The World According to Colour Audiobook By James Fox cover art

The World According to Colour

A Cultural History

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The World According to Colour

By: James Fox
Narrated by: James Fox
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Brought to you by Penguin.

A beguiling cultural history of colour by the BAFTA nominated broadcaster and art historian James Fox.

The subject of this audiobook is humankind's extraordinary relationship with colour. It is composed of a series of voyages, ranging across the world and throughout history, which reveal the meanings that have been attached to the colours we see around us and the ways these have shaped our culture and imagination. It takes seven primary colours - black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple and green - and uncovers behind each a root idea, based on visual resemblances or properties so rudimentary as to be common to all societies.

The audiobook traces these meanings to show how they changed and multiplied, the role that they have played in our culture and history, and how understanding them allows us to see many of the milestones in the history of art - from Bronze Age gold-work to Turner, Titian to Yves Klein - in a new way. It proceeds by stories, which cumulatively tell another, larger one: a history of the world from the black nothing which preceded existence to the birth of our red-blooded species; the gilded gods who animated the world in antiquity to the blue horizons which framed the Age of Discovery; the pristine aspirations of Enlightenment, the technicolour innovation which fuelled the Industrial Revolution and the colour which most embodies the environmental crisis which now faces us.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2023 James Fox (P)2023 Penguin Audio
Anthropology Art History & Criticism

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Critic reviews

"Admirable... The World According to Colour is a brilliant cultural history... This intelligent, vividly written book is full of such black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple and green nuggets." (Laura Freeman)

"Fox glides into intellectual spaces; colour becomes a philosophical feast - astrophysics, the origins of civilisation, a palette of moral associations. Though dazzling, everything has a point: when Fox shoots, he scores. You never see it coming, then suddenly all the pieces fit together as though they were meant to be." (Ed Smith)

"A tour de force...he weaves together the historical, cultural and scientific background to provide context for a succession of bravura insights...this is a brilliant book." (Honor Clerk)

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