-the-century generation that was torn between the traditional culture of the nineteenth century and the innovative modernism of the twentieth. His essay 'Ornament and Crime' equated superfluous...

Revered or reviled, Gertrude Bell was a commanding figure: scholar, linguist, archeologist, traveller and 'orientalist'. Belonging to the tradition of the great British Middle East enthusiasts of the early 20th century, she explored the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I and was hugely instrumental in the post-war reconfiguration of the...

"Bed and Sofa" is a captivating study of the 1927 film by Abram Room about the failure of the sexual revolution in 1920s Russia. The story of a menage-a-trois involving one woman and two men, and set in a 1920s Moscow flat, the film is remarkable for its frankness, humor, and its caustic assessment of the new Soviet society, particularly the new...

The work of 18 Arab women artists from around the world is collected together here, challenging Western stereotypes of the female role in Arab society and vividly illustrating how women experience and question their lives in the Arabic diaspora. ...

At the height of the Cold War, art produced in divided Germany contested the cultural demarcation of East and West. Here Claudia Mesch shows how a wide group of artists, such as Joseph Beuys, Allan Kaprow, Gerhard Richter, Carolee Schneemann, Ed Kienholz, Yvonne Rainer, Jorg Immendorff and Nam June Paik, struggled to take visual art "beyond the...