Robert Hughes

In 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonise Australia. An epic description of the brutal transportation of men, women, and children out of Georgian Britain into a horrific penal system which was to be the precursor to the Gulag and was the origin of Australia. The Fatal Shore...

For almost a thousand years, Rome held sway as the spiritual and artistic centre of the world. Hughes vividly recreates the ancient Rome of Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Nero, Caligula, Cicero, Martial, and Virgil. With the artistic blossoming of the Renaissance, he casts his unwavering critical eye over the great works of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Brunelleschi, shedding new light on...

This legendary book has been universally hailed as the best, the most readable and the most provocative account of modern art ever written. Through each of the thematic chapters, Hughes keeps his story grounded in the history of the 20th century, demonstrating how modernism sought to describe the experience of that era and showing how, for many key art movements,...