This Just In

Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane by Andrew Graham-Dixon

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (29 September 1571–18 July 1610) lived probably the darkest and most dangerous life of any of the great painters. The worlds of Milan and Rome, through which Caravaggio moved, and which Andrew Graham-Dixon describes brilliantly in this book, are those of cardinals and prostitutes, prayer and violence. In place of conventional chronology, Graham-Dixon puts the murder of a pimp at the centre of his story. It occurred at the height of Caravaggio's fame in Rome and brought about probably his flight through Malta and Sicily, and his death in suspicious circumstances off the coast of Naples. Graham-Dixon shows how Caravaggio's paintings emerged from this extraordinarily wild and troubled life, seeking to answer the question of how a man's life feeds into his art, and of the effect of Caravaggio's violent life on his work as an artist.

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Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg

In Four Fish, award-winning writer and lifelong fisherman Paul Greenberg takes us on a culinary journey, exploring the history of the fish that dominate our menus--salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna--and examining where each stands at this critical moment in time. He visits Norwegian mega farms that use genetic techniques once pioneered on sheep to grow millions of pounds of salmon a year. He travels to the ancestral river of the Yupik Eskimos to see the only Fair Trade certified fishing company in the world. He investigates the way PCBs and mercury find their way into seafood; discovers how Mediterranean sea bass went global; and almost sinks to the bottom of the South Pacific while searching for an alternative to endangered bluefin tuna. Fish, Greenberg reveals, are the last truly wild food--for now. By examining the forces that get fish to our dinner tables, he shows how we can start to heal the oceans and fight for a world where healthy and sustainable seafood is the rule rather than the exception.

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The Last Dance: 1936, The Year of Change by Denys Blakeway

‘The year has, indeed, begun in gloom. The King ill, and Kipling dead . . . ’ so wrote the diarist Chips Channon in 1936 as George V lay on his deathbed at Buckingham Palace. The passing of two such pillars of the establishment sent tremors through the nation and heralded the ending of the old order. 1936 was to be an extraordinary year in Britain: at home social and constitutional crisis threatened, while in Europe, the dictators were on the march. It was the year of the abdication and civil war in Spain. The tectonic plates of history were shifting - Britain would never be the same again. The Last Dance is told using the accounts of those who lived through this turbulent period. Through extracts from diaries of shopkeepers, socialites, bishops, and volunteers in Spain, and the memoirs of the unemployed, housewives and hostesses, as well as the contemporary accounts of politicians, journalists and poets, Blakeway offers a compelling and vivid account of a turning point in a nation’s story.

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The Disappearing Spoon and Other Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Tale of the Elements by Sam Kean

The Periodic Table is one of man's crowning scientific achievements. But it's also a treasure trove of stories of passion, adventure, betrayal and obsession. The infectious tales and astounding details in The Disappearing Spoon follow carbon, neon, silicon and gold as they play out their parts in human history, finance, mythology, war, the arts, poison, and the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them.

We learn that Marie Curie used to provoke jealousy in colleagues' wives when she'd invite them into closets to see her glow-in-the-dark experiments. And that Lewis and Clark swallowed mercury capsules across the country and their campsites are still detectable by the poison in the ground. Why did Gandhi hate iodine? Why did the Japanese kill Godzilla with missiles made of cadmium? And why did tellurium lead to the most bizarre gold rush in history? From the Big Bang to the end of time, it's all in revealed in The Disappearing Spoon.

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