Philippa Stockley

Artist and award-winning writer Philippa Stockley has designed, made and painted since childhood. Years as an impoverished painter made being frugal, ecological, and always recycling second nature. After buying a derelict small house, decorating it on a tight budget was top of the list. Stockley paints, sews, saws, cooks and mends. In Paint & Make she shares how she paints murals, floor coverings, panels and faux-effects, and makes soft furnishings, useful and decorative small shelves, organic polish, and home-made treats. With more than 300 original photos and drawings by the author, this beautiful and practical book shows you how to do the same. Where possible choose natural materials and reject needless plastics, aggressive chemicals, and waste. Making things yourself saves money, gives a unique result, and is satisfying and enriching. Careful use of precious natural resources is something to be proud of. Stockley shares projects from her own home to inspire you to create something unique and special in yours " without breaking the bank.

A paean to the passage of time in old London domestic interiors. What is it about old pine panelling layered with flaking paint that enchants the eye and tugs at the heart? The soft shine of wooden boards, worn and gappy. Sunlight shafting through an open door out to an unevenly flagged yard where a clay pipe might turn up alongside a Thames oyster shell or a pottery shard. Blue-and-and white export ware; the molten lustre of mahogany or worn silver; the curiosity of tricorn hat boxes or a fragment of Spitalfields silk; portraits whose owners might once have lived here. Would they have believed that these houses would stand 250 years later? Time has imbued all these things with unforgettable patina - not only in museums, but even more in old Georgian houses still lived in and loved, repaired, and regenerated. Like pearls, warmed to lustre by the daily caress of a hand or foot. The majority of these extraordinary dwellings began as ordinary terrace houses, built to a pattern, often in pairs or small groups. Clusters exist in the East End of London: in Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Shadwell, Mile End. They are mostly Grade II-listed, and their owners put up with the bone-curdling cold of winter howling through gaps, with mending and colour-matching, patching and piecing. Not just put up with - they embrace it. And among them are some unrepentantly furnished with 20th- and 21st-century modern, finding poetic harmony across the centuries.

In late seventeenth century London two women, one white, one black, stake everything to prevent a manipulative mogul destroying them. Zenobia, born in poverty, grasps that her only hope of controlling her own life is to capitalise on her looks; Lily, brought to London on a sugar and slave ship as a 'toy', educated alongside her mistress but used by her master, lives as a kept woman. As their story weaves and folds through a murky and merciless London, both find themselves pitted against a ruthless man the world knows as John Crace. London's rich but festering possibilities as a rapidly-changing multinational city are breathtakingly painted, and pungent milieux ranging from plague pits to prisons to pastry kitchens - and Pickled Herring Stairs - are vividly brought to life.

Set in late eighteenth-century England, Philippa Stockley's American debut gives us a wickedly delightful but deadly serious battle of the wills and the sexes. It begins with the arrival in London of the mysterious Mrs. Fox--on the run from a scandalous French past--who takes a new identity, determined to reinvent herself. She must pit her formidable skills for revenge against Earl Much, a British aristocrat with no less notorious a past and easily her match in sinfulness and intrigue. Between these two swirls a story featuring venal lords, wronged maidens, and reprobate clergymen, transporting readers from bawdy houses to country estates--places where the pleasures of the flesh are both high comedy and serious business. A Factory of Cunning takes readers to the world immortal­ized in Dangerous Liaisons. And, like Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, the vividly rendered setting and characters give the thrill of a fresh discovery.

Gilver Memmer is running short of time. He is an enormously gifted painter, staggeringly good-looking, and profoundly self-involved, a cross between every woman's dream and every woman's worst nightmare. Great though his creative gifts may be, they cannot save him from dissolution. No longer the London art scene's wunderkind, he is getting by on the fumes of his former luck and sliding inexorably-though with a certain self-destructive elegance-toward oblivion. Into Gilver's life come two women: one who wants to push him into the grave he has been digging for himself and another who just might save him from it.